#Peter Hartlaub

[got-the-wright-stuff]

[whoselineordie]

SFChronicle archive photos of Greg Proops

[levlaz-blog]

I love the audacious vision that Peter Hartlaub shares for a car-free San Francisco in this piece for the Throughline segment for the San Francisco Chronicle.

[s-k-y-w-a-l-k-e-r]

Here’s a clip of Rami reading an early ‘70s review of Queen you’re gonna want to listen to.

Here’s the rest!

[moviesandmania]

Gothika

Gothika is a 2003 supernatural horror film directed by Mathieu Kassovitz from a screenplay by Sebastian Gutierrez for Dark Castle Entertainment productions. Halle Berry plays a psychiatrist in a women’s mental hospital who wakes up one day to find herself on the other side of the bars, accused of having murdered her husband.

Psychiatrist Dr. Miranda Grey (Halle Berry) works at a mental hospital…

[o-holynight]

Joe Mazzello Podcasts

I have listened to a handful of podcasts that Joe has been in, I need everyone to be blessed with these as well. PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF THERE ARE ANY OTHERS I HAVE MISSED AND I WILL SURELY ADD THEM.

The Drop-In with Will Malnati - July 2016 | 45 min In the Season 1 finale, Joe Mazzello talks about his fear of coming out of the lactose-intolerant closet, why he doesn't answer Harrison Ford's calls anymore and why he owes everything to Macaulay Culkin. Joe makes his directorial debut with "Undrafted" which hits theaters and iTunes today. Spotify - Apple - Stitcher

Doug Loves Movies - July 2016 | 85 min Back at the UCB Franklin, Doug welcomes actors Danny Trejo and Joseph Mazzello, and comic Josh Wolf to the show. I can’t get this one to work on ANY platform, and it’s driving me insane. Its existence seems to have been removed from the internet, which is a shame because this reddit post makes it sound hilarious.

The Big Event - October 2018 | 30 min Episode 46 of The Big Event features "Bohemian Rhapsody" stars Rami Malek, Joseph Mazzello and Gwilym Lee drop by The Big Event archive studio to talk about what it was like to play Freddie Mercury, Brian May and John Deacon in the new biopic. They also talk with host Peter Hartlaub about California earthquakes, the 1985 Live Aid concert and make a dramatic reading of the San Francisco Chronicle's scathing first Queen reviews from 1976 and 1980. Spotify - Apple - Stitcher

Maltin on Movies - November 2018 | 91 min The little boy who scored such a success in the original Jurassic Park is all grown up now—and playing Freddie Mercury’s British bandmate John Deacon in Bohemian Rhapsody. Jurassic costar Richard Attenborough was so impressed with his young costar that he cast him in his moving drama Shadowlands. Director Steven Spielberg liked him so much that he wrote a letter of recommendation when Joe wanted to learn filmmaking at USC. Leonard and Jessie weren’t immune to his charms, either. He’s a bright young man who has his feet on the ground as he forges the next chapter of his rather remarkable career. He offers straight talk with a smile on his face, which is pretty hard to resist. Spotify - Apple - Stitcher

Couch Surfing - November 2018 | 11 min This week Joe Mazzello is on our couch, looking back at his earliest child roles in ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘Radio Flyer’, as well as ‘The Pacific’, ‘The Social Network’, and the new Queen biopic ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ YouTube (not really a podcast but I’m including it)

Backstage - November 2018 | 26 min Having worked with names such as Steven Spielberg and Aaron Sorkin, and holding nearly 30 years of industry experience at the age of 35, you may think actor Joe Mazzello has seen it all—but you’d be wrong. His most recent role as famed bass guitarist John Deacon in “Bohemian Rhapsody” posed new challenges. He recently sat down with Backstage to talk about the responsibility of playing a real-life figure and his experience on set in the hit Queen biopic. Backstage (again not a podcast but worth including)

[chrryblssmninja]

That was, in large part, the message of a rejoinder to the Post article from the Chronicle’s Peter Hartlaub. With the paper’s vast archives as his arsenal, he ably documented the many premature reports of this city’s demise, and assailed the lamenting of a lost, golden age as a product of selective amnesia. This was a good and necessary article. Institutional memory is a powerful ally. This city’s mascot ain’t a phoenix rising from the ashes for nothing...

