We also saw Meet the Robinsons.

We had long promised the kids that we would take them to see Meet the Robinsons on the very first day. We looked at a few of the reviews and were not so sure we wanted to do it.

Plot: This one is going to be tough to sketch, so I'm going to have to do it very, very vaguely, because there are lots of "OH!" moments in this movie. Basically, there's this kid named Lewis who can invent things. He's an orphan, abandoned at an orphanage as a baby. He's had 124 adoption interviews and never been adopted. He decides he wants to find his birth mother and starts inventing a "Memory Scanner" so he can delve into his memory and see what she looks like (it's not clear how seeing what his mom looks like is going to help him find her, but hey - this is a kid's movie). It just so happens that a big company called Inventco is going to give the winner of the elementary school science fair an internship with their company, so Lewis plans to demonstrate his Memory Scanner there for the first time. The only problem with this is that a man has come back in time to foil his plan and ruin his life. And a boy named Wilbur Robinson has come back to stop that man. Lewis ends up going into the future with Wilbur and meeting Wilbur's crazy family, which was, to me, the best part of the movie. Because it's Disney, it all works out fine in the end (and had the whole theater crying happy tears for Lewis), but I'm not going to tell you HOW. It would spoil it.

The reviews said that there were seven screenwriters for this movie, and that you could really tell. Yes, it's frenetic, but it's supposed to be. And Mike and I boiled it down to this as we walked out of the theater:

This is a movie for geeks. If you are now, or have ever been, a geek, you will LOVE this movie.

Because we live in a small Texas town, there weren't too many geeks in attendance at our showing, and hence, a lot of really confused people walking out of the theater. We weren't at all confused. Maddy and Major BOTH just LOVED it, and Major was able to repeat back to us all the main plot points. It hit on all the right levels.

On a scale of Clifford the Big Red Dog: The Movie to Narnia, it's right up next to Narnia. It might even become the new benchmark. I laughed SO HARD at this movie, because I'm a total geek.

We saw The Last Mimzy.

So, we've gone to the movies quite a bit recently (or, at least, quite a bit for US), and so I thought I'd tell you about the two movies we've seen these last two weekends.

Last weekend, we went to see The Last Mimzy. Plot: A five-year-old girl and her older brother (I'd guess he was probably about 9?) find a mysterious box on the beach. Inside the box are some glowing things that intrigue the brother, and a stuffed rabbit that intrigues the sister. The longer they keep the mysterious stuff, the more amazing the kids become. They can draw things they've never drawn before, and the little girl becomes telekinetic, etc. The parents start to get really freaked out (the mom MUCH more than the dad - I wanted to SHAKE the mom, but I hate Joely Richardson anyway.) and they enlist the help of the boy's science teacher (Rainn Wilson) and his girlfriend who reminds me of Idina Menzel but isn't. The whole plot turns when one night the boy is messing with some of the mysterious toys and he sets off a nationwide blackout. The Dept of Homeland Security (headed up by Michael Clarke Duncan) gets involved and suddenly we get to find out exactly what this is all about.

Really, this is a movie for older kids. Maddy got it and she liked it (because, really, there was a five-year-old girl with a stuffed animal!), but Major was totally in it for the glitzy special effects. For the record, there is one scene where the Dept of Homeland Security storms their house, but I don't remember them having guns or anything, and it wasn't NEARLY as terrifying as the men in the white suits in ET.

All in all, it was cute, but not the best movie ever. Parts of it were completely unbelievable. On a scale of Clifford the Big Red Dog: The Movie to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I'd probably give it a Home on the Range. Not my favorite, but not painful to watch, either. We'll probably end up buying it out of the $5.50 bin at Wal*Mart when it gets there.