Life is like a toilet...

Take heed not to get flushed.

With that out of the way, let me continue treading water with my backlog of movie reviews.

On November 3rd (!), I saw Flushed Away, a product of the mastermind behind Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit (though I guess I am in the minority in thinking Wallace & Gromit as ok but nothing special...Chicken Run was also good but not great) along with computational power to supplement his usual modus operandi. (There are going to be some plot spoilers below, but the plot is extremely generic and given the type of film, its main parts are exactly what you'd expect.)

I thoroughly enjoyed Flushed Away and wholeheartedly recommend it to everybody. It's the story of a pampered rat who lives in the lap of luxury with a rich London family. However, there are no other rats and he's actually very lonely. The movie starts off with a bang with a joke that none of the kids in the audience truly got but which I appreciated greatly. The family goes on vacation and we see the main rat ("Roddy", voiced by Hugh Jackman, who is quite the busy actor lately) suddenly party with lots of inanimate objects to the tune of Billy Idol's "Dancing With Myself." The kids just thought he was having fun partying while the humans were gone, but if you know this song at all, there's more to it than that.

Anyway, the rat gets flushed down the toilet and ends up hanging out with a feisty, red-headed sewer rat/pirate ("Rita", voiced by Kate Winslet), with whom he naturally ultimately falls in love even while they argue viciously the entire movie. Roddy also learns about family and truly realizes what he's missing when he meets Rita's destitute but large and very loving family.

OK, so the plot is generic---but the execution is awesome and that's what really makes the film. The writing, visuals, and occasionally even music (see above) are funny throughout the flick. There are a bunch of references and excellent lines, and very brief cookies like a cockroach in a nook reading Kafka and a book on a shelf with the title "A Brief History of Slime" appeal to the adults in the audience. (OK, maybe a lot of the adults in the audience don't actually catch these references---but I do and I really appreciated them.)

This film has rats, so I'm sure that will influence some people to see this. But there are things for the rest of you, too. For example, Jean Reno voices a French ninja-frog in the film.

In sum, go see the film!