So Pixar is now going to start advertising in the Stranger? The movie was cute and okay but the great Hollywood movie of the year? I think Charles overstates a bit too much...

And for those who want to be outside today: Seattle Beerfest at Seattle Center.(p)

/I'm not associated with beerfest, just like to promote outdoor drinking on sunny days.

Jonah, check out some basic spelling, grammar, and sentence structure education. Try englishplus.com/grammar. It's a first step on the road to literacy!

Then get help for your Dan fixation.

@4, HA HA!!! But he keeps posting the Dan crap and doesn't realize no one is paying attention to him any more.

@1 I saw Ratatouille last night, and it was really fucking good. I'm not alone in thinking so. Check out Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and the rest.

Ditto Gital--I fucking loved the movie, plus I had the added bonus of seeing it while totally baked.

(Delicious pun intended.)

Time for Jonah to go. He's been off-topic about 20 times in the last couple of days and is messing up comment threads.

What I don't understand about Mudede's review is how did he miss the opportunity to bring in some class or race analysis? I mean, at a minimum, Ratatouille's basic premise relies on the hoax that is the American Dream.

uh.... did we see the same movie? Didn't dig it. Neither did either kid.

Ratatouille was my favorite movie of the year, but I'm a sucker for Pixar and Brad Bird.

I can't help but notice that Ratatouille, as the first Pixar movie developed and released in the wake of the studio's de facto take over of Disney animation, that the story functions as a metaphor for the internal struggle for the future of Disney's animation efforts, with the goofy idealist deceased chef as a standin for Walt Disney, being used as a posthumous pitchman for junk food (like the straight-to-DVD soulless cash cow "cheapquels that were recently shut down by Lasseter's new management folks).

Unlike the choking glut of recent CG "animated" movies advertising product and billing their famous casts of "voice talent", this wasn't a wheelbarrow full of often-desperate gags hung on a weak excuse of a plot. The movie is all about story and characters and doesn't take its audience for granted.

@10 He went deeper than that. He went for the very essence of the transformation of the self through the hatred of the self and the aspiration to something higher. Race and class would have been off base. He should have gone for colonialism, and the natives who assist their colonizers, like the Sepoys or Koreans and Chinese who embrace Japanese culture as though it were their own.

I went at my daughter's insistence, expecting little. I left feeling
better than after any movie since "Monsoon Wedding". Great movie for anyone who loves food and/or Paris. Sure seems like
there are a lot of French-positive films around these days (La Vie en Rose; Paris,
Je T'aime; Mr. Bean's Holiday ...).