Night At The Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian

Night At The Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian

I rather enjoyed Night at the Museum when it came out a couple of years ago: a fun fantasy about what happens in a natural history museum after dark under the influence of an ancient gold tablet. It was escapist, silly, and very funny--and something that you could take your kids to and not find yourself cringing about language, themes, or nudity.

So my wife and I decided to ignore the rule that says that sequels are usually not so good--and we were actually quite pleased. Okay, there are aspects to it that read like something of a rehash of the first film--but there are still lots of great sight gags, and some very clever dialog. It was, if anything, a bit more funny than the first film, which had a very realistic but sad subplot involving divorce and child custody.

The special effects are, if anything, more impressive, especially the sequences in the photo and sculpture galleries. The Jonas Brothers as the voices of the cherubs was an inspired piece of work.

Glory (1989)

Glory (1989)

Every time I watch this film, I find myself not only saying, "Has there been a more powerful, moving, and important film ever made?" but "Could there be?" This is as stirring a film about patriotism, devotion, courage, honesty, and doing the right thing as a film can be. Wow.

The finest work that Matthew Broderick has ever done (and perhaps can do). Morgan Freeman has made many powerful films, but not one that I have seen that exceeds it in quiet dignity. Denzel Washington? Amazing. The cast of actors that you have never heard of that turned in amazing performances is also astonishing, like Andrew Braugher as Captain Shaw's bookish, very upper class black friend, trying so hard to be what he clearly is not--but becomes. Wow.

The sequences as the soldiers pray together the night before they go into battle? As powerful as any such scene can be. As they charge off into battle, to their doom? Can any film top this in its depiction of the fearlessness of men confronting a hopeless task? Wow.

My favorite film, without question.

Star Trek

Star Trek

I confess: I was never terribly impressed with Star Trek: The Next Generation or any of the other spinoffs from the original series. Enterprise was about as close as I can find pleasant, and even then, it isn't good enough to make me watch an episode unless I have nothing else to do.

The new movie, showing how Kirk, Spock, Uhura, "Scotty", Dr. McCoy, Sulu, and Chekov first meet, has utterly charmed me. It has all the strengths of the original series, and some of its weaknesses. So what? My wife and I both loved it.

It has witty dialog and amusing situations. (Strength of the original series.) It has clear-cut heroes and bad guys--but realistic heroes and bad guys, with complex motivations. (Strength.) It has Kirk unable to stay out of bed with beautiful alien women. (Weakness.) It has utterly unrealistic fist fights and gun battles. (Strength of the original, because it made it exciting; weakness, because it made unrealistic.) It has utterly implausible science. (Weakness.) It has interesting, almost self-referential inconsistencies related to time travel, (a weakness of the original) used to solve the problem of inconsistencies with the original series.

The special effects, of course, are far superior to what the original series could do with the technology of the time and the budget for a weekly television show. And to the director's credit, they didn't let the special effects take over the story--as more than few movies have done in the last few years.

My wife pointed out that they did a great job of finding actors and actresses who you could almost believe, in a few years more, might look something like William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan, DeForest Kelley, Walter Koenig, and George Takei. (Yes, there's a problem with Chekov's appearance this early--who wasn't in the first season of the original series.)

I am also gratified that the writers didn't feel a need to make the series "relevant" to today. There's no gratuitously gay character; no same-sex marriages; no speeches about saving Mother Earth from global warming; no subplots involving Romulan WMDs that turn out not to be there.

And yes, I would encourage you to see it on the big screen. It really benefits from it.

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Wow. I see why this film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It deserved them. It's a movie with heroes, bad guys, and bad guys who end up redeeming themselves with heroism of a sort. It is a film that affirms the power of love to overcome a disastrous start in life.

I don't ordinarily like heavily flashbacked movies, but there's a good reason for it here, as becomes apparent by the end. There is nothing pedestrian about the cinematography, and in spite of the fact that most everyone is speaking either Hindi (with subtitles) or various levels of Indian-accented English, it is completely comprehensible.

The language is coarse in a few spots, but it is the subject matter--the montrosity of growing up in the Mumbai slums, and the horrible things that happen there--that earns this film an R rating. My wife and I were not surprised, since we have read a bit about the problems of India, but I think for many Americans, they may find it shocking, and it is probably too intense for anyone that isn't a teenager. (Of course, there are people who take their kids to see Saw, so what do I know.) It makes you glad to know that as poor as you can get in America, you will never be reduced to this level of poverty.

