A few weeks ago we joined Netflix and their service has really been great. We signed up for the $13.99 a month plan which sends us two dvds at a time. Once we watch one of the movies it goes back in the mailbox and then we watch the other one and send it back the next day. At that rate we are watching 3 or 4 movies a week for the $13.99 charge, which is so much cheaper than Blockbuster.

This week we watched WALL-E and Journey to the Center of the Earth with Brendan Fraser. Everyone enjoyed both of the movies and they were both very family friendly. WALL-E is another Pixar creation and it won this year's Best Animated Feature Film Oscar. The story follows WALL-E, a waste clean-up robot, and EVE, a life probe robot, that meet, fall in love and save the day.

There are great themes underlying the main story, that of humans becoming increasingly lazy and dependant upon computers and how we are literally trashing our planet to the point of it not being inhabitable. WALL-E is such a innocent and sweet character that he does remind me of Number 5 from the Short Circuit movies.

I would give WALL-E two thumbs up but I would worry that very young children might not understand the film as most of the dialogue is based upon beeps and blips and body language between WALL-E and EVE.

Journey to the Center of the Earth was good family fun but younger viewers might be afraid of some of the scary moments in the film: dinosaurs and flying piranha-like fish. Originally the film was shoot in 3-D and you can tell because there a lot of scenes were things fly out at the viewer. It would have been nice to be able to have seen the movie as intended.

I forced this one on the spawn to watch this afternoon because I don't think any of them really wanted to watch the movie but they did. There was a lot of laughter coming from the living room and that is always a good thing. So even though this movie received mixed reviews, I would give it two thumbs up and I hear there is a sequel in the works.