...And yet I fear that extrapolating the future from the past is growing tenuous in the here and now. Yes, San Francisco has experienced outrageous unaffordability in the past — an egg in the Gold Rush era could set you back $3, which is about $90 in today’s money (more than any avocado toast).

But this is cold comfort. The tribulations of desperate miners willing to be fleeced in our inchoate, dirt-road town do not jibe with today’s San Francisco, a mid-sized North American city with a projected budget of $12.3 billion.

Institutional memory is a powerful ally. But San Francisco in an era of $1.77 million shacks and cleaning ladies paying $3,200 rents in Visitacion Valley and tsunamis of IPOs and jarring public misery and filth in the face of it all may have transcended history. We’ve gone off book. We’ve sailed off the edge of the map. George R.R. Martin couldn’t write quickly enough and now we’re making stuff up as we go along...

...Every business that owns property is in the real-estate business now; video-game company Zynga recently sold its building for three times what it paid in 2012 (and far, far more than it was making with its inane successors to Farmville).   But the same goes for families and individuals who own land. And, if you don’t, you’re often living in a constant state of anxiety. The clock is ticking. Your San Francisco phase may be truncated. So, no, San Francisco isn’t dying. There’s lots going on here in the neighborhoods out-of-towners don’t visit (and even in the ones they do). New people (who may or may not give a damn about our public schools and hospitals or any other problem not encountered while walking between the condo and the Uber) will always beat a path here. Individuals are being forced out or prospering — or both. But the city is in a boom.

San Franciscans suffer. San Francisco thrives.And it isn’t rotting, either. Quite the opposite: The city, increasingly denuded of its creative class and its middle class and its children, is still gorgeous. Like a lake permeated by acid rain, the pristine nature of swaths of San Francisco obscures a lifelessness of sorts.San Francisco is built between two major fault lines. Everybody knows what lies in our city’s future. But nobody knows what happens before that. Or after. 

[jessicafurseth]

Reading List, Wild City edition.

"For me, the value is in how it changes my life; how it makes me understand something I didn’t understand before.” [Agnes Varda] 

[Image by Samantha Mash] 

* 

"Touch had its own language, and the rules were the opposite of the ones I knew at home. Beijing’s streets were scenes of countless gestures of touch. If people bumped or rubbed arms as they passed in the street there was no need for an apology, not even a flinch. Strangers would lean their whole body weight against one another in a queue. Everyone seemed to have a certain kind of access to anyone else’s body. Shoppers and stallholders would hold on to each other’s arms as they negotiated with one another. People would pack in together around a neighbourhood card game. In the evening, women would hold each other in ballroom embraces as groups waltzed on street corners. Touch in public, among strangers, had a whole range of tones that were neither sexual nor violent. But it wasn’t neutral either."[Poppy Sebag-Montefiore, Granta]

"The teen idol vanishes” - Dylan McKay was never quite there [Soraya Roberts, Longreads] 

Did Julia Child really eat at Tu Lan? [Peter Hartlaub, San Francisco Chronicle] 

How the Oxford comma became such a big deal on dating apps - Filed under “Things I wish I’d written” [Kieran Dahl, GQ] 

"Unless we have lived in war zones or under dictatorships, we don’t tend to think of daily political life as so damaging. Yet reactions to Brexit suggest that it is being experienced by many as a trauma, with intrusive and repetitive thoughts emerging from a severely disruptive or damaging situation. Disbelief, fear and the wish for it all to be a bad dream are common features of trauma.” The psychology of Brexit [Susie Orbach, The Guardian] 

The people who eat the same thing for lunch every day [Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic] 

"Exposing cheese to round-the-clock music could give it more flavor and hip hop might be better than Mozart, Swiss researchers have found.” Okay. [Reuters] 