Bonhoeffer: Man of Grace

Bonhoeffer: Man of Grace

My wife and I watched this last night. If you don't know who Dietrich Bonhoeffer is--well, you should. He was a prominent Protestant theologian who was executed by the Nazis a few weeks before the end of the war for his involvement with the von Stauffenberg plot against Hitler.

This is an important story--but I confess that this film left much to be desired. First of all, it was a bit choppy--seeming to jump from scene to scene with insufficient explanation.

Secondly, nearly every actor in it is German, speaking English--and some of them, I fear, didn't do a great job because they were acting in a language not their own. The temptation to use an entirely German cast was strong, but I think the production suffered for it.

Third, the script left far too much unexplained. I didn't have a problem with it, because I have read extensively about the various plots against Hitler. I knew, for example, that Admiral Canaris, who head the Naval Intelligence Service, provided documents for a number of Jews that let them leave Germany with papers that claimed that they were German spies. (The irony!) But if you don't know a good bit about the internal opposition to Hitler within the military and intelligence services, there will be much that will be mystifying.

Still, it is an inspiring story, one that survives even the weaknesses of this production. It is also an important and sobering lesson for anyone who thinks that they may need to take action against a totalitarian government: be prepared to die, because decency lacks survival value against monsters.

The other lesson is that you can't spend too much winning the battle against monsters through the electoral process. If it comes to warfare, the costs will be far higher than any amount of money or time.

Batman Begins (2005)

Batman Begins (2005)

My daughter spoke very highly of this film. Had I not been too busy at the time, I might have gone to see it. I was a fan of the Batman series in the 1960s, campy as it was, and very impressed with the depth of Michael Keaton's performance in Batman (1989). But this film is one of the perhaps five finest, and certainly ten finest films that I have ever seen.

There are so many things right about this: the performances of Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, and Katie Holmes, were all spectacular. The script creates a powerful emotional significance to Bruce Wayne's actions, while creating plausible methods by which Batman can do the things that he does, with his time in the underworld, ninja training, and the gadgets from the Defense Systems Division of Wayne Enterprises! All of them are just barely in the realm of possibility (or just out of the realm of possibility).

Sets? Wow. Beautiful editing, especially the fight scenes. A thoughtful film about how the very human desire for revenge can lead people astray--and how the quality of a person's character can pull him back from the precipice.

V is for Vendetta

V is for Vendetta

This is one of those movies that I briefly considered going to see when it came out, since I am a big fan of dystopian fiction, and it's nice to see totalitarian thugs lose. Part of what put me off was that some of the reviews tried very hard to make it sound as though it was about the evil that George Bush (the man with horns on his head) causes.

My guess is that the original "graphic novel" (as comic books with literary pretensions are now styled) was probably indeed ferociously hostile to American values--and that these were toned down substantially for the movie. If so, it could be one of those examples of a movie being better than the novel.

The essential problem of totalitarianism is about the very human desire for power and control. It doesn't matter if the justification is socialism (as in 1984), or religious and moral conformity (as in this film), or capitalism (which doesn't seem to yet have a dystopian novel of any note--for good reason).

Power attracts evil people, and it doesn't matter what the underlying justification is--the power to control and to hurt others is the real reason. Some ideologies are better suited to the will to power than others. Anyone with the desire to control others who hitched his star to libertarianism would qualify as too stupid to be dangerous! Socialism represents the obvious danger, as 1984 points out.

The justification of control by obscene wealth--plutocracy--is a bit less direct, but there's no question that if you are rich enough, you can control and destroy people. Hollywood is perhaps the best example of how obscene wealth does this. There's a reason that the casting couch and rape has long been a problem of the entertainment industry (for example, this charming example in Doe v. Capital Cities, 50 Cal.App.4th 1038, 58 Cal.Rptr.2d 122 (1996):

An aspiring actor is first drugged and then gang-raped by a casting director and four other men one Sunday at the casting director's home. Can the actor successfully allege causes of action for sexual harassment and negligent hiring against the casting director's employers? The trial court ruled against the actor, sustaining a demurrer without leave to amend. On this appeal, we analyze the allegations in the actor's second amended complaint in light of pertinent statutory and decisional law and conclude that he has adequately pled a cause of action for sexual harassment but that the allegations for negligent hiring are insufficient as a matter of law.

