So I’m spending a quiet evening in tonight–the combination of chocolate cheesecake, hairpin turns, and time of month all ganged up to make me think that maybe laying on the couch and watching a movie would be a nice way to spend the evening. So I flip through my host’s extensive video library, and discover “The Secret of NIMH.”
“God, I’m such a furry,” I muttered, but I hit Play anyway, because dude, it’s been a good eighteen years since I watched it.
Be warned. I am about to speak blasphemy.
And you know, it’s a cute enough flick, that old school Don Bluth stuff, but damnit, I think it’s time for a remake of the book. And really use the book this time, because as charming as “Secret of NIMH” is, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH was a much superior book. They turned what was a surprisingly elegant work on the power of science and brains and ingenuity–even rat ingenuity!–into all that quasi-mystic mumbo-jumbo that didn’t need to be there. That was just lazy filmmaking. The rats triumphed because they were smart and logical, not because they had magic amulets of dubious origin, damnit.
Of course, they’d probably insist on doing it in 3-D, and I don’t know how I’d feel about that. Still.
Although if they wimped out and didn’t kill Justin at the end, I’d probably be okay with that.