The minions are coming

Uh oh. I've really done it this time.

I've opened the door to the minions, and now they are barging through. And this time, they're coming at me where I live.

It's already started, but it doesn't figure to end any time soon, if I know my sister-in-law.

But let's go back to the beginning.

I have already written twice (here and here) about hating minions, the walking yellow globules from the Despicable Me series, so I won't rehash those arguments at length. I will remind you, though: I hate minions. We can allow this post to serve as my inevitable minions rant that would have accompanied this summer's release of Minions, the Despicable Me spinoff.

Because of that spinoff, there are a ton more minion-related products flooding the marketplace than usual ... but I am again getting ahead of myself.

When we were in the U.S. last fall, my older son found a yellow minion winter hat at T.J. Maxx and put it on his head in the store. I immediately balked at it, just because of what it was, but almost as immediately I realized how cute he looked in it. I refer you to Exhibit A:

As Exhibit A amply demonstrates, I caved and bought the hat.

I figured, my son doesn't actually know what minions are. He has been very carefully kept separate from them. To him, it's just a cute yellow hat with eyes. And it made a nice little accoutrement for the rest of our trip in America.

Well, it's been summer since then here in Australia, so we haven't seen a lot of that hat. But the weather has turned, and we are nearly a month-and-a-half into autumn -- a season that actually begins on the first of March, by convention, rather than its 21st. And lo and behold, that hat has found its way out again, like an evil that had been hibernating, waiting for its chance to pounce.

It's still cute, but now it is also portentous.

See, my sister-in-law saw it yesterday for the first time. We were having lunch over at the kids' grandfather's house, and then she was taking them for the afternoon so we could go see a movie (While We're Young). And whenever she takes them, their collection of toys, books or clothes ends up enlarging by more than a few items. (She's about the most generous person I've ever met.)

I was aware of some the items upon first getting home. But it wasn't until clearing out the dish rack this morning that I saw not one, but two of these:

I repeat: Uh oh.

Now just because my sister-in-law brought them one minion item, it doesn't mean that she is going to start hitting the minion meme with the full weight of her purchase power. The kids have plenty of other interests, especially since a specific interest in the minions has not yet been established, as such.

But the encroachment of these guys in our house means that they could gain a foothold, and that's what worries me.

The funny thing is that when the topic of my son's hat came up at lunch yesterday, I made sure to immediately contextualize its purchase. I explained to my sister that I thought the Despicable Me movies were rubbish (I didn't actually say "rubbish," but I'm feeling particularly Australian this morning), but that the hat was cute so we bought it. I didn't want her to confuse me with someone who actually endorses minions, and I wanted to be as clear about that as possible.

The message she took was: "The kids like minions, and it doesn't really matter what dad's thoughts on the subject are."

I'm not blaming my sister-in-law. It was I who opened the door. It was I who stood there at the decisive moment, with my credit card in one hand and a minion hat in the other, and made the purchase.

But if they want to go to see Minions, I'll leave it to her to take them.

A (mostly) successful dry run

I mentioned on Wednesday that I'm on the verge of a major movie marathon, as soon as my wife and son leave for Australia on Sunday night.

Last night I got a dry run to see how it would go.

As an early Mother's Day present, my wife took herself to a neighborhood motel last night. It's a cute place that we've always admired and in which our family has stayed, but in which we ourselves have never stayed -- for the obvious reason that you rarely need to stay at hotels that are less than a mile from your house. Since it's also cheap, it made a perfect place for her to get away for the night, without really being "away" -- a staycation to the extreme. Especially since she'll soon be the only parent looking after a baby with his body clock all screwed up, for 11 straight days, she desperately needed the treat of a full night's sleep -- her first away from the baby in the nearly 8 1/2 months since he was born.

Naturally, I lined up a double feature to watch at home, for after he went to sleep.

I had one Netflix movie I needed to return (Despicable Me), and I wanted to supplement that with a spontaneously chosen movie from Redbox (Skyline).

However, I didn't start the second movie until after midnight, and had to finish it this morning.

See, last night I discovered that it's very possible to be "out of practice" in watching movies.

What? you say. How's that possible? You just press play and passively watch what comes on the screen.

Except it's not quite that simple, is it? Watching a movie by yourself is a bit different from watching a movie with someone else. With someone else, yes, you hit play and watch. By yourself, however, you can be distracted by the many other things that compete for your time -- especially when you can spend that time doing whatever you damn please. You can hit pause whenever you feel like it -- there are no social repercussions.

