Hillandale Elementary Goes to the Dogs

The best child movies manage to appeal on a more mature level to the adults who are subjected to them--Snow Dogs is, unsurprisingly, not one of those movies. Rather than trying to leap over the generation gap ourselves, Recess brings you cinematic criticism straight from the demographic's mouth. Tasos Kanopoulos, age 9, and Yousif Nazo, age 10, are third-grade students at Hillandale Elementary.

Yousif: Snow Dogs is about a guy (Oscar winner Cuba Gooding, Jr.) who goes to Alaska and gets a snow dog team and he met this girl there and they got in love but he wasn't really good at racing with the dogs.

Tasos: Cuba is scared of ice but the people in Alaska eat ice for breakfast.

Yousif: The funniest part of the movie was when he put hay in his butt and danced around in front of the dog. The dogs were all pretty cool but they didn't talk like the ads said they would. But they would look at each other and make faces like they were talking and that was funny.

Tasos: I thought Cuba should have been Chris Rock or Will Smith. He's not funny.... He played in that movie Men of Honor and he was as serious as that guy with the pimple on his face (Robert DeNiro).

Yousif: His dad (James Coburn) is white but the girl Cuba loves is Hispanic or something.

Tasos: If Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Chris Rock got in a fight, Chris Rock would win. But if Chris Rock and Martin Lawrence got in a fight, they would tie. Shrek was better than Snow Dogs because Eddie Murphy is funnier than Cuba Gooding, Jr. I think the reason why Disney's stock is going down is because they've been making retarded movies. [CEO Michael Eisner] probably eats out of the trash because his movies are so bad. They only make kiddie movies, and Snow Dogs was kind of a dumb kiddie movie.

--Transcribed by Greg Bloom