Skip to main content

Banning Dreamworks and its Animated Attitude

Oh you know what I'm talking about. The hand goes on the hip, the head tilts, and then the eyes, in tandem, are rolled back in the head ending with a sneer that sends the blood spurting northward into your brain like an oil spurt.

My daughter, the 5-year-old, has mastered it.

Do you know where she's discovered this delightful tick? From all the cute furry animals in all the lovely Dreamworks/Pixar flicks where they toss off one-liners so that the parents shuttling their tots don't get bored.

Guess what - I'm not bored. I'm fed up. Yes, that was the sound of my rolling MY eyes.

Last week I took The Rabbit instead to Kit Kittridge. Sure, it sounded like an advertorial for the American Girl brand. But guess what -- it wasn't. No dolls in the movie. Just a really great script, stellar acting (Stanley Tucci, Wallace Shawn, Julia Ormand, a FEMALE director), a wonderful timely story about a little girl and her family during the depression, and not an eye roll in sight.

I fully recommend this flick to anyone. The Rabbit asked to see it again before the credits stopped, and I loved it enough to possibly indulge her. And just think, I don't have to spend the next month fielding jokes about body parts or odors, nor snarky sasses that emanate from the mouth of a hippo to a lion.

Shrek? Bleck.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Apologies for being incommunicado this week and hope none of you out there are too distraught not to be receiving the usual almost-daily MotV missives. The reason for the silence is that I'm up to my neck, metaphorically-speaking, in research papers for my first grad course assessment. This experience has made me realise how rigorously un-academic I am in my thinking. It has also illuminated how reliant I am on red wine in order to get through endless evenings typing furiously on my laptop, not to mention the fueling of increasingly colorful curses that I feel obliged to aim at the University's online library system which consistently refuses to spit out any of the journals I'm desperate for (I refuse to believe this is 100% due to my technical incompetence...) Oh well, if this is the price one has to pay in order to realize a long-cherished dream then it's not all that bad... No one ever said a mid-life career change would be easy. Wish me luck!

A thought

Perhaps sometimes a gift can be delivered in the guise of a tragedy. It's just a matter of perception, after all. I suspect that the talent lies in looking beyond the surface to what lies beneath and beyond. And, of course, being able to make sense of it all and going on to apply that knowledge to building a productive way forward. Here's hoping.

It's my party and I'll cry if I want to

A friend recently emailed me to say that her big memory of her stay with us last year is that she had a great birthday, one of the few where she didn't 'act like a spoiled grumpy princess'. She tried to give me all the credit but as I explained to her, it was all down to having a fellow female organising the birthday fun rather than leaving it to her partner. Her email got me thinking about birthdays and how very different men and women are in their attitudes to celebrating special occasions. It also had me thinking about my birthday two years ago when I threw a major tantrum in the Carrefour car-park after being told that we were off to do the weekly shop, kids in tow, which was simply the final straw at the end of a very uninspiring day. In contrast, my birthday last year was rather lovely (a morning on my own in a spa with no mobile coverage, pure selfish bliss). This year - in a few short months, eek! - I'll be hitting the grand old age of 38. This will be my las...