The mystery of the Global Hum [Philip Jaekl, The Guardian] 

"I don’t think that movie could have been written by a 30-year-old who knew better.” Love this interview with Helen Childress, the woman who wrote Reality Bites when she was in her 20s. [Soraya Roberts, The Atlantic] Also! "“Reality bites” wasn’t meant to be “reality sucks,” though it’s usually defined that way. In the summer of 1992, Childress kept hearing references to “sound bites,” which made her think of Lelaina’s recorded vignettes of her friends—“little bites of reality.”" <3 

In the 1970s, Mens Lib was all about "men to free themselves of the sex-role stereotypes that limit their ability to be human”. [Nona Willis Aronowitz, Vice] 

"It’s ok to be purposeless." Most things Edith Zimmerman writes is beautiful. [The Cut] 

"I thought I wasn’t allowed to write about this until I made it to the mythical other side. You hear it all the time: When you write about a personal experience, especially one that is dark and unpalatable, you should be far, far removed from that time in your life to process it in writing. You should have a lesson, a realization, a moral, a triumph. An ending. But I might want to die forever. That’s just how it is. But in the meantime, I need to talk about the treading.” [Anna Borges, The Outline] 

"This study’s participants didn’t remember the sentences played to them [while asleep], but “that does not mean though that they were not aware or not understanding them, just that they cannot remember.” [Shayla Love, Tonic] 

“I’ve been out with some nasty pieces of work, same as anyone else - but none of them have really touched my self-esteem the way bad jobs and bad bosses have. Because I ultimately never defined myself by how good a girlfriend I was, but I constantly - to this day - define myself by how good a worker I am.” [Caroline O’Donoghue, The Times] 

The best metric of success is the one we most often ignore: connection [Jenny Anderson, Quartz] 

"Marie Kondo helped me sort out my gender" [Sandy Allen, Them] 

Concrete Week at the Guardian was quite something.

London Transport fabrics over the decades [The Guardian]

[pendesvoyage]

‘What Men Want’ Has Us Laughing About Everything, Including the Plot

Photo: IMDb.com

What Men Want is a remake of the 2000 Nancy Meyers romantic comedy What Women Want with Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt. This time around they’ve swapped genders and the new movie stars Taraji P. Henson as Ali (like the boxer), a hard-working, emotionless husk of a woman. We’re lucky for the comedy because the plot is nothing new. I came for the nostalgia and stayed for Erykah Badu.

Ali works at a male-dominate sports agency. She is surrounded by testosterone and “locker room talk”. Inevitably, she is passed over for Partner for a dim-witted ball of “man-child”. The daily mansplaining and sexist attitude rings true for so many women in the business world. The film did a fantastic job of highlighting the struggles women face when they choose a “man’s job”.

Too bad the lead role wasn’t nearly as culturally apt. Ali was brutish and egotistical, where she should’ve have been witty yet too try hard. I understand the need to make her imperfect so she will learn a lesson, but she was almost so ill-tempered it was hard to watch.

Photo: Peter Hartlaub, Datebook.com

When we first meet Ali she is powerful, sexy, and sociable, but not twenty minutes in we find out she’s absent from her friends, over-bearing in bed, and a team of one at work. We quickly become aware of how messed up Ali is when she attends her best friend’s bachelorette party and meets Sister (Erykah Buda), a cooky psychic and asks for her help to understand men. Sister then proceeds to pour her a funky-tasting tea. 

The next morning Ali wakes up hungover and, oh yeah, able to hear men’s thoughts. Her adventure gets off to a great start when she hears her doctor’s thoughts about craving cocaine. She then hears her loyal assistant’s thoughts, and then every male coworker in the area. By the time she makes it to her office, she’s losing her mind. Understandably.

If someone could actually hear men’s thoughts in real life, I would hope they’d hear something more interesting than the thoughts ringing around the head of Ali in this film. Most of the men’s thoughts were made of old jokes and new stereotypes. I attended with my sister, and she called nearly every man’s thoughts before they even thought them. 

