Cheating on a movie theater, using its own popcorn

I had to say two things that were inspired by my viewing of How to Train Your Dragon on Friday night, but I think you'll agree my diatribe about the humans improbably surviving the improbably ineffectual dragon scourge was worthy of its own post.

This one has nothing to do with the movie, directly.

You may remember, but probably not, that the Sun Theatre in Yarraville, my regular theater, gives its customers a nice benefit, if they happen to attend the last screening of the night and they're still hungry when they get out. Instead of tossing their leftover popcorn in the bin (to use the Australian term for a trash can), they bag it up nicely in the individual bags they use when you purchase it, and leave it on the counter of the snack bar/ticket purchasing area for anyone who wants to collect it on the way out. There's no sign that tells you this is why it's sitting there, but there's no one else around, it's 11:30 at night, and it doesn't take much to put two and two together.

Sometimes there's just one sitting there. On Thursday night there were six. So naturally I did my part and grabbed one on the way out of Dangerous Animals.

Being good, I gave myself just a taste of the salty goodness with the faint butter taste, saving the rest for the next day. 

I figured I'd munch on it whenever the mood struck. I was going in for a rare Friday in the office because my longtime work computer, which I've had since 2020, was finally forcing my hand and requiring me to turn it in for a new one, something they wanted me to do at least two years ago. A piercing fan-whirring sound, which started on Wednesday, was too much for me to continue tolerating, forcing me to give up on the hardware that had served me so well. I hate change, but I have to say, the transition to my new computer, which also involved moving to Windows 11 for the first time, was pretty smooth. 

Anyway, being in the office may have preventing me from getting the idea to snack on it. While I can shove handfuls of movie popcorn into my gob when sitting in my home office, it tends to beg questions, or at least funny looks, when you do the same thing in the office. So even though only a very scant number of people I actually knew were in the office that day, I just let the opportunity go by the boards.

Which meant I still had more than half the bag remaining when I went to the movies again that night.

Ordinarily I don't get to movies on back-to-back days these days, but when my wife suggested I stay in the city to go to a movie after my rare Friday in the office -- a possibility that had been in the back of my mind anyway -- I'd already gotten the idea to go out to Dangerous Animals on Thursday night. My wife encouraged me to do both.

And I must say, it's been a long time since I've stayed in the city for movies after work. I used to do this with some regularity, maybe once every six weeks, but both of my usual days in the office, Wednesday and Thursday, now feature for me some obligation on the home front regarding my kids' sports trainings. It's my older son's second basketball team on Wednesday and my younger son's only soccer team on Thursday. Yes, my wife could take them to these on occasion, but it would be an inconvenience for her so I haven't claimed the benefit yet. Going in on a different day made for a great opportunity to take advantage. 

So that takes us to my 6:30 screening of How to Train Your Dragon at Village Crown, the first of two Village Crown screenings, followed by Materialists. (If you want to see how much I disliked that particular movie, my review is up here.) 

And even though I'd had an earlier dinner at my favorite ramen bar, I still found enough room in my stomach for the remainder of that Sun Theatre popcorn, given freely to me at one movie theater and eaten at another.

If it's actually cheating, it can't be a very serious case of it. Given my lack of viewings in the city lately, I am seeing about 90% of my movies at the Sun these days. They can't feel any serious envy. They know my loyalty is true.

Then again, they don't benefit very much from that loyalty. My tickets are always free due to my critics card, and I only rarely by a small packet of lollies (or so they are called here). I did buy a $3 small bag of mixed gummies for Dangerous Animals.

And if you think this was a betrayal of Village -- after all, I did bring in outside food -- I made up for that one later on. Before Materialists, enough of a hole in my stomach had opened up again that I could not resist the purchase of a box of their sweet and salty popcorn. Which, it must be said, was mildly disappointing next to the Sun popcorn. 

How to Train Your Dragon strikes me as unrealistic

Now wait just a minute here.

That title is a joke, yes, but it's revealing a real truth underneath. 

Of course a movie in which dragons play a significant role is not realistic in any strict sense of the word. But we all know that a good movie strives for its version of realism within the larger fantastical context it is presenting.

