PG, and that mostly fits what we're looking at. Since I'm going to be comparing this to its natural cousin, Cheaper by the Dozen, I have to say that Yours, Mine, & Ours is the bad boy of the two. I'm not saying it is a rebel or anything, but there is something edgier about the whole thing. It's really weird that we're fighting for a marriage that probably shouldn't have happened so quickly. The kids are just meaner in this one. There's a lot more behavior issues. Also, bullying is apparently the answer to some problems. Who knew? PG.
DIRECTOR: Raja Gosnell My wife loves movies about big families. I get it. I was an only child basically for my entire life. My mom remarried after my dad died, but my siblings were adults...so whatever. I swear, my wife uses these movies at templates. It's just such an odd thing that movies just want to get a billion kids on screen at the same time. Last time, I said that I watch Cheaper by the Dozen because Tom Welling was in it. I can't tell you why I've seen this movie before. I have. I definitely remember watching this movie in all of its 2005 glory. But why I watched it, I have no idea. Perhaps it came down to the fact that it was a five dollar movie and I had nothing to do. I just know that I can't divorce the fact that it was trying to market off of Cheaper by the Dozen. And what a bar to set too. It's odd, in retrospect, to think of Cheaper by the Dozen as a box office hit, enough to have a copycat film happen a few years later. In the MPAA section, I talk about the idea that Yours, Mine & Ours is the slightly more rebellious version of the same film. If Cheaper by the Dozen is wholesome Disney, Yours, Mine, & Ours is the slightly more rebellious Nickelodeon version. The kids are a little meaner. Everyone in this movie is a straight up jerk. It's harder to like the movie a little bit because of it. The kids in Cheaper all picked on one kid, which made me angry. But this was a bunch of kids all hating each other. Really, no one is off the hook for this one. But the thing that really confuses me is the message of the film. Cheaper had a really screwed up message of "Dads can't do anything right". It's in the background and I spend the entire blog on that one defending that argument in the movie. But in this one, the parents are actually kind of wrong. Yeah, I'm a judgy person, especially when it comes to fictional characters. I acknowledge that it is very sad that these fine people lost their spouses. I also love the fact that they were high school sweethearts. But the movie really fast-tracks some moral choices in the attempt to get the story moving. They marry...immediately? Like, these two people who haven't seen each other in at least twenty years, just marry like that? I mean, I'm going to get real Catholic right now. Marriage is a sacrament and a commitment. I'm oddly more cool with casual divorce in movies than I am with people getting married on a moment's notice. I know, this is really uncomfortable for me to say. I am not a widower. I hope not to be a widower until I'm very old, but in reality, I want to die first. Still, having that many kids, and that much responsibility, these kids have a point. Dating provides a lot of insight into the conflicts that two people would have before getting married. It's really uncomfortable to think that these characters have so much trouble during their marriage, but that's kind of the point that the movie kind of shirks around. They tried to Dharma & Greg the entire situation, which probably explains the ampersand in the title. (Dharma & Greg had an ampersand, right?) The movie, instead, tells us that the kids are wrong. I mean, the kids ARE wrong for wanting to break them up and how they handle the situation, but the parents decided to throw all of the rules out the window. It actually makes no real sense with Frank's character, who is all about the rules. That's something else entirely. But these kids are thrown into this whirlwind where things are normal and then they are just asked to be normal. Dating does go a long way to kind of smoothing out these issues. I really wonder if there was a draft where the entire thing is about dating. Yeah, you can't get them to move into a lighthouse, which is a visual thing that feels like the filmmakers really wanted to do. I know the marriage introduces the element of chaos that makes the movie fly, but the morality becomes really skewed. The big lesson at the end of the film is that the two families realize that they want to continue being one family and that family sticks up for themselves. The kids realize everything that they have been doing to Frank and Helen has been completely toxic and shortsighted. But the morality lies on them still and their feelings made sense. Instead, by having Frank and Helen date, it makes the kids commit a crime on their own and when they have that redemptive moment, that bunch is all the more important. Where the redemptive arc is now, it feels like that's just a desperate attempt to end the movie. There's no real moment where they realize they need each other. Sure, there are moments throughout the film where the separate families watch out for each other, but there's nothing inherently important about them being legally a family that forces that moment. I really feel like I'm becoming more gender bias despite the fact that I am desperately trying to be less. Between Marriage Story, Cheaper by the Dozen, and now this, I find myself sympathizing with the male protagonist way more than the female protagonist. It seems like every story has the dad be the one who is the bad guy, despite doing nothing wrong. Every single joke that is about one of the parents seems to be anti-dad. Dad keeps trying to maintain a sense of structure and we're supposed to laugh at that. Again, if we use Dharma & Greg as our template, Helen's foibles are meant to be charming. She likes a messy room, there are no consequences to action, she's a free spirit. Oh no. Nothing bad ever happens to her. In fact, the one scene where she rips Frank apart is when his kids clean up her area. She acts like a monster to those kids. Yeah, it was part of the break up plan. But considering that she's so tolerant when terrible things happen to other people, her