lunabee34 | Entries tagged with movie reviews: animated

1. Ha ha! I am vindicated.

So, my family will sometimes say stob for a small stump or a stick sticking up out of the ground or a broken off piece of fencing. Josh has insisted repeatedly over the years that this is not a real word and just something weird my family says. However, I'm reading one of Rick Bragg's memoirs and he uses the word stob, which prompted me to look it up in the dictionary and confirm it is indeed a real word and not just another example of the ways in which I belong to a bunch of hicks. I've always assumed it's a bastardization of the word stave.

2. Fiona is sick again. She has the flu now, and the pediatrician had us go to the hospital so she could get a chest x-ray (I guess their machine is better than the one at the pediatrician's, IDK). We haven't heard back about the results of the x-ray, but I really hope she doesn't have pneumonia again. I just don't understand why she keeps getting these respiratory things.

3. Dylan has a weird lump on her shoulder that we think might be lupus-related. The rheumatologist is sending her to an orthopedist to look at it (which makes no sense to me), so hopefully we'll know more about it soon.

4. I have to go to the dentist today. I've been putting it off as long as I can because I am a ding ding, but I hate going to the dentist so much. :(

5. We watched The Wild Robot on Netflix. Fiona loves the book(s?), and she was satisfied with the movie as an adaptation even though it made some minor changes to character and plot. All three of us ended up crying multiple times throughout; Josh popped into the living room at one point and turned heel and left again immediately. LOL Definitely worth a watch.

1. I am signed up for Yuletide! Here is my letter. <3

2. We had a very wee ant-cident immediately following all that rain last week. I am certain it is because the water was literally almost a Feefers deep out by the road, and they were just scrambling to survive, but we lived on some sort of haunted anthill at our old house where we were constantly being invaded by demonic ant warriors, and even though this ant-cident probably involved like twenty ants total, I had a traumatic flashback to those troubling times. *crosses fingers against future incursions*

3. We randomly picked a Netflix kid movie to watch and ended up with Vivo. It was super cute (but definitely tugs at the heartstrings; contains one of the major AO3 archive warnings if you see what I mean). I didn't realize until it was over that Lin-Manuel Miranda had written the music and was the voice actor of the main character. Very, very catchy music.

4.

Marriage and Late-Victorian Dramatists by Mary Christian

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Utterly fantastic. Extremely readable and well researched academic prose. Accessible to the layman.

My favorite chaper is the concluding chapter about Elizabeth Robins's suffrage play; Robins is a fascinating person--actor, writer, activist. I knew a little about her as a writer, but I didn't know that she had anonymously written a play in which a woman commits infanticide because her son is born with physical deformities (and the play was apparently received more favorably than I would have imagined).

Highly recommended.

View all my reviews

1. Today's tests started with ultrasounds of my arms; these were administered in a dimly lighted room while I was sitting in the most comfortable leather recliner I've ever sat in. LOL Then the tests took a rather more unpleasant turn. First, the doc put electrodes on my arms and hands; then he took what looked like a metal tuning fork and delivered sharp electric shocks to my hands and arms for what seemed like a truly interminable amount of time. Then he stuck thin, flexible needles in each arm at about four or five points. I go back tomorrow for some sort of test on the computer; not sure if I will be hooked up to the cap o'gel or not. LOL

2. This weekend, we watched Over the Moon, the Oscar Award winning animated film, on Netflix. I cannot recommend this movie enough. It is exquisitely beautiful with really interesting and compelling characters, and by the end, I was just ugly sobbing (Emma, too). Go watch it! ( spoilers for possible trigger warnings )

1. The canals are full of swiftly flowing water again. Yay! I wasn't sure if they would come back or not.
I am looking forward to a spring full of turtles and frogs and minnows and crawfish.

2. Today while I was watching dishes, I watched a tiny bird fly multiple times from the eaves down into the thicket, search for the perfect leaf, fly it up to the gutter, pose as if for a picture, and then disappear up the roof to presumably build its nest. It was very relaxing.

3.

Black Sun Rising (The Coldfire Trilogy, #1)

Black Sun Rising by C.S. Friedman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had forgotten most of what happens in this book, so I really enjoyed this reread and was continually surprised.

