Dead Frogs & Missing Bees

I’ll be happy when I can turn both of the girls loose at a movie theater and send them off to see confections that might stick with them long after their childhood evaporates. Lilly is there already. When I was her age, I remember seeing a triple feature: Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, Frogs and The Incredible Two-Headed Monster without a bit of parental accompaniment, and I’m glad, since my mother -- same age then as I am now, more or less -- probably wouldn’t have cared for it.

Ann’s still too little for that. So on Saturday I saw Shrek the Third with my daughters. It wasn’t bad, but there wasn’t much to recommend it, either. Mostly empty of the charms of the first, such as they were. I remember laughing once, maybe twice. You know what? I don’t care who’s the king of Far Away Land. They can set it up along the lines of Anarchist Barcelona in 1937 for all I care.

Incidentally, John Cleese, probably motivated by a large amount of money for very little work, voiced the dying old king of Far Away Land, who happened to be a frog. We see him croak (haw, haw), which touches off the succession crisis, and the joke is that he seems to die a couple of times, but comes back. But not once does he say, “I’m not dead yet!” A missed opportunity for an homage that I would have laughed at. But my daughters wouldn’t have laughed, and since the movie was for them, no need for lines like that.

One of the trailers advertised another upcoming animated animal movie, one with Jerry Seinfeld as the voice of a bee who leaves the hive to become… let’s see, a sardonic Manhattanite in an overrated sitcom? Something like that. I wonder if the movie’s going to dramatize the problem of honey-bee colony collapse.