Chicken Little is a kids movie, so I wasn’t expecting that much when I saw it. The only reason I saw the thing in the first place was because my little sister wanted me to go with her to the theater. I have to say, even for a kids movie, Chicken Little is pretty mediocre.

The general plot of the film is this: Chicken Little is trying to clean up his reputation after upsetting the townspeople by claiming the sky was falling, when he realizes that the sky actually is falling. He and some of his friends set out to solve this problem without alerting anybody in the town or causing any type of panic.

I don’t know about anybody else, but when I think of a children’s movie, I think of films like The Lion King, Bambi, Aladdin, Toy Story, or stuff like Finding Nemo.

These are films that are made for kids, but still have enough in them that adults can actually watch them without feeling too annoyed. Chicken Little has none of that. The plot is thin and hard to follow, the dialogue is silly, and the way the characters randomly break into classic 70’s and 80’s songs every 20 minutes is really out of place and horribly annoying. It just has no real entertainment value to it, unlike some of the more recent Pixar/Disney films.

While I was in the theater I noticed that it was packed with kids my sister’s age (around 8 years old), and most of them were quite visibly bored. This is really a film that is suitable for toddlers, not children over the age of four. Your kid may possibly like this film, but be prepared to be bored and annoyed out of your mind.

Let me know what you think of this movie by adding your comment below.

If you enjoyed Cheaper By the Dozen, you’ll love the sequel. Though sequels are not always what they’re cracked up to be, this one is great.

Steve Martin plays Dad Baker, who is affectionate to his family and it comes through as realistic affection, not a lot of sappy goo. Bonnie Hunt plays the mother and puts on a great performance managing her brood. Alyson Stoner plays daughter, Sarah, who is entering adolescence and her performance is brilliant. The scene of love’s first kiss comes off so well that it will take you back in time to your first kiss. The scene is tastefully done with elegance and the innocence and shyness of youth.

Dad and Mom Baker decide to gather their clan together for the final fling of the summer at a rented cottage on Lake Winnetka. Unknown to Dad Baker, his high school nemesis, Jimmy Murtaugh has built “The Boulders,” a fabulous home directly across the lake from the cottage. The two men take up their rivalry where it left off years before. At a Fourth of July clambake, Jimmy shows off in his usual annoying manner. Mayhem sets in when the fireworks are inadvertently set off early and destroy everything within range.

Sarah falls in love the moment she sees Eliot Murtaugh, who played by Taylor Lautner and Eliot feels the same way about her. Sarah thinks she’s not pretty enough for Eliot and begins to experiment with makeup. The results are catastrophic.

Cheaper By the Dozen 2 takes us back in time to our early teens. It shows how sensitive thirteen year olds really are. One very heart warming scene is when Sarah’s older sister, Lorraine shows her how to properly apply makeup for a girl her age. Sarah is transformed into a beautiful young woman and the scene is done so well that it touches the hearts of the audience.

Surprisingly, Jimmy’s new wife, Sarina, who is played by Carmen Electra, is very nice. The audience has to wonder how she ever got hooked up with Jimmy. She loves all eight of her step children, is pretty and sexy and is well liked by Mom Baker. Sarina intervenes when husband, Jimmy, goes on his ego trip and puts him in his place, which delights all viewers.

If you want to take the entire family to a movie, take in Cheaper By the Dozen 2 because it is the one to see. It is much better than “The Family Stone,” or “Yours, Mine and Ours.” Cheaper By the Dozen 2 shines and is great family entertainment. Highly recommended.

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Fun with Dick and Jane is a remake of the 1977 comedy by the same name that starred George Segal and Jane Fonda.

The new version stars Jim Carrey as Dick, who’s an executive at a mega corporation. He gets promoted to vice president of communication just in time for the company’s stock to plummet to next to zero. It is he who has to appear on cable tv to tell the stockholders that they have lost everything.

Jane, his wife, is played by Tea Leoni. Tea is a travel agent, but when Dick gets his big promotion, she decides to resign and does so one the same morning as Dick’s company takes the fall.

Instead of the couple looking at the bright financial future that they were when Dick got his promotion, they are not looking at a bleak existence. They are literally broke. Their savings are gone, their retirement fund is gone and all that they own is being repossessed faster than they can blink their eyes. This includes the lawn. The landscaping company sends men to literally roll up the sod and take it back.

Dick decides that he will find a job and goes out to numerous job interviews, with no success. It seems that all the employers that matter have seen his company’s fall from grace and Dick’s performance on cable tv. No one wants him to work for their company.

Dick and Jane decide to take up a life of crime to allow them to maintain the lifestyle to which they are accustomed. At first the couple takes up petty thievery. Then they get greedy and decide to turn to bigger and better things. That’s when everything goes wrong.

The fall from grace of Dick’s company is very much likened to the fall of Enron. In the first place, Dick’s company was built on the premise of lies. Richard Jenkins and Alec Baldwin do a great job of playing characters who remind the audience of Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay.