Or this suit:

Dede Harris, one of the most famous producers in New York, has been landed with a multi-million-dollar lawsuit after half the cast of her latest play walked out.

Harris, the award-winning producer of such previous hits as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Hairspray, has been sued for $5m by the partners of her venture Dog Sees God, a satire on the Charlie Brown comic strip Peanuts. Legal papers filed with a Manhattan court claim her conduct has resulted in cast members leaving the show.

The lawsuit claims Harris is 'sexually obsessive and compulsive and is unable to refrain from sexually harassing cast members of productions with which she is affiliated'. It alleges that Harris asked one female cast member to 'feel her up', groped another's breast in a bar and made sexual advances on several other men and women. It describes a game of 'truth of dare' played with the cast in which Harris asked some of the male actors to touch her.

The scandal over Harris's alleged behaviour certainly marks a new shift in a profession notorious for the the sexual abuse of young actresses - usually it is ageing male directors who are accused of promising parts in return for sexual favours to young starlets.

Could the men in the Capital Cities suit not have found a young man willing to have sex with them? Of course. Can casting directors find pretty young women for sex, without having to mix it up with business? Of course. But in both cases, the objective is power--to use wealth and influence to control actors and actresses, and degrade them. It's more subtle than monsters like Nicu Ceausescu and Saddam Hussein's boys, but it is still fundamentally about the desire to hurt people.

Anyway, in spite of the fact that the bad guy (played by John Hurt, who played the good guy in 1984's 1984) is ostensibly doing horrible things because he is some sort of devout Anglican (which seems almost oxymoronic), and that the victims seem to be disproportionately well-scrubbed and emotionally stable homosexuals, I still found it a powerful film. (In the next ten years, I can guarantee you that more homosexuals will be executed, tortured, and degraded by Islamic governments than governments in Christian nations will do in the next ten years--or have done in the last one hundred years.)

What I find rather bizarre is that the reviews of the movie that I read when it came out claimed that the graphic novel upon which it was based is apparently motivated by the Thatcher government, and in the movie, the bad guy is described as leading the Conservative Party--even though one brief clip shows that the winners of the election are actually a fascist party called Norsefire.

I confess to being confused why reviews implied that this was an attack on the Thatcher government. If I had to pick words to describe Thatcher's government, "religious" is not one of those words. And while Conservatives generally were not supportive of repealing the law against homosexuality, "Thatcher was one of few Conservative MPs to support Leo Abse's Bill to decriminalise male homosexuality and voted in favour of David Steel's Bill to legalise abortion...." In reading the Wikipedia description of the novel, it appears that it was not primarily an attack on Thatcher at all, but is set in a post-nuclear Britain in which Conservatives lose the 1982 elections, and the Michael Foot-led Labour Party gives up nuclear weapons--with predictable results, leading to a post-war fascist government.

Anyway, it's a bit bloody (the hero uses edged weapons, throughout--this is Britain), but quite interesting.

UPDATE: A reader tells me:

I wish I could remember where I read this, but I remember an interview (or maybe just something that mentioned an interview) about the original book in which Moore said he set the story in a totalitarian version of a Thatcher government basically because there was a conservative government in power at the time. He said had there been a Labour government when he wrote it, the book would have reflected that--basically demonstrating the universality (not quite the word I'm looking for) of the totalitarian impulse that you mention in your post.

Considering when it came out, I'm not surprised that the film makers might have missed that universality.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

My wife and I went to see this film this afternoon. It is emotionally overwhelming--but I confess that I had some doubts about how plausible it was. At least at some work camps, young children were immediately gassed, because their labor wasn't considered worth feeding them. There were children almost as young as the boy in the striped pajamas in some concentration camps, it is true, but I don't get the impression that this was at all common. There are problems with the lack of patrols around the fence, and the sheer unlikeliness of what happens at the end of the movie.