hypocrisy is never really addressed in that moment. She gets really mad that someone tried doing something nice to her. From her perspective, someone did something nice that they didn't understand was a problem. Yet, she still is about to get a divorce about the whole thing. There's also these grand gestures that Frank makes that are painted in a light that make him look like a jerk. Helen doesn't like to be arm candy, which I'm on her team for. I get that. But when he is blind-sided by his promotion, he actually makes the right call. But it seems like Helen holds him in contempt for making the sacrificial choice. She would be livid if he had accepted that post, but there's this weird passive aggressive thing going on throughout. Helen never even gets wrecked by one of the traps. There's a narrative reason for this: Helen should be able to enjoy it based on her character choices. I don't know why there's an open kiddie pool full of slime, but she hypothetically should be able to roll with the punches if she fell into slime. I bet you she wouldn't, but that might have been a discussion at the time. Also, it's funnier to see a male character get completely destroyed by a kiddie pool full of slime. But it seems like the movie doesn't really trust women to be the bad guys once in a while. Instead, the movie goes out of its way to give Frank all these scenarios where he is in a no-win situation that makes him look like the bad guy. Why isn't Helen the bad guy? Why aren't the kids the bad guy? There's actually something kind of telling how bad the kids get when there is no discipline in the house. But I can't even say that! Do you know why? Frank's kids are also super evil. Maybe the message of the movie is that, when you get a whole bunch of kids together, they end up being kind of evil and awful. The Dharma & Greg model always comes across a little stilted because it's the whole Jack Lemmon / Walter Matthau Odd Couple thing going on throughout the entire film. One has to be clean; one has to be messy. One has to be a big believer in the rules (me); one has to do whatever. People live in shades of character. But that's no fun, especially for kids. Kids love when there are defined archetypes and that Yours, Mine & Ours really lives in that spectrum. But that's not to say the movie isn't fun. Yeah, I get slight depression thinking of the moral complexities of a film like this (a sentence of which I'm ashamed). But it does everything a kid wants to happen in a movie. There's actually an adult falling in slime. That's so on the nose, I can't even begin to analyze it. Also, Danielle Panabaker, as a young girl, is in the movie. She's on The Flash. I mean, she wasn't on The Flash in 2005, but there's that weird Smallville connection that I had with Tom Welling as well. In terms of doing its job, it did that. I'm actually kind of floored that there isn't a sequel to this film given that these movies apparently must clean up enough to copy another formula.
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PG. It's pretty violent for a PG film, but also its animated. Man, animation can literally get away with (showing) murder. I mean, THE "N" STANDS FOR "NINJA". Yeah, the turtles don't kill. But there are some deaths in here. Admittedly, the deaths often surround practically immortal beings, but there is death nevertheless. Also, there are lots of goofy monsters. I mean, there's a lot of monsters in this movie. That's fine. Peril is part of the course. But also, there's a lot of infighting. I don't know if you've heard this, but Raphael? He STILL HAS AN ATTITUDE!. PG.
DIRECTOR: Kevin Munroe I'm in a pickle with this one. This is the second time I've technically seen this movie. I know at least one person who has this movie on a Top 5 or 10 list, so I'm going to be really delicate about how much of a bad person I am. I watched this one back in the halcyon Thomas Video days, simply because I could. I remember not paying too much attention to it at the time. It didn't grab me for some reason, mainly because it felt like not a real movie. (I'm a judgmental jerk.) When my son picked it as his family movie night choice, I kinda / sorta was doing the dishes at the time. I mean, I was facing the television while doing said dishes, but I wasn't really invested. By the time I sat down from doing the dishes, a lot of the movie had passed and I had to play a bit of catch up on Wikipedia during a pause break. Can I really analyze this movie? I don't know. I will say that if I watch this a third time and give it the time of day a movie deserves, I will either rewrite this or write a whole separate entry that gives more insight into the film. I was a big advocate of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. That movie showed that a licensed property can find legs in a computer generated world, despite the fact that previous entries in the franchise were live action. That movie was 2018. TMNT, unfortunately, has 2007 to contend with. I didn't realize that this movie was supposed to be in the same world as the live-action movies. The Wikipedia article was very helpful on that front. But a lot of this movie didn't feel really cinematic. It honestly felt like I was watching the film spin-off of a television show. The turtles themselves have some basic rules. I say this from reading the Eastman and Laird comics during the '90s. I also remember my animated Turtles from my childhood and the live action movies. Despite the fact that the comics were heavily influenced by Frank Miller, the character models were roughly the same. Well, except for Michelangelo. He became way more of a party dude later. The reason I could follow what was going on is that the characters are fundamentally the same characters. Leonardo is still serious and intense. Donatello might be the relatable one, despite the fact that he's the Reed Richards of the group. Michelangelo is the comic relief. Raphael is a hot head. Raphael and Leonardo are still Wolverine and Cyclops. Cool. I get it. Splinter is Mr. Miyagi. All of the character archetypes are there. But the movie doesn't really push anything beyond that moment. There's never a sense of grandeur to this film, despite having a heavy fantasy element to the film. Much of the movie is