The film doesn’t take advantage of opportunities to land Dick and Jane in the center of a political comedy. Instead, there are too many wigs, too much slapstick and too many false beards during the couple’s robbery attempts. Late in the movie, the executive played by Alec Baldwin tries to move his money out of the country. It’s too little and much too late.

Though Fun with Dick and Jane is not a sensation, it may be pleasing to those who haven’t seen the original 1977 version. It’s a mediocre attempt at a remake and I predict it will not make great money at the box office.

Let me know your thoughts on this move by adding your comments below.

Directed by Rob Reiner, Rumor Has It, has all the qualities to make it in the movie world-great actors and a great storyline.

Jennifer Anniston plays the role of Sarah Huttinger. Sarah is engaged to be married and suddenly finds herself unsure of who she is, based on a slip of tongue from her grandmother, Katherine, played by Shirley MacLaine.

When Katherine lets it slip at Sarah’s sister’s wedding that Sarah’s mother almost didn’t get married, Sarah begins to put the pieces together. Knowing that at the same time her mother had run off with someone else, a rumor started about a young woman running off with a young man who had been seduced by her mother. This rumor turned into a book and eventually became a film, “The Graduate”. Sarah believes the rumor to be based on her family and she sets out to find out what really happened.

With Shirley MacLaine as Sarah’s grandmother, Katharine, the movie is hilarious and she plays the part to extreme. Katharine only wants to protect everyone from hearing the truth about what happened with her daughter and their “common” lover. However, Sarah pushes on and discovers more than what she expected.

What Sarah discovers is Beau Burroughs, played by Kevin Costner. Beau not only slept with Sarah’s mother, but also her grandmother. Sarah tells Beau that “Maybe every girl in my family has to sleep with you.” Beau states to Sarah, “Well, I don’t know if they have to, but they certainly have.” To Sarah, Beau represents excitement and adventure and she, too falls under his spell.

This movie is hilarious and is a must see. While the character of Sarah is not quite as interesting as “the book Sarah”, Shirley MacLaine does an outstanding job of the playing the “Mrs. Robinson” of the film. If you remember “The Graduate”, which was nominated for seven Oscars and won Best Director, you’ll follow this movie with excitement and get caught up in the story of Sarah, her husband-to-be, Jeff, played by Mark Ruffalo, her grandmother, Katharine, and of course, Beau, the “family lover”.

Please let me know what you think of the movie Rumor Has It by adding a comment below.

Maybe there’s a group of people dedicated to Sarah Jessica Parker and at the same time hopelessly enraptured by the dysfunctional family at Christmastime theme that could possibly make this dog a hit. I’m harder to please. I actually look for (and encourage) originality, crisp writing, great characters and interesting and unexpected plot twists. This movie is lacking in all of those departments.

In fact the only thing I can say in defense of this film are that the actors are talented enough to have made a very professional although boring movie. If you haven’t seen almost every character, every conflict and every resolution before, you have missed a lot of movies – almost all of them better than this one.

Sarah Jessica Parker said in a recent interview that she didn’t take this role because she was trying to portray an anti-Carrie character to get away from being typecast into the type of roles she played on Sex In The City. She merely took the role because she thought the script was terrific and the chance to work with the other talented actors in the cast was something she couldn’t pass up.

She should have. In the company of other, more experienced film actors Parker comes across as over the top, too cloying, too fake and too easy to please at the end. She plays the role of Meredith Morton, the uptight fiancé of Dermot Mulroney brought home to meet his family for the Christmas family celebration. Instantly, actually before they even meet her, the entire family hates her which doesn’t make sense as the Stones are educated liberals full of compassion for the handicapped and underprivileged people in the world – just not uptight fiancés.

As for the rest of the family, you’ve seen them all before. Just once I wish someone would raise their hands at a pre-production meeting and say something like, “Uh, boss, my character’s the same one I played on such and such and the same one that was in such and such. Can’t we come up with something a little bit different for me to say or do or be in this film?” But no.

Apparently, the size of their paychecks is equal to the amount of guts it would take for one of them to actually say something like that to a successful producer, director or writer. They must think, well, maybe the lighting guy will save this turkey, or perhaps, maybe it will look better on film than it sounds right now. Wrong. This isn’t a horrible mistake of a movie, not with the talent in the cast and the high quality production values, its just that we’ve seen it all before, done better and it wasn’t all that great to begin with.

Trust me, in twenty or thirty years some new cast of great actors will not be pressing their agents to remake this movie. Once around the block with the Family Stone is more than enough.

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Anybody truly in love with Mel Brooks’ original classic or the subsequent Broadway adaptation will be thrilled to hear that this remake more than lives up to its predecessor.

Knowing beforehand that there would be no reason to remake a brilliant, hysterical movie unless they could do it justice, the cast and crew worked together to make this adaptation even funnier than the original and that’s really saying something. I am personally such a fan of the original that I watch it several times each and every year when I am lucky enough to stumble across a showing on cable. To this day, many years after the original was made, the original still makes me laugh and the anticipation of my favorite scenes still keeps me on edge.

