Finding Dory

So I watched the latest Pixar movie last week. Finding Dory was an okay sequel, but I didn't love it as much as other films like Up or Wall-e. I didn't even cry at the sad parts; I was just looking around the audience to see if kids were upset and parents were comforting them. I guess it's because I didn't really like Dory that much in the original Finding Nemo. I always hated a bunch of Disney sidekick characters that other people seemed to love. And I really hated that young Dory was drawn as basically two huge eyes to be super-adorable; I found it cynical and dumb to not give her a more normal fish shape. Plus, the octopus lost one of his tentacles, but don't these things usually grow back? Hank could have had a stump in the process of regrowth, and then Dory wouldn't keep calling him a "septopus". Then the plot got super dumb at the aquarium, going full circle back to quarantine. But if Hank had been in quarantine for a while, then why didn't he say to Dory in the first place, "Hey I just recently saw a tank full of blue tang in quarantine. Why don't you go in there and look for your parents?" The car chase scene was so over the top too, and I ended up really annoyed by the movie. Only afterwards, when I read reviews talking about how Finding Dory showed a lot of special needs characters with disabilities, and how these characters weren't helpless, did I start to appreciate the positive messages of the movie. I still don't love it, though, and decided to watch the Jungle Book again to cheer me up.

Meanwhile, the latest Houdini & Doyle concerned Bram Stoker, and his fans pretending to be vampires. Bram's weird behavior turned out to be symptoms of tertiary syphilis according to Doyle, though some stuff was kept mysterious, like the fall into the fire at the cemetery. Then the show threw all history out the window by having Houdini's mother die (when in real life she didn't die for years). I guess I shouldn't expect better, given the liberties taken with Doyle's home life and Houdini's wife being nonexistent in the show. Now Houdini will have to take his mother to America to bury her, and he also offered to take Constable Stratton to investigate her dead husband mystery. I assume Doyle will come along too, and the promos for next week showed them seeing Thomas Edison for some other mystery. I hope whatever this show is leading to will be worth it.