A dude playing a dude playing another dude?

Look, I loved reading Pauline Kael in the New Yorker -- I hardly ever agreed with her opinion, but I loved reading what she had to say. And I respect the whole "Stephanie Zacherek is Pauline Kael's anointed torch-bearer" schtick.

But the fact is, Stephanie Zacherek writes googledy nonsense. I defy anyone to read this review and make heads or tails of it. I have no idea what the hell she's talking about, and, as a result, I have no idea whether I might like this movie.

I don't need to agree with what Salon's movie reviewer says. I just need it to be logical and comprehensible on some basic level. If SZ can't clear that low bar, why does she have this job?

Lack of pretension?

What I recall of this movie is the utter lack of wit, Brendan Fraser (who is hilarious in the first two Mummy films) constantly shouting "Ahhhhhh!!!!!!" and the sense that I was watching a Disney ride rather than a movie. It was witless, utterly lacking any of the charm, substance, and real fun of the original. And where was Gertrude the goose?

There's a huge difference between 3-D movies where things are supposed to look like they're coming out of the screen at you and you have to wear special glasses to see the effect and 3-D animation which simply means the objects are rendered as three dimensional objects, like in a live action film.

Stephanie Zacharek doesn't seem to understand this, which makes me question everything else she's said in this review. If you can't tell the difference between something seeming to jump off the screen at you or simply looknig three dimensional your grasp on reality isn't very strong.

It does have the special glasses in some theaters. She got that right.

Everything else is up for debate. ;)

The title for every new Zacharek review should be "Stephanie Zacharek doesn't get another movie." Her complaints about most films don't register with any human beings who don't happen to already be Stephanie Zacharek.

And I'm a pointy-headed elitist college-educated know-it-all type who is frequently prone to berating big corporations and summer blockbusters! I'm supposed to be the target audience here, and yet I can't identify with anything she says. Yikes.

Thanks, I hadn't seen anything about that in any of the previews I saw of the movie and hadn't hear that it was actual "3-D" in some theatres. It still doesn't bode well that Ms. Zacharek was unable to clearly convey that there are showings of it that have 3-D effects.

What good is Susie Essman if she can't unleash a few F-bombs? Nobody does it better. What a sad waste of talent!

"the charm was lost on me"

Stephanie can just use this sentence from this review as the entirety of every review she has ever written and we'd all be better off for it.

It's silly to blame the reviewer here for a perceived misuse of the term "3D". The stereoscopic segment of the film industry itself calls its offerings "3D", i.e. "Disney Digital 3D", "Bolt 3D", etc.

"3D", referring to (not necessarily stereoscopic) 3D modeling (using ray-tracing and related techniques) is no longer a useful distinction in discussing animated cinema, as that technology is nearly ubiquitous (South Park type stuff notwithstanding).

maybe

It's a Disney!

What else is playing?

/how many kids under the age of 12 read movie reviews at Salon?

I think that we can all thank Ms. Zacharek for setting us straight about hamsters.

Bolt was made for children, even with a story that adults could appreciate. The reviewer completely missed the point.

Even after Bolt learns he is just a regular dog without superpowers, he is still hero. The point of the story: Heroism doesn't require superpowers. It's really that simple.

Present Day Disney should NEVER produce films that invite cruel comparison to their classic hand-animated unforgettably orchestrated movies of the "Golden Era". Case in point: "Bolt" vs. "Lady and the Tramp".

Can Disney hope to ever again re-create the most romantic scene in American Film history?: Tramp and Lady's intimate Italian supper in the candle-lit alley, the accidental spaghetti kiss, the refrain of "Bona Nota"?

Can any scene in "Bolt" ever touch the cultural melting-pot American-School-of-Hard-Knocks bittersweet scene in the Pound, with Tramp's old flame (Peggy Lee's steamy voice) swinging her hips and singing "He's a Tramp, But I Love Him"?

Not in this Millenia....