This Week In Cinema: March 27-April 02, 2011

Kitty Galore is totally a porn name, speaking of which mine would be Rowdy Irving, yeah, I rock!

Another paltry week at the movies for this hombre. What can I say, life gets busy folks, and when that happens I watch less movies. I have been making a concerted effort to do more full length reviews though, hopefully that helps ease the pain of my movie watching betrayal, a little, a tiny bit, maybe?

Cats & Dogs: The Revenge Of Kitty Galore (2010, Brad Peyton, Australia/United States Of America) 1/2*

It pains me that my daughter actually liked this. It’s not just stupid, but it’s full of stuff that she couldn’t have understood, like a whole The Silence Of The Lambs sequence. I don’t want to talk about this movie much, it’s really not worth it. To keep it simple, there are a few lines to chuckle at, the footage of real cats and dogs playing over the end credits is really cute, but that’s all the film has going for it.

Monster House (2006, Gil Kenan,United States Of America) **1/2

There are moments where this is cute and charming, moments where the ideas explored in the animation are very interesting. There aren’t enough of those moments, nowhere near enough. A lot of the film is way too bland, and the animation settles into a style that is quite odd. I’ve never complained about the Robert Zemeckis CG style of animation, I have no issues with how The Polar Express looks for instance. But, Monster House falls in between that style and a more traditional style and it looks weird, in a bad way. It was too real without actually being real, I want to use the uncanny valley example, but I’m not sure it really applies to Monster House. There are some laughs, some good moments, but not enough for this to stick out among a sea of great animated tales.

Wrap-Up:

Only two films this week, one was terrible and the other had its moments but ended up being a forgettable experience. Not much to wrap-up, is there?

Cheers,
Bill