Zootopia

Review by Bob Ignizio

In a world seemingly without humans, animals have evolved to the point that predator and prey live together in harmony. It’s a utopia for intelligent animals. A ZOOTOPIA, if you will (aren’t those Disney folks clever?).

The filmmakers seem quite pleased with their imaginative creation and spend a fair amount of time and effort in “world building”. Just enough to engender questions in the analytically minded such as myself, but not enough so as to offer any answers. Questions like – how are all these creatures using technology when many of them still lack opposable thumbs? And if the film is going to mention evolution in its efforts to explain how things got this way, then what do the predators eat now that they don’t chow down on their fellow animals? Have their digestive systems evolved that drastically that they are now vegetarians? Or maybe that explains why we never see any humans.  

Something Borrowed

Review by Pamela Zoslov

One of my favorite girlhood pastimes was playing a board game called “Barbie, Queen of the Prom.” The object was to get to the prom first, with the prettiest dress and the handsomest date. We would roll the dice to win one of four boyfriends, the most desirable of whom was Ken, a perfect, chiseled WASP of a fellow, on whose arm we would presumably spark the envy of all the other girls. Honestly, readers, this game and its questionable values messed me up for years.

I was reminded of this while watching SOMETHING BORROWED, a romantic comedy in which two women compete for the love of a man named Dex, played by the impossibly good-looking Colin Egglesfield, late of Melrose Place and All My Children. Aside from being a nice guy who will lend a law school classmate his only pen, Dex’s chief virtue is his underwear-model handsomeness. He is also maddeningly feckless, an object tossed about by two women and his parents, a helpless cork bobbing about in a sea of other people’s desires.