Counting shits

If you're hoping I'm calling Uncharted "shit," no, it's not quite that bad. It's basically mediocre-minus. The shits in question relate to spoken dialogue, not quality.

I really hemmed and hawed about whether the new Tom Holland movie would be appropriate for my eight-year-old and 11-year-old. That the movie is effectively being marketed to them by starring the erstwhile Spider-Man, who could reasonably be considered the most popular actor for kids under 12 (he's my kids' favorite actor), is helpful, but only in a limited sense. If I used that logic take my kids to The Devil All the Time and Cherry, that would have been a disaster.

I also didn't have any real knowledge of the video game, except that it was in the same realm as Indiana Jones in terms of its swashbuckling and seeking of treasure. I remember everyone always said the cut scenes were really great. Was it one of those game where when the characters died, they died bloody? I didn't know.

I did, however, have a person in my Flickchart Facebook group say "Ehhh probably?" when I asked if it was appropriate for kids that age. (He's an American critic and he saw the film earlier in the week.) He likened the level of violence to that of a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and indeed, that seemed fine for them.

Because I also wanted to make this my first review on ReelGood next week, I brushed aside any remaining qualms and took them on Friday night.

We ran into a problem at Uncharted, but it didn't have anything to do with the movie itself. It was the same problem we ran into at Spider-Man: No Way Home -- exactly the same, in fact, which I wrote about in this post. The two movies whose trailers horrified my eight-year-old at that viewing -- Morbius and The Batman -- still have not come out, so sure enough, we got those trailers again. The difference this time was that I was the one in charge of helping my son avoid any visual or auditory input from them, where my wife did it last time. (She was not present for our Uncharted viewing.) My heart went out to that poor boy, seeing the intensity with which he closed his eyes and covered his ears, and it was clear he wanted more than his own meager body parts could accomplish. So during the Batman trailer I also sung a little funny song right next to his ear, so that was all he could hear, and not the punches, screams or scraping metal. (He later on told my wife he had "averted his eyes" during these trailers. I had no idea he knew the word "averted.")

To my great delight, the violence level in Uncharted was perfect, probably even better than Spider-Man. There was only one part that wigged out my son a little bit, when a character gets his throat slit. That sounds like a lot to take in, but the way it was staged was comically tame. Yes, this man dies almost immediately from his injuries, but one really wonders why, given that the only sign of his fatal wound is a red line on his neck about the thickness of a Sharpie -- not the freshets of blood that flow from such a wound in reality and lead to death pretty quickly. Pretty sure this guy could have walked away from this one, and maybe even kept his appointments later in the day.

There was, however, one part of the movie that bothered my son ever so slightly, something I only knew because I asked him about it.

The profanity level is pretty tame in this movie too, with maybe one or two "son of a bitch"es and I'm sure some "hell"s and "damn"s scattered in there, though at this point those words pretty much go in one ear and out the other. Seeking to give the film some sort of edge, though, they went to the "shit" well quite a lot. "Shit" is the perfect form of profanity to pay a compliment to the aspirational viewers in the audience without really offending younger viewers.

So I don't know if my younger son was offended, but he certainly did notice.

After about 15 minutes I turned to him and said "Are they using the S-word enough for you?"

"They've said it six times," he retorted, without missing a beat.

I had to contain my hysterical laughter so as not to bother the people around me in the mostly full theater.

I secretly hoped he would keep counting. The movie didn't make that task easy. When I asked him near the end if he had kept track, he said he hadn't, but he suspected it was in the vicinity of 25 times. That sounded right.

Well, the movie was a huge hit with them. It wasn't with me, but I don't care about that. My older son proclaimed it his favorite movie ever -- what a surprise -- and the younger didn't make any such assessment but was eager to talk about how Holland was his favorite actor. When my older son asked me what I thought about, I was honest, though I probably softened it a bit just because I knew how strongly he felt. I tried to explain that he hadn't seen movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and so had nothing to compare it to. Of course, Raiders is only the movie I name check in this scenario because I hadn't seen the older movies that inspired Raiders, which my dad would have championed with me in this same situation.

In truth, if Uncharted were the first movie of its kind you had seen -- which I suspect it was for these guys -- then it would deliver the goods well enough for you, especially if you didn't have the high standards of a film critic. (As for Raiders, well, that's still a long way off. I might have seen it for the first time around my younger son's age, but the Nazi face-melting definitely requires several more years of maturation.)

I'll close by saying I was really encouraged to see our theater almost full. In fact, by leaving it until the last minute to buy tickets, I actually flirted with losing out on tickets entirely -- completely unheard of in the COVID era. We had to rush over from our dinner at the neighboring pancake restaurant to get there before the trailers started -- trailers my younger son would have been just as happy to avoid -- and the three tickets I purchased in the front row were the only three available that were next to each other. We could have sat scattered, but that doesn't make it very easy to share popcorn and Skittles -- nor to cover your son's eyes and ears when the trailers are too intense.