Taraji held the movie together like the ring leader of a circus. She was comedic at all the right times, and hard-hitting the rest of the time. It was a laugh a line thanks to Henson, which kept me entertained despite the somewhat chaotic and cliche story line. 

Speaking of hilarious, let’s talk about Sister. Erykah Badu nearly stole the movie with her over-the-top character portrayal, talons and all. She was so funny they even made a blooper-like reel during the end credits, so stay tuned when the movie is over. Badu had all our jaws dropped and our grins wide.

Photo: blog.streamplay.tv.com

The movie comes to a climax when everything is at its worst for Ali, and she screws up pretty much everything. Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. After she demolishes her first healthy relationship in forever as far as we can tell, ruining her best friend’s wedding, and hurting her assistant and friends she is left alone and confused as to how she got there. In the depths of our despair, we find our way. 

After losing her ability to hear men’s thoughts and an inspirational talk with her entrepreneur single father, she pulls herself up by her boot straps and does what women do every day. Get shit done. She realizes that she doesn’t need to hear men’s thoughts to know what they’re thinking. They’re pretty much just like women according to Ali’s sort-of boyfriend in that they just want to love someone and be respected.

The real lesson of the movie is that you should listen in order to know, and that we’re all pretty much the same. Because Ali had all her walls up, she couldn’t let anyone in. No one can flourish in this world all by themselves. Take the time to listen without preconceived notions. For every moment you’re judging someone else, they’re in turn judging you. 

Lost in dictation,

Jess

[intoxicatingimmediacy]

Peter Hartlaub‏ Had a fun time interviewing @DaveedDiggs and @RafaelCasal after the 7:30 “Blindspotting” screening at the Metreon. They also took time to pose next to the enormous @MickLaSalle’s Datebook review in the lobby. #LittleManClapping

[sfmuniverse]

Inspired by San Francisco Chronicle journalists Peter Hartlaub and Heather Knight, who embarked on a the entirety of Muni in a single day, one father and his two kids will ride every Muni line from end to end until the school year starts. This week in Summer of Muni, we completed 8 routes, riding 53 miles not counting our connecting trips on the 22, 48 or T, which we take from our Dogpatch home in order to transfer to our target route each day.

[kneipho]

From, The SF GATE:

(Photo: Washburn, Alex, The Chronicle)      

Rod Dibble, bar pianist at the Alley  in Oakland, dies at 85 

By Sam Whiting

Published 12:13 pm, Thursday, December 21, 2017    

Rod Dibble, the hands at the keys of one of the last piano bars in Oakland, has died, ending a half-century run at the Alley, a dimly-lit dive on Grand Avenue.

“I’ll never retire,” Dibble told The Chronicle’s Peter Hartlaub, in a 2011 interview. “I’ll be very happy to die right behind this piano here.” He was good for his word right up until he fell and broke his hip two years ago. After that, he could no longer maneuver his way through the bar and behind the piano.

He made a determined comeback earlier this year and the regulars rejoiced, packing the bar. For two hours he played and everybody sang along to the favorites like “The Oakland Song.” But he knocked off earlier than usual and was never able to return.

Dibble died of heart failure in his sleep at his Berkeley home on Dec. 18, at 85. His death was announced on the Alley Facebook page.

“He kept The Alley, as well as the Great American Songbook alive by playing night-after-night, song-after-song, with singer-after-singer for the better part of 50 plus years,” read the post by Bryan Seet, one of two pianists who have taken over Dibble’s workload, along with a guitarist. “He kept The Alley going and virtually unchanged throughout the decades keeping its unique character and grit intact.”

Dibble was a protector of that character and proud that he did not stoop to trendy requests. He refused, for instance, to play “The Piano Man” by Billy Joel, or anything else by Joel or anyone else who would be associated with modern rock. Or much of anything recorded after the 1930s.

