The Favorite Aunt

After unwrapping many Christmas presents and enjoying much food and wine with my friends Barb and John, it was suggested I take Charlotte out to the local Blockbuster to find a DVD we all could watch.

Perusing the shelves, I spotted Stardust, starring Claire Danes and Charlie Cox (a cutie I hadn’t seen before). The movie caught my attention because it also stars Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert De Niro. I remember seeing a preview in the theater, and mistaking it at first for The Golden Compass — it’s got a similar visually fantastic style.

I tried to decipher the review blurbs on the DVD case, knowing that to be a fool’s errand. And then I remembered I had that ultimate aunt tool with me: the iPhone. I quickly called up the Internet Movie Database, and found that Stardust had received a rating of 8.1 out of 10 from IMDb users. That’s high, and so I felt encouraged.

(High School Musical 2 just came out on DVD, but I knew better than to suggest that. When I asked her yesterday if she’d seen the first one, Charlotte sniffed, “Yes. Boring.” That’s the difference between an almost 12-year-old and a 9-year-old like Violet.)

Charlotte picked up “Christmas with the Kranks“. I seemed to remember hearing that it was terrible, but I didn’t have to convince Charlotte to take my word for it. Again using my trusty iPhone, I learned that it had a 4.6 rating. Not good. As I said to her, “I don’t trust these IMDb ratings 100%, but I do think a movie that has been rated twice as high will probably be better.”

Stardust was even better than that. It’s very funny and exciting. There’s swordplay and witches and amazingly imaginative sets, like the pirate ship dirigible captained by De Niro. “Princess Bride” meets “Pirates of the Caribbean”. It features some amusing cameos, including a fun one with Ricky Gervais which will please fans of the original British version of The Office.

It’s rated PG-13. I do think some of the violence would be too intense for Violet and Dash. A lot of knifing and stabbing and gutting of animals… There’s also a whole riff on pirates and cross-dressing that would probably go over their heads–and that’s one of the funniest parts.