And on that front, the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon fails spectacularly. 

I don't want to hear "but that's how it was in the original!" I'm sure it was. I haven't seen that movie in a long time, but these live action remakes -- Dreamworks is getting into the game after Disney has been doing it consistently for the past decade, most recently with Lilo & Stitch -- tend to be slavishly devoted to the source material, so that wouldn't surprise me at all. So let's just take this movie on its own terms, as we really should with any movie. 

The people in this movie should all be dead a hundred times over.

Let's start with the living conditions. 

To set the stage, we open on a dragon attack on the Viking island of Berk, where the story takes place. Apparently, these attacks are a semi-regular occurrence as the character infrequently narrating the story, Hiccup, tells us that all the buildings are new, suggesting their recent rebuild. 

And what about the people? Are the people new?

What we see here is no less than 70 dragons bearing down on the village with the full brunt of their firepower and other destructive ability. Even if it is only 17 rather than 70, it's enough to kill every living thing in the village each time they attack, not to mention razing every manmade structure in town. I mean, you saw what Khaleesi and was it one? two? dragons did to King's Landing.

And yet these dragons are likened more to pests, to rats, than to killing machines the size of four elephants that also have flamethrowers in their throats. The narrative considers their attacks whimsical, unlikely to result in even a single death on any given attack. And true enough, the only actual character we have heard of losing her life to a dragon is Hiccup's mother, and this seems to have occurred many years ago.

We are also told, by the eventual trainer of the teenage characters, that a dragon "always goes for the kill." Then how to explain raining fire and fury down on a village for something like 45 minutes straight and not claiming a single life? Let's consider the ways a dragon can kill you:

1) Fire. Of course.

2) Biting you in half with their mighty mouths and sharp teeth. (The main dragon we meet here, Toothless, actually reveals teeth, so I'm not really sure of the origin of the name.)

3) Stepping on you with one of their heavy claws.

4) Running into you in flight, which would be something like a train hitting you at 150 miles per hour.

Not only do they not kill anyone, but any significant edifice in the city -- like the meeting hall where they all gather for inspirational speeches from the chief, Stoick -- seems to be completely undamaged by their fury.

Okay let's leave the opening attack alone there for a bit and move on to the training.

Soon after this attack we learn that Hiccup and a quintet of is friends -- actually more like jerky rivals who happen to be his same age -- are about to start training to be able to slay dragons. This is conducted by the aforementioned trainer in an arena which, very much like a Roman coliseum, is rung by contained cells where something like a half-dozen dragons are held just so they can assist with this training. 

I don't understand why all six of the trainees are not killed on the very first day of training.

On this first day, they are engaging with an angry, vengeful dragon who has been chained up and probably not fed enough, for God knows how long. A dragon that always "goes for the kill." And they are, it would seem, barely 16 years old, and in some cases -- at least in Hiccup's case -- utterly unacquainted with combat, with evasive action, with the tricks you learn in training to emerge from an interaction with a dragon alive.

But let's say that even one of the trainees died on the first day. You have to agree that an angry, vengeful dragon let loose in an arena with six children, who have only the barest of protections from shields and other obstacles, should be able to kill at least 17% of them? That would be an awful tragedy that would immediately put the value of the whole training program into question, causing intense soul searching in the village about whether these trainees should have just been abstractly training against large Vikings pretending to be dragons.

But not only do all the trainees emerge intact from the first training, they emerge intact from every training, every day, for what we can only imagine is weeks worth of training in order to give them the necessary skills to fight dragons.

Now let's skip ahead to the end, when the Vikings, through the unwitting help of Hiccup, find the nest from which all the dragons originate. In this scene, we realize the estimate of 70 dragons may have been way, way on the low end, as there are hundreds of them here. 

How the hell do you expect to dive into what amounts to a volcano full of dragons, one of them the size of 50 whales, with only 50 warriors, and a) do anything meaningful to capture or kill any significant portion of them, and b) expect not to lose a single one of your warriors in the process?

Of course, whether that was the expectation or not, it is the reality.

