Head-start Thursdays

If you're like me, you know your calendar by release dates.

If someone asks me what day of the week, say, March 23rd is, I'll be able to deduce it relative to the release dates of movies coming out around that time. If I know there's a movie coming out on March 21st and a movie coming out on March 28th, that means March 23rd is a Sunday.

For film fans this kind of thing becomes second nature. You see a release date on a poster, you internalize it, and voila -- just a little first grade math and you know what day every date of the month is.

So for a long time I thought that May 26th (today) was a Friday. I knew both Kung Fu Panda 2 and The Hangover II were coming out today, so that should make it a Friday, right?

Glad I didn't use that reasoning in any important situation, because today is of course a Thursday. I could have had dentist appointments and business meetings on all the wrong days.

Movies releasing on Thursday rather than Friday is nothing new, but it is a phenomenon that's only been around for five years or so. Prior to that, if you wanted to get a head start on a holiday weekend, you released your movie on Wednesday, not Thursday.

The reasons for getting the head start are clear enough. If you're like me, you're going to start celebrating your Memorial Day weekend tonight, rather than tomorrow. Everyone knows that tomorrow is a blow-off day at work -- many people even have half days (at my work, we expect to get out two hours early). But you do have to go to work, which means you can't leave for your weekend away until after work gets out on Friday. What better way to spend Thursday night (or in the past, Wednesday night) than at the movies, with whatever new blockbuster Hollywood has seen it fit to unleash on you?

Plus there's the whole psychology issue when it comes to weekend box office. If you want your movie to have the perception of a massive weekend -- which helps sell future tickets -- there's no better way to do it than to add an extra day, so the Sunday night totals look all the more impressive. Most prospective ticket buyers will just see the total, and not stop to consider that the movie had an extra day to reach that total.

But in both of those instances, doesn't it make sense to give yourself yet another day, and open on Wednesday rather than Thursday? A lot of us are probably blowing off the whole end of this week anyway, not just Friday. And the box office total might look all the more impressive with yet one more day.

But we're not seeing many movies open on Wednesdays anymore. It's always Thursdays now. I googled and couldn't find a useful explanation for this. I got some explanations about why they come out on Wednesdays rather than Fridays, but nothing about the shift from Wednesday as the traditional early day to Thursday.

When you take a step back, however, you'd think a Thursday opening would make more sense for a big-budget movie that had some amount of risk involved -- a Thor or a Green Lantern, where audiences might either embrace the character or reject him. The PR boost from the extra day of box office would seem to help a movie like this a lot more than it would help a movie with a built-in audience.

Yet there's a piling on effect with certain movies, isn't there? The Hangover II and Kung Fu Panda 2 are already being given the plum Memorial Day weekend release date, where lots of dollars can also be earned on Monday (though I think the totals are still reported on Sunday). Is the extra day in front of the weekend, as well, designed to give them the boost they need to possibly set records? For example, in the case of The Hangover II, highest opening weekend ever for an R-rated movie?

Lots of questions with only theories as answers -- at least, at the level I'm willing to google. (I stopped being a reporter because I was more comfortable with opinions and shallow research than facts and deeper research.)

Briefly, my thoughts on both films:

I liked Kung Fu Panda, but not as much as most people did. It was animated well and had some thrilling sequences, but there was a bit too much slapstick and a bit too much Jack Black-speak (everything was "awesome" or "righteous" or whatever word he felt like semi-improvising at the time. Oh yeah, I didn't really like the word "skadoosh" that he apparently made up, either). My reservations were significant enough that I'm not making a b-line to the theater for the second one. Plus, I might also like to start saving these kid-friendly movies for when my son is old enough to watch them. A movie I haven't seen to look forward to -- and if he loves it, I'll have one fewer viewing under my belt, meaning a delay in how quickly I get sick of it. (I've heard my friends with older children say they've seen certain Pixar movies 30 times.)

As for The Hangover, again I fall into the category of not liking it quite as much as most people did. I mean, that movie's really funny in spots and I'd definitely watch it again some day -- but from the trailers, I feel like I'd rather see the original again than watch the sequel. I think I resent the cult they're trying to create around this supposed "wolfpack." I don't remember why these guys started being called "the wolfpack," but I have to say I don't really like it. What's funny is that a term like that would normally be reserved for characters who are indisputably cool, but only one of our main three from the original -- Bradley Cooper -- has traditional "cool" credentials. Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis are both massive dorks. I'm not saying this is a problem, because dorks more closely reflect my own personal experience than cool guys. But don't try to make them seem super-cool by calling them "the wolfpack."

