I may be circling another Cable Guy viewing

On actual Father's Day -- which was this past Sunday in Australia, not sometime in June -- I sought to keep the good vibes going from my Liar Liar viewing on Saturday night. You know, another movie I'd already seen and knew I liked, which might be similar in ways to Liar Liar.

As you know if you read my last post, Liar Liar gave me some unexpected Father's Day food for thought, and my initial browsing on Sunday night was aimed at continuing that theme. But the right option never really presented itself, so instead I continued to pursue a different theme: people laboring under the influence of a curse/spell, in order to radically change their perception of, and interactions with, other people in the world.

That's right, I landed on Shallow Hal, the 2001 film that nearly cracked my top ten that year, but has since come under probably justified scrutiny for its implied fat shaming -- even if the message of the movie is that we shouldn't fat-shame people. (So why so many fat jokes, Shallow Hal?) 

We're different as a society since now, so I wanted to see if I was different as well. And was a little worried about the possible result, making this the opposite of a guaranteed fun viewing experience on Father's Day -- what I was seeking with the Liar Liar viewing. 

It turns out yes, I am different, in that I didn't laugh very much in this movie, whereas I remember laughing a fair bit in 2001. But I still thought it was a worthy, possibly misunderstood, effort.

But let's start with the not laughing, and whether it actually has to do with our enlightened viewings toward body positivity or is rooted somewhere else.

I don't think in 2001 I was laughing at things like furniture breaking under Gwyneth Paltrow's Rosemary -- bad timing, as I just broke a piece of furniture in our house the night after I watched this -- or the rear of their canoe pitched six feet off the surface of the water, with a flabbergasted Jack Black fruitlessly rowing air. If you are going to do this concept, these are good visual sight gags, but I don't believe they made me laugh per se. Certainly didn't on this viewing.

So was it laughter that vaulted Shallow Hal to my #13 in 2001, or sentiment? 

Peter and Bobby Farrelly do make every effort to shine a light on the humanity of their characters. We know they have a pattern of putting people with physical or mental limitations in their films, to give a showcase for people of all types and to proactively shout down the people who would laugh at them. I think this is what Shallow Hal is trying to do with unattractive people, even though there is an obvious false equivalency between a character with spina bifida and a character who is just "ugly" -- which is actually just "ugly" as defined by society and popular magazines.

Because they are comedy directors, they of course also have to make jokes, and the jokes stem from the scenario they are investigating. I think Shallow Hal is mostly devoid of cheap shots, even though it's clear the movie would never be made today. And characters who are insensitive pricks are taken to task for that.

No, the real quandary regarding Shallow Hal is whether Hal actually displays any personal growth in his journey, at least not until an ending that strains some credibility. 

Namely: If he sees someone who he thinks is physically beautiful, is he actually really doing anything different than what he's been doing this whole time?

It's a tricky one. The idea is that by being able to see inner beauty, he's seeing what she actually looks like and not caring. And though he starts to become a nicer guy at the same time, displaying generosity rather than ogling, it's still the guy who thinks he's seeing a perfect 10, and that isn't real growth.

I think the conceptually idealized message that Hal is seeing what people really look like, and then converting it into physical attraction on the basis of connecting with them emotionally, is worth conveying, and I don't know if you could put it in that different a package -- especially coming from a comedy background. (It would still be years before Peter Farrelly made something not explicitly comedic, like Green Book.) But it may never be fully possible to appreciate Shallow Hal without some sort of asterisk. 

And the Farrellys may have always known this would be the case. Which actually speaks sort of well of them as "artists" -- I have to put it in quotation marks because I doubt they would classify themselves as such. But artists, by definition, go outside their own comfort zone, or the comfort zones of their intended audience, to present a challenging version of the truth, and it isn't exaggerating to say that this might be what Shallow Hal is doing.

I've written all this about Shallow Hal and so far it has nothing to do with the subject of this post. What does The Cable Guy have to do with all this?

Well, it specifically has to do with the combination of the two movie choices I made this weekend, both of which have similarities to my favorite Jim Carrey movie, and top 20 movie on my Flickchart.

Liar Liar has an obvious connection in that both films star Carrey. In fact, it was the very next film Carrey made after The Cable Guy, and in most people's minds, it represented a return to form after that critically dismissed Ben Stiller film. (The Cable Guy has vastly gained in appreciation since then, and as you might know from previous mentions, I am its biggest champion.)

But there was a funny lesser connection with The Cable Guy that I didn't notice until this viewing. Namely, both films feature Carrey's character beating somebody up in a bathroom.

