Pixar has made sone pretty incredible movies. Their stories are usually very intelligent and well put together. Wall e is also quite innovative imo and if you just dislike childrens movies or wgatever this should at least be checked out.

My favorite recent childrens movie is dream works how to train your dragon however. Really just incredible all around.

It's times like this that make me want to rip of my head and run thru the streets with my balls in a fruit pickers basket!

best part of the movie... the detail of the sound of the doors opening and closing in the earle!

i really dont like childrens animated movies and rarely find them anything more than slightly entertaining. that said, i will try to make an effort to check some stuff out. also old disney cartoons too.

i also need to watch more contemporary asian cinema, but there is just so much of it. and every time i try to watch something, i just end up losing interest

"That man talked a living language; I embalmed some dead phrases."

Agreed.

they aren't children's stories. I mean some of them are... but majority ARE NOT.

case in point, Pinocchio. the is such a classic tale of an inanimate object obsessing and longing for it's own humanity. This transcends puppets to current day of Artificial Intelligence.

Saw The Hobbit...but not in the HFR, as I didn't want to see it in 3D.

I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's pretty seamless from the first three, and it's action packed. It's got orcs and goblins and trolls and big, nasty spiders...awesome all around.

After today's events was thinking about that movie We Need To Talk About Kevin. It was actually damn good movie. It's very slow and depressing, but has a lot of depth and content and the actors shine.

The Gollum scene in The Hobbit is just perfect. I also like the trolls.

Well yeah, the movie was hinting at that the whole time. Thought there would be a bigger reveal ...

Watched Lawless based on the reccomendation of a friend. Didn't care for it at all except for some pretty graphic violent scenes and thought the last 30 min was lol bad.

Same kid said he didn't like argo so I just watched that and enjoyed it a lot.

Hated this. A lot.

Wonder Boys

Strong cast, I felt like it was an odd combination (Douglas, maguire, Downey jr, mcdormand, Holmes) but they fit beautifully.

I've probably watched it 3 or 4 times but it never gets old.

Lawless was pretty average. lol labeouf

The Hobbit

Going to say a lot of my feelings towards this movie are impacted by how great LOTR was. The Hobbit, by itself, was a perfectly entertaining movie. But when comparing it to any of the LOTR movies it is massively disappointing. Some people have made these points in the OOT thread and this one but it wasn't very dark or dangerous. None of the group was ever in any real danger because they always had some magical escape, including a thousand foot fall that conveniently was slowed down enough for them to live. Now I know this happens all the time in movies, and I assume it happened in the book (I read it once many years ago, forgot everything), but again it brings me back to LOTR. In the 1st movie Frodo gets stabbed, Gandalf and Boromir die, and Merry and Pippin get kidnapped. Things were pretty real and you weren't sure who was going to be next.

It's obviously my fault for trying to compare the two when they are vastly different stories but I can't help myself.

Gollum scene was fantastic, I agree with Dom on that.

I also saw it in HFR 3D or whatever thanks to the idiot working the ticket booth. I mostly did not enjoy it. There were a few times when it was pretty cool but mostly it felt unnecessary. Too many things popping out and I don't need great visuals and clear picture to enjoy a movie. Felt like a few scenes were made just to show off the feature.

Overall: 7/10. Pretty good but LOTR are all in the 9s.

I think this is my longest post on this site.

My Hobbit review:

The 1st hour is really tedious. It picks up once Bilbo runs out from his hole to catch up to the others and from there the action is pretty consistent. I would say that this movie is handicapped because everyone will compare it to the LOTR trilogy. However, it is best if you compare it to the 1st movie, Fellowship of the Ring, because you have to remember that it takes a while to lay the groundwork of story.

Other than it is hard to take the dwarves seriously as badasses it is a good movie. I think that the main drawback is not having a nice kickass character like the LOTR trilogy like Aragorn present b/c it can get tiresome thinking the movie is just trying to save the dwarf contigent time after time. If you can get past that it is a solid movie. Not great. But legitimately good. It is fair to say that grading this movie depends on the 2nd installment. Like LOTR, the 2nd movie (Two Towers) added much needed heft to the narrative and I think the same will happen with the Hobbit once they embrace the Smaug portion of the story.

Bilbo Freakin Baggins

I am not too surprised for the not stellar reviews of the hobbit, the book is simply not as good as LOTR. I am looking forward to seeing it and I am glad they were made but this is a case of setting your expectations at a realistic level.

Watched the first movie from the extended LOTR blurays last night, still awesome.

The Hobbit: a Three Hour Cardio Adventure

I saw it yesterday evening and almost fell asleep in the beginning. The first hour and a half is a goddamn chore to get through. Yes, yes, it was cool to see Elijah Wood again, and there are a lot of easter egg inter-film references for diehard fans who imprinted every frame of the original trilogy onto their minds.

Once they leave Rivendale, things pick up... with one long chase scene after another. Forty minutes left in the film I felt ready to dismiss the criticism that there were too many chase scenes, and then we got an avalanche of them. The dwarves get almost no characterization. I took to thinking of them as things like "The Fat One" and "The Bald Spot Dwarf" and "Really Angry Irrational Dwarf."

Did Radagast honestly have dried bird **** on the right side of his face? WTF?

Some good points. I read the book a long time ago, so could say the integration of the appendices and Silmarillion felt like a seamless narrative to me.

The first hour and a half does take an ungodly amount of time setting things up, but this is essentially a 9 hour movie, so we have to multiply the amount of time a film with a normal length would take to set up the plot and introduce characters. If Jackson treats this like a single film, the next one will maintain the pace set in the last portion of part 1 and it will be a fun ride.

It was some of the finest use of 3D I've ever seen. Now stop making movies in 3D.

As others have said, the Gollum scene was fantastic. It almost made up for the rest of the film.

The scenes with the Elves are a bit boring, but they are fascinating and beautiful. I'd sit through a four hour film with Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving as the lead characters.

And while I'd have preferred a tighter film, I don't think it was Peter Jackson's intention to make a tight, well-paced epic. He is a gigantic fan-boy making a film for other fan-boys (and fan-ladies). This is perhaps his only chance to film the rest of the mountain of material Tolkien left, and to do so with all of the original actors so that it feels like it's all part of the same world. Perhaps this time he'll take the reverse approach he did with LOTR and release condensed versions of The Hobbit on DVD and bluray. There will almost certainly be fan cuts that trim the fat and give us a better paced film. But for those who wanted everything Tolkien ever wrote about Middle Earth to be on the big screen, this is a crowning achievement. They got what they wanted.

It's a terrible book. There I said it.

I can't think ofa film I have less interest in seeing.

Good news for Transformers 4? Michael Bay will be thrilled at this early positive press.

Re: The Hobbit
Seems I'm an exception in that I didn't mind the early slow parts. I only started to dislike it when the action scenes happened. The action scenes were ridiculous and filled with pretend danger that never really threatened any of the characters. And all solved by deus ex machina. Gandalf does a role call after they're escaped 50,000 goblins like he's making sure everyone is getting back on the bus after a school tour.

Hmm, good point. One more thing to move from the positive side to the negative

First time on the big screen, that riveting classic, Principia Mathematica, combining the genius of Whitehead and Russell with directorial skills of Michael Bay.

Dont be ridiculous.