No Evil Shall Escape My Sight

Back when I used to be a writer, I had this thing where I reviewed movies I'd never get to see, at least not in a timely fashion. Like everything else in those days, the bitterness of too much free time and not enough freedom was the driving motivating factor behind its creation. It's the same combination of factors that got me kicked out of my housewives' online reading club. Let's see how much Jane Austen you have to read before you start SWEARING IN ALL CAPS too. And if you're reading this, fuck you, Brenda. I still say the girls would have liked Palahniuk if you'd just let us give it a chance.

Now I have less free time than I did when I was staying home with the kids, but, ironically, I have all the freedom I want to see movies. It helps that the kids have gotten older now, so there's less worry about being the guy with the crying children in the movies. It almost never happens now. Almost. But look, the rules are R is Restricted wherein no one under 17 is allowed in without parent. With parent, it's every pre-teen for himself. Sometimes Daddy wants to see the one with exploding heads and plot-unnecessary boobies. So yes, sometimes there is crying. But it's manageable. They're all past what the Catholic church calls the "age of reason." For the church I think it's mostly a legal out for implied consent. For me, it means I can convince them to cry at a more reasonable volume if I threaten to take away their Nintendo DS.

The daddy-time outings are rare. I may now have the time to whip out the suffocated, insufferable, douchebag of a cinephile long dormant in me, but I'm stuck for the most part seeing things that a 12-year-old boy might want to see. Or does want to see. I know this because he asks me directly. Or when the commercial comes on, he says something compelling like "Whaaaaaaaa, awwwweessoooomme!" in the way only California public schools can teach one to articulate.

So hooray, more movies! And boo, Green Lantern and Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Yes, I know there was a gap where I wasn't able to get out as much, but at my age, there's no excuse for not expecting big stupid loud action movies to be some combination of loud, stupid and big. So that's not really the complaint. Although, that said, I should be allowed to complain about another fucking Transformers movie. Not just a fighting robots movie, but a Michael Bay fighting robots movie. Not really a haven for nuance, unless by "nuance" you mean a new invented single-word meaning describing  the ability to ascertain the pubic-hair configuration of a woman via the tightness of the dress she's wearing. Which I now do. Most nuanced film ever.

Green Lantern had kind of the same problem except all the tight and/or missing clothing happened to Ryan Reynolds. He basically spent the entire film in a green onesie. I spent most of the film, as you can imagine, thinking "dang, this film could use a lot more nuance."

That said, I was still a little ashamed of my erection.

The moral of this and probably all other stories ever is be careful what you wish for. As I noted above, my oldest is 12. And all the movies he wants to see are PG-13. Which means, as a parent, this means not only do I have to sit through shitty movies and pretend they're not shitty afterward while the kids talk about how awesome they are (don't worry, I puncture their self-esteem by "accidentally" referring to them by girls' names), but quite often I will have to sit through these films twice, once solo as a pre-screening, then with the boys.

Rarely does a pre-screen lead to an overrule. With the last Harry Potter movie, it just meant I knew when to tell the scaredy-cat ones to cover their eyes, but we still went. The only one I rejected on their behalf was X-Men: First Class. The part where the Nazis murder someone's mother and then later when a guy dies by having a coin very slowly and lovingly passed through his skull were enough to exercise my executive veto.

You'll be happy to know I don't have to see all of them twice. Transformers, I mean, fuck, come on. First of all, Mr. Bay lacks the narrative or constructive skill to manufacture a scene of any psychological impact, frightening or otherwise. Plus, I fucking wish a movie like that would give the kids nightmares. Then maybe I can dare to hope they'd at least pause before considering seeing the next abomination of CGI battle porn.