So, with my dad out of town, I got roped into spending "Happy Family Time, damnit!" (yes, that's really what we call it) with my mother as she decided to show me the Blockbuster Blue Box rental experience. The problem is that my mother is really terrible at picking movies, though at least I got to pick one halfway-decent movie. So it was that we ended up watching Hall Pass, Just Go With It, and The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader (which was my pick). I really don't have much to say about Hall Pass and Just Go With It. I expected neither a funny nor good movie out of an Adam Sandler film, and Just Go With It didn't exceed my expectations. Hall Pass could have been good, but the writers decided to take a decent premise and possibly a good message and utterly destroy it with raunchy humor and explicit jokes/imagery (really, does anyone want to see several guys' junk when they go to the movies?).
As for Voyage of the Dawn Treader, that is my second-favorite of the Narnia books (my favorite being The Magician's Nephew) so I was really looking forward to seeing this movie. Unfortunately, the book doesn't seem to translate really well to the Big Screen in this script. There's nothing seriously wrong with the movie, though I didn't appreciate that they rewrote the plot to have a completely unnecessary "villain" in the green "mist". The movie just comes off to me as pretty bland, even compared to the Lord of the Rings-inspired Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe. The movie just seems to drag in places and neither the characters (with the exception of Reepicheep, who is still awesome) nor the situations feel altogether memorable. I had a good laugh as well at seeing that while the writers cut the hilariously goofy "baptism" of Eustace from the books, they still left in the eye-rolling "Well, you can know me in your world by ANOTHER NAME!" line. The special effects and set design are decent, but the movie just didn't feel like anything special and I think it loses that "light swashbuckling adventure!" feeling the original book has. Considering my favorite Narnia book is likely next (there's seriously nothing worth filming in The Silver Chair or A Horse And His Boy), I'm concerned with how they could botch that movie as well.