Friedman is such a good writer. All her books have such interesting and unusual world building. I think I prefer her straight up science fiction novels to this series, but I really love The Coldfire Trilogy. It's so tropey: enemies forced to work together, all the h/c anyone could ever want, plus you don't even need goggles for the slash to leap off the page. LOL

View all my reviews

4. We watched How to Train Your Dragon 2 today. ( spoilers )

5. I started watching Gibi's ASMR channel at night before bed, and I am really digging it. I don't like ASMR in general, so IDK why I like her videos, but I do. I don't like all of them; the ones where she puts on costumes and wigs and plays a character are instant cringe for me, but I like most of the others. I have discovered that my favorites are the ones where she is pretending to touch the viewers' face/hair in some way. Of her recent videos, I really liked "Doing Your Makeup Before Class" and "My Jewelry Collection Up Close." I haven't watched the videos she uploaded yesterday yet; I suspect they are not my jam. LOL

1. Watching movies with Fiona is really funny. She's got the attention span to sit through Charlotte's Web or Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast, but something like Ratatouille has too much talking in it and she loses interest before the end.

We've been trying to get her to watch new movies (on the weekend, we go to the playground and watch movies) because she always wants to watch either Spongebob SquarePants Movie or what she calls Willburd (Charlotte's Web). So this past weekend, we watched Lilo and Stitch, which I'd never seen before. OMG, why did nobody tell me how hard this movie was going to tap dance on my emotions? Emma and I sat there with tears streaming down our faces pretty much the whole movie. It was so good and so sweet, and I felt so badly for how hard Nani was trying and still failing to meet the appropriate standards for keeping Lilo with her. AND THEN EMMA AND I BOTH JUMPED TO THE SPECTER OF EMMA HAVING TO TAKE CARE OF HER BABY SISTER AND THEN WE ALL CRIED SOME MORE AND FIONA THOUGHT WE WERE STUPID.

2. Josh and I watched Storks, which turned out to be awesome. Highly recommended. We just had the TV on in the background and then got sucked in because it was so cute and funny.

3. We saw Wonder Woman today and really liked it. ( SPOILERS )

Crossposts: http://lunabee34.livejournal.com/518746.html

I went to see this with Emma yesterday, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. I've been reading a lot of grousing about everything in this movie from Emma Watson to the music to the yellow dress to the pacing; lots and lots of people are prepared to despise this movie (most of the grousing is from before the movie even aired, naturally). I thought it was pretty great.

( SPOILERS )

Crossposts: http://lunabee34.livejournal.com/509378.html

With Emma gone this week to camp, Josh and I have watched a lot of movies and read a lot of books. Fiona goes to bed at 7:00, so we've had two extra hours each day to kill.

Yesterday we went to see Inside Out because Emma expressed negative interest in seeing the movie. One of the best movies I've seen in quite a while, y'all. We listened to the NPR interview with the writer of the film several weeks ago, and I was really impressed with the efforts he and the film team made to represent memory and cognitive processes as scientifically as possible. I am even more impressed now that I've seen the movie.

( Spoilers )

What I do not recommend is John Wick. Josh and I watched that last night, and it was pretty middling. ( spoilers; brief mention of animal harm )

Tonight we're starting our good friends on Treme. He's a musician who just spent the past umpteen years living in LA, so I expect him to know everybody in the show. Should be fun.

One episode of Rome left. Joe Carroll in eyeliner makes a girl's heart go pitter patter. LOL

Crossposts: http://lunabee34.livejournal.com/437281.html

( SPOILERS )

Emma and I watched The Croods tonight, and I really really liked it. I am a sucker for a story about parents realizing that they have to let their children grow and change and make their own decisions while the children simultaneously realize that their parents aren't complete dumbasses and make most of their decisions out of love or fear for their children's well being. Which is probably why Finding Nemo reduces me to a quivering mess every single time I watch it. The Croods was no exception. Serious sniffle time at the end. IDK what was wrong with me (maybe I'm tainted by Littlefoot's mommy), but I was genuinely worried that the movie was going to end with Grug dying or permanently separated from his family. Sometimes I think I shouldn't be allowed to watch cartoons. Or credit card commercials. Or Very Special Episodes of Television. LOL