“I always lay out the ground rules: If you want to play in my backyard, you sing my songs,” Dibble told Hartlaub during a break between “Fly Me to the Moon” and the 1937 jazz standard “Caravan.” “As the years go by, the younger crowd doesn’t know the older tunes. But they come in and they listen and they learn them. Cole Porter and Gershwin and Hoagy Carmichael ...”

The Alley is a small joint with red lighting just bright enough to make out the names on all the business cards tacked to the walls. Hartlaub counted 12 seats at the U-shaped piano bar and Dibble told him he first took his seat there in 1960.

He accepted requests and knew more than 4,000 songs, singing along in a rasp of a voice. When one of the regulars would nail their lead vocal he rang a cowbell, in appreciation.

Rodney Merritt Dibble was born and raised in Berkeley and learned to play piano when he was 6, in 1938.

“My uncle was in vaudeville,” he said. “My mother toured with them and taught me all these great old tunes. She’d sing around the house, and then I’d pick them out on the piano.”

A father of two, and grandfather of four, Dibble lived in downtown Berkeley, just six blocks from where he grew up, with his fifth wife, Linda McCormick.

For decades he worked Tuesdays through Saturdays, 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. But after heart surgery, he cut back to weekends a few years ago. His hobby was walking, up to 10 miles a day. His hobby was not the Internet or social media.

“I don’t even know how to use a cell phone,” he told Hartlaub, laughing. “I wouldn’t know how to turn on a computer. I’m a dinosaur and proud of it.”

He learned at least one new song every week; and after working at the Alley for 50 years, he told Hartlaub he could see himself playing for another 20 years, “at least.”

“He was sort of the last of his kind. Every week he would come up with an old song that I had never heard before and I know a lot of songs,” said Paul Rose, of San Francisco, who went twice a week for 35 years, even when it meant crossing the bay to sing “If I only had a brain,” from the Wizard of Oz. “Over the years we really got to know each other very well.”

When Dibble realized he would never make it back to the Alley he brought the Alley to him. Six months ago, a dozen of the regulars were invited to Dibble’s home for one last party. He knew everybody’s song and when he sat at his piano and started tinkling out the introduction, he expected the singer to pickup on cue. If he or she didn’t, he’d point to that person and command “sing.”

This went on for four hours until he got to tired to play. That was it for Rod Dibble at the piano bar but not for Dibble at the piano. Every morning he would sit down and play while Linda would sing, right up until a week before his death.

A memorial at the Alley is pending.

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Instagram: @sfchronicle_art

[ggbfurniture-blog]

Look for us us in the SF Chronicle this morning! We made it into the 2019 Holiday Gift Guide by Peter Hartlaub in the Culture section of today’s Sunday Chronicle... “For the town... and the city: A holiday gift guide that reps the bay” - - - - #goldengatebridge #internationalorange #sanfrancisco #citybythebay #uniquegifts #artisanfurniture #handcrafted #islaiscreekstudios #pictureframe #bookends #paperweights #holidaygifts #christmasgifts (at San Francisco, California) https://www.instagram.com/p/B6Gt6OtJSx1/?igshid=63m7o34gs8bs

[ecotone99]

Countdown to Cable Car Bell Ringing Contest Oct. 10

Countdown to Cable Car Bell Ringing Contest Oct. 10 By Keli Dailey

A uniquely San Francisco tradition is happening Thursday, Oct. 10 at Union Square and you’re invited! It’s our 55th Cable Car Bell Ringing Contest.

Come see the best of Muni’s professional bell-ringers in a lively competition for trophies, prizes and the title of Bell-Ringing World Champion. Everyone is welcome to attend this free, public event held from noon to 1:30 p.m.

The competition rules are clear: no props, no electronic devices, and no additional performers. For their solo songs, cable car operators and grips will be judged on the bell-ringing rhythm, originality and style.

This year’s judges include media personalities like KTVU’s Sal Castaneda, the SF Chronicle’s Heather Knight and Peter Hartlaub, KCBS’s George Rask, NBC’s Joe Rosato, and KPIX’s Maria Medina. Expect local dignitaries, community leaders and performances by our very own Cable Car Division band aka Abel Sanchez & The Frisco Project.

