Ratatouille

For reasons that will take some amount of time for me to passively figure out, Ratatouille, which I saw with classicaljunkie at the Boston Common multiplex last night, was such an elemental force of a movie that it left tears running down my face through most of its running time. The last time I reacted to a film this way was when I saw The Fellowship of the Ring in late 2001. Make of this what you will.

It is the best filmic implementation of follow your bliss that I've ever seen, a celebratory portrayal of the artistic obsession which I could really identify with, and nevermind that I can barely make spaghetti. I'm still feeling mushy just thinking back on it, it was so perfect and wonderful. Really.

Bee Movie: needs more girls

Also, I would have forgiven Bee Movie for portraying its protagonist as a boy-bee if a scene revealed by its trailer were slightly different. The plot setup apparently involves the Jerry Seinfeld bee exploring the world beyond his hive because he manages to accompany a squadron of soldier bees on an air sortie and then gets separated (just like the last 5,000 talking-animal pictures, including the one I just fell in love with, yes).

Now, if they made those soldier bees into lady-bees, that would (for some reason) allow me to overlook the film's other gender issues, but instead every bee seen in the trailer seems to be male, and you're gonna have every smarty-pants reviewer pointing this discrepancy out with at least as much relish as they applied to the udders in Barnyard.

Maybe there'll be an in-movie reveal that actually all the worker bees are female and they just happen to look and sound (and act?) like dudes when anthropomorphized. But really when you think about it too much it's hard to keep caring.

I predict I'll still end up seeing this movie in one form or another anyway, coz the jokes in the trailer are actually pretty funny, and Seinfeld's delivery doesn't seem to suffer for coming out of the mouth of a cartoon bug. The "it's a disease, a horrible disease" line has cracked me up both times I've seen it.