I have just removed my review for Charlotte's Web in protest

I have just removed my review for Charlotte's Web in protest of the decision by the movie's young star, Dakota Fanning, her mother Joy ,and agent Cindy Osbrink, to star in a movie that features the rape of her preteen character.

I will not name the movie. I will not see the movie. And I won't review another movie in which Dakota Fanning stars. Ever.

This movie isn't art, it isn't entertainment, it's pedophilia. And the fact that in real life children are raped is no argument for depicting it. It wouldn't hurt my feelings or slight my reverence for our First Amendment rights if the district attorney where those scenes were shot charged the producers of the movie with child abuse.

Dakota Fanning... who won't be 13 until February 2007... is hardly the first mainstream starlet to act in a movie that presents the sexual exploitation of children, but she's probably the youngest.

Brooke Shields was less than 15 when she was in the 1978 Pretty Baby, a movie wherein her character's virginity was auctioned off. Jodie Foster was about the same age when she played a teenage prostitute in Taxi Driver in 1976.

But there is a difference. Reportedly, Fanning is shown in the nude or scantily clad during the movie and during the rape itself her face is reportedly shown in close-up.

There's a second difference. Pretty Baby was banned in a number of countries, including Canada. Not even 30 years has passed, and Dakota Fanning's movie will be banned almost nowhere.

In other words, our morality and sense of outrage over the sexual exploitation of children has measurably declined. We ruffled our national feathers when Rep. Mark Foley sent salacious instant messages to young Congressional pages, but the depiction of the rape of a child brings an actor early Oscar attention. This is morally wrong.

Hollywood can't stop itself from producing these kinds of films. But Americans of normal sensibilities can respond by actively shunning them, their producers and the actors who star in them.

I hope you'll join me in doing so.

Flushed Away with Hugh Jackman & Kate Winslet

Sushi Without the Fish

There was something especially wonderful about Aardman Animations and their stop-action clay animation movies like Chicken Run and the Wallace & Gromit movies and shorts, produced by Nick Park.

The stories were inventive and affecting and the characters were handmade; you could literally see the artist’s fingerprints in the clay.

The problem with Flushed Away, the latest CGI release from Aardman and Dreamworks may be that there are too many fingerprints on it. There are four credited story writers and six screenplay writers, none of them Nick Park.

The movie ends up being a kind of California Roll; you know, sushi without the fish.

There’s the makings a good movie here. The cast is dynamite. The storyline is out or the ordinary and the animations are shiny as a newly-minted penny. It's just missing a soul; or maybe just Nick Park.

Flushed Away is about the longstanding enmity between the class amphibia and the order rodentia, which plays out in the sewers beneath London.

Roddy (Hugh Jackman) is a lonely if pampered pet mouse in a posh Kensington apartment who finds himself flushed into a shadow-London with bustling streets, Big Ben, a mini-Thames, even the London Bridge.

There he falls in with lovely Rita (Kate Winslet), a riverboat captain from a family of scavengers who is on a collision coarse with The Toad (Ian McKellen), a grandiose crime kingpin with a scheme for ridding the sewers of mice.

Roddy is horribly clumsy physically and socially in this lower world, but he’s quite taken with Rita and her extended family of seemingly hundreds of mice. Roddy and Rita openly disdain one another, but we no where that relationship is headed. They throw in together to stop The Toad from fully flushing London's sewers.

McKellen plays The Toad the way Sidney Greenstreet might have; big and broad. McKellen's way over the top and having fun. He's joined by Da Vinci Code co-star Jean Reno, who plays The Toad's French cousin Le Frog. A Frog playing a frog. Funny, eh? The versatile Jackman also gets to sing a few numbers.

Flushed Away is rated PG for "crude humor and language."

The DMR grades Flushed Away a B-.

The Dollar Movie Review Grading System: The Dollar Movie Review grades on a curve. Movies that make choices to be course or vulgar are downgraded a full to a half grade or more. Likewise, movies that don’t gross out or offend too much can be upgraded as a ‘thanks for trying’ attaboy. Flushed Away was downgraded a half-grade because it was a hair too crude.

Santa Clause 3 with Tim Allen and Martin Short

An Easy to Swallow Sugar Confection

My mother used to make the candy confection ‘divinity’ each year at Christmas. Her recipe produced sweet, light sugary-goodness. As a kid I’d eat it by the fistful and wonder why, at the end of the season, she didn’t make it more often.

Truth be told, my blood-sugar counts couldn’t have handled it more than once a year.

