Movie: the Adventures of Tintin

Our child care provider for last night cancelled and so "date night" became "family movie night". As a result, we saw Tintin rather than some counterfactual movie aimed at older ages.

But that was not so bad. I was not really familiar with Tintin at any level. I had seen the character around but did not know the history and had never read it. My sense from the NYT review is that having read the books made it a bit harder to like the movie, which is my usual experience in other cases. 

For our purposes, it was very good fun and, contra the NYT reviewer, a love interest was not really missed, and would have very much changed the character of the movie. And, yes, the drunkard captain Haddock is portrayed in a more positive light than would be approved of by modern-day public health scolds, but this is art, not a documentary, so people ought to chill out about it. It is also a movie based on books written in a different time, and so ought, in my view, to be true to that time.

My 4.5-year-old daughter was engaged throughout (probably the result of the non-stop pace that the NYT reviewer complains about) which is extra impressive given that the movie runs more than two hours in length. 

The one error in the movie, which is set somewhere in the 1930s or 1940s, was having one of the characters use the term "third world". That term came along decades later. I thought big-budget movies like this one had people on staff to check that sort of thing.

Recommended if you have a kid and marginally recommended otherwise.