Not having a chance to read the book series before seeing the screen adaptation of The Spiderwick Chronicles I went into the viewing with zero expectation and no predetermined notions of how the movie should be.

The storyline revolves around the experiences of the children of Helen Grace (Mary-Louise Parker) a newly divorced mother who inherits her uncle’s forest secluded mansion. The daughter Mallory (Sarah Bolger) and the two twin sons Simon and Jared (Freddie Highmore) find themselves fighting a fantastic battle against goblins, trolls and a mighty ogre after unwittingly calling their attention to a book full of secret information regarding all types of mystical and magical creatures.

The storyline is engaging but short. As I understand it the book series consists of five novels and to condense that into a 90 minute movie means a lot must have been left out of the movie. The computer generated graphics for all of the mystical creatures was par for a movie these days without nothing really standing out either good or bad.

If you like fantasy films you will probably enjoy the film however if you are a fan of the books you may be dissapointed by the lack of substance in the film.

I give The Spiderwick Chronicles a 6 Rogueys out of 10.

Last night my brother-in-law invited me to a pre-screening of the movie Jumper.  My original feeling is that this movie is probably one of most unique films to have come out of Hollywood in ages.  Most of the movies released these days are rehashes, regurgitations, or remakes of previous works and it was refreshing to see something new.

Found this video of my car on YouTube today.

This is a video I put together a year or so ago to show the advantage of the INTENSE Limited Slip Differential for the 4T65E-HD Transaxle. Apparantly someone liked it enough to put it up on YouTube.

This was a pretty crazy video shoot. There was so much smoke by the time we were done that it looked like the building was engulfed in white smoke and the neighboors almost called the fire department. One of our part time employees coming into work said they could see the smoke cloud from a mile away.

After we were done and we moved the car out of its burnout spot the pile of rubber that had accumulated around the tires was still smoldering. In fact to this day there are still two rubber patches in the concrete that can’t be cleaned off. We joked for a week afterwards that the car still had that new burnout smell.