As they arrive, a bunch of smaller dragons are expelled from the cave, these ones maybe the size of cows. Even a dragon the size of a cow flying through the air, if it happened to hit you, would completely and utterly kill you, knocking that Viking helmet right off your head and smashing your head on the rocks.

Look we're not going for realism in a movie like How to Train Your Dragon, and we're certainly not going for a bunch of gruesome death in a movie aimed at children.

But did they really have to spit so mockingly in the face of any shred of realism?

Other than that it was fine.

Ripoffs don't get ripoffier than this

We're accustomed to seeing all sorts of movies ride the coattails of other movies, whether it's the explicit ripoffs of the Asylum (like Transmorphers) or the more benign "similar subject matter in slightly different form" (Antz vs. A Bug's Life). 

What we don't usually see is movies that are just so obviously a retread of another movie getting a theatrical release, which is the case with Dragon Rider, as evidenced by its appearance on this bus stop.

Now, I'm not going to deign to read the plot synopsis of this movie, which might show me the ways it is not actually a cheapie carbon copy of How to Train Your Dragon. But whether it has the same plot or not is kind of beside the point. The intention is to fool people into thinking this might be How to Train Your Dragon 4, and hope they'll already have a ticket in hand before they realize it isn't. 

It does have decent vocal talent, which I guess is not an indication of anything. Since I'm sure you can't read the tiny names on the poster, Freddie Highmore and Thomas Sangster are both past their prime child stars, and Patrick Stewart probably just wants a little more retirement money. But Felicity Jones is right in the prime of her career, coming off a recent Oscar nomination, the lead role in a well-liked Star Wars movie, and playing Ruth Bader Ginbsurg. 

I guess there's no law against appearing in derivative, sub-par material, is there? 

Or really, you can't put a price on having something for Australian families to do with their kids during the summer holidays.

Okay, rant over. Return to your regularly scheduled reading of other blogs.

The year of endings

Given that 2019 is the last year of the 2010s, it seems only natural that we’d be thinking about endings.

What doesn’t necessarily follow, though, is that so many popular franchises would have been geared toward a natural 2019 endpoint in their own chronologies.

No popular cultural commodity can be packed away for good, so in many cases, what we’re talking about here is a pause in the action. But it’s a big pause with a big symbolic value, even if it ends up proving to be a short one.

That this should coincide with the end of a decade is, to be certain, a coincidence. It must be. No franchise starts with the idea of wrapping it up by a certain symbolic date, if only because most franchises can’t be sure they will endure long enough to get there. The point it starts is entirely a function of when its perceived viability has reached a critical threshold in order to make it into a film (or a TV show, as we shall see). The point it finishes, then, is usually a function of x number of consecutive production schedules until the entirety of the story has been told.

For whatever reason, that entirety really descended on us in 2019.

SOME SPOILERS, TREAD CAREFULLY

Let’s look at the examples:

Star Wars – This is the big one, as a story dating back 42 years, with many of the same actors, finally reached its conclusion in 2019. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is not, of course, the last Star Wars movie we will ever see. In fact, it’s almost certain that 20 years from now, we’ll already have as many more Star Wars movies as we’ve gotten in the last 42. But as the end of the Skywalker saga, or at least the end of the actual Skywalker bloodline, it’s a pretty big deal. Sure, Daisy Ridley may say now that she’s done with Star Wars, but I also read that she went and cried alone in her car after seeing the final cut. Emotionally, she’s susceptible to returning, and she adopted the name Skywalker after all. But there’s no doubt that for now, this is an ending, and it’s a big one.

Avengers – It’s hard to feel like a saga has come to an end when a new movie featuring some of the same characters comes out scarcely two months later. But there’s no arguing that Avengers: Endgame represented a real culmination of 11 years’ worth of movies that had preceded it, and that you definitively draw a line when you halve the total of six original Avengers in one fell swoop. Of course, in the perfect example of pop culture’s perennial self-rejuvenation, one of the deceased Avengers is actually getting her own movie just a couple short months from now, albeit a prequel (or so it would seem). Still, to measure just how much of an effect the MCU has had on us, many of us (myself included?) were sadder to see the end of this story than the end of Star Wars. And walking out of that theater back in April, it sure did feel like an ending.

