MOVIE: How to Train Your Dragon (2010)

How to Train Your Dragon Year: 2010 Rating: PG Length: 98 minutes / 1.63 hours There are a few movies I would consider pinnacle achievements in story, animation, and heart. When I saw How to Train Your Dragon (2010) in theaters, I knew I had just witnessed something special. It felt like DreamWorks had finally grown up from the bodily humor of the Shrek (2001) era and into something that could be taken seriously. It's no wonder that I still consider How to Train Your Dragon to be one of my favorite films of all time. I have always appreciated the stories that successfully convey the "brains over brawn" mentality without being too critical of either side. This film not only emphasizes a creator/tinkerer mindset, but the importance of empathizing with nature. That it made sense to kill dragons without the full context of why the dragons behaved the way they did didn't make the "brawn" side of the equation the enemy in the way...
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MOVIE: Alpha (2018)

Alpha Year: 2018 Rating: PG-13 Length: 96 minutes / 1.60 hours I’m not sure what surprises me more about this movie: that nobody had made a film about the domestication of the wolf or that anyone needed to make that film at all. Consequently, Alpha (2018) seems a little unnecessary and highly predictable as the “hero’s journey” plays out. The trailer doesn’t leave much for the imagination, as a lot of the events in this film don’t have any significant twists that the astute viewer wouldn’t see coming. And maybe I’m biased because I’d be more of a cat person than a dog person—despite being allergic to both. Visually, though, Alpha does provide some fantastic shots of wilderness that one can only find in places like Canada and Iceland. Plenty of the flat silhouette shots of characters traversing huge distances and the stylized slow-motion events made this movie feel a bit like 300 (2006), which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The real trouble is that it takes these characters so long...
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