Movie Reviews: Two for One Sale

Ratatouille (G): Dreamworks rarely misses the net and Ratatouille is no exception. There has been a review floating around in the blogosphere that argues that the movie will flop commercially. The reasons given are varied. One sticking point is promotion, Dreamworks did very little to promote the film except to issue a teaser trailer only in theatres. Now, you can't go sticking a little plastic rat into everybody's happy meal, but promotion is not everything. In fact, movies that are heavily promoted tend to suck. Reference Shrek 3, Pirates 3, etc. Word of mouth works pretty well given global communications is available to massive numbers of people. Others comments have been just plain silly, such as the film not going over well because of its theme of gourmet cooking. In others words, we assume that the audience is stupid. Which is largely correct, however everyone's gotta eat. Cooking is not that hard of a subject to grasp. Anyway, the film is very well done and the animation is an improvement even over Finding Nemo. The sense of humour is very subtle and should keep the adults in the audience from getting bored. And since Dreamworks is not in the habit of doing sequels, the story actually gets a proper ending.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (PG-13). Since the Harry Potter series was designed from the outset to grow up along with its audience, this installment is darker and more adult than preceding films, hence the jump from PG to PG-13. The film is quite condensed from the book, but the losses are necessary as the book is much longer than previous installments. Things that take 30 pages in the book often get 30 seconds in the movie, if they appear at all. There are a couple of new characters introduced that don't get proper development, which is a shame and could cause problems for the final two films. I enjoyed it, warts and all, and am looking forward to seeing what they do with the Half-Blood Prince.