I’ll start up the Blog Train with something not-so-weighty. Just a few cars. How about a movie? 
Ack, it looked so charming in the previews, but…I can’t recommend it. Not that it’s probably playing anywhere any longer anyway. Anyhow.
The Water-Horse seeks to blend various bits of legend, including that of the Loch Ness Monster, with World War II and the yearnings of a child for his father. It just doesn’t work.
Brief plot synopsis: Boy – the son of an estate housekeeper (Emily Watson, sans cello)   finds mysterious object in a loch. It turns out to be an egg, and the creature that hatches from said egg grows at an astonishing rate. There is comedy as he struggles to keep the creature a secret, and emotional moments, as the boy, whose father is off at sea, connects with it.
An army (or Navy?) regiment comes to be billetted at the estate, bringing with them the odd subplot of having as their task the prevention of U-Boats entering the loch – a subplot that is played for contemptuous laughs at such folly, which might be the stuff of adult black comedy but struck a wrong note in a children’s film, I thought. I’m not going to synopsize from this point, but just say it becomes one of those films where you know in general  what’s going to happen and you’re sort of sitting there putting the blocks in place in your own head a few steps ahead of what’s going on up on the screen.
The CGI was pretty good, although I retain my doubts about scenes in which there is a lot of motion and activity and swooping and diving and characters who are supposed to be hanging on to each other – it still looks fake to me.
But I utlimately can’t recommend you spending your hard-earned dollars on this movie, especially if you’re going to take anyone younger than say, 6.  As in Michael. Who is 3. And usually does fine with movies (up to the 90 minute point, at least), but was fairly restless through much of this one. It’s trying to do too many things, and the emotional texture of it is disrupted rather than enhanced by the direction the wartime story takes. I also didn’t much like the pretty obvious device of the old man telling the story to two young tourists in the modern day. It was cringe-worthy at times.
 My dissatisfaction with the film made more sense to me when I did a bit of research and discovered that Dick King-Smith’s novel upon which the film was based was not set in 1942 in the midst of war, but in 1930. Ah. The World War II element was dominant, so I can’t say it was exactly “tacked on,” but that’s certainly what it felt like, and the change from the novel explains why – it wasn’t there. 
(Other changes – it’s the sister who finds the egg, not the brother, and the existence of the creature isn’t a secret kept from the rest of the family.)
What gave me more to think about than the film, though, were the previews.
The previews were for more children’s films:
Nim’s Island (starring a Jodie Foster who is finally starting to look her age)
The Spiderwick Chronicles
Inkheart
The specifics are unimportant. What was fascinating was that all three of these films revolve around powers and hidden, magical realities contained in…not computers or movies or television…but..
books.
It was striking. In this age when we are all justifiably fretting about declining numbers of readers, young and old, there is obviously still something quite powerful about the simplicity of words printed on paper, which can open worlds up to us in ways moving images cannot, since (I think) the depth and nature of our engagement with those words and what they express is deeper because of what the act requires of us – a connection several steps beyond spectating that takes us to place all the more enduring since we can envision ourselves walking there – because we have.