Ratatouille

Day 115 - 4/25/09 - Movie #114

BEFORE: Well, this movie got the big buzz, so the expectations are high...will it be the best talking rodent movie of the week?

THE PLOT: Remy is a young rat in the French countryside who arrives in Paris, only to find out that his cooking idol is dead. When he makes an unusual alliance with a restaurant's new garbage boy, the culinary and personal adventures begin.

AFTER: Yep, best so far, though the other films didn't exactly set the bar very high. Patton Oswalt was great (of course), but I had to go to the web mid-movie and look up who the other voice actors were. That didn't sound like Janeane Garofalo at all, and I would have guessed that the food critic was played by Ian McKellen, not Peter O'Toole. Brian Dennehy was well cast as Remy's father, but Ian Holm's French accent was so thick, we had to turn on the DVD's subtitles. (Not a great idea to have a major plot point spoken by the character with the thickest accent...)

As for the story, I'm sort of glad that the mice and the humans couldn't talk to each other, so in that sense it was more "realistic", but this of course was countered by other, even more wildly UNrealistic plot points. I live in NYC, so I figure that probably every restaurant kitchen has had a rat or two in it at some point, but I still squirmed while watching a rat cook a meal...

RATING: 7 out of 10 mushrooms