It was picking out a movie for the 13- and 14-year-old boys to watch on the projector in our garage.
There would be three of them, including my son -- we thought two initially, but a third ended up coming, which is good. I worry so much about social awkwardness that I even worry about it on behalf of other people. My son knows the kid we knew was coming well enough, but that didn't mean I didn't worry about how they would keep each other occupied for five or six hours.
The movie was supposed to relieve that pressure for a couple of those hours, but instead it shifted the pressure on me.
How to find a movie that three different teenagers would all want to watch, when I can barely convince my own son to watch any movies at all?
When we had this same gathering last year, the latest Scream movie was chosen. I don't remember how it was chosen, but I definitely had my misgivings about it, given that they were only 12 and 13 at the time. My son, one of the 12-year-olds, shrugged off the extreme violence, or at least so he said.
So when I allowed myself to give it a few thoughts on Saturday between listening to baseball, cleaning, and trips to the store, I tried to think of the equivalent of Scream VI in 2024. Most of the horror movies I've seen this year have been pretty lame, and I thought if I were putting my name to it, I didn't want to sit them in front of Imaginary or Night Swim or some shit like that. (Actually, Night Swim might have worked, come to think of it.)
I did ask my son, but he said we should just wait until the others arrived. Which was sensible, but just kicked the can down the road to a time when I was busy readying dinner and the like.
Fortunately, Ben saved the day.
His name is actually Ben, so let's call him Ben.
Ben was the one we knew was coming. And before I even had the chance to worry about how this would go down, he said, "Can we watch Grown Ups?"
It struck me as a very odd choice. The movie came out in 2010, meaning it isn't some hot off the presses release everyone is talking about, and to my knowledge, it's pretty tame, especially when taken in comparison to something like Scream VI. Some ogling of attractive women, but probably not much more than, if memory served. (I hadn't seen it but I remember the trailers, and just now I see I actually wrote one of those scathing sight-unseen posts I used to write back in the day, which you can find here if you're interested.)
A brief glance on IMDB showed me it was actually rated PG. Not even PG-13. Am I being punked or something?
What's more, it's streaming on Netflix, so I didn't even have to rent it.
The fact that this decision was made so quickly and decisively -- and that the other two agreed to it, and that my son said he really liked it -- took a huge amount off my plate, to allow me to put food on other people's plates. It was a kind of bliss, really.
I always watch what the boys watch
I hadn't intended to watch Scream VI to rank it with my 2023 movies, but once I'd already rented it for them to watch last year, I figured I should get two viewings out of the 48-hour rental, and watched it myself later that night after everyone left. (I ended up really disliking it, ranking it #153 out of the 168 movies I ranked last year.)
This year, I also watched Grown Ups the next night, even though there was no closing rental window and no movie to rank for the current release year. I watched it on my son's recommendation, actually.
And am glad I did.
Enough time has passed since the movie's 2010 release for me to have gone from annoyed with most of the five stars of this movie to feeling sentimental about them, just a little bit. Then you've got a handful of great female co-stars, those being Maya Rudolph, Salma Hayek (more on her in a minute) and Maria Bello. Then of course a couple younger ogle-worthy actresses who play Rob Schneider's daughters, but it's probably not worth saying any more than that about that.
In 2010 I thought this movie would be smug, crass and self-satisfied. It probably is that, but in much smaller quantities than I expected, and with some decent heart.
Plus as a father of children who are about the same age as most of the children in this movie, as opposed to my first still being in my wife's belly back then, I appreciated it a lot more than I would have back then. There's good content about how today's kids never get outside to do any activities and are stuck to their screens, which was even a thing back in 2010. (Video games rather than phones then.) It's probably worse now, but maybe not.
Anyway, solid recommend on Grown Ups. I laughed a fair number of times.
Retrofitted credits
I find it sort of frustrating that Salma Hayek now goes by Salma Hayek Pinault -- and wrote about that frustration here -- but I found it downright surprising that this is how she was credited in Grown Ups.
So Netflix is retrofitting credits now?
That's the only possible explanation, unless Salma Hayek is capable of time travel.
It seems like one of the many extended favors that go along with Adam Sandler's deal with Netflix, but that doesn't make it right.
Hayek was indeed married to Francois-Henri Pinault back when Grown Ups came out, having tied the knot the year before, but she didn't change the way she was credited until last year, at the prompting of her daughter. So while she could have conceivably been Salma Hayek Pinault back in 2010, she wasn't.
I guess I feel like movies are finished products when they are cut, printed and released, and tinkering should be kept to a minimum. (George Lucas' FX meddling being one of the more obvious examples.) If Lana and Lily Wachowski are still credited as Andy and Larry Wachowski in streaming copies of Bound and The Matrix, despite a far more justifiable rationale for retrofitting their credits, Hayek should just live with her decision not to annex her husband's last name.
Thematically appropriate
It was not lost on me how similar the things that were happening in Grown Ups were to what was going on in my house right now. The movie is about a gathering of old friends and their children at a lake house, the children having to get to know each other and become comfortable with each other, and that's what was going on for a single night that night. It even takes place at the same time, though in quite different seasons. They're celebrating 4th of July in the movie, and we just, well, ignored it last week, given what's going on with the corrupt Supreme Court.
Our kids know each other better than these kids do, but just like the characters in this movie, I was worried about whether everyone would get along okay and do something fun together, rather than just being glued to their phones.
In fact, they did do that. We had that campfire in the back yard, and not only did the kids sit around and join the conversation, but they had fun burning marshmallows to a crisp and eating the other s'mores components we had gathered, whether they actually put them together into proper s'mores or not. Making s'mores is kind of the antithesis to phones, isn't it?
Funnily enough, the characters in Grown Ups also toast marshmallows while drinking at one point. And even the ratio of drinkers to non-drinkers was about the same, since two of the three visiting adults at my gathering were drivers, so they had to go easy. In fact, we were probably crazier than the movie characters in that none of the characters had to drive anywhere, and yet they were still drinking only a single beer or coffee, a detail designed to illustrate the changes that accompany parenthood and middle age.
Making s'mores was not the only "go out and experience the world" thing the three teenagers at my house did. (My younger son never has any age appropriate mates in this group, and mostly kept to himself, excepting when making s'mores. He was on screens most of the night, but I suppose you can't have everything.)
In fact, the three left my house after 9 p.m. to walk down to the pier, a ten-minute walk from the house. I did worry a little bit about it, but also, you're supposed to worry a little about your kids putting themselves out there on adventures. But our parents pushed us out the door back in the 1980s, and we were the better for it.
I have no idea if they got up to any misadventures down at the pier or were just on their phones the whole time, but they did come back in one piece.
And seeming just a wee bit better for the experience.