Cable cars are an iconic symbol of San Francisco; they were invented right here in 1873. The sound of the cable car bell is part of what makes coasting along San Francisco’s scenic hills a singular joy.

This year marks a milestone anniversary in our cable cars’ lives: San Francisco’s cable car system was designated a National Historic Landmark 55 years ago.

The 2019 Cable Car Bell Ringing Contest is in its 55th year as well. That makes this event a double Emerald Anniversary!

The contest brings back reigning seven-time World Champion Bell Ringer Byron Cobb and challengers Balraj Singh Rai. Thomas Leal, Antonio Marquardt and four-time winner of this event, Leonard Oats.

Special thanks to our generous sponsors Union Square Business Improvement District, SF Recreation & Parks, the Cable Car Museum, Hyatt, McEvoy Ranch, Ghirardelli Chocolate and Cirque du Soleil. We’re also thankful for in-kind support from Clif Bar, the Exploratorium, Alcatraz Cruises, the Museum of Ice Cream, Outerlands and the Marriot.

Visit the Cable Car Bell Ringing Contest page on SFMTA.com for more details. No ticket or RSVP needed – just come join us at the square! Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and share images of your time at the event using #CCBR55 #SFCableCar.

Published October 07, 2019 at 06:39PM https://ift.tt/2VmM1GT via Blogger https://ift.tt/30WYRg2

[shimanosimp]

Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties is a 2006 American-British family comedy film directed by Tim Hill and written by Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow. It is the sequel to the 2004 film Garfield: The Movie. The film stars Breckin Meyer, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Billy Connolly, Ian Abercrombie, Roger Rees, Lucy Davis, Oliver Muirhead, Bill Murray, Tim Curry, Bob Hoskins, Rhys Ifans, Vinnie Jones, Joe Pasquale, Richard E. Grant, Jane Leeves and Roscoe Lee Browne. This film was produced by Davis Entertainment Company for 20th Century Fox, and was released in United States on June 16, 2006. A video game, Garfield 2, was developed by The Game Factory. The film earned $141.7 million.

Contents

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hide

]

1Plot

2Cast

3Reception

4Home video

5Awards

6See also

7References

8External links

2.1Voice cast

3.1Critical response

3.2Box office

Plot[edit]

Jon Arbuckle (played by Breckin Meyer) plans to propose to his girlfriend Dr. Liz Wilson (played by Jennifer Love Hewitt), who is going on a business trip to London. Jon follows her to the United Kingdom as a surprise; After escaping from the kennel, Garfield(voiced by Bill Murray) and Odie sneak into Jon's luggage and join him on the road trip. Garfield and Odie break out of the hotel room due to boredom, then get lost.

Meanwhile, at Carlyle Castle in the British countryside, the late Lady Eleanor's will is read. She leaves all of Carlyle Castle to Prince XII (voiced by Tim Curry), her beloved cat who looks just like Garfield. This enrages the Lady's nephew, Lord Dargis (played by Billy Connolly), who will now only get the grand estate once Prince is out of the picture. Lord Dargis traps Prince in a picnic basket and throws him into the river.

Garfield inadvertently switches places with Prince: Jon finds Prince climbing out of a drain and takes him to the hotel, while Prince's butler Smithee finds Garfield in the street and takes him to Carlyle Castle.

In the grand estate Garfield is residing in, he receives the royal treatment, including a butler and a team of four-legged servants and followers. Garfield teaches his animal friends how to make lasagna, while Prince learns to adapt to a more humble setting, while in Jon's company. Lord Dargis sees Garfield and thinks Prince has come back - if the lawyers see Prince/Garfield they will not sign the estate over to Dargis, who secretly wants to destroy the barnyand and kill the animals to build a country spa. Dargis makes many attempts to kill Garfield, one involving a unmerciful but dim-witted Rottweiler, Rommel (voiced by Vinnie Jones).