Game of Thrones – Apologies if I switch to TV on a film blog, but GOT is one of the most cinematic TV shows we’ve ever gotten, and in the past decade, its cultural cachet came to rival the two mentioned above and the likes of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. That too came to an end in 2019, though I’m sure we’ll get The Further Adventures of Tyrion Lannister at some point in the next decade. The final season of Game of Thrones was heavily criticized in certain corners of the internet, as well as off it, as you didn’t have to be a geek to get involved in this epic of swords and dragons, breasts and beheadings. For me, the final season flashed moments of brilliance and moments of great disappointment, though more disappointment in the way our heroes can let us down than the way the writers botched the job of telling their story. And for me, it was another sentimental end to a saga I’d been living with for years.

Breaking Bad – While we're on TV ... Breaking Bad should have ended years ago, but since Vince Gilligan decided we needed a conclusion to the story of Jesse Pinkman, we got a movie that did that in 2019. Although the movie was received well in most circles (though not this circle), I suspect Gilligan won't decide he needs to wrap up any more characters, making this the final chapter in the story of these characters, in any case. Unless he gets the bad idea for Breaking Bad: Alaska, which, I hope not. 

Toy Story – So if Toy Story 3 wasn’t really the end, then Toy Story 4 surely is, isn’t it? Never say never, but for now, it does seem like Pixar is ready to move on from the story of Buzz, Woody, Bo Peep et al, delivering the final installment of their story in 2019. There’s nothing that states this has to be the end, except for the perceived catcalls of Pixar fans who thought a fourth movie was already a bridge too far. But at the very least, it’ll be hard to imagine how Woody will reunite with the legacy of Andy and his family friends, represented most distinctly by the gaggle of toys who do remain together at the end of this one.

X-Men – Not all conclusions had a sentimental quality to them. Given the general response of sheer exhaustion and disinterest by fans, they didn’t want to let the door hit X-Men on the ass on its way out. Dark Phoenix was always envisioned as the end point to this particular iteration of the X-Men franchise, but after the way the last two films were resoundingly rejected, it could be a stake to the heart of the franchise on the whole. If so, it’ll leave a bad taste.

It – Okay, so the first chapter of It was only two years ago. But this is definitely the last chapter, unless someone wants to pull some silly stunt like getting these actors together again in three decades, Before Sunrise style, to have them fight Pennywise as 70-year-olds. I include it here more for the way the poster added to the symbolic trend I’m exploring today. The tagline reads simply: “It ends.”

How to Train Your Dragon – Okay, I didn’t even see The Hidden World, which came out in early January in Australia (I was invited to a preview screening in 2018, as a matter of fact). I guess I tired of seeing these movies before they tired of making them. However, they have now tired of that, as producer Dean DeBlois confirmed they don’t intend to make any more. Right, and Sylvester Stallone didn’t intend to make any more Rocky movies after Rocky IV.

Rambo – Another one I didn’t see, but since the aforementioned Sylvester Stallone is now 73, it’s reasonable to believe the promise implicit in the title Last Blood. And since I didn’t see it, I have no idea if Last Blood puts a definitive ending to the story of John Rambo. But whether it does or not, this is actually a pretty big one, as the character has cinematic origins older than any other character on this list save Luke Skywalker.

And this is to say nothing of the franchises that may have practically ended due to poor box office, whether they intended to or not (Terminator, Charlie’s Angels), and the movies that felt like they were career summations based on the age of the director (The Irishman, Pain and Glory).

So yeah, it seems that 2019 was a year for us to look back on the past and kill it, to quote Rian Johnson’s version of Kylo Ren.

But 2020 is not only the start of a new year, it’s the start of a new decade. It seems likely that we’ll get more recycling of franchises that haven’t yet worn out their welcome. But don’t forget that when the last decade started, most of us hadn’t even heard of Game of Thrones or How to Train Your Dragon, and the MCU was in its comparative infancy at only two years old.

Ten years from now, we might be mourning the endings of things we haven’t yet imagined.

