Over the weekend, we watched Disney Pixar’s Brave.  After watching the movie, NHL immediately had two reactions.  First, he loved the movie.  Second, he wanted to see the Special Features.

Special features are NHL’s favorite part of the DVD/Blu-Ray viewing experience.  He loves seeing deleted scenes (and figuring out where they would have fit and/or why they were removed), alternate endings, and even (sometimes) small featurettes.  If the disc has enough special features, he might even spend more time watching them than the spent watching the movie itself.

In the case of Brave, he watched two special features on the DVD.  The first was a short film that Pixar put in front of Brave during its run in the theatres called La Luna.  The second was an expansion on the Mordu legend that was introduced within Brave.  The one feature that NHL didn’t watch, which might have bored him but was highly interesting to me, was the audio commentary.  During this, the filmmakers talked about how Brave changed throughout the process.  They revealed how scenes were supposed to play out originally and how they morphed (for the better) to the version you see onscreen.  I love these little glimpses of the special kind of magic that it takes to put a movie together.

Do you watch the special features on DVDs and/or Blu-Rays?  Or do you just watch the movie itself?

Note: The "CD / DVD" image above is from Chrisdesign and is available from OpenClipArt.org.

Once upon a time, an author named J.K. Rowling wrote a series of books about a young wizard named Harry Potter.  After a few of her books sold an insane number of copies, some movie companies thought they would make wonderful movies.  (READ: Would sell tons of tickets, DVDs, movie tie-in toys, etc.)  So movies were made and released.

B, having read the books, begged me to see the movies.  I watched them initially because it was important to her, but quickly grew interested in the stories I saw on-screen.  However, for whatever reason, my love of the screen adventures didn’t translate to me reading the books.  We had all 7 books sitting in a box, but I didn’t read a single page.

Fast forward a bit and we introduced NHL to the first movie: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.  He fell in love with it instantly and soon we had also shown him Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets as well.  At this point, we made a decision.  He would see no more Harry Potter movies!  Not until he had read the book that the movie was based on.  Every night, NHL and I would sit down and read a few pages of a Harry Potter book.

As we got through the first two books, we would often stop and discuss how the book was different than the movie.  What scenes were longer in the book or omitted entirely in the movie?  What characters were left out?  How were events altered to fit the big screen?

NHL and I recently finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, so we’ve 1) started reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and 2) watched the Goblet of Fire movie.  I remember really liking this movie and sensing the peril that Harry is put through.  However, upon re-watching it after reading the book, I felt that it was rushed.

Harry and his friends go to see the Quidditch World Cup.  The players fly out onto the field and then… we flash back to their camp site post-game.  This was just fine when I didn’t know that the book described the entire game.  There were wondrous sights in the pages of the book that I’d have loved to have seen on the screen.

In addition, whole subplots were chopped out.  In the book, Rita Skeeter is a major thorn in the side of Harry and his friends.  Her stories, and how she obtains them, puts Harry through a lot of grief.  In the movie, however, she’s regulated to one major appearance, two minor appearances, and a mention or two.

Now that I’ve read the book, the movie feels like a faithful rendition… were half of the book ripped out and tossed away.  I still like the movie, don’t get me wrong and  I understand that you can’t make the movie 100% like the book.  (Otherwise, Goblet of Fire would be a 10 hour long movie and who would sit through that?!!!)  Still, I can’t help but miss the discarded sections, subplots, and characters when the movie skips by them.

Curse you Harry Potter books! You’ve totally ruined the Harry Potter movies for me!

Have you ever read a book after seeing a movie based on it?  How did the movie hold up after you read the book?

Note: The "book/movie" image above was created by combining the "Book" image from CrazyTerabyte and the "Cinema" image from Merlin2525.  Both of these images are available from OpenClipArt.com.

On Sunday, we all went to the movie theater to see Wreck-It Ralph.  We’ve been anticipating this game for quite some time.  Going in, I was expecting a funny story and lots of references to old video games.  We got all of that, but what we didn’t expect was a valuable life lesson.

Note: While I’ll try to keep the following as spoiler-free as possible, I might slip and reveal a little too much here and there.  So, if you haven’t seen the movie yet, proceed with caution.

