Movie Mini-Reviews: A Ferocious Foursome

I always try to blog about books more than I do about movies, mostly because I believe books just so often affect my thinking day to day than movies. Rarely a movie will jump out and bite me and I'll write about it. Most recently it was I [Heart] Huckabyes, and before that the list is fairly slim (mostly Charlie Kaufman sci-fi comedy tragedies). Last week while recovering I spent most of my time supine on the couch (for obvious reasons) watching random NCAA coverage, Comedy Central, and collection of four films. Individually each movie really didn't quite make it to my "that was a great movie, it really made me think" list, but collectively they all had their strong points and worked together to keep my mind somewhat active.

The Incredibles was a film I had been wanting to watch since it first came out, but I generally wait for a "kiddie" film like this to hit the discount theaters first if I'm to see it alone and my family never decided it was worth a gathering for. Due to its power with audiences this film made it to DVD at just about the same time it finally settled into a berth at the local discount screens, which worked out nicely for me and the timing of my surgery. It was a beautiful movie, but I was expecting just a little bit more from it. It wasn't because it was Pixar film, it was because I really liked The Iron Giant, particularly its pulp era style. Where The Iron Giant was largely a "serious" telling of an old fashioned pulp comic, The Incredibles was merely a charicature of a silver age comic. That isn't to say a "mere charicature" was bad, it was in ...