I caught the High School Musical 2 movie last night. I wasn’t a “oh-my-god-it’s-high-school-musical!” fan. I just thought the movie was cute. The sequel however, I wasn’t too happy with. The only thing that made me NOT want to turn the channel was the awesome choreography and music. Story-wise, not so pleased. But I’m sure that won’t stop the sequel from being another hit for the Disney channel.

Straying away from that, my brother received a bearded dragon as a pet. It’s actually kind of cute in it’s juvenile stage. I saw some adult pictures of it, and I’m not so pleased with their looks, but right now, it is. It tends to just lay around and bask in the heat lamp though I managed to catch it flinging itself against the glass walls of its cage. Was it trying to gain more territory? Who knows. I found it quite amusing though. Ever since then, I’ve really only seen it sleep and attempt to hunt crickets. It’ll start to move it’s forelegs really slowly but it won’t move. I’m not sure why it does that, because it’ll scurry around and catch the crickets quite quickly when it wants to. Still, it’s amusing. Click on the thumbnail to see him bask in the light! Oh yeah, my brother hasn’t named it yet, so any and all suggestions will be helpful! We don’t know if it’s a he or she yet either because the PetsMart associate told them they can’t tell the sex of the dragon at its age.

Sadly, Tatonka has rejoined the herd at the buffalo farm. She didn’t seem to be coping too well when I saw her last week. I didn’t go this week because I felt lazy. Apparently, she doesn’t know she’s a buffalo yet. However, when I did go last week to the farm, I managed to spot a golden eagle! I caught it on camera, but it isn’t the greatest shot. It just sat there on the porch and let us basically come as close as we wanted. It was creepishly tame, yet had no band. The owner managed to scare it off - it had killed one of his chickens before we got there.

 Finally, I hope you all enjoy the new layout! I’m so proud of my first Wordpress layout. If you see any errors, please notify me as soon as possible and I’ll try to fix it. Thanks!

To view the entire pictures, please click on the thumbnails in this post.

I went up to the buffalo farm again this weekend, this time armed with my camera. Tatonka seemed to be doing quite nicely. This time, the owner was there so she was following him like a little puppy the entire time. She came trotting up after realizing that the owner had already left to greet us. It was quite cute, watching her. Tatonka didn’t seem to really care about the rest of us, though she did rub her head on my leg (something about her horns are growing in and they itch, so she wants to rub her head against things) before going straight to the owner. She kept licking his knee, which isn’t as grand as it would seem because buffalo tongues are a bit like sandpaper. They don’t have upper teeth (in the front) and thus, they use their tongues to pull the grass out from the ground.

Besides running off to see Tatonka, I managed to get my hands on a VHS copy of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I’m surprised that I’ve never owned this movie - I remember seeing it ages ago but I don’t really remember much about it. The music is so powerful, something Alan Menken is amazing with. But what I was surprised to note was the “forbidden” theme of desire in the church that seemed to creep out within the movie. That’s something a 7/8 yr. old doesn’t see when they first watch it. The movie also touches on genocide. I think out of all the Disney animated movies I’ve seen, this could be the most adult oriented movie yet, though they did put so many antics in it that children would love it as well. However, I want to think that this movie is the only movie that’s strongly based on a novel; Oliver and Company is more or less a parody of Oliver Twist and the rest of the movies are based off of fairy tales, so I don’t really count those.  Hunchback is a movie that isn’t as widely known, but I think a lot of people would definitely enjoy it.

EDIT: There’s a new page, labeled ‘Writings’. Check it out if you care to read some of my literature. 

If you watch the commercials for Ratatouille, I don’t think anyone can really get a sense of what the movie’s about. From what I gathered, I thought it was about this little rat who befriended a human to get him out of some sort of predicament. I went to see this Disney/Pixar movie and I was quite surprised with what I saw. For the first time since Toy Story, I had a sense of the character’s “soul” in a CG film. With this new surge in CG animation, I was afraid that I wouldn’t ever see a character’s “soul” anymore in a film after 2D animation died. It’s a hard thing to describe, but it’s there and I was quite pleased to see that Pixar took great care and detail into breathing life into each of their characters in this film.

The film is about a rat, named Remy, who’s dream is to cook. He’s tired of his mundane life as a theiving rat and doesn’t understand what’s wrong with wanting to create something. His family, of course, believes he’s odd and doesn’t support him; they instead bring him down to earth by telling him he’s a rat. After a certain incident, Remy finds himself in Paris, torn away from his family. There he befriends a human after he was caught fixing up a soup that the human, Linguini, tried to fix but instead made worse. They team up to become a great chef.

It was so refreshing! I know I said before that I was sick of talking animals after movies like Happy Feet, Madagascar, The Wild, Over the Hedge, and Hunting Season, but because this was so refreshing, I soon forgot that I had made that statement before. What I loved even more than the animation was the storyline. It flowed nicely together, and though there were some age old cliches (boy gets girl), you couldn’t exactly guess what was going to happen next. I didn’t laugh out loud at every single joke, but it didn’t bother me.

The movie had everything a Disney/Pixar movie should. It had a wonderful sense of magic about it to engross children and make them believers. If Ratatouille doesn’t become a Disney classic in the next 20-30 years, then I’d be shocked. This movie has the potential to stand beside Snow White and Seven Dwarves and even Beauty and the Beast. If you haven’t seen it yet, you don’t know what you’re missing.