In Wreck-It Ralph, the title character is the bad guy in a video game called Fix It Felix, Jr.  Ralph destroys the building in Niceland.  Felix (controlled by the player) fixes it up with his golden hammer.  When the player fixes the whole building, Ralph is tossed off the top of the building by the citizens of Niceland and lands in the mud below.  When the game shuts down for the night, the Niceland citizens party with Felix.  Ralph, meanwhile, is regulated to spending his time alone in the dump, lying atop a pile of bricks.

Sick of being the bad guy stuck on the sidelines, Ralph attempts to join a party celebrating his game’s 30th anniversary.  Unfortunately, things don’t go according to plan and the citizens of Niceland tell him, in no uncertain terms, that his place is in the dump and not with them.

Meanwhile, in another game, Venellope Von Schweetz is a glitch of a character.  The other racers pick on her, shun her, and actively try to keep her from racing.  They want nothing to do with her and would love if she would just disappear from the game entirely.

Both of these characters could listen to the crowds.  They could listen to the people who tell them that they are worthless and won’t ever do anything good or important in their lives.  Thankfully, they don’t.  (Or it would be a very short movie.)  They do their best to prove the crowds wrong.  And, in the end, they must show how the very things that people decried as horrible about them are actually useful strengths.

Wreck-It Ralph is a great movie to watch for pure entertainment.  However, it also has a very powerful message, especially to those of us who have dealt with bullies in the past.  Let’s take a lesson from Ralph and Venellope and show those who oppose us just how being ourselves makes us stronger and not freaks or "glitches."

This past week has been quite the geeky upgrade.  It all started on Friday.  Ok, technically that’s not “this week”, but it is within the past 7 days.  As part of my birthday present, I received three Lego minifigures that I’m going to use to create some Lego tie clips.

On Saturday, the boys and I watched some Bean episodes.  I had previously shown the boys Mr. Bean’s Vacation and they had fallen in love with Rowan Atkinson’s antics.  I figured that they’d like the Bean shorts more and I was right.  They laughed non-stop at Bean in a hospital (hand stuck in a teapot), Bean visiting a school (losing his pants in a changing room and tracking them down), and more.  Every place Bean went, chaos seemed to follow and Bean would either be the cause or would come up with an extremely creative (and unusual)

Sunday was the day that I took apart my laptop to fix a problem deep inside.  Though I believe I fixed that problem, it turned out that the power cord was faulty too.  A replacement has been ordered and is on its way.  Still, the lessons learned from that operation were well worth the effort.

Sunday night, I introduced NHL to Back To The Future.  He’s been hooked since that night.  We watched BTTF parts 2 and 3 and he is in love with the entire trilogy.  I was so proud of NHL when, after Marty was apparently shot and killed, he guessed that Marty had copied a scene from A Fistful of Dollars starring Clint Eastwood (a scene shown in the previous movie) and had a metal plate under his shirt.  He could barely contain himself as the third movie reached its climax.  Check that, he didn’t contain himself.  He was up off the couch, jumping up and down, and cheering Doc Brown and Marty McFly on.

Finally, I had a small geeky upgrade of my own.  For years, I’ve heard people say how great the Doctor Who series is.  I meant to watch it, but never seemed to get a chance.  With six seasons available on Netflix, though, I decided it was time to watch.  I’m only three episodes in, but I love it already.  The weirdness, time travel, and plot lines have me wanting more.  Given that I still have 80 episodes to watch before I catch up, I should be good for some time.

Have you or your kids tried any new geeky pursuits?

There are quite a few pieces of geeky culture that I have shared with NHL.  I’ve introduced him to superheroes, to video games, Star Wars, and even to the Internet.  However, there are still many more things to show him.  Some will need to wait until he is older, but this weekend I showed him yet another element: Back To The Future.

Back To The Future is, of course, the classic time travel tale featuring Michael J Fox and Christopher Lloyd.  NHL was pretty excited when we took it out of the library.  When the movie began, however, he changed his mind.  It was just going too slow for his taste and he wanted to turn something else on.  I kept reassuring him that this was all setup and that things would pick up once they went back in time.

Then, Marty got himself stuck in 1955.  From that point on, NHL was hooked.  He was on the edge of his seat as Marty’s siblings started to disappear.  He cheered when Marty triumphed over Biff.  He kept hoping against hope that Doc and Marty could pull off their plan and get Marty home.

Then, Doc showed up at the end and whisked Marty and Jennifer off to the future.  Though we didn’t have time, he kept trying to guess what happened next.  He is definitely a Back To The Future fan and can’t wait until we have time to watch parts 2 and 3.

What geeky movies have you and your kids watched recently?