journal features

movie review - Despicable Me

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2012.09.03

This is an animated movie about a villain with minions, a lair, and a mad scientist. He pulls capers like shrinking the moon for ransom money. The story begins when he becomes the guardian of three small sisters as part of one of their plots. In doing so, he exposes himself to their affection and needs and despite himself becomes a parent. Will he change? If he does, will his minions and mad scientist go along? What of his overbearing mother and the villain community?

The Boy loved it, and I wouldn't say it's really aimed squarely at kids. I quite enjoyed it.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)