Firefly

Now that you’ve had a week and half to calm down from Hollywood’s annual bluster-fest, we here at the Family Valued Garage and Taqueria though you’d like to know what our kids thought about the year in movies.

Ellyn Rolleston’s (age 15) Best Movie Made from a Great TV Show That Nobody Watched: Serenity. Created by Joss Whedon, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame, Serenity is the continuation of the cowboys-in-space TV series, Firefly, that lasted only 14 episodes. The movie and the TV series are available on DVD. Watch them. You’ll be hooked.

Carolyn Rolleston’s (13) Best Inspiration for Making a Parody Using Dungeons and Dragons People: BrokebackMountain. After we saw this movie, my sister, cousin, friend, and I made a two-minute stop-action movie capturing the best scenes from Brokeback Mountain. Ours turned out to be a comedy.

Carolyn and Ellyn’s Best Thriller: Redeye.In most thrillers, the characters make decisions that we would never make. We have to scream at them and tell them how annoying they are. In this one, we would have made the same choices so there was much less screaming.

Aaron Brendze-Brownlie’s (10) Coolest Battle Scene: Helm’s Deep, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. It is! It is!

Owen Daniels’s (9) Best Swordmaster: Inu-yasha, Inuyasha the Movie. He can break barriers and put out fires.

Duncan Phillips’s (11) Largest Sword: Sano’s Zanbato, RurouniKenshin. The largest katana ever made --- made to take down a horse and rider in one blow.

Julia Kostin’s (9) Best Movie: Corpse Bride. The bad guys get defeated and there’s no violence. It was funny how they had Ray Charles as a piano player. And they had Napoleon, too, but he just stood there and didn’t do much. You can tell it’s by the same person who did Nightmare Before Christmas because the good characters are skinny and tall, and the evil ones are chubby and shorter.

Mike Kostin’s (12) Best Movie: King Kong. It really appealed to kids my age. A giant monkey killing T-rexes. What more do you want? It would have been perfect, except they had to throw in the little blondie. Every time they were going to have a cool shoot-out, she had to stop them. But she was the one who killed King Kong. Like the guy said at the end, it was beauty that killed the beast. They should have an Academy Award category for kids’ movies, because animation doesn’t count unless you’re a little kid. King Kong was the best movie.

Iris Wilcox’s (6) Best Movie: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It’s a great movie. It’s really fun and I think the dragons and the mermaids and the maze... It’s really a cool movie.

Lila Wilcox’s (9) Most Moving Animated Movie: Howl’s Moving Castle. When Howl has a temper tantrum, it’s how Sophie takes that in and deals with him. And when he catches a cold, how she can understand, kind of, people’s feeling and stuff.