Note to self: Never see a Peter Jackson movie on a full bladder, and never, under any circumstances, go to see one after 8pm or you may find yourself closing the theater/mall down with the security crew; as I ambled out of the theater brushing down my chair hair I asked an employee how long the movie was…. he answered “Three hours and twenty minutes”. A policeman on security detail replied with “But it was worth it, wasn’t it?”

Yes, it was absolutely, incredibly, heartbreakingly worth it.
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Finally, a worthy successor to Jumanji… just as I was getting worried that the cursed board game genre was nigh on fading away along comes this glittering piece of filmdom complete with a swoopy name: Zathura.
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This review is a tad tardy and wholly unnecessary as there are five kazillion reviews of the movie online now, but if you’re interested in the opinion of someone who won a writing competition to be IN the first Michael Keaton Batman movie, here goes:

I’m giving this movie four and a half bats out of five.

I saw ‘Batman Begins’ at the 12:01am Atlanta premiere with a theater full of fans, which always tends to make an action-adventure movie more fun to watch although it does make it harder to see the screen when there are 200 little Bat-Ears poking up from everyone’s costumes.
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I have to hand it to Steven Spielberg, he really goes all out when he makes a movie. On the way home from seeing ‘War of the Worlds’ tonight the world was alight with intermittent flashes of lightning, illuminating the dark roiling skies from within like giant lanterns. Chances are, if I’d seen the silhouette of a city water tower tossed into sharp relief I would have driven straight off the road into the trees and not stopped running until next May.

I’m giving this movie four out of five alien tripods.

It would have only been six but I’m buying off the Scientologists with an extra point so they’ll stay off of my back. Johnny T., QUIT calling man – I keep telling you that I’m Methodist!!
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This week I attended a special screening of the film ‘Serenity’, the third such pre-release audience test screening to visit Atlanta in the last eight weeks. Based on the failed FOX network series ‘Firefly’, this movie represents a Very Big Thing to the world of science fiction fandom; one of the very few times that a cancelled television show is moved up to the silver screen with creator, cast and crew intact (think: Star Trek). Before the movie began there was a brief, pre-recorded introduction by the show’s creator/director, Joss Whedon (aka Joyce Wilber, aka Jox Wheaty, aka Jake Wheelbarrow and any other other intentional mispronunciation I could think of to elicit wails of frustration from the man’s fans).
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It was Thursday, May 19th in the wee hours of the morning and I was driving home from the Regal 24, sleep already burning its way into my eyes when I sensed it.

“What’s wrong Drewprops?” I spoke into the rushing wind from an open window.

I paused, sighed contentedly and the answer slipped into the world… “A great disturbance on the Internet. It was like a million petulant geeks crying out in unison, then suddenly being silenced. George Lucas finally made another decent movie.”
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Towel-less went I into the great gaping maw of the 12:01am Atlanta premiere of HHGG, anticipation mixing with excitement, stirring itself into soda mixed with peanut M+M’s, bubbling over into a growing expectation that the movie might actually be good, raining down into a puddle of foreboding that the movie was all too soon going to dash my heart upon the sharp and familiar rocks of cinematic best-intentions-gone-horribly-astray.

Something even more terrible than my opening sentence.
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It’s a lot of fun when a foreign language film breaks out of the art film circuit and into mainstream American culture, which will easily be the case with this movie. The subtitles were quickly digested by the audience, made all the more palatable with the zesty sprinkles of Warner Brothers “cartoon violence” (boy does that term steam my goat (no, I don’t know what that means either)).
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