Twas brillig, and the slithy tovesDid gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
"Jabberwocky," Lewis Carroll
There are some flicks of which moviegoers would do well to ignore the critical reviews. The word critic in their title should clue us in sometimes.
The Last Mimzy is a shining example of this. The kids and I went the other day and wow...I was blown away. I thought it was great. It was like a cross between The Celestine Prophecy and E.T.
The kids - ages 7 and 10 - loved it. Of course. My two are near and dear to the same ages as the two children cast in leading roles, and what do ya know, appear to have the very same love/hate relationship with their sibling. Plus, the movie, while shot on location in Vancouver, BC, was set in the toney, Seattle neighbourhood of Queen Anne (which is not to be confused in any way with our humble little neck of the woods, that might have been schwanky for all of an hour back in the 60s and 70s. Nearby Whidbey Island earned a cottage getaway cameo and the Bainbridge Island ferry actually featured in the movie is not to be confused with the bumper-to-bumper drive north and ferry traverse over to Whidbey that said island commuters actually must suffer.
The movie, based on the 1943 sci-fi, short story, Mimsy Were the Borogoves tells the tale of the little girl's beachcombing discovery of a mysterious green crystal sent from a far-future human race as a last-ditch attempt to capture the "purity" of distant-past DNA as a way to preserve and save humanity.
Sappy, fantastic and mimzical? You betcha.
And I looooved it. I mean, what's not to love? It was perfect blend of cosmic (futuristic teddy bear) , kismet (Tibetan Buddhism), and inane (FBI tracking a major Seattle power outage to their house - side note: wish the hell they had actually done something similar last December - then maybe we wouldn't have been without power for a whole freakin' week!).
But, anyways.
I say it was da bomb, yet the critics predict it will bomb. As in dive bomb into a million little rotten tomatoes. But tomatoes, toe-mat-oes. It was a two-thumbs up heart-tugger, the cottage is exactly what we're in the market for (less $900,000 or so), and the Tibetan mandela and psychokinetic references were ultra mystical and cool.
Yeah, it was awesome. I might even go see it again.
