I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving weekend. We had a great time seeing everyone. R., in particular, had a great time with a new baby in the family, a 10 month old who she helped feed and play with. It was very cute, although I keep reminding her that babies aren't so much fun until you're around 25-30 years old.

I got to see three new movies over the last two weekends. Here are some mini-reviews.

Zathura: The storyline on this one is like this: a kid finds an old space-themed board game in his father's house. On every turn, the game spits out a little card that tells you to do something in the game. When he and his brother start to play, the stuff that comes out on the card actually starts happening (meteor shower, malfunctioning robot, aliens attack). The house ends up in orbit of an unknown planet and they have to play out the game to get home, while avoiding getting killed as the various game-generated calamities occur.

It wasn't a bad movie, but I thought the storyline was a bit difficult to follow. It also tended to get preachy in places. J. liked it, but I could tell he wasn't real enthusiastic about it.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: The adaptation of the 4th year at Hogwarts might be the best Harry Potter movie yet, although I still like The Prisoner of Azkaban quite a bit as well. The movie pares the 700+ page book down to the barest essentials that keep the story moving forward. Probably my biggest complaint about the movie is that Harry's Muggle family, the Dursley's, are denied an appearance. The special effects are wonderful (especially the dragons), and the all-star team of British character actors does it's usual wonderful job.

The kids acting gets better with each movie. In fact, my only complaint about the acting is Michael Gambon as Dumbledore. In both the books and in Richard Harris' portrayal in the first two films, Dumbledore is an extremely calm individual. Gambon seems to get way too excited about things in this movie, especially when Harry's name comes popping out of the Goblet.

One more thing - take this PG-13 rating seriously. There are some very frightening images in this movie, and Ralph Fiennes Voldemort is the stuff of nightmares. J. won't be seeing this movie for quite a while, no matter how much he begs. Oh, and I wouldn't reccomend this film as your jumping on point into the Harry Potter universe. If you haven't read the books, or at least seen the previous movies, you are going to get lost very quickly.

Chicken Little: This one is far from a Disney classic, but it has some funny moments in it. The movie is Disney's first all-CGI effort, and it looks great, but the story doesn't really hold together. Disney has a ways to go to match Pixar in the animated movie department at this point.