My initial reaction upon hearing of the remake was, well, dread. I feared that a bumbling attempt to remake what already worked would destroy the original in my eyes. I thought the money guys were in control of the creative process once again as has been the case in so many remakes through the years. But not this time, I am happy to report. This time they’ve actually improved on the original – and that’s really saying something.

The cast of Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Uma Thurman, Will Farrell and Roger Bart as directed by Susan Stroman are so uniformly blended with their characters that the movie literally zips along flawlessly from start to finish leaving the audience almost in tears from so much laughter.

The music numbers are really to die for. If I had one complaint about the original it would be that the music numbers were given short shrift budget wise and screen time wise as they were secondary to the comic antics and desperation of the two main characters. And with their humorous take on Nazis, they were so outrageous that too much might have been considered overkill. But here, the Broadway show “Springtime For Hitler” is every bit as impressive an undertaking as it should have been in the original and it is truly hilarious. Nobody but Mel Brooks could make a humorous, sympathetic Adolf Hitler work so well. Others have tried – none have succeeded.

Ultimately, the movie turns on the chemistry between the two main characters Max Bialystock, the desperate Broadway producer, and Leo Bloom, the mild mannered, neurotic accountant who discovers that the key to financial success on Broadway is to produce a huge failure and here the chemistry works on every level. Just as in the original with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, the comic tension and timing between Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick is every bit as sharp if not more so.

This might be the very first remake that I really have no complaints about even though, as I said, the original is truly one of my all time movie favorites. This remake might actually be so fresh and funny that it could end up right next to the original on my all time favorites list. For people who have never seen the original I envy you the experience of this fresh remake. For those of you who have, like me, seen and enjoyed the original, have no fear – your time and money will be will spent watching this movie as well.

Did you like the movie as much as I did? Let me know what you thought of the movie in the comments below.

Yours, Mine and Ours, starring Dennis Quaid and Renee Russo is a remake of the 1968 movie starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda. Let’s just say that after seeing the 1968 movie, there’s no need to see the 2005.

Basically, the problem with this movie is its predictability. There is almost nothing in the movie that can not be predicted. For example, when on the sailboat, Frank, played by Dennis Quaid, tells everyone to be careful of the boom, otherwise someone might get knocked in. Guess what? Someone gets knocked overboard. Not only that but who couldn’t predict that two large families thrown together by marriage wouldn’t get along?

As for combining two families, with a total of eighteen children, in today’s world, it would be impossible not to be poor. Yet these people have a live-in housekeeper, Dad has an office, Mom has an art studio, and of course, none of the eighteen children are going without. Just a little unrealistic!

As for the premise of the movie, it’s the reunion of two high school sweethearts, who after seeing each other a couple of times, decide to get married without even consulting their children. He has eight children and she has ten. Once they are married, it, of course, has the never-ending story of the two sets of kids not liking each other or messing up the house or getting into trouble.

Beyond the fact that the Yours, Mine and Ours is predictable, it will catch a few laughs. After all, you’ve got Dennis Quaid and Renee Russo playing Dad and Mom, and Linda Hunt playing as the housekeeper. Maybe not as good as the 1968 Lucille Ball version, but it will provide you with some entertainment.

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Drew Baylor has issues.

Drew, played by Orlando Bloom from Pirates of the Caribbean, is about to experience the cosmic law that bad things occur in threes. Shortly after a euphoric success at work, he is suddenly responsible for the company’s catastrophic loss of almost one billion dollars. As his boss, played by Alec Baldwin, tells Drew that the company will no longer be able to save endangered species or sections of precious rainforest, Drew realizes his error has global consequences. His memories of carefree office parties and being the golden boy at work are squashed by his present horror. That is bad thing number one.

Next, Drew is dumped by his girlfriend, although you may experience stomach pains watching because Drew doesn’t quite comprehend he has been dumped. Such is love.

Worse than losing almost a billion dollars, and being dumped, Drew learns his father passed away while visiting family in Kentucky. Ironically, his sister called with the news at the exact moment Drew was about to commit suicide. With his sister crying and his mother barely making sense, Drew realizes he must be the one to bring his father back from Elizabethtown, Kentucky.

On the flight to Kentucky, Drew meets Claire (Kirsten Dunst) a bubbly and at first annoying flight attendant. Under normal circumstances we are lead to believe that Drew would not give Claire the time of day, but her persistence and his state leads to conversation.

Drew is depressed and clearly distraught over his father’s death, his work situation, love life, and state of his mother, but when Drew arrives in Elizabethtown he is cocooned by his father’s family whom he had not seen since his youth. Writer and director Cameron Crowe shows and doesn’t tell us what is going on in this story and suddenly we realize Crowe has exaggerated Drew’s success and failures in a way that makes us realize, it’s okay to take chances and fail. Crap happens. Life goes on, And during this movie, if you look close enough you’ll see a remedy for a broken heart.

The most touching and at the same time exhilarating part of this movie is when Drew accompanies his father back home. This movie (irony, metaphors and all,) the scenery and the soundtrack make for one great emotional ride. This is one of those movies you see more than once, and then buy the DVD and watch a few times more.

Please let me know what you think about Elizabethtown by leaving your comments below.