Thankfully, I don't have to sit through 100% Wolf itself for any longer, as it mercifully ended 96 minutes after it started on Saturday night, and I never intend to watch it again. But I won't have to sit through movies like 100% Wolf for very much longer either.
It was my eight-year-old's choice for a family movie, but he'll be growing out of making choices like this pretty soon.
It already wasn't his first choice. He wanted to watch The Last Airbender, the 2010 M. Night Shyamalan movie that I didn't hate as much as most people did. Apparently I had more hope for 100% Wolf than to reassess my not-completely-negative take on a Shyamalan dud.
Bad choice.
100% Wolf was not actually my first choice among our remaining choices. My son had watched a trailer for Over the Moon, which reminded me a bit of the surprise delight Wish Dragon that I ranked last year. My son kept the moon theme -- 100% Wolf is about werewolves -- but picked the wrong movie.
Bad choice.
Look, 100% Wolf wasn't awful, and it was an Australian production, so I give it some additional home team points. As you can see from the poster, it's got a decent voice cast, though I'm starting to wonder how much that really means these days -- who would turn down the opportunity to phone in some line readings from their house and collect 20 or 30 grand for a couple days' work?
So it could have been worse. But I'll be happy to be past such movies, probably within the next year.
I'm a film critic, so I theoretically see everything. But there are certain movies that just don't have any hope of seeming relevant to my audience, and therefore, I'm not going to watch them if I don't have a specific reason, like having an eight-year-old son who is just sentimental enough about his own dwindling childhood to continue gathering my wife and me on the couch for movies like this one.
Where was his older brother, you ask?
Well, here's the preview of things to come, the feeling that 100% Wolf hasn't got long left. My 11-year-old had two other 11-year-olds over for a sleepover, and they were set up in our garage with the projector, watching the first Avengers movie. I guess we're getting closer to that day when I finally agree it's okay to show him Infinity War, which features _______ getting choked to death by ______.
But it's not the MCU that is the preview of things to come. The 11-year-old has probably seen half those movies by now, and his younger brother has seen at least five. No, it's what his friends wanted to watch instead that really opened my eyes.
If I was taken aback but pleasantly surprised that another friend wanted to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail on a sleepover -- as discussed here -- I was taken aback and less pleasantly surprised when one of these kids wanted to watch Police Academy.
Now, it's been pretty long since I've seen Police Academy, but I'm pretty sure it has f-bombs and I know it has nudity -- since the kid confirmed it when I humorously confronted him with that fact.
How does he know it has nudity? Well, he'd already watched it. With his parents' consent.
My wife, usually far more vigilent about these things than I am, said she would have been okay with Police Academy, when I reminded her that it was rated R -- at which point she did a complete about face.
The compromise between Police Academy and a Marvel movie -- in terms of appropriateness if not in terms of subject matter -- was going to be Dumb and Dumber, which is largely lacking in profanity and entirely lacking in nudity. My son was keen to see it. But the other two had already seen Dumb and Dumber more than once each, so they opted against it. And because it was already closing in on 8:30 and they needed to get that damn movie started, we just went with The Avengers, telling my son that my wife and I would watch Dumb and Dumber with him later on -- probably not as fun as with his friends.
So under some set of circumstances, the contrast between what was showing in our living room and what was showing in our garage could have been as extreme as a movie featuring a boy who transforms into a pink-haired poodle rather than the rest of the werewolves in his family, and a movie featuring bouncing boobs among profane police officers. Such a stark discrepancy can't last long, and never again is it going to lean in favor of the first movie rather than the second.
Don't get me wrong, I actually think it's time. In fact, I view it as a positive development that my older son was more interested in the idea of a comedy than another Marvel movie. Even at age 11 he is able to see how much they resemble each other and start to feel like a bit of a slog. He doesn't have a completist mentality, and he doesn't have my luxury of having spaced these movies out over nearly 15 years now, rather than watching a dozen of them within essentially two years. I can understand the exhaustion, and I like it that my son wants to laugh, maybe even that he'd be on the fringes of naughty humor. Maybe if John Cleese and Graham Chapman weren't a hit with him, Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels will be. (He'll have to wait a bit longer to see what he thinks of Steve Gutenberg and Michael Winslow.)
Even these 11-year-olds are weirdly betwixt and between though. For as much as the most mature of them -- in terms of interests if not behavior -- is appearing to show the signs of attraction to the opposite sex, and has to really censor himself not to swear constantly, the guys also weirdly played hide and seek a number of times during the weekend. Granted, they were videoing it with the intention of posting it somewhere, but it was still hide and seek.
Maybe they're not so different from my eight-year-old, but it's much more likely that he will aspire to be like them going forward than they'll aspire to be like him. Especially in their choice of cinema.
Will I miss D-grade animated movies like 100% Wolf and last year's Dog Gone Trouble, which was also known as Trouble in some parts?
I won't. But I do know this can never be an absolute stance, and here's why: The aforementioned Wish Dragon, which ended up at #35 on my year-end list, is not a movie I ever would have watched if my son hadn't suggested it. The animation was more than competent -- far better than 100% Wolf, anyway -- but its lack of a theatrical release would have been code for "It ain't worth your time."
Well, Wish Dragon was worth my time. Maybe before he fully grows out of animated movies and wants to watch bouncing boobs instead, my eight-year-old will pick one or two more Wish Dragons along the way.
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