The Reaping

The Reaping is a movie that has had several release dates only to have Warner Brothers change their mind. Two time Oscar winner Hillary Swank stars as Katherine Winter -- a Louisiana State professor who specializes in strange occurrences, or as some would call them miracles. She has a more jaded view of life since the murder of her husband and young daughter while on a missionary trip to the Sudan.

Winter is summoned to investigate the happenings in a small Louisiana town where cattle are dying, the rivers are filled with blood and townspeople are in fear of plagues.

The Reaping is a movie that had me interested for at least the first 45 minutes and then in became a convoluted, over edited mess. At a running time of a little over 90 minutes this movie for as much content as it has should have been two hours in length. Instead everything is crammed into this film, characters are underdeveloped, and the constant quick editing became very annoying after a while.

I'm a huge fan of Hillary Swank, and she does her best to rise above this material and for that her character is believable. The disappointing thing is what could have been a great female character in the end turns into another underdeveloped, wasted opportunity.

Some of the swarm effects are cool to look at, but in the end you get a rather lackluster film containing a few scares, and a movie with all kinds of possibilities that never fully delivers.

Meet The Robinsons

Meet The Robinsons is a real treat and one of the best releases from Disney in a long time. Little Lewis is an orphan who's always wondered who his real mother is. He's a brilliant kid with a fascination for science. At his schools science fair, Lewis meets up with one of his classmates Wilbur Robinson, who isn't who he seems to be. He is after all from the future. Wilbur is chasing a villain who is attempting to take a brain scanning machine able to retrieve people's memories. With this machine Lewis hope to recover his memories as a baby to discover who his mother really is.

Meet The Robinsons is a delight from beginning to end with lively animation that leaps off the screen and a great story filled with wonderful eccentric characters. This is a movie that I found to be better than Cars and far more entertaining. I think that Disney was hoping to take whatever they could get from this movie as far as box office and be happy with it. Fortunately for viewers, what has happened is a quality movie has been made that will delight not only the kids but also the parents.

Also this film is an experiment for Disney as in 600 theaters nationwide are offering the movie in 3-D. If the process is a success look for Disney to slowly require any theater showing their animated movies will be required to be equipped with 3-D capabilities. This is another example of a big corporate studio further flexing their muscles to the theater chains around the country.

Putting all of that aside Meet The Robinsons represents one of the best times I've had at the theaters in some time. This is the perfect movie for a family outing to your local theater.