The Santa Clause movies feature that same kind of treacly sweetness. But at Christmas time I find I have a sweet-tooth.

Judged by the movie trailer, I expected to dislike Santa Clause 3. The infinitely talented Martin Short looked mean-spirited and Tim Allen appeared to be sleep-walking. Instead, I found myself enjoying this frothy holiday confection.

It involves Santa Claus/Scott Calvin (Tim Allen) finding a jealous rival in Jack Frost (Martin Short). The original Santa Clause developed a clever back story for Santa Claus and explained such head-scratchers as ‘how does Santa deliver the goods when there’s no fireplace?’

Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, doesn’t revisit Santa lore so much as it invents new lore for a guild of Legendary Figures that includes Santa and Frost, but also Mother Nature (Aisha Tyler), the Easter Bunny (Jay Thomas), Cupid (Kevin Pollack), the Sandman (Michael Dorn) and Father Time (Peter Doyle). The cast also includes the reliably droll Alan Arkin as Santa’s father-in-law, and Ann-Margret as his mother-in-law.

Frost learns that there is a way for him to assume the mantle of Santa. By trickery he transports himself and Calvin back to the moment when Calvin first slipped into the big red jacket. In a Back to the Future moment Frost gets to the jacket first and Calvin is suddenly living a joyless life as a successful toy company executive.

As Santa, Frost crassly exploits the commercial possibilities of the North Pole. Christmas, it turns out, could actually be more commercial. This is, as I say, a sweet movie so suffice it to say that the movie doesn’t end there.

This is a deeply-talented cast with not enough to do, although the producers somehow managed to fit in musical numbers by Ann-Margret, which was too short, and Martin Short, which was too long. And maybe someone can explain why flatulence jokes… in this case involving the reindeer… are now part of every G-rated movie these days. Sigh!

Santa Clause 3: the Escape Clause is rated G for general audiences.

DMR grades Santa Clause 3 a B.

The Dollar Movie Review Grading System: The Dollar Movie Review grades on a curve. Movies that make choices to be course or vulgar are downgraded a full to a half grade or more. Likewise, movies that don’t gross out or offend too much can be upgraded as a ‘thanks for trying’ attaboy. Santa Clause was upgraded a half-grade because it was clean and because I want to encourage more movie producers to cast Ann-Margret.

Open Season with Martin Lawrence and Ashton Kutcher

Don’t Rush to Put Open Season in Your Sights

When I reviewed Over the Hedge I wrote that it was an animated movie that wanted to be good for you, like a high fiber cereal.

Open Season, another animated movie featuring furry forest creatures has no such ambitions. It’s a cheese doodle and a Diet Coke. It fills 99 minutes but when you’re done you realize that there’s not a lot of movie in this movie.

And they spend way too much time answering the eternal question, “just where does a bear do his business in the woods?” The jokes are kid-friendly enough, they’re just few and far between and take their sweet time delivering.

Open Season stars Martin Lawrence in the Shrek character and Ashton Kutcher as the Donkey character. Open Season isn’t a direct clone of Shrek, but the buddy dynamics and the ‘journey of discovery’ plotline are plenty familiar.

Lawrence stars as Boog, a 900-pound grizzly bear who is the pet of Beth (Debra Messing) and the mountain town of Timberline. He’s the star of small animal show and so house-trained he uses a porcelain toilet. Then one day Elliot (Kutcher), a scrawny one-horned deer turns Boog’s life and Timberline upside down.

In the wake of the mess, Beth does the only thing that makes sense to her. She returns both misfits to the forest above town where they encounter beavers, squirrels, porcupines, deer and other denizens, who mock the pair’s foreign ways. Worse, hunting season is starting soon.

One of the movie’s shortcomings is Lawrence, who’s no Eddie Murphy or Mike Meyers for that matter. Open Season would have gotten instantly better with almost anyone besides Lawrence. Kutcher is surprisingly strong as the mischievous buddy. So too is Gary Sinise as Shaw, a hunter on the lunatic fringe.

Kudos to the producers for casting Canadian native American actor Gordon Tootoosis as Gordo, Timberline’s Indian law enforcement officer.

Open Season is rated PG for "some rude humor, mild action and brief language."

DMR grades Open Season a C+.

The Dollar Movie Review Grading System: The Dollar Movie Review grades on a curve. Movies that make choices to be course or vulgar are downgraded a full to a half grade or more. Likewise, movies that don’t gross out or offend too much can be upgraded as ‘a thanks for trying’ attaboy. Open Season was downgraded. Without the potty jokes I would have graded as a B-.