Rhapsodies

For numerous reasons ( the biggest one being expense) I’ve been very selective about what films I see in the theaters lately and for the most part I have’t even seen the need anymore. Because I’m more than happy to wait for a film to come out on video for the most part by the time I have an opinion about any film most people have seen them already.

So anyway what I’m saying is that I’ll probably reviewing films months after they first came out and well past their sell by date..

Anyway… I’d put off seeing How to Train Your Dragon  mainly because the first film’s director Chris Sanders, of whom I am a huge fan, not directing the sequil. Later on I heard “It was good but flawed” so eventually I decided to break down and see for myself. Somehow I had missed most of the spoilers… I’d heard that the teenage cast of the first movie had aged to near adults and It was hard to miss one of the main spoilers in the marketing but I’d missed the BIG spoiler so there was nothing that affected the sense of drama for me.

So anyway I’d say that I mostly agree with the good but flawed assessment. Make no mistake this movie was gorgeous but it lacked a lot of the quiet beauty that the first movie had. I think  this is mostly a quantity vs quality thing. But in this case less is by no means bad it just means I have a longer list of nitpicks.

The biggest problem I think I have is that I get very tired of idealism being the same as naivity. Perhaps because  one of the main theme of the last movie was new learning vs hide bound traditionalism. Hiccup, the protagonist, seems to believe that people can be eventually be convinced to learn what is right. This gives him quite a blind spot for Drago Bludvist, the film’s villain, assuming that when his traditionalist father says that Drago is a madman he assumes he can explain things to him as opposed to Drago actually being a madman. But other than this and a bit of preachiness near the end I enjoyed this technically beautiful film.