How to rank the instruction manual movies

While finalizing my year-end rankings, one of the things I disliked most was entrenching How to Survive a Plague firmly in the second half of my list (#68 out of 119). I so disliked doing it that I'm glad I found another reason to write about the movie, to ease my conscience. (Not that I'm going to rescind the ranking, just that I'm getting the chance to explain it in the context of writing about the movie in a different way.)

The reason I feel "ashamed" about not liking How to Survive a Plague is that it's about AIDS, and most of the characters we meet are homosexual. I'm a liberal and political correctness is second nature to me, which means it's also second nature to upbraid myself if I've given a politically correct topic less than my full love. Of course, liking things just to be politically correct is not being true to yourself, nor to anybody else.

But I have enough liberal guilt that when a critically acclaimed documentary about AIDS gets only a lukewarm assessment from me, I do worry that people think "Vance hates gays!" or something like that. That's not the case, of course -- I'm sure I needn't even say it. Here are the actual reasons I didn't love How to Survive a Plague:

1) I don't generally love documentaries that consist primarily of talking heads and archival footage. This may be a successful format for a documentary when the subject is something I don't know anything about, but that's not the case here, because I'm actually quite up on the 1980s era of AIDS activism by virtue of reading Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On. (There, that eases my liberal guilt.)

2) I tend to prefer documentaries that don't take themselves so seriously. There was little choice with this particular subject matter, but Plague is dour and humorless from start to finish. The movie suffocates me with its Importance (with a capital I) at every turn.

3) I watched it on the second-to-last night of my ranking period, after already sitting through Les Miserables. I was probably just exhausted.

4) Given how deathly serious the topic literally is, isn't that kind of a whimsical title?

Here we get to what I actually want to talk about today: the film's title. And not because it's perhaps too whimsical for the movie. Actually, while adding this movie to my list, what struck me is that there are quite a few movies whose titles are structured as follows: How to Something a Something. Because of this How to structure, I am referring to them casually as "instruction manual movies."

And any time I can find a relatively finite number of movies in a certain category, it always occurs to me to rank them. It turns out, seven is just enough to be worth noting, while also still qualifying as "relatively finite."

So ... shall we?

1) How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog (2000, Michael Kalisneko). My #1 instruction manual movie is also the most obscure title on the list. I can't remember how I first heard about, or how I came to rent it. Did I borrow it from the library? In any case, it's the story of a washed-up British playwright (Kenneth Branagh) living in Los Angeles, and it's more of a character study than a real narrative. The put-upon playwright deals with his wife's unrequited desire for a baby, a homeless person who is stalking him and a noisy neighborhood dog. For some reason, it just works, in part because Branagh is so funny and Kalisneko's dialogue is so sharp. And my wife agreed, so I know I'm not crazy.

2) How to Train Your Dragon (2010, Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois). What would be many people's #1 is not mine because of what I consider to be a deficient script. Yes, the world that's created here is wonderful and the visuals are first-rate, but hero's journeys rarely feel as by-the-numbers as this one felt to me. Sorry, Dragon fans. But the world and visuals are cool enough to put it ahead of five others on the list.

3) How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989, Bruce Robinson). This might really be the instruction manual movie I like second-best, but my guilt over not liking Dreamworks' Dragons more has vaulted that movie ahead of it. (We liberals feel guilty about the strangest things, don't we?) Advertising is definitely the oddest one on the list, as this satire deals with a London advertising executive (Richard E. Grant) who grows a boil on his neck that starts turning into a second head -- a head that seems to have much more shrewd impulses about how he can prosper in his field. This movie is an oddball hoot, but also strangely mournful in its third act.

4) How to Make an American Quilt (1995, Joceyln Moorhouse). Although I suspect there is probably something middling about this patchwork of female empowerment stories, I remember having a soft spot for it at the time I saw it, probably three or four years after its theatrical release. Would I still like it today? I don't know, but movies we end up watching only once can sometimes benefit from being exposed to us only a single time. (I also had a soft spot for Winona Ryder at the time, which probably helps explain it.)