So yeah, audiences will still go to the movies and in fact, they seem eager to. We've had some COVID restrictions lifted this week, so maybe we're finally getting back to a time when the cinemas won't feel in constant jeopardy of going under.

In the end, the eight-year-old -- who had expressed major concern about being so close to the screen, both for visual reasons and because he thought it would be louder -- said that sitting in the front row turned out just fine. He wasn't bothered by it at all.

Just like he wasn't bothered by the 25 shits, though he certainly did notice them. 

Watch your mouth, there are children acting nearby

When considering the idea of adult content in movies that also feature child actors, I always think of that great moment in Jerry Maguire.

You remember the one. Tom Cruise is at the end of his tether and goes on an extended rant, which is either directed to, or in the presence of, the young kid played by Jonathan Lipnicki. During this rant he lets an f-bomb slip out. When he finally stops speaking, Lipnicki's Ray looks at him and says, in a shocked whisper, "You said 'fuck.'"

The moment makes you laugh because it's funny, but also because it discomfits you. The idea of an adult failing to sanitize his language in front of a child is funny, because we've all done it, in most cases by accident. (Or when you and your family almost get run over by a car that's driving on the bike path. Speaking from experience.) In the making of Jerry Maguire, they had to do it on purpose. Even if a child actor would tend to be less innocent than your average child, it still feels a little wanton. But it works and is memorable and I support it. 

One of the reasons Little Monsters is a bad movie is that it repeatedly trammels on these decency standards, in situations that don't make you laugh, and never really had the hope of doing so.

On the surface, there is everything to like about this Australian zom-com, which played MIFF last year as the mid-festival showcase, and which stars the wonderful Lupita Nyong'o. She's not only wonderful in general, but she's lovely in this movie. 

That's in direct contrast to her two adult co-stars, who take toxic masculinity to a particularly profane level.

The story involves a class of students who go to a zoo that's next to an American military site, where they are doing testing that results in the unleashing of zombies. The cheap pot shots the movie takes at Americans would be triggering enough to reduce the effectiveness of this movie for me, if I really cared about that sort of thing. (Especially nowadays, when we so richly deserve it). 

Nyong'o's character is the class teacher, but she's not the movie's main character, all advertising to the contrary. It's a good 15 minutes before we meet her, because we have to spend the beginning of the movie on an extended montage of an angry break-up between Dave (Alexander England, who reminds me of Alfie Allen) and his girlfriend. Dave is the uncle of one of the kids in the class, Felix (Diesel La Torraca), and has to live with Felix and his mum (Dave's sister) after the break-up. 

Dave is the good guy. We know this because we can tell that his transgressions are not disqualifying. He will learn to be a better guy over the course of the narrative. But among those transgressions is to repeatedly drop f-bombs in the presence of his nephew, who must be about six years old. Even if he's not accustomed to being around kids on a regular basis, and his life is in disarray, he puts very little effort into keeping his language clean. The patience of his sister is off the charts, especially when Dave takes the kid over to his girlfriend's house as part of a misguided marriage proposal in the middle of the night, and finds her shagging another guy. 

But the coup de grace in terms of both casual torrents of profanity and American bashing comes in the form of the character played by Josh Gad. That's right, the guy who voices the snowman in the Frozen movies, who surely has enough money to avoid garbage like this.

Gad plays an American children's entertainer named Teddy McGiggle, who is performing at the zoo that day. If there's anything more tired than the idea that a children's entertainer is actually a foul-mouthed asshole, I don't know what it might be.

But this particular character is a caricature of even the most extreme characterizations of this type of character. (Once I used both "character" and "caricature" in that sentence I decided just to double down on the allieration.) Teddy McGiggle drops profanity not only casually, but in the extreme, even calling someone the c-word. He is dripping with unwarranted malevolence. He's also cowardly and sniveling. He double crosses people who have helped him for no greater reason than to make us more and more satisfied at the arrival of his inevitable demise at the hands of the zombies. After teaming up with one particular character to get to a vehicle that can help them all escape, he not only shuts himself up inside in order to escape alone, for no reason other than basic meanness, but he also gives the finger to the characters he abandoned outside. 

Little Monsters did not need to make Teddy McGiggle so vile, and it did not need to expose the 15 to 20 children who acted in it to such repeated vileness. I know the c-word is used more casually in Australia than it is in the U.S., but just imagine being those actors' parents as they watched the movie and had to explain to their kids why a children's entertainer used that most gut-punchy and gender-specific of insults. 

I'm not a prude, but if a movie is going to stomp all over such basic decency considerations, it has to do other things right. But the only thing it does right is present us with a very sweet Lupita Nyong'o in a yellow sundress. Everything else is hateful and tone deaf, and there's nothing even remotely clever about the zombie stuff, which may be the worst part of all.