From: robgood@bestweb.net   
      
   My friend and housemate Don wanted to see this award-winning movie at last   
   night's outdoor showing in Memory Park in Newton NJ, so we went.  Less than an   
   hour into it I found myself doing astronomy, as it was a beautiful clear night   
   and the field lights    
   were off.   
      
   The first 20 minutes gave me the impression (which was not dispelled by the   
   rest of it) that the makers wanted to sell it for people to buy and rewind   
   often to watch in slow motion.  You can't follow the computer-animated action,   
   it's so fast and    
   visually spectacular, with very fast operatic monolog to music.  So it's   
   dazzling but incomprehensible.  That's OK, except for one main point, it's   
   irrelevant anyway.  Although it keeps distracting you, where it's all going is   
   telegraphed very shortly    
   after the opening.   
      
   What semblance of plot is discernible is trivial, and one you've seen many   
   times before and may well know from real life, minus the allegoric magic: a   
   well-meaning but insensitive and controlling matriarch.  The conclusion avoids   
   the predictable-but-good    
   idea which would've been, now we'll live like normal people, what's wrong with   
   that, huh?  Instead it presents the also-predictable-but-evil Disney idea that   
   all the magic is restored, magically.   
      
   Oh, and the setting, if you can figure it out, appears to be a rehash of   
   Hanuka.  It's people restoring their lives after some delay after an invasion,   
   with a flame that inexplicably keeps burning, symbolic of miracle.  But that   
   too seems like a    
   distraction from the main action in the movie.   
      
   Bob in Andover   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)