Eventually Garfield and Prince meet each other for the first time (spoofing the Marx brothers' mirror gag). Jon, with the help of Odie, discovers the mix-up and goes to the castle, which coincidentally Liz is visiting.

Garfield and Prince taunt Dargis, whose plan is exposed, and are seen by the lawyers. Dargis threatens everyone if they don't sign the papers to him, taking Liz hostage. Garfield, Prince, Odie and Jon save the day, Smithee alerts the authorities, and Dargis is arrested. Garfield, who had been trying to stop Jon from proposing to Liz, has a change of heart: He helps Jon in proposing, and she accepts.

Cast[edit]

Breckin Meyer as Jon Arbuckle, the owner of Garfield and Odie

Jennifer Love Hewitt as Dr. Liz Wilson

Billy Connolly as Lord Dargis

Ian Abercrombie as Smithee

Roger Rees as Mr. Hobbs

Lucy Davis as Ms. Abby Westminister

Jane Carr as Mrs. Whitney

Oliver Muirhead as Mr. Greene

Voice cast[

edit

]

Bill Murray as Garfield

Tim Curry as Prince XII, a British cat who looks like Garfield

Bob Hoskins as Winston

Rhys Ifans as McBunny

Vinnie Jones as Rommel

Jim Piddock as Bolero

Joe Pasquale as Claudius

Greg Ellis as Nigel

Richard E. Grant as Preston

Jane Leeves as Eenie

Jane Horrocks as Meenie

Roscoe Lee Browne as the Narrator

Reception[edit]

Critical response[

edit

]

Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, reports that 11% of 73 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; the average rating is 3.5/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Strictly for (very) little kids, A Tale of Two Kitties features skilled voice actors but a plot that holds little interest."[4] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 37 out of 100 based on 20 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".[5] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale, the same grade earned by its predecessor.[6]

Joe Leydon of Variety gave the film a positive review, saying "Good kitty! Superior in every way to its underwhelming predecessor, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties is a genuinely clever kidpic that should delight moppets, please parents -- and maybe tickle a few tweens."[7] Janice Page of The Boston Globe gave the film one and a half stars out of four, saying "You'll only be attracted to Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties if you're very young, you're very easily entertained, or you just can't get enough of Jim Davis's lasagna-scarfing cartoon cat."[8] Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars, saying "Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties is actually funnier and more charming than the first film."[9] Elizabeth Weitzman of New York Daily News gave the film one and a half stars out of four, saying "Connolly, bless him, throws himself heartily into the task of acting opposite a computer-generated cat given to bad puns and flatulence. Everyone else, however, looks mortified, and can you blame them?"[10] Peter Hartlaub of the San Francisco Chronicle gave the film one out of four stars, saying "The best thing that can be said about Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties is that the movie isn't quite as bad as its name."[11] Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club gave the film a C, saying "Two Kitties marks a considerable improvement over its predecessor. It's faster paced and the filmmakers wisely shift the focus away from bland owner Breckin Meyer and onto a menagerie of chattering animals. After a dreadful first entry, Two Kitties elevates the Garfield series almost to the level of mediocrity."[12] Claudia Puig of USA Today gave the film one and a half stars out of four, saying "It comes off like a coughed-up furball: a wan rehash with too many elements of the hard-to-swallow 2004 original."[13]

Box office[

edit

]

Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties grossed $28.4 million in North America, and $113.3 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $141.7 million.[3] The film opened to number seven in its first weekend, grossing $7.3 million.[14] According to 20th Century Fox, the studio was aware that the film would not make as much as the first, and only made it based on the worldwide success of the first film.[15]

Home video[edit]

The film was released on DVD on October 10, 2006. The DVD includes a "Drawing with Jim Davis" featurette and two games: Garfield's Maze, and Odie's Photo Album. It also includes a music video, trailers, and footage not seen in theaters.[16]

Awards[edit]

The film was nominated for two Golden Raspberry Awards in 2006, one in the category "Worst Prequel or Sequel", and one in the category "Worst Excuse for Family Entertainment", but lost to Basic Instinct 2 and RV, respectively.[17]