Still, it might be the only awareness that most young people will ever have of the Holocaust, since the left seems to prefer that kids get out of school with almost no awareness of it. Language is not a problem. The PG-13 is only because the subject matter--mass murder--is the greatest obscenity that one can imagine. It is also more subtle than I have would expected in its portrayal of the complex problems of growing up in a society where every significant instrument of government and the media were propagandizing in favor or barbarism. On the other hand, there just too many German characters prepared to voice their opposition (or at least bite their tongue) to a system that enjoyed overwhelming support from Germans until almost the end.

An American Carol

An American Carol

If you thought Airplane! and Top Secret were riotously funny, you will probably enjoy David Zucker's latest film, An American Carol. It is intentionally parallel to Dickens' A Christmas Carol--and in one or two places, it carries the parallel forward in ways that don't work, except for the slapstick sight gags that come from little Timmy, and his sister with the vision problems. But the real strength of the movie is that it is (and I'm not giving anything away here), about an obnoxious Hollywood "documentary" film maker whose anti-Americanism is given a thorough shaking by visits from three American patriots from the past.

This could have been a really, really preachy film--but with David Zucker making it? There are too many sight gags, completely unexpected twists, and wickedly sharp satirical jabs. My cheeks still hurt from laughing--and I've been out of the movie for an hour. The sequence with the chanting college students and the tenured radicals musical number is still giving me a chuckle!

It is rated PG-13, primarily for language, although the sequence with the ACLU zombies is probably too violent and bloody for it have reached PG anyway. I do wish that Zucker had decided to go for a PG rating, because there are large numbers of social conservatives who would have appreciated the film quite a bit more with only the most trivial of changes. As it is, my wife is tempted (when it comes out on video) to use the sequence of George Washington (played by John Voight) in St. Paul's Chapel (just down the block from the World Trade Center) at some point in the classroom. It is powerful.

A number of the actors who appear in this film are noted conservatives or libertarians--which makes them stand out for that very reason in Hollywood, and you can tell that some of them were putting heart and soul into their performances. Kelsey Grammer's performance as George S. Patton is simultaneously dramatic and humorous. James Woods' performance is especially touching because he actually warned the flight crew on a Boston to Los Angeles flight a month before 9/11 that some of those onboard were acting oddly--almost like they were planning to hijack the flight. We now know that these were the 9/11 hijackers, doing a dry run.

The Awful Truth (1937)

The Awful Truth (1937)

My wife and I watched this Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, and Ralph Bellamy comedy this evening. I confess that a lot of 1930s comedies are, at most, good for a few grins, but this was uproariously funny--almost to the sides aching level. Some of it is very amusing physical comedy--Cary Grant's antics with a chair breaking up are brilliant, and the incredibly well-trained dog with the hats--and a lot of terribly witty dialog! And once you get past the misunderstandings that start the divorce proceedings, it is a terribly romantic comedy.

Wall-E

Wall-E

My daughter and son-in-law really enjoyed this, so my wife and I went to see it this afternoon. It answers the question that philosophers have been pondering for many centuries: can a robotic trash collector find true happiness with a heavily armed and trigger happy robotic explorer?

This being a Pixar film, it is about as family friendly as any film can be. I can't recall a single moment that was even slightly worrisome. At the same time, it was funny, touching, and cute, with a bit of social commentary thrown in as well.

And this is probably my only grumbling objection to an otherwise very fun animated film: poor Wall-E (an acronym that describes what this robot is supposed to do--and it involves picking up trash) is one of the only working robots left on an Earth that has been abandoned after an environmental disaster. There are echoes of Silent Running (1972) here, with some not terribly subtle jabs at a very Wal-Mart like company that seems to have played a major part in making Earth uninhabitable. Now, Wal-Mart is indeed a powerful (and sometimes destructive) force in our economy, but they aren't that powerful.

The plot is perilously derivative of The Story of Stuff, one of those "rich people making everyone else feel guilty about wanting to live well while blaming the capitalists for it all" ideas that seems to be very popular among people with more education than sense. The harsh reality is that capitalism isn't to blame; human nature is to blame--and the production of material goods really isn't a problem. It usually takes a government somewhere pushing down on the scales with a heavy thumb to turn production of genuine needs and wants into an environmental problem. I suppose that I should be glad that Pixar didn't engage in a heavy-handed global warming subplot.

Another part of the story involves soft drinks, cell phones, and laziness, and while played for laughs, looks like a script writer somewhere may be suffering from the health consciousness equivalent of reformed smoker syndrome.