And this "dry run" showed me some of the potential obstacles to watching quite as many movies as I think I'll watch over the next 11 days:

1) Sports. There will be a lot of sports I care about on TV while my wife and son are gone. You can start with the NBA playoffs, where my Celtics are fighting for their lives against the Miami Heat. They'll play at least one game while my family is gone (Monday night), more if they win tonight. Then there's all the baseball that will be on. You may remember that I'm in two fantasy leagues.

Last night, the start of the double feature was delayed by the fact that I wanted to watch the Lakers-Mavericks game. Even more than the Celtics winning a championship this year, I want the Lakers not to win one -- you see, one more and they'll be tied with the Celtics in terms of total number of championships (17). I'm trying to forestall that inevitability as long as possible, and last night's Laker loss to the Mavericks -- which put them in a historically insurmountable 0-3 hole -- took a big step toward delaying that tie at least one year. (And if the Celtics do somehow manage to win it all, even longer.)

2) The internet. I just got a new laptop last weekend, and its much-faster speeds make the internet a much more attractive option for wasting time at home. With my old machine, I had to keep the power cord taut at all times in order for the laptop not to power down. This has tended to discourage random browsing for a couple months now. Well, not anymore.

So I didn't start Despicable Me until around 9:20, and about an hour in, the beer I'd had with dinner suddenly caught up with me. So I took a 45-minute "nap" before finishing. I considered not even starting Skyline because it was so late, but I hate keeping a movie an extra day from Redbox -- in fact, I've never done it. And now was my window to watch it. So I started at around 12:15, and went to bed with about a half-hour left. Which I watched this morning over my coffee.

So what have I learned?

1) Watch the Redbox movie first. That's the one you have to return on time. The others will wait. You can expand that to "watch the movie from the library first" as well, because that also has a hard-and-fast deadline.

2) If you have a movie you don't really want watch, but are obligated to watch it as a result of circumstance (like having it out from Netflix), then just return it. I have to say, I was impatient with Despicable Me from about its first minute. I have spent the better part of the nine months since the movie came out growing increasingly grouchy about it -- first it was the omnipresence of those silly yellow minions, then it was my boredom with the whole animated supervillain concept (and I have yet to even see Megamind). I must say that Despicable Me did not surprise me, which I half expected it to, since most people say it's good. It was pretty much what I thought it would be, and I didn't really care for Steve Carell's performance -- I've written before about the fact that he's far more miss than hit for me at the movies. It didn't end up mattering in the end because I got the second movie in, but my disenchantment with Despicable Me nearly cost me the double feature.

3) Trust your instincts about the movie you want to see, even if people told you it was bad. I couldn't believe how much I ended up liking Skyline -- in fact, it help put me in touch with how much I've decided I dislike Battle: Los Angeles. For two movies about the city of Los Angeles being attacked by aliens that came out less than five months apart, Skyline is clearly the superior effort. First and perhaps most importantly, they're not afraid to show the aliens in Skyline -- and they actually look good (even if they are sort of indebted to War of the Worlds, The Matrix and District 9). Second, it's much more interesting to follow random citizens than the military in a movie like this. Third, Skyline didn't feel the need to cop out with a Hollywood ending. So, if you wanted to see Skyline but heard it sucked, you now have at least one person recommending it to you.

Okay, now for the real thing starting tomorrow night.

Cute, or despicable?

I was immediately taken in by the first teaser I saw for Despicable Me, way back in 2009.

I'm sure many of you saw it, or if you didn't, I could link to it. But because I'm a man of words, let me describe it.

It takes place in Egypt, and features a rotund family of American tourists, each more disagreeable than the next, visiting the Pyramids. The precocious little boy climbs up on rickety scaffolding next to one pyramid, eluding the notice of the guards. As he nears the top, the guards finally do notice him, but it's too late -- he's losing his balance, falling a hundred feet toward the unforgiving edges of the pyramid below. It's certain death. But right as he hits the surface of the pyramid, it gives -- and it turns out this is an optical illusion, some kind of billowy tent with a pyramid painted on it, taking the place of the actual structure, which has been stolen right out from under everyone's noses. The boy sinks into it like someone would sink into a trampoline, then is ejected hundreds of feet into the air, landing on his family. In real life, this would also have killed him, and probably them. But not in a cartoon.

