Someone oughta tell "Holy Joe" that it's not about him.

The most important vote of his lifetime; the one time that he could actually make a difference and he's gonna hold a grudge. He should be thanking his lucky stars that Al Gore wanted to define himself as being different than Clinton by selecting Joe as his running mate, otherwise we wouldn't know the lil' pecker, he'd be a back-bencher with very little to offer the national scene. Fuck him. No really.

one of the great right-wing myths of all time. If you have made your self wealthy by working within and, (as often), exploiting our economic system, pay your fair share. A fair progressive tax code is patriotic. Otherwise, Please shut up. Take your ball and go home.

I thought Stephanie Zacharek wrote an insightful, intelligent and witty review which as I said enriched my understanding of why I found the movie so bewildering and unsatisfying. Perhaps the derision comes from what I have come to expect to be the usual onslaught of indignant readers in these pages, screaming because the critic dared criticize something they felt psychologically inclined to hold dear and defend at all costs. It's really not a matter of the movie not being to my taste, (I wanted to like it, I really did), to me it's a misguided attempt at taking something quite innocent and simple, direct even, and artificially grafting a "deeper meaning" onto it. It feels stilted and uneven and not all together honest. It's not uplifting, it's depressing. In the end, these creatures aren't howling at the moon in some sort of fierce and triumphant collusion with the powers of nature but in a defeated and existential melancholy. No wonder Max left them mewling on the shoreline, at least he gets a hot meal at home. The whole business about the sun burning out seemed unnecessarily tacked-on and then dispensed with later on with a casual shrug by the main miscreant and fuzzy-wumpus, Carol. What in the end should be a story about the triumph of unrestricted childhood id becomes a turgid dissertation on loss and yearning and more loss ...etc. Like a children's movie made by disaffected adults wallowing in mid-life ennui. P.S. You have every right to love it.

...actually I suppose that I would have to underline the phrase, put it in italics and boldface followed by a winking emoticon.

that the movie seems to be aimed at the parents rather than kids, it's themes essentially ones relatable to somewhat morose adults who want to see themselves in Max ( and by turn his alter-egos),by revisiting what appears to be an awful lot of general insecurity/neurosis that in the end make them sound like kvetching middle-aged folks at a not-very-interesting cocktail party rather than mythical creatures brimming with rage and joy and danger. I see what the writers/director were trying to do and there are some almost inspired moments sprinkled throughout, but it misses as an affecting narrative that rises above the level of an intellectual exercise in how to expand not only the backstory of Max but his stay in his imagined forest and in turn the film's "meaning". I'd call it a misguided if not inspired failure. Sorry. and boring to boot. If you want a dark, well crafted, children's fantasy with psychological undertones filled with a discernible amount of existential ennui, watch Coraline. It is everything this movie isn't; inventive, visually stunning and charming.

Possibly it's not a film for actual kids but for their self-consciously disaffected parents.

I know that there are going to be the requisite number of Gen X-ers crying "foul", but this is one of those reviews that enriched my understanding of a film that I didn't particularly like while discussing some of the pitfalls of adults attempting to portray the "wonder of childhood". Like someone attempting to recall a dream adequately, it falls woefully short on most accounts while committing the cardinal sin of actually being somewhat dreary and lacking any sense of story, (granted the original book doesn't have, as Stephanie points out, more than 10 sentences altogether). The whole thing to me came off as somewhat joyless overall while much of the woodland antics had all the episodic pointlessness and anarchic glee of a Jackass sketch where they dress up as pandas and trash a department store. This isn't to say that the creatures weren't amazingly well-crafted but their ponderous nature along with the unrelenting drabness of color made the whole affair seem, well, drab. My favorite quote says it all, "Even the look of the picture becomes tiresome after a while -- it starts to seem depressive and shaggy and tired, as if Sid and Marty Krofft had forgotten to take their meds." I actually laughed when I read that line.

My 7 year-old daughter didn't like the film much and as the author points out, kids are pretty easily awed. Tellingly she doesn't claim to "understand" what's happening in the book but the movie made linear sense to her. That's not necessarily a good thing. She was bored throughout as was I, even though she sighed as she shrugged that she liked it, "ok". Possibly it's not a film for actual kids but for their parents.

There is much to admire here in some ways but honestly, did this actually beg to be stretched to a feature length effects-laden film? How would this not have been more effective as an animated short?

It seems missing from this discussion often is any notion about the still-developing psyche of a teenager, even one who is 19. We all tend to think of someone who is approaching 20 as "old enough to know better", but really, how many of us were equipped to deal with complex and compromising issues of identity/sexuality/morality if presented to us at that age, especially if our childhood had been riddled with excess and unsettled questions of propriety? I admire her for coming forward.