In The Cable Guy, Carrey's Chip Douglas thinks he's helping out his new "friend" Steven (Matthew Broderick) by attacking the date (Owen Wilson) of Steven's estranged girlfriend, Robin (Leslie Mann). So he poses as a bathroom attendant at the restaurant where they are on a date, and when the jerk comes in to relieve himself, Chip introduces him to various hard surfaces and standard bathroom components. 

In Liar Liar, well, of course, it's Fletcher Reede beating himself up. It's his desperate attempt to get a continuance on his court case because he is unable to lie. It's certainly just a coincidence but I thought it was a funny one.

Shift to Sunday night, and there are some funny similarities between Shallow Hal and The Cable Guy as well. 

For one, Jack Black is in both movies. He plays the titular character in Hal, and he's the supporting role of Steven's best friend -- his actual best friend -- in Cable Guy. 

But Tony Robbins is also in both movies, though his role in The Cable Guy is small enough that you probably wouldn't remember it unless you'd seen the movie nine times (or so) like I have.

We know his role is significant in Hal, as he is the one who frees Hal's mind to see inner beauty by putting a "spell" on him. How Robbins does this is a bit of a mystery, and it doesn't matter. I mean, how did Max's wish come true in Liar Liar? It doesn't matter.

But Robbins also has a small -- albeit off-screen -- appearance in The Cable Guy. There's a moment when Steven, laid low by Robin's decision to take some time apart from him, is listening, only for a moment, to a Tony Robbins self-help seminar in order to get his mojo back. (Yes, I just noticed the Robin/Robbins connection myself.) Chip then arrives to pick him up -- even though Steven didn't realize they were supposed to get together -- and the sequence ends.

So will it be The Cable Guy the next time I'm looking for a comfort food comedy circa the turn of the century?

Could be. You know how I talk about how favorite films seem to come up for me for a viewing about every four years. Guess when my last Cable Guy viewing was?

Yeah that's right: June 18, 2020. 

A pre-Father's Day cautionary tale

Today is Father's Day in Australia. Mother's Day is perfectly aligned between Australia and the U.S., but Father's Day is pushed from June to September (assuming we can consider June the default and September the deviation). Something to do with it being winter in June and ... not quite winter in September. (In fact, today is also the first day of spring, per the southern hemisphere convention of changing seasons on the first of the month. Yes they have to be difficult down here.)

When I was searching for something light and funny to watch last night -- we'd had a couple hours where emotions had run high among various people in the family -- I didn't expect that thing I would fix on would end up also being a profound warning about taking fatherhood for granted. 

In fact, I didn't land on Liar Liar on Amazon Prime until the second time going through my options. I have of course seen Liar Liar -- this might be my fourth viewing overall -- but that was by design. I knew the light and funny thing I would end up with would be something I had already seen, in order to guarantee myself the lightness and funniness I wanted, rather taking a risk with some unknown quantity.

At first I thought maybe it wasn't quite the right thing, for one reason that doesn't have much to do with anything and one that does. The random reason was that I had just rewatched another Jim Carrey film from this era, The Mask, earlier this year, and watching Liar Liar seemed like going to too similar a rewatch well. 

The more salient reason was that over the years, I seem to have forgotten just how good Liar Liar is.

Not only have I not written about it on this blog, as I can see by the fact that I'm using the "liar liar" tag for the first time, but my records should that I haven't watched it in the "rewatch era" -- in other words, the era in which I started keeping track of my rewatches. That began in in 2006, so it's been more than 18 years since I've watched this movie, though I think I did watch it three times in its first ten years of existence -- if we are indeed calling this my fourth viewing overall.

It would have to be at least four, because there was so much I remembered about this movie -- lines of dialogue, inflections of Jim Carrey's voice, laugh-out-loud bits of physical comedy. 

What I didn't remember is exactly how funny these things are -- and just how touching I find the movie's underlying sentiment. 

In fact -- and it could just be because my own son had a tough emotional moment an hour or so earlier -- I almost found myself getting a little choked up.

Liar Liar is an exaggerated version of a very real problem, or at least potential problem, among fathers and their children. Mothers, unless they defy what the statistics tell us, are very unlikely to neglect their children. You are much more likely to find mothers that go to the extreme of suffocating their children with love and affection than those that fall down on the job even a little bit. Mothers are treasures and we should probably acknowledge them a lot more often than we do. 

Fathers? Fathers can drop the ball without even trying ... often because they aren't trying. 