At the end of the teaser, there's a sinister laugh and the silhouette of a man with a very large nose. He's the despicable man of the title. And we immediately imagine him as some kind of evil (but probably loveable) genius with an evil fortress and unlimited amounts of money, who goes around stealing landmarks and generally making mayhem, just for mayhem's sake. Maybe he'd be across between the Grinch and Ebenezer Scrooge.

At least, that's what I thought the movie would be about. Now, I'm pretty sure it's just about a bunch of oblong yellow dudes in overalls.

Yes indeed, the ad campaign for Despicable Me has officially been hijacked by a bunch of preciously cute android worker bees, or whatever these things are. That's all you see of Despicable Me, anywhere you go. Having once rested its laurels on the naughty charm of some kind of dastardly supervillain, Universal has since gone a thousand percent kiddie in one of the most stunning market corrections you will ever see in film advertising.

These stupid little yellow guys -- whose character design I hate, by the way -- are everywhere. On bus stops. On the sides of buses. In poster kiosks in malls. On billboards. On TV. They even star in their own intro bit for Real 3D that has been playing before movies like Toy Story 3 and The Last Airbender. They are simply inescapable.

Oh, and never mind the series of strategically timed posters designed to steadily whet our appetite throughout the spring, which have instead done the exact opposite. In addition to the Mother's Day-themed poster seen above, there was one for Father's Day and one for Easter.

But how much more excited for the movie were you when the poster below was symbolic of how they wanted to advertise it?


For the record, I hear Despicable Me is quite good. Which just makes it all the more unfortunate that the advertising campaign has turned off people like me -- people who were fine with seeing it for free on Wednesday (had my free screening transpired correctly), but are pretty wary about spending money on it, if only because I am so damn sick of those walking grapefruits with googly eyes.

Granted, Despicable Me doesn't make its money on me. It makes its money on the little kids who love those walking grapefruits.

If I wanted to give Universal a break, here's what I'd say: In choosing a movie title that contains a word children don't understand, they had to re-double their efforts to connect with them in another way. Hence the current blitz of grapefruit minions. The more kids see the grapefruit minions, the harder they'll try to pronounce the word "despicable" -- at least well enough for their parents to buy tickets to the correct movie.

Ultimately, wishing that Universal could go with a despicable approach rather than a cute approach is akin to the many other complaints we film buffs have about the film industry, in which we wish it could only be such-and-such a way, and if so, everything would be awesome. But the need to make tons and tons of money almost always prevents it from being such-and-such a way.

In other words, accepting the grapefruit minions brings us one step closer to accepting reality.

Multiplex blues

A lot of bloggers have written about how this has been a bad summer for movies. My aim today is to explore a phenomenon that's related to that notion only superficially.

Yesterday my wife and I drove down from our house in Los Angeles to a multiplex in Torrance -- the AMC Theatres Del Amo 18 -- to see Despicable Me. I know it doesn't come out until tomorrow, but I clicked on a link in an email sent to me by Entertainment Weekly, and was selected on a first-come, first-served basis to attend a free advanced screening last night at 6:30. Feeling a little thrill of "victory," I got excited to go, even though I had my doubts about the movie. We rearranged our day yesterday, my wife even taking a conference call in the car on the 30-minute drive there, in order to be there in plenty of time. But when we walked up a full hour before showtime, the guy at the front basically told us that the line was hopelessly long, and we shouldn't even bother. This is a topic for a full rant at some other time, but a "free" movie feels a lot less free if you need to camp out all day to get in.

The good news was, we were there at a theater with 17 other screens, and there was surely something else we'd want to see, right?

Nope.

Here's what was playing:

Get Him to the Greek
Grown Ups
Knight & Day
Knight & Day
The A-Team
The Karate Kid
The Karate Kid
The Last Airbender
The Last Airbender - 3D
Twilight: Eclipse
Twilight: Eclipse
Twilight: Eclipse
Twilight: Eclipse
Twilight: Eclipse - The IMAX Experience
Toy Story 3
Toy Story 3 - 3D
Toy Story 3 - 3D

That doesn't quite add up to 18, so I don't know what happened.

