My days of bad children's movies are numbered

I don't think I will have to sit through 100% Wolf for very much longer.

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. 

Dumb thoughts

My wife and I had each had a rough couple days. Nothing major, in the grand scheme of things, had happened to us, but we felt beset by the types of little to mid-sized things that make you sense the universe is against you.

The things we might ordinarily turn to for a laugh on a weeknight -- sitcoms, which can be consumed quickly in 22 minutes -- were actually one source of our bum mood, as we'd recently learned that two shows we like (Don't Trust the B in Apartment 23 and Ben & Kate) had both been canceled. That's in addition to two other sitcoms (30 Rock and The Office) ending their long runs this spring. (30 Rock has already ended, but we haven't watched the finale yet.)

So I made a command decision Wednesday night: We were going to pop in some comedic comfort food in the form of Dumb and Dumber.

Even though it's one of my favorite comedies of all time, I hadn't owned Dumb and Dumber until a friend bought it for me on BluRay for Christmas. We almost watched it around New Year's, but that moment passed. The moment came up again on Wednesday night.

Ah, comfort food. Is there anything it can't do?

As is often the case when revisiting an old favorite, I'm inspired with a bunch of new thoughts about it. And though some of them seem like continuity nitpicking, don't mistake my mentioning them as something it's not. These little quirks just make me love the movie more.

Aspen dreams

One thing I noticed this time through is that Lloyd's terrific fantasy while falling asleep at the wheel is set in the wrong location.

By that I mean it's set in the actual Aspen, the ski town, not the warm getaway on the California coast Lloyd imagines Aspen to be.

When he first meets Mary while driving her to the Providence airport, Lloyd places Aspen in California rather than Colorado. He still has this impression of it when describing it to Harry later, selling him on its warmth and other idyllic qualities.

You could even say that he keeps this impression on into the fantasy sequence, when he imagines Mary greeting him at the door of her Aspen home on a sunny day in a yellow sundress. However, in the next scene, he's impressing people with his party tricks (which include lighting his farts on fire) while they're sitting in front of a roaring fire and wearing ski sweaters. During the great fight in the restaurant against the waiters and the Chinese chef, snow-capped mountains are clearly visible out the window.

So which is it, Lloyd? California or Colorado?

The Gas Man Cometh

When the heavyset hood Joe reads the note Lloyd and Harry left for the "Gas Man," he mistakenly believes they're professionals who are taunting him. Clearly, they are aware of his flatulence issues, which means they've been following him for weeks.

Yet later on, his ploy for getting to know them better is to pretend he's a motorist broken down by the side of the road, so they'll pick him up as a hitchhiker and he can surreptitiously suss them out.

If they had been following him for weeks, wouldn't they know what he looks like? And if they're professionals who are also armed, wouldn't they just whack him as soon as he came into view alongside the interstate?

No ketchup residue

Not that it really matters, but I noticed that there's no evidence of the squirted condiments Harry and Lloyd use to try extinguish the heat of the peppers they just consumed at the diner. In the very next scene, both they and the surrounding counter are clean.

Who are they, Wile E. Coyote, instantly recovering from the bomb that blew his face into a smoking cinder?

Magic gas

How could Lloyd mistakenly drive 1/6th of the way across the country in the wrong direction without stopping for gas? (And without Harry ever waking up?)

That would be about 500 miles.

Not the version I know

I've seen Dumb and Dumber somewhere between five and eight times, but maybe only three times (including last night) from start to finish. The rest of the viewings have involved catching it on TV and being unable to change the channel until the movie was over. I used to be like that with The Shawshank Redemption as well. For some reason, I think of these as the two movies I can't turn away from if I come across them on TV. 

So it's actually a different version of Dumb and Dumber than this one that I know so well.

There are a couple parts of this movie that lift out easily that TBS (it's always on TBS) has gone ahead and lifted out.