5) How to Survive a Plague (2012, David France). GUILT! GUILT! GUILT! GUILT! Plague is an excellently researched and assembled movie, and the topic is certainly one worth talking about. But one thing that limits my affection for it is that it rather oddly fails to speak to our modern world, in part because drugs and education have been so effective about controlling the spread of AIDS in the United States. I'd probably be more interested to see a movie about AIDS in Africa, since that would have greater 21st century immediacy. I guess one of the movie's points is that we wouldn't have the luxury of taking AIDS for granted if it weren't for the activist spirit of some trailblazers back in the 1980s, but that's only something I take away from it in hindsight. And I have to admit that I tend not to be as impressed with activism if it is conducted merely out of self interest. The activists who interest me most are the ones who aren't directly benefiting from the successful pursuit of their cause.

6) How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (2008, Robert Weide). And there's a huge dropoff from #5 to #6. I don't think it was just because I read (and liked) former Vanity Fair writer Toby Young's autobiography, which was the basis for this movie, that I was so very disappointed by it. But the fact that the novel is pretty raw and uncompromising, and the movie totally chickens out into utter romantic comedy conventionality, certainly did have something to do with that. Don't bother with this one, even if you are a fan of Simon Pegg, and even if you want to watch a dripping Megan Fox emerge from a swimming pool.

7) How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days (2003, Donald Petrie). I guess I really don't want to know very much about how to lose things, do I? Losing things is easy enough to do without an instruction manual. This is easily one of Matthew McConaughey's lamest star vehicles. It's neither funny nor observant, and it also wastes Kate Hudson.

Other prominent instruction manual movies that I have not seen: How to Steal a Million (1966, William Wyler), How to Deal (2003, Clare Kilner), How to Be (2008, Oliver Irving), How to Be a Player (1997, Lionel C. Martin), How to Eat Fried Worms (2006, Bob Dolman), How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967, David Swift), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953, Jean Negulesco).

Movie that would be #1 if I thought it counted: Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, Stanley Kubrick). See, once you change from "How to" to "How I," it changes from an instruction manual to a memoir.

At this point I would love the following instruction manual: How to Cleverly End a Blog Post About Instruction Manual Movies.

Faith restored

Editor's note: Darn it, I thought of a much better title for yesterday's post: "What a Rapunzeled web we weave." That would have been funny.

I must say, I've lost my way with animated movies in recent years.

For a couple years now, I've been involved in a crisis of faith about whether animated movies still do anything for me. And because the target audience for these movies is children, it's been difficult for me to decide whether it's the child inside me that's dying, or if the movies are just not as good as they used to be.

This is not to say that no animated movies touch my heart or my sense of awesomeness anymore. Instead, it's that they don't touch my heart/awesomeness as much as I feel they should, or as much as they touch other people. Even when ranking the two animated movies I had seen previously this year -- Toy Story 3 and How to Train Your Dragon, which both received extensive critical praise -- I felt like I was artificially inflating them because of how much I was supposed to like them, not how much I actually liked them. To be sure, Toy Story 3 is a great film, but I didn't consider it in the same category as Toy Story and Toy Story 2. This seemed to support the idea that it's me that's gotten more jaded, since the movie is not recognizably inferior in any way, shape or form, and may have even touched some viewers like the other two did not. As for How to Train Your Dragon -- well, terrific visuals, but a pretty stale story if you ask me.

Enter Tangled.

I wouldn't usually write about the same movie two days in a row on my blog, but after seeing Tangled, I knew I needed to go about correcting any misconceptions I may have promoted, as soon as humanly possible. I even considered doing something I've never done on this blog -- writing two posts in one day.

That's how I felt after leaving the theater yesterday.

Quite simply, Tangled was one of the best animated movies I've ever seen. "Ever." That's a strong word, but it applies here.

My thoughts are not formed enough to give you a proper review. It's still swimming around in my head as a dizzy soup of images and moments. But let's just say this: It literally has something for everyone. Want a movie about princesses? You got it. Want a movie about a rakish thief? You got that too. Want terrific non-human characters as sidekicks? Pascal the chameleon and Maximus the horse are two of the most fun Disney has ever produced. Want tender moments? You've got them. Want hilarious comedy? There was one line in the middle that left me laughing for 15 seconds, and then a couple bursts of laughter in the ensuing minutes just replaying the line in my head. Want dazzling visuals like none you've ever seen before, with the kind of detail, depth and imagination befitting of a fairytale? Step right this way.