And that's all I got for this head-start Thursday. I'll probably write something tomorrow, but if I don't, enjoy your Memorial Day weekend.

Teaching kids to say the f-word

Is it just me, or are animated films involved in some kind of conspiracy to insinuate, use replacements for, and in all other ways put the word "fuck" into kids' minds?

This occurred to me as I was waiting for Rango to start on Saturday afternoon, when two straight trailers alluded to the word "fuck" without actually saying it.

First it was the newest trailer for Rio -- which, darn it, I can't find online -- in which the bird played by George Lopez says "Yippee Ki Yay [something something]." (See, that's why I needed to find the trailer.) Suffice it to say that he says a four-syllable phrase beginning with "M." That is, of course, an allusion to Die Hard, in which Bruce Willis famously says "Yippee Ki Yay, Motherfucker!"

The second was the newest trailer for Kung Fu Panda 2, in which the word "freakin'" makes several appearances. The word "freakin'" or "freaking" would not exist at all if it weren't being used as a non-vulgar substitute for "fucking."

You might say this isn't much evidence. In the first instance, you have to have actually seen Die Hard to get that the word "fuck" is being referenced. In the second, if you haven't heard the word "fucking" before, you have no idea that "freaking" is a cleaner synonym.

But we parents ... we get both of them, don't we? And it does make a person wonder.

And then, when Rango started, the allusions to swear words came fast and furious. I don't know about you, but when I grew up, I learned that these were the swear words: hell, damn, bitch, shit, ass and fuck. Yeah, there are words that are worse than all of these, that aren't technically swears, and at least half of these curse words can freely be said on television ("shit" and "fuck" being the only definite exceptions, and you can even say "shit" on basic cable now). But I think we can generally agree that none of them have a real place in a children's movie, right?

Well, I counted at least three instances of one of these words, either said or alluded to. When the hawk attacks Rango and that other lizard in the desert, and ends up grabbing the other lizard and flying off, you hear the other lizard curse Rango's name as he disappears into the sky: "You son of a biiiiiii ..." He doesn't get the whole word out, so it's okay. Then later on, the word "hell" is spoken at least twice. The first of which is really chilling, and may be the single clearest indication that this movie is not appropriate for young kids. The villain Rattlesnake Jake makes the following threat: "I'll send your soul straight to hell!" Yeah, I bet some kids were asking their parents about that one. Then the heroine, a lizard named Beans, tells Jake later on to "go to hell." Relatively tame by comparison.

I'm no prude -- not in the least. (If I were, would I have written out the word "fuck" eight times in this post already? Make that nine.) I just like to point out apparent hypocrisies when I see them. Here you have three children's movies that are, I'm sure, being embraced by conservative parents' groups everywhere, and each is doing its damnnedest (pun intended) to give their children a potty mouth.

But maybe it's much simpler than I'm making it out to be. Maybe those groups talk the talk about keeping young minds in pristine condition, but they don't really want to walk the walk. Maybe they really want their kids to learn these words.

Think about it. How much easier would it be if children could learn the bad language they're eventually going to learn, now, and just get it out of the way?

Parents would no longer have to worry about what their kids are watching on TV. They'd no longer have to wonder if the music their kids listen to contains explicit lyrics. Most importantly, they'd no longer have to worry about the words coming out of their own mouths. I think it's safe to say that a lot of us like dropping an f-bomb now and again, regardless of whether we're churchgoing folk, new-age liberals, or somewhere in between. If the kids knew those words already, it would let us all off the hook.

I'm obviously being a little bit disingenuous when I say this. It's straight-up bad parenting to not care what your kids watch or listen to, because it's not the word itself that is usually the problem, but an undercurrent of violence the word may suggest, in the context it is being used. We probably observe a difference between the way "fuck" comes out of our own mouths and the way it comes out of the mouths of gangsta rappers. At least when it's us saying it, we can control the context.

Still, I think it's interesting to note the way animated films are pushing their own standards of decency, just as the other parts of the entertainment world are doing the same. In the interest of making the movie seem like it speaks to adults -- and Rango may actually speak to adults more than it does to kids -- the writers want to give the movie some clear-cut adult content, or at least content that adults recognize is intended for them. The surest way to do that is something like the "Yippee Ki Yay" line in Rio, which will be entirely over the heads of children, but work as a wink to their parents. At some level it is simply a calculated attempt to get a higher box office. The best path to a good box office is when you can also get people to go without their kids -- like I did on Saturday.

I guess it's probably a freakin' good idea.