The one overriding triumph and tragedy of being a parent is this: kids grow up. If you do your job as a parent right, you train these amazing bundles of potential to be good, thoughtful, self-sufficient people and you push them out into the world to live their own lives and make their own way and just maybe do the same for their own kids someday. But that beautiful, agonizing process of maturation into adulthood necessarily involves the leaving behind of childish things, a development which tends to be harder on the parents than on the kids — and, Toy Story 3 argues, even harder on the childish things being left behind.
Ron Howard’s good with actors. That’s obvious both from the quality of the actors who have appeared in the movies he’s directed and the quality of the performances he gets out of them. The thing is, though, The DaVinci Code really shouldn’t have been a movie about the actors or the characters — it’s a [...]