Several Weeks of Movie Nights
Die Hard 2, The Mummy, Young Frankenstein, Ghostbusters, Ruthless People
This one stretches back to before our vacation trip, when the kids had a three-day weekend so we squeezed in an extra movie night, but prepping for the trip kept me from writing it up.
Die Hard 2
It took forever to get the kids to agree to watch Die Hard, so I was surprised when they agreed to this one pretty quickly. There are a great many things about this movie that make no sense at all, chief among them the escape plan involving snowmobiles at Dulles Airport. It’s still good fun, though.
The Mummy:
This is the Brendan Fraser classic, not the Tom Cruise remake. I sold this as “Like Jungle Cruise but done a bit better.” Unfortunately, SteelyKid was out on movies in general that night (I forget why), and it turned out to be too scary for The Pip.
Young Frankenstein:
I had really high hopes for this one, which I still think is hilarious. It was a little too slow for the kids, though, who both gave up on it well before the end. It didn’t help that they don’t really know the movies that it’s riffing on.
Dune:
I wrote about this last week, at greater length than usual. The Pip didn’t watch, but SteelyKid loved it.
Ghostbusters:
I managed to get them to agree to seasonally appropriate comedy heading into Halloween weekend. This holds up pretty well, actually. Venkman’s behavior toward women plays as more creepy than funny in 2021, and the kids noted that, but that’s actually a relatively small part of the plot. The Pip is exactly the right age and temperament for the rest of the humor— as I expected, the “That’s right. This man has no dick.” joke killed.
Ruthless People:
SteelyKid initially requested something that The Pip was absolutely not going to watch, but we put that off by asking him what he was in the mood for. He asked for a comedy, and then added “R rated” because as noted above, he is at the age and of the temperament to find it really funny when people in movies curse. The problem, though, is that both of the kids are vehemently opposed to sex in movies, which knocks out a huge swathe of R-rated comedies.
I had them sold on Throw Momma from the Train (it helped that SteelyKid has a classmate named Owen), but that doesn’t seem to be on any of the streaming services now. So we ended up with Ruthless People, an 80’s comedy with Danny DeVito, Bette Midler, and Judge Reinhold that I remember as the first R-rated movie I saw in the theater (with my parents). There’s a subplot involving a sex tape that SteelyKid kept fleeing the room to avoid, but otherwise it played really well.
Special Bonus “For the #Discourse” Content:
The comedy special that launched a trillion thinkpieces…
It’s become absolutely universal across media these days to talk around controversial speech in a way that makes the discussion almost completely unintelligible if you haven’t already seen the act in question. It used to be relatively easy to find an article that reported what was actually said, but that’s gotten to be really difficult these days. It’s all oblique references to “offensive comments” or “controversial jokes” or “politically charged” material, even from people who are arguing that whatever it is wasn’t really offensive.
The problem with this is that whenever I finally break down and watch whatever it is at the heart of the controversy, it turns out to be so much less than it’s been built up in the #Discourse. Almost inevitably, my reaction is “Hunh. That’s it?”
And that’s what happened here. It eventually became clear that Dave Chappelle’s latest wasn’t going away as a topic, and since I was stuck biking to nowhere, I threw it on and… Hunh. I guess that’s it.
The special didn’t strike me as particularly exceptional in either direction— the controversial bits about transgender issues didn’t seem that outrageous in the context of the whole thing, nor did they seem especially courageous. They’re just… there, presented in a manner that’s too didactic to be either deeply shocking or genuinely funny. In the end, I mostly just found the choice to devote so much of the hour to this particular topic kind of puzzling.
So, that’s the last several weeks of media consumption. I’m also one episode from the end of Squid Game, and will likely finish it off today while biking-to-nowhere. If you’re just dying to know my take on it, here are some buttons:
and if you want to remark on my kids’ dubious taste in movies, the comments will be open.
I remember thinking even then that Venkman didn't come off as all that funny in his behavior towards women, especially in the opening bit with the experiment, but it really feels bad now. Though that's interesting in its own right, because it clarifies how much a certain male POV at the time completely sanctioned older men aggressively going after women in professional settings--the film isn't even slightly guarded or apologetic about Venkman.