Wasn't Tintin a dog?

No.  That was Rin-Tin-Tin.


All right, so it's been a very, very long time since I've been truly excited about a movie.  They've...sort of lost their appeal to me over the last several years.  I think the last time I was truly excited about seeing a movie was when Star Wars Episode III came out.  That was 6 years ago.  (Holy shit.) 


Now, don't get me wrong -- it's not that I think that everything that's come out since then was crap.  Hardly.  I'm ecstatic that the Harry Potter films all did so well and were so well received.  I believe Avatar was a huge milestone in film making.  And I think the Sherlock Holmes film with Robert Downey Jr. was just a really good film.  There have been plenty of great movies.  It's just...none of them really got me really EXCITED. 


Well, let it be known that I am excited about "The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn".  Which I will simply call Tintin.  (It figures that the first movie in nearly a decade that I get excited about has a title longer than a political speech.) 


Here's a foreign trailer.  Here's the teaser trailer. 


When I was a kid, I used to borrow Tintin books from the bookmobile that stops in my town.  I'm pretty sure I read each and every one of them, and I'm sitting here seriously questioning why I don't own them yet.  (To Amazon!)  I remember feeling very grown-up while reading them, because the stories seemed to adult to me as a kid.  Not in a sex/violence/controversy kind of way.  The stories are adventures.  I would compare them to Indiana Jones, to Brendan Fraser Mummy movies, stuff like that.  It's hard to describe why the stories appealed to me so much...but I'll try, and break it down into three points:


1. The time period.  I love early to mid 20th century stories.  There's something so appealing about the period of time before the technological revolution.  It's probably utterly bizarre for something like me who has computers so ingrained into his everyday life to say he prefers movies before they exist, but there you go.


2. The simplistic story.  Simple but not simple.  Mostly all of Tintin's adventures are a simple mystery that needs to be solved.  It's not over-complicated, transposed, analyzed, filled with hidden meanings or allegories, or anything like that.  It's an adventure.  It's fun. 


3.  The humor.  Herge had a knack for putting just the RIGHT amount of humor into Tintin's adventures.  It was enough so that you never took things too seriously, but it was never too much so that the entire thing seemed silly.  It's a fine line, and he walked it quite well.


In addition to reading the comic books, I also watched the animated television series on HBO.  I probably still have the episodes on VHS somewhere, and I'm quite certain I can find them online.  (A quick search on YouTube, and I found one full episode already.)  


I suppose that it just so happens that this movie is just exactly my kind of movie, and that's why I'm so excited about it.  I'm a fan of the type of movie it is -- a period adventure film.  I'm a fan of the source material -- Herge's comics.  I'm a fan of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson.  I was excited about this movie even before I saw any photographs or videos of it.  


AND ANY INTERNET HATERS CAN DIAF.


*cough*


Er, I mean.  Everyone is entitled to their own thought and opinions.


EVEN IF THEY SUCK ASS.