We had already seen Get Him to the Greek, Toy Story 3 and The Last Airbender (my wife hadn't seen Airbender, but I wasn't going to sit through it a second time). We had no interest in the movie playing on a full five of the 18 screens, Twilight: Eclipse. Grown Ups was definitely out. I would have grudgingly seen Knight & Day, The A-Team or The Karate Kid, and my wife might have acquiesced. But none of them had a starting time closer than an hour and ten minutes away, even with two of those movies playing on two screens.

I was determined to see a movie, so I suggested we stop at another multiplex on the way home, to see if we might luck out on the times. This was advertised as a 16-screen theater, AMC Theatres Galleria at South Bay 16. But here's what was playing:

The Last Airbender
The Last Airbender - 3D
Twilight: Eclipse
Twilight: Eclipse
Twilight: Eclipse
Twilight: Eclipse
Toy Story 3
Toy Story 3 - 3D
Splice

Only one different title from the previous theater, and it was one I'd already seen.

In case you're counting, that's only eight different movies playing at a theater with 18 screens, and only four different movies playing at a theater with 16 screens.

I understand that these results are skewed slightly by the Twilight phenomenon, and by the summer season, but it still points to a very disappointing trend: Today's multiplexes are offering less than half of the movies they could be offering. And gone are the days when, if you missed one movie, you could be sure there was something else at the multiplex you'd be willing to subject yourself to.

I'm not saying all the movies listed are bad -- that's definitely not the case when one of the movies you're talking about is Toy Story 3. But I used to appreciate a time when there were still movies you could see, beyond those you diligently prioritized seeing (like Toy Story 3), if you were in a jam. I love random exposure to movies I hadn't planned to see, and I thought I might get an occasion like that last night. I was even willing to see something I didn't particularly want to see, but the start times weren't staggered in a convenient way for me to even have that option, either. So you take the combination of bad movies, bad start times, and too few options to choose from, and my wife and I had to slink back home last night, having seen nothing.

Oh don't get me wrong, I understand it's a business. I understand it only makes sense to play movies that are still ringing up ticket sales. If you're going to make more money on five Twilights than you are on three Twilights and two other movies, I guess you have to play the five Twilights. And speaking of all the Twilights, there was something weird going on at the second theater, I see as I look at the movie times online today. Twilight is playing 13 times today, which means four times each on three screens, then one other time on one other screen. Yet I can't see which other title is standing down to allow a fourth Twilight screening in the 7 to 9 p.m. primetime slot. This suggests that there's one empty theater whose only purpose all day is to screen one primetime showing of Twilight.

And I guess this sheds a little more light on the whole business thing I'm talking about. That second theater advertises itself as a 16-screen theater. But by my calculations, even with that one theater showing only one Twilight, only nine screens are currently being used. This means they're better off, financially, simply showing less than their full capacity, than to play movies that aren't selling any tickets in order to utilize their full complement of screens. By this model, one has to assume that in this particular slice of the geographical landscape, Splice happens to still be selling enough tickets, more than a month after it opened, to be worth playing for another week. I'm inclined to cheer them for showing continued faith in a pretty cool movie, but I know it's only business. If Splice isn't selling tickets, it's gone.

I'm not really blaming anyone for all this. Audiences see what they want to see, and theaters screen what audiences want to see. It just causes me to arrive at a rather obvious conclusion: The average multiplex out there sucks, and is no longer going to cater to a film fan like me, if it ever did.

Fortunately, I live in Los Angeles, where we have a couple truly great theaters that adhere to my definition of what a multiplex should be. Of course there are the three branches of the famous Arclight concept, in Hollywood, Pasadena and Sherman Oaks. But none of those is within 15 minutes of me. I do, however, have the Landmark on Pico, about four miles from where I live, which is currently showing the following:

Cyrus
I Am Love
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
Knight & Day
Love Ranch
Restrepo
The Secret in Their Eyes
Twilight: Eclipse
Toy Story 3
Toy Story 3 - 3D
Winter's Bone

The Landmark has found that perfect balance between needing to make money (Twilight, Toy Story 3) and showcasing films you won't see anywhere else (Love Ranch, Restrepo). When they shifted from all-indie to a few hits, a few years back, I initially bemoaned the change. Now -- and especially after last night -- I think that if the Landmark can just be the shining example of what I wish most multiplexes could be, that's fine with me. At least they're only playing Twilight on a mere single screen.

I guess the real lesson of this whole experience is: Don't get roped into the false promises of vastly overbooked free screenings.