Planes; Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2

Planes

As a pilot, I was primed to enjoy Planes. It features lots of details that aviation folk will understand, it tells an inoffensive “believe in yourself and all will be well” story, and it does as fine a job of skirting the horrifying realities of the post-singularity world it portrays as its predecessor, Cars.


Here's the setup: a crop duster wants to be a racing plane. It races. It wins. The kids pass out in a Red Vines -induced coma during the closing credits. Done.

And that's pretty much it. Planes is an inoffensive, effective entertainment with a nice eye for aviation detail. You could do worse.


Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2

Hey, do you like puns? Do you like visual puns? Do you like food-related visual puns?

If so, then Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 is for you. It's pretty much one pun after another, and your enjoyment of the film will vary directly with your enjoyment of that kind of humor. Personally, I like that kind of thing and, while it didn't make me laugh out loud, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 put a smile and my face and kept it there for 95 minutes.

The story? It doesn't matter, as it only exists to keep things moving along between gags. The performances? Professional. The animation? Great fun in conception, acceptable in execution. The entire package? A perfectly fine way to spend an evening on the couch with your little one(s).

W.

W bounced on and off my Netflix queue a number of times. I knew that Oliver Stone is a major director, but I didn't particularly care to sit for a two-hour tomatofest directed at our 43rd president

Yep, I expected a hatchet job, and some blademarks are clearly visible: Dick Cheney's Strangelove moment in the War Room, the mannequin that stood in for Condi Rice. But the movie got at what I perceive to be the fundamental nature of its subject: a good man out of his depth. Josh Brolin was phenomenal, making us believe in his character at every step in his journey, and taking all those Bushisms and weaving them into the natural language of a guy whose brain often outpaces his mouth.

While watching the film, I wondered why it needed to be made in 2008. I think there's a difference between a sitting president and and an alumnus, no matter how recent. As the Obama team has learned with the lack of traction of its "blame Bush" public strategy, unless the last guy in the job was a towering figure, he may as well be Jim Garfield. W was urgent during 43's presidency because then, he formed a member of our perceived "circle," those people in our daily lives who have the greatest impact on us. Now, he's like a member of that circle who has since moved away. He's a person in whom we're still interested, but that interest lacks the immediacy it once had.

Immediacy aside, W is still a film worth watching. It's a take on a man and a time by a master filmmaker with a surprising point of view. It looks great, most of the supporting cast is terrific, and it was over before I knew it.