There are a lot of sequences that are clearly intended as humorous jabs at other movies, especially Star Wars--and some of these actually work quite well. The graphics are quite good--especially the outer space sequence involving the Pillars of Creation. And make sure you stick around for the closing credits--you'll see the re-creation of human civilization, expressed in a cartoon form of art history. (Of course, if you aren't familiar with Egyptian tomb art, Greek vase art, pointillism and impressionism, a lot of it may be lost on you.)

The New Indiana Jones Movie

A bunch of us from work went to see it yesterday. It has been quite a wait since Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and in that time, Harrison Ford has aged a good bit. (Haven't we all?) To their credit, Lucas and Spielberg had the good sense not to pretend otherwise, and the movie is set in the late 1950s. The bad guys are no longer Nazis--I think you can guess who.

On the plus side, it has many of the same endearing qualities of the previous movies. The action sequences are both exciting and funny. There is some clever dialog, a few surprising plot twists, and there is an odd mixture of the supernatural and the natural. You aren't supposed to take it seriously (unless you are a von Daniken follower, I suppose).

On the down side, the action sequences in the first three movies, while clearly impossible, were often just a bit beyond impossible--just enough for you to laugh and say, "Okay, we're making fun of the 1930s action adventure genre." A couple of the action sequences here--for example, involving some waterfalls and a refrigerator--just didn't work. They were so far beyond impossible as to fall a little flat.

In the first movie, Indiana Jones comes out of these horrendous action sequences pretty clearly injured and in serious pain--but Harrison Ford was much younger. It gave a little implication that while these action sequences were impossible, the screenwriter was acknowledging that Indiana Jones wasn't Superman. In this movie, he much, much older, and if anything, the consequences of Indiana Jones' heroics are less severe. Making a cartoonish adventure even less realistic definitely did not help the drama or the humor.

Great special effects have been part of all the Indiana Jones films, but great sight gags and dialog have been even more important. Who can forget the Nazi in the first film opening up what we assume is a torture device--but it turns out to be a foldable coat hanger? Or that great moment when the heroine asks Indiana about his plans as he gallops off to catch the Nazis: "I'm makin' this up as I go along."

By comparison, there are a few good gags (we see the Ark of the Covenant again) and some mildly witty dialog--but I was hoping for more. (And the mushroom cloud is all wrong--bad perspective, and a former co-worker who was 5000 feet from Ground Zero on one of these tests tells me that they are way colorful and pretty.) And the last ten minutes of special effects really took a pretty decent action adventure movie and gave a rather leaden ending. Unlike the first three movies, where there was an adequate explication of what was going on, I found the explanation disappointing. There were too many unanswered questions.

I would say that it was inferior to the first and third movies, but clearly superior to the second movie--which I, like many others, just hated.

Beowulf (2007)

The new movie has something of the same relationship to the Anglo-Saxon poem that 300 had to classical history. The title is the same; most of the same characters are present--but let's just say that I would never have imagined Grendel's mother to look like this!

Someone was clearly enamored of how 300, with its digitally created backdrops for live actors looked, and figured, what the heck, we have to create Grendel and other assorted non-existent critters digitally, why not do that with the people, too? My wife's reaction (after she got over the travesty that they made of the plot) was that the effect was too much like Shrek or Toy Story.

The humans were better (technology marches on), but I'm not persuaded that it did anything for the movie. At least Shrek and Toy Story were comedies. This cartoonish effect for what is a combination of a horror story and a morality play just doesn't work.

Another irritant to my wife (whose MA is in English Literature) is that the poem was apparently a pagan folktale that, because of the recent Christianization of the pagans, had been recast into a morality play of good and evil. What few references there are to Christianity in the movie are mild little snipes. But then again, you might argue that there's some merit to it. Beowulf was written on the cusp of the Christianization of pagan Scandinavia; this movie was written on the cusp of the de-Christianization of the West, so perhaps it all kind of fits.

Why did they digitize all the people, and not just the monsters that needed special effects? Because had we seen Angelina Jolie truly as naked in film as she is in digital effects, it would not have been PG-13 (for violence), but R (for violence and frontal female nudity).

