Recent Good Stuff

The LEGO Movie (2014)

/ AlftheRed / Leave a comment

(This is part of the What to Watch With Your Kids series)

Minimum Age: 7 Maximum Age: None Categories: Recent Good Stuff
Test drive: I watched it twice, which is rare for me. It became a favorite of my 11-year old boy, who eventually got the soundtrack, which he now uses to torture his sister.

This movie is deceiving. It looks for most of its run as a pastiche, devised to sell sets from all LEGO collections while making better-than-average jokes about action-movie cliches. The adventure, set in a variety of LEGO worlds, is done with enormous talent, cleverness and attention to detail. It’s enough to make every kid (and a fair share of the grownups) laugh from beginning to end, with some wows! here and there.

But there is more to it than that. An unexpected, fantastic twist makes all the apparently chaotic silliness suddenly make perfect sense.

That’s all I want to say about it, else I’ll ruin it (“You’ve got to trust me on this one.”) If, like me, you are looking for wonder in all places, you won’t want to miss it.

Special mention deserves the theme song, Everything is Awesome! Engineered to be both insufferably catchy and obnoxious, the energetic lyrics (proclaiming, yes, that everything is awesome, and going through a hilarious list of awesome things) also have a deeper level (though this may have been unintentional). I, for one, used the above, fan-made video in one of my classes to comment on the Bible’s story of Creation. After all, “God saw that it was good” will be more readily understood by my young students as “God saw that everything is awesome!”

Alf the Red

*If you are already a fan, and are craving for more, check out this HISHE (How it Should Have Ended) clip.*

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Avatar: The Last Airbender

/ AlftheRed / 1 Comment
Minimum Age: 7 (Okay, maybe 6) Maximum Age: None Categories: High Adventure;
Recent Good Stuff
Test drive: It became the favorite show of both my 6-year-old boy and my 8-year-old girl, who continued watching it over and over, for many years since.
When my wife and I began watching it, it became the show we’d all watch together every evening.

Avatar coverIf you haven’t watched this one, you should definitely begin here!

How good is it? Don’t let the fact that this is an animated series put you off: This show has better writing than most live-action series, and it is possibly the best-written show that’s ever been done in the fantasy genre.

Just how good is it? Do you have a family member who cares only so much for fantasy, and not at all for cartoons? Well, that would be my wife, and she made me promise not to watch too many episodes ahead.

Which was hard, I tell you, because the story draws you in. This is neither one of those shows in which every episode is like the rest, but a three-season story in which characters develop, allies are won and lost, and cities and countries fall to the war. The animation is extremely beautiful, each elemental type of magic based on actual kung-fu styles. The humor is spot-on, with visual gags that will have the young ones rolling on the floor, and clever jokes on the genre itself, which will stay with you for a long time. (The song “Secret Tunnel!” appearing early in the second season, became a family joke for months! I think my kids asked me to stop.)

In short, I can’t recommend this show enough without becoming a bore.  The one bad thing about it is that it ends. How dare they!

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(P.S.: Just make sure you don’t confuse it with the very disappointing live-action movie by M. Night Shyamalan. If you want to see how bad it is, follow this link to Honest Trailers. Nuff’ said…)