At the Movies

Every once in a great while we will go see a movie at the cinema. We're on the once-a-year plan or there abouts. When we have a special occasion, such as this weekend, though we sometimes head out to see a show.

With family visiting from out of town, we headed off to the cinema. There were two offerings available to us, being that we were a party of four adults and two children. "Monsters Vs. Aliens", and "Race to Witch Mountain" were showing, and it was no contest for me.

Would I rather see another iteration of the tired formula of liberty-siphoning propaganda coming from sassy, selfish, impertinent creatures set in child-friendly colorful cartoons? or some live actors portraying an action adventure story?

No contest. Thankfully, the Artist and the Engineer were also turned off by the ads they had seen for Monsters vs. Aliens.

We saw about half an hour's worth of previews (yawn). Rick and I whispered to each other that two of the movies previewed looked bad, one for being environmentalist overkill and the other for being blatantly anti-American.

When the feature show finally began, our whole party was hooked into "Race to Witch Mountain" right away. It was fun, action packed, exciting, a little scary in some parts according to our pre-teen and our 7-year old. The best part was, through the whole movie there was not a scene I wished I could have shielded my kids from seeing, and not one word I'd rather them not hear. We had fun at the show and enjoyed talking about it afterwords too. There was one thinly veiled political issue briefly addressed in the script, but it was skirted so quickly I could forgive them. And the great, repeated, use of a certain product logo placement lent a great irony that Rick and I particularly enjoyed.