What a suprise! The second one is better than the first! The addition of Queen Latifah as Ellie, perhaps the only other living wolly mammouth, as a foil to Ray Romano’s Manny is a great choice. I had my college intern, Diana, review the movie with me and she loved it just as much as I did. The same crazy squirrel shows up throughout which makes me laugh each time I see him. Families will want to see it twice and for groups of teens/college kids it is a wholesome, funny movie that they’ll laugh through. Queen Laitfah’s humor coupled with Dennis Leary’s sacrasim keeps it witty and clever enough to engage the older viewers. You’ll enjoy seeing the first Ice Age movie if you missed it.
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FIVE of our children have seen the movie 3 times!! They love it and I do too because it teaches such wonderful life lessons. If you like basketball you’ll enjoy the movie even more but even if you don’t like the game you’ll find the movie to be one of the best family films in a decade. The movie is based on a true story. A new basketball coach comes to Texas Western (now UTEP) and recruits and starts an unheard of number of blacks. You witness the prejudice, the acceptance, the teamwork and you learn how one person really can change their part of the world. The actors portray the big and little issues that arose as blacks and whites began to treat each other as equals. Racial prejudice on both sides is candidly shown. The basketball sequences give you goose bumps.
What a wonderful film. In short, a woman is misdiagnosed and believes she has weeks to live. She lives! Travelling overseas to a posh resort she has always dreamed of, she tries everything she’s ever dreamt of. The film resonates with adults who may wonder if they’ve spent enough of their life doing the things they love or if they are spending their lives waiting to get to a point where they feel financially or emotionally secure enough to do those things…and perhaps will miss out on them. Queen Latifah is such a warm, funny actress who brings a “realness” to the character she portrays. She plays characters with an honesty that makes them more real…not perfect…but real. The kids 9-14 loved the movie and adore Latifah. I did too.
Based on the 2002 Fox series Firefly, Serenity can be enjoyed by both Firefly fans and those unaware of Serenity’s heritage. What did I like? The charaters were people one could like. The “good guys” and the villain had a certain honor.
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This is the little known story of a battalion of Midwestern Army Rangers picked to raid a Japanese POW camp near the end of WWII. As the Allied troops are advancing, the Japanese are eliminating hundreds of POWs using gruesome methods. The story covers a virtually impossible-to-accomplish 4-day mission. The videography is great. You understand the lives of the POWs and how the Phillipine resistance thwarted Japanese attempts to reinforce troops. Not only does it tell the overall strategy of the raid but it gets into the human stories behind the people in the battalion and the POWs.
The disturbing images are at the beginning of the film when you see the Japanese douse POW’s with gas and burn them alive. There is mild cussing if any. I would take my 12-year-old boys to see it.
Joe Hill
If you liked “Saving Private Ryan”, “Black Hawk Down” or “We Were Soldiers” you will appreciate this movie.
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