My son's birthdays with Paul Rudd

Whenever we can, we go to a movie on my son's birthday, which is also New Year's Day. He's 12 now.

More often than not, Paul Rudd is also there. 

We couldn't go last year, because -- pity us -- we spent the day at Universal Studios Hollywood instead. But this is now three out of the last five years (I don't know why we missed 2023), and in two of those, it's been a Paul Rudd movie.

The most successful was 2024, when we saw Next Goal Wins, making my son the noted soccer fan very happy -- and the rest of us very happy as well. Paul Rudd is not in that. Paul Rudd is, however, in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2022) and Anaconda (2026). We enjoyed Ghostbusters quite a bit too, at least that first reboot. 

Four years ago when he was only eight, my son didn't know Paul Rudd from a hole in the ground. Now, however, he recognizes all of his Avengers. We saw a trailer before Anaconda for Crime 101, which stars two of the original six: Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo. He identified Hemsworth straight off, but I had to point out Ruffalo. I didn't bother to tell him that Halle Berry had been in the original X-Men movie, because I don't think that's a reference for him.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure he knows Paul Rudd is Ant-Man and he definitely knows Jack Black, who has been in a disproportionate number of movies he's seen, most recently A Minecraft Movie.

I was hoping Anaconda would be as fun as that, even if it weren't going to be as R-rated as the original. 

Unfortunately, Anaconda was not fun. It was not funny, and it was not fun. In fact I found it quite painful. In fact I couldn't believe, after it ended, that it was only 99 minutes long.

I don't really plan to give you a full Anaconda takedown in this post -- I'll probably have a review up on Monday if you want to read it -- but I did want to express my disappointment with not keeping the birthday win streak alive for my son. 

Oh, I think it stayed alive for him -- he said that he really liked it, though I think he ventured this a little reluctantly, while the credits were still rolling. I said "Yeah!" in an encouraging tone, which walked the line between enthusiastically endorsing his perspective while also not saying it was actually my own. In fact, I did not speak another word about the movie, positively or otherwise, which seemed to work without being awkward. We just talked about other things on the ride home.

I couldn't tell if my wife shared my perspective, though she certainly laughed a couple of times -- which I think was partly out of a desperate desire to laugh. It's been a rough year concluded by an especially rough past few weeks. 

The 15-year-old? I couldn't tell what he thought. He didn't offer up a perspective either way, he just kept his mouth shut, which maybe shows wisdom beyond his years. 

I'll still go back to the Paul Rudd well if he has a new, age-appropriate movie coming out for my son's 13th birthday, but this does feel like another reminder that we can't have nice things. It's just a bit of a rotten time right now, and maybe proof of that is a disjointed, intermittenly diverting but ultimately soulless Anaconda meta reboot with weakly drawn characters and tangential bits that should have been left on the cutting room floor. (The whole part where Steve Zahn has to pee on Black's leg after Black gets bitten by a spider? CUT IT.)

I guess 2026 can only get better from here? 

Next Year Starts, for the world and for my son

January 1st 2024 is my younger son's tenth birthday.

No single-digit children in my family anymore. A fitting milestone to go with my 50th birthday two-and-a-half months ago.

So while most people were celebrating New Year's, we were celebrating the night ten years ago when we didn't know whether our son would be born in 2013 or 2014. It was about two hours into 2014, it turned out -- which means his American relatives learned about it on New Year's Eve, and I would not be surprised if they think of him as a December 31st baby. They can have that if they want. There must be some tax benefit of this we can work to our favor.

January 1st 2024 was also the Australian release date of Next Goal Wins, Taika Waititi's latest, which has been getting negative reviews that, after seeing it, I just cannot fathom.

Yesterday, while lying on the beach and listening to the three-hour best of the year podcast on Filmspotting -- on which Next Goal Wins did not appear -- I put two and two together:

My son is a soccer fan + today is his tenth birthday = let's go spend his birthday watching the soccer movie released on his birthday.

I immediately texted my wife, thinking she would try to see through it as a chance to tick a 2023 movie off my list while incorporating it into a family activity. It was only partially that. I like to think it was more fuelled by genuine inspiration.

She texted back with a thumbs up and "that could be fun!"

There was still a chance she would ultimately balk at the idea, since she backtracked her initial positivity last night, turning it into more of a "let's see how the day goes" thing. The prelude to a full cancellation, I was sure.

But this morning she was talking about times to see the movie, and we went at 2:20.

I was initially concerned that the PG-13 rating would contain things that even a child who is double digit years old would blush at. My youngest errs on the side of being young for his age, in terms of his exposure to the world's harsh realities, even if his intellect is advanced for his age (he beats me more often in chess than I beat him). But aside from a handful of "shit"s and one "asshole," Next Goal Wins was clean. I myself blushed more in the trailer for Mean Girls than in anything this movie offered up.

And what this movie offered up was: heart, soul, exciting soccer action and that inimitable Kiwi humor that Waititi has been giving us for well over a decade.

Even my older son, who barely registers enthusiasm for anything these days, pumped his fist during a couple of the movie's climactic moments.

As for my younger son ... well, for a kid who got a new soccer goal, new soccer "boots" as they are called here, two different books on soccer and a framed poster of Lionel Messi for Christmas ... yeah obviously he loved it. It was almost like the movie was made for him, even containing Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," which he discovered last year and has been playing regularly. 

I won't read the film's negative reviews before I write my own very positive review. I can't imagine what they focus on as the film's primary weaknesses. It's conventional? Sure. Name a sports movie that isn't. 

And ... that's all I can think of.

If your beef is "Taika Waititi shouldn't make an inspirational sports movie," then I think you are misunderstanding him as a director. He brings his own touch to the movies he makes, but it's not like he's redefining those movies or the genres they are in. He's just delivering the whole thing from the perspective of his Maori upbringing, in which line deliveries are hilarious without even trying to be, and everything feels sweet without suffocating you with that sweetness.

What sports movie couldn't benefit from that?

And so 2024 is here, as is my son's 11th year on this planet.

I can't wait to see what both of them bring.