Another week of media in Chateau Steelypips. I initially expected that we would be going to my parents’ on Friday, but that didn’t happen, so we got in the usual Movie Nights with the kids.
Real Genius
As you can see in the photo, SteelyKid sat out Friday’s movie, in favor of watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on a phone. This led to some chuckles at inappropriate points during the movie on the big TV, where The Pip finally agreed to watch Real Genius.
When we do these, The Pip always asks for popcorn, and will eat an entire bag of microwave popcorn on his own if nobody else jumps in and claims some. So what finally sold this to him was saying that it contains the greatest popcorn scene in movie history. He enjoyed it quite a bit, even the parts that didn’t involve popcorn… It holds up very well, all things considered, though it’s got some very 80’s ideas about sex. Tons of snappy dialogue, and Val Kilmer is great.
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Saturday’s Movie Night selection process involved the dreaded “Let’s see what the recommendation algorithms suggest” scrolling. This often involves me clicking past inappropriate things really fast, though I wasn’t quick enough to avoid “Hey, what’s Alien about?” (Answer: “No. Just… no.”)
Anyway, this was in the list of Amazon Prime suggestions, which was mildly surprising. I remember renting it when I was around the age the kids are now, and we got a VCR for the first time, so I offered it (“A bunch of weird families learn where a treasure is, so they’re racing to get it and wacky stuff ensues.”), and they said “Yeah, sure.”
This was mostly OK, but it’s very long— over 2.5 hours in the cut we watched, but there’s apparently another cut with an additional half-hour of material. Both kids enjoyed the early going (in particular hating on Ethel Merman’s overbearing mother character), but SteelyKid bailed out with an hour left saying “I’ve had enough of Sixties comedy.” The Pip stuck it out to the end, but grumbled about the length. I don’t really disagree— all the individual bits are good, but they also all go on a couple of beats too long by modern standards. You could easily shorten most of the setpieces— the airplane flight, the hardware store basement, trashing the service station, most of the car chases— by 20% and probably be better for it.
Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage
This is a new documentary produced by The Ringer for HBO, and as such is being promoted relentlessly on the podcasts of theirs that I listen to. And, you know, I’m sort of in the demographic for this, so I gave it a shot, in pieces. I watched the first day worth of stuff on a weekday afternoon when I was too fried to do anything else, and finished it Friday night after The Pip went to bed. SteelyKid (whose bedtime is an hour later) watched the tail end of it with me.
This does a nice job of pulling together contemporary footage of the event and present-day interviews with a small selection of artists and attendees and cultural commentators. Despite some of the claims made in promotional interviews, I didn’t think there was anything especially revelatory about it— it was obviously a shitshow, but everybody knew that pretty much as it was happening. I was also underwhelmed with the present-day analysis, which leaned a little too hard on the idea of the inherent atavism of young white men, and romanticized the grunge era in a way that always makes me roll my eyes. It also doesn’t have anything from the artists at the center of the catastrophic breakdowns (the closest is some interviews with a guy from Korn, who’s engaged in some massive self-justification); that’s not surprising, really, but it is a major obstacle to revealing anything genuinely new about what went on.
Ultimately, I’m not convinced this was a searing indictment of a generation or anything like that. It mostly just demonstrates that the knuckleheads who organized this had gotten really lucky with their previous go-rounds, and rather than learn any of the right lessons they pressed ahead with a new cash grab, and it blew up in their faces.
So that’s the latest in media consumption with my pre-teens. Here are the traditional buttons to click if you so choose:
And if you’d like to complain about our taste in movies, or just quote favorite lines from Real Genius at me, the comments are open.