Monday, August 07, 2006

DVDs in the mail

Mostly, i only get spam and bad news (bills) by mail. I should write more letters. One letter i wrote (well, filled in the form, anyway) was to get a free DVD from my cereal box company. My son (9) picked out the movie from a short list. He picked Agent Cody Banks. We watched it. It's about an hour and a half. It has much of the James Bond gadgets and banter. The gadgets are toned down to familiar cell phones, video games, and cars. In a break with tradition, the cars aren't destroyed. Since Cody is supposed to be a 15 year old, the amount of sex is limited. Even in the banter. It's rated PG, but, for example, in the big fight scene, the 'villains', who were set up as bullies, and therefore deserved what they get, are thrown into a pool. It could nearly be rated G. For example, there is no swearing. Mom's hand covers the child's mouth when he says "Holy ...". What was he going to say? We'll never know.

So, it has action to rivet the attention of a nine year old. Yet no scary dreams. No foul language to be repeated ad nauseum.

Can't beat the price. We're practically addicted to Raisin Bran anyway.

I give it two thumbs up. If you've been following this blog, you'll note that one of the thumbs is worth five, and the other is worth fifty. That's better than Siskel and Ebert.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I almost hate to admit that I enjoyed that movie.

Stephen said...

OK, on the 3rd watching, i have discovered problems with this particular DVD. First, there's no menu. No menu means you can't skip to the part you want. To a lesser extent, there are previews for other movies up front. It's about 4.5 minutes, which is 270 seconds. At 8x fast forward, that's 34 seconds. I can probably cope with that. Not being able to skip into the middle is just cheap.