Thu Aug 20, 2009 8:57 pm
Thomas and the Magic Railroad.
My wife and i watched it with our then 2 year old son, and it was so bad it's become one of my favorite movies to watch with my son. There is literally nothing that makes sense and every actor is out of place delivering ridiculous lines throughout the movie. This passage from a review just about sums it up.
"The movie's shabby, mismatched visual style prevents its multiple story threads from coming together, and creates a schizophrenic tone, especially as characters zoom across different worlds "Alice in Wonderland"-style without ever looking shocked. There are scenes in 'reality' -- where a reclusive railway tycoon, Burnett Stone (Peter Fonda), is being visited by his granddaughter Lily (Mara Wilson). Their time together is interrupted by a distress call from the film's main character, Mr. Conductor (Alec Baldwin), a midget pixie who uses a magic whistle to transport himself across the multiple universes he inhabits.
I found this hard to follow. Kids will be so confused you might as well hand them the work of Plato in the original Ancient Greek tablets. The actors deserve sympathy, too, because they had to pretend that it all made sense. Baldwin is the most embarrassing -- wandering around on his own, attempting to breathe excitement into nothing in particular, talking as if to an imaginary friend. Fonda delivers a ridiculous series of sentimental, deadly serious speeches; he looks like he's trying to win an Oscar, even though his lines are all similar to the following: "Lady was the best steam engine in the world... ah, how I loved her... and my wife loved her, too... but Diesel chased her... and her coal all ran out! O God!"
This message brought to you by the letters A-L-P-H-A-K-I-N-G and the number 6
“Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.”
-Henry David Thoreau
