Another movie which I went in to with neutral expectations.  I saw it because I love animals, and my movie-goer friend also loves animals, and it seemed a no-brainer. Still, We Bought A Zoo turned out to involve much less monkey sh!t than I anticipated. See what I did there?

I’d had a discussion earlier in the day with another movie-loving friend about what the most important element of film is. He argues that the writing is most crucial.  You could have crap cinematography, awful audio, shitty whatever, but if the writing is fantastic is doesn’t matter (and vice versa: you could have amazing everything else but junky writing, and chances are you end up with a craptastic art film that most people eventually walk out of). At the time, I argued that I felt like all elements of film were equally important. After seeing this film I sent him a text saying he was right. Writing is the most important, but that everything else was tied for a close second.

Why?  Well, this was a decently acted film (Matt Damon and ScarJo are lovely, as are kids, extras, and animals!), with great animal audio and lovely cinematography. Nothing special and something almost expected in any ‘decent’ film these days. However the writing and characters were fantastic, and almost blew me away. It feels like this has been really underrated and frankly, I don’t understand why more people aren’t talking about this film. No, it’s of course not the greatest movie ever, and no it shouldn’t be nominated for best adapted screenplay or anything like that (but who knows), however, I was pleasantly surprised by it. I wasn’t surprised by the acting, or the audio, or cinematography, or editing, but I was surprised by the quality of the writing. Was it a result of my earlier conversation? Perhaps.  Still, it’s not a film for everyone, but if you want to see something that gives you warm fuzzy feelings, deals with the difficult topic of grief and loss, shell out the few bucks for this one, and bring a tissue.  A-