Ramona

I've always liked Beverly Cleary's children's books, particularly the Ramona books, even though most of them postdate my own childhood, so I decided to rent the movie Ramona and Beezus. It's a sluggish but rather charming mashup of the whole series into one movie, so if they want a sequel they'll have to just mash up different elements, assuming there's many of them left. The Ramona books are the tales of a little girl who wants to be good but doesn't know how, and as a former child I could really identify with that. The frame story of the movie is Ramona's father losing his job, and this is handled well, focusing on Ramona and her sister looking fearful as they hear their parents' financial arguments coming muffled and unintelligible through closed doors. The other main story is the courtship of Ramona's Aunt Bea by the Will Ferrell-like lug who lives next door (he's played by Josh Duhamel, who I guess is the guy you get when you want Will Ferrell, but need someone a bit younger, or possibly cheaper). Ramona gets to go yuck at the mushy stuff, but here the movie occasionally forgets that it's supposed to be from Ramona's viewpoint and not Aunt Bea's.

For very small children, one scary scene (a fantasy sequence of a canyon opening up below Ramona's feet as she hangs from playground equipment) and one sad one (their old cat dies; dead cat not seen on-screen but its grave is).