Back when I was a kid, I remember regularly biking over to our local two-screen theater and catching the latest and greatest movies on hot summer days. Then when my lovely and talented wife was pregnant with Son #1, we spent almost every summer Saturday catching a matinee to stay out of the heat. Since then, we’ve fallen out of the habit of seeing movies in the theater.
Part of this has been due to the high cost of movies, but mainly it’s been due to the continual presence of young kids running around our house. Now that our youngest has reached an age where he can sit still a bit more than in the past, we’ve started going to movies again. What follows is a ranked* list of movies that we’ve seen this summer. These rankings reflect my own not-so-humble opinion, whereas the star ratings are taken from IMDB.
1. Iron Man (8.2 stars)
2. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (7.1 stars)
3. Kung Fu Panda (8.1 stars)
4. Speed Racer (6.6 stars)
5. WALL-E (9.2 stars)
A few notes: Son #1 largely agrees with these rankings, though he puts Indiana Jones ahead of Iron Man. Kung Fu Panda was very fun, and loved by all. Speed Racer was particularly well-loved by Son #2 (eight years old) and Son #3 (six years old). Pretty much all of us found WALL-E to be a bit, well… Boring. It was interesting to a point and I wanted to love it, but it ended up being little more than one of those Pixar shorts that they run before the main attraction, except that it seemed to run on forever.
Next up… We’re looking forward to seeing both Get Smart and Hancock in the near future.

