Snap Judgment: Some Pig! Some Banker! Some Dragon!

This weekend almost got away from me, but with material like this I really couldn't let that happen.



Eragon (fantasy, rated PG, directed by Stefen Fangmeier, written by Peter Buchman, based on the novel by Christopher Paolini)

Remember how the first Harry Potter book got all that extra hype when it came out because it was written by an unemployed single mom on legal pads at her local coffee shop? (No, of course you don't remember that. Like most kids, you were probably born during that grueling 3-year interval between the 4th and 5th books, when millions of Americans turned to procreation as a brief distraction from obsessing over what Voldemort was up to next.) Well, the British welfare mother thing had its cachet for a while, but it's now been overthrown completely, and the brave author to pull that particular sword from its stone was a 15-year old home schooled kid from Montana. Yes, this is completely true; I may make a lot of jokes about home schooling (and believe me, I'm about to) but I'd never invent a fact like that. Okay, I probably would, but in this case I'm not. Seriously, Christopher Paolini was schooled by his parents in Paradise Valley, Montana and "graduated" by the time he was fifteen. Not sure who he went to the prom with, but I'd like to think he had the good sense to sit it out. Anyway, after digging a little further into his life I realized I was coming up a little short on quality material: shockingly, I've been unable to find any interview quotes along the lines of "I'm really just writing these books to honor our Lord Jesus, and gosh, I sure hope that the kids who read them really believe in dragons and elves before they believe humans descended from apes." No, it sounds more like his mom and dad kept him out of school to prevent him from being immersed in red-state propaganda. Which, I guess I have to admit, is a decent excuse in this particular instance. And while he doesn't necessarily seem like the most well-adjusted kid in the world, at least he was spending his sexually frustrated teenage years cranking out best-selling (if ultra-derivative) novels instead of hacking the NetNanny firewall and borrowing dad's credit card to access the Club Jenna website.

Oh yeah, the movie? It pretty much looks like a piece of crap. And what's Sienna Guillory doing in it? She must have woken up one day thinking she was actually Sienna Miller and, therefore, that it was her job to embarrass herself.



The Pursuit of Happyness (drama, rated PG-13, directed by Gabriele Muccino, written by Steve Conrad)

So, I forgot that Will Smith actually has two sons. That would explain why this kid is named Jaden, that super-hip kid celebrity kid name of the moment (etymology: "We had no ideas so we just added an N to something else"). The older one is Trey, whose name is nowhere to be seen. Was there perhaps some squabbling over who got this lucrative, Kid's-Choice-Awards-baiting role? Because I can completely imagine Jaden and Trey going at it, Godfather II style, on premiere night.

"I'm your older brother, Jaden, and I was stepped over!"
"It's the way pop wanted it!"
"It ain't the way I wanted it! I can handle things! I'm smart! I can find lens and cry on cue! I'm smart and I want respect!"

Or, maybe Trey just passed up the role outright because he wasn't quite ready for the intensity of a Dakota Fanning-esque existence. Speaking of which, wouldn't it be great if there was also a Dakota Fanning movie on which to hold forth? Wait a second...



Charlotte's Web (heartwarming, rated G, directed by Gary Winick, written by Susannah Grant, Karey Kirkpatrick, and Earl Hamner, based on the novel by E.B. White)

There she is. Sure, Dakota's already Spielberg's go-to girl for the moppet-in-danger roles; she's even showing a really disturbing amount of precociousness by already playing a rape victim (and this time I am really not kidding)... but it's good to know that she still has time for a good, meaty role in a film catering to the training pants crowd (i.e., the age bracket whose MySpace profiles mostly consist of random keystrokes and parent-approved links to Dora the Explorer fansites). The filmmakers also managed to nab Julia Roberts as the voice of Charlotte, probably reeling her in with the truthful but misleading pitch that it was "another project from the writer of Erin Brockovich." Actually, looking over the entire voice-cast list, I'm thinking it's more likely that they just fired a mind-control ray at every actor who happened to be on the Paramount lot that morning. That would explain how Cedric the Entertainer "just happened" to walk out of his meeting with studio executives (topic: how many films he'd have to wear a mumuu in before they'd finance his pet producing project about Miles Davis) and straight into the ADR stage for Charlotte's Web without even stopping for so much as a Jamba Juice in between.