I'm a bit disappointed. As an action adventure kind of tale, it wasn't too bad, and some of the special effects are pretty cool. But as my wife observed, on our way home, The Thirteenth Warrior told the story of Beowulf more accurately, and more appropriate to its chronological setting than the movie of Beowulf! And The Thirteenth Warrior was set several centuries later!

Odd Little Movie: Possession (2002)

Odd Little Movie: Possession (2002)

No, it's not about demons. I found it an achingly beautiful bittersweet romance story. The framing story involves two modern scholars who are both way too attractive to be real academics (when I tell you that Gynweth Paltrow plays the feminist literature professor, that alone should tell you how far from reality it is). She and an American grad student try to piece together a mystery involving two Victorian poets from letters, diaries, and other clues. And yes, it is far more watchable than that sounds.

This is, in some ways, a profoundly unPC movie. There's one character who leaves her lifelong lesbian relationship because she falls madly in love with a man.

It is also a film in which people feel free to do as they wish--ignoring conventional morality--and the consequences are very Victorian.

If you are familiar with the story of Dante Rossetti and burying a book of his poems with his wife--and then retrieving it six years later--well, you will recognize the odd little reference to that, too.

It may remind you a bit of National Treasure or The Da Vinci Code as our two scholars rush around from archive to decaying English manor house to library--and there is a willingness to abscond with primary sources that I assure you, real scholars would never do. (Of course, I used to think that real scholars wouldn't just make stuff up, either.) There is also a bit less use of white gloves when handling antique papers and items than would really happen. But still, it does capture something of the excitement of scholarly investigation, and adds a dollop of romance on top of it all.

Okay, maybe I'm partial to this movie because I'm married to someone whose specialty in grad school was Victorian literature. One aspect of the film that really, really grabbed me at a very visceral level was how the actors managed to convey with subtlety and surprising economy of words and gestures the excitement of two people falling in love. You don't really realize, until you see a film this deftly made, that most films manage to only give you the impression of animal lust. There is a bit of that involved as well, of course, but this film makes me remember the magnetism that comes from two similar minds that are attracted to each other.

This film brought back an enormously powerful set of memories of when I met my wife, and for the first time, I found not just someone that I enjoyed being around, but another soul that rang in perfect harmony--and the rush of that first kiss.

Movies I've Seen Recently

Shining Through (1992) with Melanie Griffith and Michael Douglas. It's a World War II spy movie (which you learn at the very beginning, so I'm not giving anything away). It was better than I was expecting. There's a bit too much modernity that creeps into a lot of movies about this period, and maybe Melanie Griffith's character is a bit too aggressive for the normal female of that time--but other than that flaw, it's a pretty entertaining, almost plausible story.

I guess part of why I found it interesting is that I worked with a guy many years ago who worked for OSS during World War II, and went into Germany. The tale he told emphasized how well he was trained and equipped (right down to authentic-looking German laundry marks on his underwear)--and not him at all. That was one of the reasons that I was prepared to believe him. People that make up stories like that usually make themselves, their courage, or their intelligence the center of the story. This guy was quite the opposite.

I, Robot is a bit more recent--one of those movies that I was mildly interested in seeing, but never got around to it. The title comes from an Isaac Asimov story, and the Three Laws of Robotics come from Asimov's robotic short stories, but the rest of the story doesn't seem to come from any Asimov story that I recall. It is, in most respects, too sophisticated and thoughtful.

I don't want to spoil the plot, but if you saw the previews you know that Will Smith plays a police homicide detective a few years in the future investigating a murder--and one perhaps committed by a robot. The rest of the story is what I imagine a Macintosh fanatic with paranoia might construct if he found out Microsoft was going into the robot business.

There is a surprisingly thoughtful set of questions posed by the movie about what constitutes a soul, free will vs. determinism, the importance of keeping the population armed, the dangers of concentrations of power, and when a single company becomes too dominant on the economy. (Sorry, Microsofties!) It also has so many twists and turns that I kept changing my mind about who the bad guy was right up to the last few minutes.

Will Smith being in it, there are a couple of subtle Christian messages scattered in the movie. At least the version that I saw on cable television was astonishingly clean. There are a few very, very subtle double entendres that small kids won't catch--just about as clean as a movie as gets made anymore that isn't animated. There is a bit of violence in it, but nothing terribly detailed or gross, since most of the violence involves robots, and robots don't bleed.