Any Planet Earth fans out there? As a follow-up to that fantastic and beautiful 2006 series narrated by Sigourney Weaver, the Discovery Channel is about to debut a new epic TV event called Life. Narrated by none other than Oprah Winfrey, the 11-part series promises to bring fantastic footage of bizarre and amazing animal behavior around the world. We’ll get to see the mating rituals of the humpback whale, the dramatic rescue of a baby elephant by her grandmother, and birds, insects, and reptiles of all kinds. Using state of the art, high-definition filming techniques, Life was filmed over 3,000 days on seven continents. It will be breathtaking. Look for it on March 21 on Discovery.
12
Mar
Mar
Alice in Wonderland, The Reviews are In
By Parents' Choice
With all the anticipation surrounding the release of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, we asked Jerry Griswold, Director National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature, to pose an adventurous review assignment to his graduate students. Here we present the unedited reviews, in un-Alice fashion, alphabetically by author’s last names: Paris Brown, Amanda Hansen, Chris Learned Kane, Francis Merlie, Jaimee Pease, Natalie Scott and Danielle M. Seid.
05
Mar
Mar
Jerry Griswold on Alice in Wonderland
By Jerry Griswold
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland was a promising movie from the very start. The new cinematic technologies of 3D and CGI (computer-generated imagery) almost seemed to have been invented for this famously hallucinatory story. And the offbeat sensibilities of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp seemed a perfect match to those of the story’s author, Lewis Carroll.
05
Mar
Mar
Ann Oldenburg on Alice in Wonderland
By Parents' Choice
Parents’ Choice reviewer Ann Oldenburg got a special sneak peak of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Here’s what she had to say:
“I loved it. It’s so empowering and full of imagination and I love how it encourages bravery and thinking out of the box. I was worried because Tim Burton can be so dark, but it is fantastic. I expected the movie to be so eerie and scary – Johnny Depp’s face in posters with those shining green eyes is creepy! – that it would get a PG-13 rating. But it’s PG. There is a frightening dog with tons of sharp teeth and a menacing, fierce dragon, but the overall feel of the movie is so much about victory and believing in yourself, that it’s perfectly suitable for tweens. It’s up to parents to decide about any children under 6 or 7. There are odd creatures that I suppose might haunt younger children, but overall I was pleasantly surprised that the movie was more wondrous than weird.”
03
Mar
Mar
The Academy Awards’ Best Animated Films
By Parents' Choice
The Oscar race is on now, and we loved Up, the animated film about a 78-year-old man who ties balloons to his house and flies away, with an 8-year-old stowaway. It’s one of the 10 films nominationed this year for Best Picture, competing against Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, and Up in the Air.
Up is also competing for Best Animated Film, a category the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences first opened in 2001. Since then over 30 movies have been nominated in this category including several Parents’ Choice Award winners. Whether you’re warming up for the Oscars or just looking for movies for family movie night, our selection of Oscar-worthy DVDs is a great place to get started.