Tangled is so good that it might be better than all but the top few Pixar movies. It's so good that it might be better than all but the top few fairytale movies, including live action and animation. And it's also one of the most vivid 3D experiences I've ever had in the theater.

I don't want to overhype Tangled. But sometimes, excess hype is necessary if you want to overcome someone's doubts. And I think there will be a lot of doubts out there about Tangled. There will be a lot of people who think as I did in yesterday's post, who deride Disney for lacking the courage of its convictions in choosing the title for this film. Well, if the title Tangled gets one more person in the theater than the title Rapunzel would have, it's worth it, because that's one more person who will discover this spectacular romantic adventure.

But the biggest thrill I got from Tangled was that it transported me like an animated movie hasn't done in years. It whisked me away into that world and reminded me that I do have a kid still inside of me. It just takes the right story and script and vision to come and wake him up.

Tangled is the right everything, and it's one of the best movies of the year. On Thanksgiving, I want to give thanks to Disney for getting it just right, and reminding me of the endless possibilities of theatrical animation.

How (not) to advertise your movie

There will be a lot of people seeing How to Train Your Dragon this weekend. I may even be one of them.

But if I am, it will be because of the first trailer I saw several months ago, that really whetted my appetite. Not because of the spate of advertising that has followed, which has done its damnedest to kill that same appetite.

Shall I count the ways I have been numbed of my desire to see this movie?

1) If you don't live in Los Angeles, you may not have heard this story, but a man was arrested for putting up the so-called "supergraphic" you see above. This kind of advertising is now illegal, so the man was jailed and given an original bail of a staggering $1,000,000. His intention with this graphic? To get it in the background of the hundreds of cameras that would be filming in the vicinity of Hollywood and Highland for the Oscars. And it might have worked, had he waited a little closer to the telecast to put it up. But he was forced to take it down before he had the chance for his moment to materialize -- and he still faces the criminal charges. Is there a Darwin Award out there somewhere for this guy? Such large graphics have been deemed a safety to motorists -- especially when they feature a large mythological creature flying directly at you through a ring of fire.

2) And let's talk a bit more about that ring of fire, which alternately has the rider and dragon flying through it, as above, or has the dragon peaking through innocently. In the six weeks since the How to Train Your Dragon campaign has been in full swing, I have been assaulted by this giant ring of fire in no less than 397 different places around Los Angeles. On billboards. On buses. On bus stops -- both in the stop itself, and on the bench. Painted on the sides of horses. In place of stop signs. Tatooed on the insides of my eyelids. And when you see one image so many thousands of times -- I've passed some of these 397 places more than once -- you never, ever want to see it again. It's probably my duty to mention that many of these billboards also have a an actual plastic dragon walking atop them. If I'm most sick of that ring of fire, I'm second most sick of that dragon.

3) But perhaps the most obnoxious way this film has been advertised has been on television. Some of you have no doubt noticed that they've stopped calling this movie by its actual name in the ads. Instead, it's "Come see Dreamworks' Dragons!" Ugh -- let me pause a moment while I kill myself. There's nothing more insulting than being told you are too stupid to remember the full title of a movie. If they really didn't think we would be able to handle the outrageous grammatical complexity and highfalutin vocabulary of the title How to Train Your Dragon, they should have called it something else. It's not like it's The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. It's not like it's Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. It's not like it's Zack and Miri Make a Porno, which was abbreviated as Zack and Miri, or Zack and Miri Mrfmr Flf Pfrmrm, with the announcer swallowing the rest of the title so tender ears wouldn't be offended. It's a fairly simple, straightforward, inoffensive title, that only needs to be abbreviated because Dreamworks considers its consumers to be moronic monkeys who can only remember one word of anything. "Hmm, I knew there was something I wanted to see this weekend. It had something to do with dragons. Oh yeah! Dreamworks' Dragons! That was it." It disgusts me.

But, I will probably still see this movie. In the theater. In 3D. In IMAX 3D.

Hey, I can't boycott everything.