Movie Night

“Friday night is movie night,” Little T announced with enthusiasm.

It was something he learned from cable advertising, a pitch to encourage purchase of pay-per-view fare that was aimed at families on Friday nights. Apparently successfully. But not entirely. I turned the ploy around, as I had rented seven kid-friendly movies a week ago for Big T’s birthday sleep-over, which the kids then all unanimously opted not to participate in. The local video store has a seven movies for seven nights for seven dollars deal, and being cheap, I mean, frugal, I was determined to watch these movies rather than return them early. So, I agreed, yes, Friday night was family movie night. Pizza for dinner, microwave popcorn for optional dessert, kids all showered and pajama-ed early, we were set for Friday night family movie night.

Both Big T and Little T are on this kick about pie. It’s apparently something they saw on a cartoon on Cartoon Network, where a brainless character wanders around a cartoon muttering “I like pie” as a non-sequiter that they find irresistible and unstoppably hilarious. As a result, they’ve been muttering “I like pie” whenever they don’t want to answer a question, alternately funny and infuriating. So, what movie do they want to see first? “I like pie.”

We’d already seen Brother Bear 2, the latest in Disney’s ill-conceived factory-movie mentality assembly line offering. I became aware while I talked to a friend who worked at Disney a decade ago that this was their plan. They had the talent and the expertise on staff after years of developing each feature film offering. And they utilized the same expertise in terms of drawing. Backgrounds, color and voice for a follow up to each successful feature film. Never mind that the story wasn’t there. The story is what Disney spends years, sometimes decades developing before it comes to ink and cell reality, for each multi-million dollar feature. It’s number one for that market. But it seems more like number three for each direct-to-video sequel. Seems a shame to follow up a steak dinner with a hamburger sundae, but in their infinite (or increasingly, seemingly limited) wisdom, Disney has done so with Lion King 2, Lion King 1-1/2, Tarzan 2, Atlantis 2, and now Brother Bear 2. Ugh.

More successful offering was Sinbad. This DreamWorks special was remarkable for a pretty cool story featuring Sinbad as a cool anti-hero. I’m a big fan of anti-heroes, guys with failings as large as their features, just as likely to disappoint as amaze and enthrall, yet somehow manage to tip the scales toward heroism at the nth hour. The only failing of this film was the voice of Brad Pitt as Sinbad. In this, I finally figured out what my big prejudice against Bad Pitt is. I’ve had a brief discussion on this, with a woman who told me why she though Brad Pitt was hot. But he doesn’t do it for me, and it’s not just because I’m not gay. Really. It’s that he doesn’t have a hero's voice-he has a punk's voice. Brad Pitt is the perfect voice for the Artful Dodger in an animated Oliver Twist, or even Peter Pan or Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. But as Sinbad, he left something to be desired. He carried the right cavalier attitude, but didn’t have the strength of bravado to make me believe he could scale the mizzenmast and hoist the mainsail and avast ye hardies and all that. Sosueme.

Finally, and as a topper, was a movie with Kurt Russell and Dakota Fanning in a horserace epic, Dreamer. The tagline boasts “Inspired by a True Story,” which is shorthand for “This basic idea is from something that happened, which was absolutely nothing like what you’re about to see.” It think it’s frankly hard to make an exciting movie about horseracing, as horse races are about five minutes long, and as exciting as marbles IMHO, and very difficult to sustain over an hour-long period. You need a lot of fluff over the course of an hour to make you care about that last five minutes. The fluff here was a lot of father daughter stuff, which tugs at my heartstrings as I never had and always wanted a daughter. So I snuggled up with my boys, one under each arm until the youngest abandoned me for Mom, and hugged them, and enjoyed being their Dad. I hardly get enough of that. In fact, I never do.

At the end of the movie, I quizzed Little T about what the movie was about. I mean, he was awake for most of it, right? And it had in-depth themes of family and belief in the impossible, of dreaming and achieving amid loss and tumult. Something of significance may have filtered through. But before he could answer, Big T blurted out “I like pie!,” which, of course was then all his little brother could say. So maybe I’ll never know what he really thought. I covered Big T’s mouth and tried to prod Little T further, to get a hint of what he might have said otherwise. Meanwhile Big T shouted muffled cries against my hand. Finally surrendering on getting nothing more from Little T, I released my hold on Big T, to see what gem of wisdom I’d been squelching. It may be something significant, something properly penitant, something reasonably insightful, right?

“I like pickles on pie,” he said.

Pickles on pie. Yum.