Even good fathers, though, can slip into a sort of middling indifference toward their duties, knowing the mother will pick up the slack, knowing that everything will get done when it should get done because of the ingrained calendars most mothers have in their heads. That's certainly true of household duties and life admin, but can even be true of some of the basic ways children need to be nurtured. 

In Liar Liar, I thought specifically about how Carrey's Fletcher Reede keeps putting off the game of catch with his son, the one where young Max is supposed to be Dodger pitcher Hideo Nomo and Fletcher is supposed to be Oakland A's star ... well, you know the line of dialogue: "I'm Jose Canseco! I'M JOSE CANSECO!" 

Putting off playing with my kids is something I have been guilty of. Although I kick a soccer ball with my younger son in the backyard about once a week in good times -- we have a game where we switch who plays goalie in the net in the back yard, and the other one takes shots until he scores -- he'd probably like that to be more like two to three times a week. And as I sit here typing this, I feel like life has gotten in the way and it's been about three weeks since we've done this.

See that's the thing, for dads it is easy enough to say that life has gotten in the way. Or even just to give off that vibe, that you're too tired, that you're too busy, that you just can't do it right now. Give off that vibe enough, and you don't actually have to say no to your kids. They see the no in your face so they don't even bother asking.

And then one day, it's the last time you ever play soccer in the back yard with your son, and you don't even know it already happened until after the fact.

The time we have with our children is precious. In the moment, we find certain demands of that relationship onerous, and we think only about our short-term gratification in not having to do the thing they want to do, so we can lie down, so we can scroll through our phone -- even so we can do things that we legitimately have to do, like prepare dinner or put away laundry.

But the children are not going to be there forever. One day they will grow up and they won't want you or need you to do any of these things. Or, in a more extreme version, Cary Elwes will try to get them to move to Boston with your ex-wife Maura Tierney, leaving you in Los Angeles wondering where it all went wrong.

Even though my biggest takeaway from the movie was how much I laughed -- still laughed, all these years later, at brilliant physical comedy by Carrey that I have seen at least four times -- the takeaway about my relationship with my sons was almost as big. I think of that heartbreaking look on Carrey's face after the scene where he has tried to get Max to unwish his single-day truth curse so Carrey can try to win his case in court. When Fletcher explains that all adults lie, even the perfect Gary (Elwes), Max says "But you're the only one who makes me feel bad." 

The look on Carrey's face that captures the shock of his recognition of the truth in Max's words ... it's one of those early moments from the actor where we must have recognized he was capable of more than mugging. And it really drove home, for me, that we rarely are so lucky to have a child spell out for us, in so many words, the ways we are failing them. In most cases, they never give it to us so bluntly, so we don't have the opportunity to mend our ways and make sure the relationship doesn't deteriorate by degrees until it no longer exists.

It's almost enough to make me go to my son's soccer game this morning ... almost.

You see, my wife has set it up so that I get a "break" on Father's Day, not having to go to the early soccer game so I can stay home and lounge in my pajamas. It's a nice gesture and I have to give her the gift of taking it, to make her feel like she is properly recognizing me on Father's Day.

But after seeing Liar Liar ... well I really want to go to that game.

Now, for context, I have only missed a few of his games this year. There have been a couple times when he's stayed over at his aunt's house for a sleepover, meaning she took him to his game the next morning. However, on one of those occasions, I actually did go to watch the game anyway, even though she brought him there. I am a good father -- pretty good, at least, I hope -- and so I've gone out of my way to see certain games, even when I didn't need to.

But the thing is, you never know when the game will be a watershed moment for them. About three or four weeks ago, my son had one of those games, where he scored not only his first goal of the season, but his second. Thankfully, I was there to see it. 

If something like that happens today, well, I'll miss it.

But I think I can make up for it. I think I can play soccer with him later, after he gets home, even if he's a bit soccer'd out. I think I can also play some one-on-one basketball with my older son, even though he doesn't need me like he once did.

Last night, though, my older son did need me. He was feeling a little lost -- those were his words -- for reasons he couldn't put his finger on. He had given my wife a little attitude and then had snapped at her. For a moment we didn't know where he had gone, and then we realized he had been in the back yard, crying.

I was there to give him a long hug. (She was too, but I was the one who saw him first.) He's 14, so I don't get to hug him often. I made it count and I said the right things to make him feel better, at least a little bit.

I am a good father -- but I could always be better. And I won't have forever to prove it.

And sometimes, we get cinematic reminders of such things from the most unexpected placed.