It looks like disappointing sequels are a thing of the past. There was a time when I wouldn’t have bothered with a sequel. But that was a time. Ice Age 2 brings back the world’s favourite mismatched prehistoric herd with a splash. It’s ‘meltdown’ time!

The last dinosaur is long gone and Manny the mammoth is wondering if he is the last of his kind too. Sid the sloth would be wondering the same if he wasn’t getting increasingly hassled by the lack of respect he gets from everyone. Diego the sabretooth tiger is getting a load of the other two and… well… he’s being sane. But he does have a slight hydrophobia thing.

I wouldn’t say kids actually aspire to ‘be’ them. There are no kids as stupid as that. At five, one may be taken by the muscles and the gadgets and the colours that define superheroism, but man is born sane and faith in the super only comes after the ‘real world’ beats you to squishy pulp.

There is something in a super that kids really appreciate. I think I speak for all kids when I say that Superman wouldn’t be half as super if there was no Clark Kent. Superman is a lot of things (truth, justice, freedom, blah blah blah…) but what is Clark Kent? Just a clever disguise?

Calling everyone who watched The Incredibles more than once. Personally, I saw it twice in a theatre and plenty more times on DVD. There is just so much between the lines stuff in it that re-watching becomes essential. So much that could go into the sequel to the mock-superheroic.

No, I am not ignorant to the infamous likeness to the Fantastic Four. That’s just something we all will have to live with (Pixar sure did. Nobody sued them. Miracles still happen!).

A couple of days down with something you think is flu will let you insight into movies seen long ago. If you see them again, you will get brainwaves the likes of which will sweep away lesser mortals. Skycaptain and the World of Tomorrow is what I will comment on first.

For once, I was stumped. How can a movie’s technical folk be so innovative and the creative folk be so uncreative? I admit with much shame that my intuition deceived me on this. Usually, my first impressions are correct about any movie whose trailor I have been exposed to.

I heard they are going to air National Treasure on Star Movies some time soon. I thought it might do some people some good if I re-post the review I wrote after watching it for the first time in Chennai. Feeling very Chennai-sick right now. So here goes:

A bit of the father-son thing from Indiana Jones but the rest was cool, I dare say better. Nicholas Cage has a cool name, Benjamin Franklin Gates in the movie. What made it watchable was that Cage had generations of explorers to look back upon. The (however sentimental) premise of family and tradition made the movie so enjoyable for me. Am a sucker for things like that! The introduction where young Gates is mock-knighted by his grandfather was extremely cool (my opinion).

Now there’s something that makes sense. I was beginning to wonder if it was only the Japanese that even had a modicum of appreciation for a moral machine’s potential. American Sci-Fi is always so “machines are going to kill us all.”

There are hundreds of thousands of machines today that can physically outperform human beings in particular tasks. Ever since IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov at chess in 1996, the mental task, too, has become academic. Obviously this fact does not make Deep Blue better than human. However, consider a machine that is morally superior to man; that, in my opinion, could qualify as a machine that is better than human, in fact, superior to mankind.