For one, I noticed that the scene in the sleazy motel with hourly rates and hot tubs runs longer than I remembered. There's a whole part where Lloyd talks about what he would do to Harry if he were a woman. And then he calls Harry a homo. It struck me as quite odd. In this case I think TBS' edit is the right choice.

Another moment with potentially homophobic overtones is shown on TV in edited form as well. When Seabass shows up in that Colorado restroom in accordance with instructions left on the bathroom wall in black magic marker, TBS doesn't show him pulling down his pants and showing his leopard print underwear. It wouldn't seem to be any worse than Harry's junk bulging out from his tightie whities while he's wearing the masseuse's outfit, but they leave it out nonetheless -- likely to limit the suggestion of gay sex, and not just to prevent us from seeing Cam Neeley's underwear. (And, a thought I've had every time before -- what the hell is Seabass doing in Colorado?)

There was one other specific moment that I didn't remember, where a post-laxative Harry pulls Mary's broken toilet out of the floor and proceeds to dump the contents out her bathroom window. Another strange thing to leave out, since you don't see any actual cascade of diarrhea.

Harry is Beavis and Lloyd is Butt-head

Not really, but the hair colors work, right?

I do have a serious comparison to make, though. On this viewing I noted that the plot of the surprisingly enjoyable Beavis and Butt-head Do America (which came out two years later) cops liberally from Dumb and Dumber.

Both movies involve a hapless road trip in which the travelers get where they're going through chance and dumb luck. Both movies involve outsiders (cops, criminals) mistaking the main duo as brilliant criminal masterminds, their apparently dumb comments made as an ironic form of derision. And there are those hair colors.

But the moment that actually makes me think most of Beavis and Butt-head when I watch this movie is when the shivering Lloyd and Harry finally pull their moped to a stop in downtown Aspen. "We're there," says Lloyd. Take his tone and add the word "dude" at the end, and you've got something one of the precocious metalheads might say.

The masterful reactions of Lauren Holly

As good as Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels are in this movie -- legendary, really -- it was Lauren Holly I couldn't take my eyes off this time around.

Okay, okay, she's an attractive woman. But what I'm going for here is how good her reaction shots are.

Since her character is written as essentially passive, her primary responsibility is to react to the odd behavior of Harry and Lloyd. And she knocks it out of the park.

Either Holly or the Farrelly brothers decided that Mary Swanson was going to be a society woman with snobbish tendencies, but essentially a good person who can be touched by displays of human decency and isn't completely turned off by eccentric characters. She incorporates these traits into each of her reactions, and it makes for an exceptional realization of a possibly underwritten character.

Shall I name some of her triumphs?

There's her reaction to realizing that Harry is referring to the Icelandic snow owls when he walks up to her and comments on her hooters. She tries desperately to keep up a polite facade while stifling a laugh at his clearly unintentional double entendre. She doesn't entirely succeed, and her laugh creeps into the next line. That's no easy thing to do.

There's her bemused pause when Lloyd offers her the explanation that he's shaving, when instead he's trying desperately to fan the fumes of his bowel movement out the window.

There's her dawning realization that she does in fact recognize Lloyd from the Providence limo ride to the airport, and then the slightly different incredulous realization that he is the one who's had her suitcase full of cash.

There's the look of surprised horror when Harry nails her in the face with a snowball at full speed.

And there's the scene where she's handcuffed to Lloyd on the bed, and Harry flanks her on the other side. As the two friends bicker, she turns her head from side to side, registering the exact meaning of the things they're saying in her face in subtle increases and decreases in her level of alarm.

And there are others.

But Holly is not simply reacting effectively. She's engaging in some deceptively agile comedy here as well. Take the scene where Lloyd is basically eating her face as part of his dream sequence -- kissing her so passionately that she must have been unable to breathe during the 10 seconds this shot lingers. Her hands shoot out, fingers splayed, almost like those of a zombie. This is her involuntary reaction to this attack, and it always leaves me in stitches.

********

Even though I now own Dumb and Dumber on BluRay, don't be surprised if I still watch it through to the end the next time I come across it on TBS.