As with yesterday’s links round-up, we’re covering a long span of time, here, but not that much more material than usual because we were on vacation for a while. Anyway, these are the movies we watched with the kids over the last few weeks:
National Treasure: Book of Secrets:
(No photo for this one because we were in Florida…)
Having watched the first of these the weekend before our trip, it was a natural choice to fire up the second when we wanted a quiet-ish evening on vacation. As is natural for a sequel, it’s louder and dumber than the first one in a lot of respects, but still pretty good fun. It did plant the seed for the subsequent films in this round-up, though…
21 Jump Street:
(No photo for this one because I had work meetings and missed the first half-hour)
The Friday after our return from Florida, I had an all-day meeting that extended into dinner time, so Kate handled the movie selection process. Which appparently involved just scrolling through Netflix recs until The Pip said “Let’s try this” to the Jonah Hill/ Channing Tatum 21 Jump St from 2012. This was not an option I would’ve expected…
This was well underway by the time I got home, but I tagged in for Kate, and it was… fine. Very much in the Ironic Rebooot vein that was popular for a little while there, and which I probably like better than the Gritty Reboot trend. The kids didn’t qute believe us when we told them about the original 90’s show, and thought the cast photo that Kate Googled up was hilarious.
Con Air:
The National Treasure movies were very much Nic Cage on a leash, which is fun, but not as good as when he doesn’t have the constraints of a Disney production. So we fired up one of his “Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and an ambulatory pile of cocaine” films. This was a big hit with the kids, who absolutely loved John Malkovich’s scenery chewing as Cyrus the Virus, and gleefully pointed out all the absurd moments. Which naturally led to:
The Rock:
Again, just enormous quantitites of drugs behind the production. The kids cackled gleefully throughout, fully recognizing that nothing in the plot actually makes any sense, but it’s all fun.
Galaxy Quest:
When the SEAL team in The Rock is infiltrating the island, Sean Connery goes into this randomly flaring furnace thing, and I said “This episode was badly written!!” referencing the chomper scene in this movie. The Pip got the reference, because he watched this with me during the early days of the pandemic, but SteelyKid didn’t watch with us, so didn’t get the joke. Which meant we needed to re-watch the movie the next night…
We had a little trouble keeping SteelyKid in the room during the early scenes— “I hate [Tim Allen’s Jason Nesmith]!” “Yes, I know, that’s the point…”— but once it headed out to space, both kids were fully on board. Alan Rickman’s fussy prima donna and Tony Shalhoub’s stoned-to-bejeezus engineer are both magnificent.
This really is a terrific movie, tight and funny, with genuine affection for its reference points. I remember hearing someone in SF fandom say that the makers of this were the one Hollywood group who seemed genuinely excited to win the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, and I could readily believe that.
And that’s what we’ve been up to, media-wise. Nothing outside of movies with the kids at this point, but with the turn in the weather, I’m going to be doing a bunch more biking-to-nowhere, so expect to see some streaming series showing up here soon. Here are the usual buttons:
And if you’d like to quote Galaxy Quest jokes (“Maybe you’re the plucky comic relief, did you think about that?”) the comments will be open.