spent neutering the Turtles. (I don't know why I feel I should capitalize "turtles", but I'm going to keep doing it. I apologize right now.) When a film franchise has been missing for a while, we tend to get the story of "moving on." Rather than being a the height of their game, there's a decision to make these characters abandon what defined them before. It happened in Ghostbusters 2, which wasn't that long after the first film, but still happened. Wolverine is constantly leaving the X-Men. Jake has to get the band back together in Blues Brothers 2000. Part of that comes from the idea that these movies act as soft reboots of the original. I'm going to jump into the fact that the villain doesn't matter later, but these movies act as second origin stories. I feel comfortable lumping the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles into the superhero camp. They, after all, were made by winking at the Daredevil origins, so I'm allowing them to be superheroes. (If Batman can be a superhero, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles definitely can be superheroes.) I love superhero origins, but the villain is usually wasted in the superhero origin. I was really bummed when the Green Goblin was burned off in the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man film because he's such a cool and complex character. But much of an origin is intentionally holding back characters from doing amazing things so when they actually do amazing things, it is super impressive. It's that learning curve that people need. It's the reason that people get so mad at Rey in The Force Awakens. What ends up happening is that we know these characters can kick butt. Raph in his actual superhero disguise is good, but we have also seen him fail when he goes out on his own. Part of what makes the Turtles work is the harmony between the characters. Munroe kind of gets that and really stresses that as the underlying theme of the film. (This is all coming from a guy who was doing dishes at the time.) The heroes and the villains have a parallel arc. Winters and his generals are largely successful for the majority of the movie. Their morally ambiguous plan goes well because they display a unified front. However, while the generals have their stuff together, the Turtles are all over the place. This is a theme throughout the film, but it also has been done before. If this technically is a sequel to the original live-action Ninja Turtles film, that separation has happened before. And we're back to what I keep talking about in the problem with sequels. In TMNT, Raph learns his lesson about family and valiantly rallies the Turtles to save Leo. Cool. The thing is, the inverse happened before and also because of Raph. Raph as a loose cannon has gotten himself into trouble before and it's taken the combined might of the Ninja Turtles to save him. We aren't really treading new ground. TMNT also takes a secondary hit in the sense that Shredder and the Foot Clan were actually pretty scary. The abuse that Raph takes in that original film is personal and a threat to the team as a whole. There's genuine concern that the boys won't be able to get it together in time to fix what needed to be fixed. But Winters has no personal connection with the Turtles. Given time, we actually discover that Winters is less of a villain and more a guy stuck with a bad set of circumstances. I normally like morally complex antagonists. There's something sympathetic about characters who are compelled do do something questionable because all of the options have been made known to them. But, again, this movie acts as a second origin for the Turtles. I imagine it is to reintroduce these characters whose popularity was waning in 2007. But that leaves a villain that we don't care about. For once, I would have actually liked to have Shredder for a villain in this movie. Remember how I whined about having the big bad in the origin movie? The good news is that Shredder doesn't really need to have an epic origin in a movie that's intended to be a soft reboot. I imagine the temptation to do that would be there, but Shredder acts as an amazing short hand for a movie that is trying to juggle too much already. An origin story takes up a lot of cinematic real estate. We're so concerned with stretching out character development that the movie ends up suffering in the long run. Introducing Winters, especially when he's played by Patrick Stewart, seems like such a waste of an opportunity. Could Winters be compelling? Maybe. I still think his story is a weird choice in the whole rigmarole of what is happening in the film, but there's probably something there. Again, he feels like an episodic villain for a TV show, but I get that you don't want to go to the Shredder well over and over again. But if you are introducing all this stuff, I would love to have a movie where the bad guy is just evil for evil's sake. All of his character development happened in the first two films, so you don't need to be wasting your time in the soft reboot version of the movie. Come on, this wasn't terrible for having such a low vestige in the movie. Yeah, I will say that I probably didn't give it a fair shake because I was bored pretty silly. If I was in a room with a TV and no distractions, I might have something really positive to say about this movie. But it just felt cheap and empty. Again, like what you like. This one isn't for me. PG? Straight-up PG? This is shocking me right now. (So much so that I can't write "I'm shocked" and instead sound like a robot.) I mean, I agree. This is the definition of '80s PG. It's got peril. The bad guys look super-duper scary. I'm sure there's some real mild language in here. They go to a casino? That can't be good for kids. There's a bit of innuendo, especially concentrated at one moment in the film. Straight up innocent people die on screen. There's a beheading. But, again, I'm cool with this mostly being PG. I mean, I'm glad I didn't take my kid to an IMAX showing of this because he'd be terrified. But at home, where he's allowed to leave the room if he's scared? Perfect.
DIRECTOR: Chris Columbus I'm plagued by having two conceits on how this essay should go. I'm probably going to talk about both, so I'll just let this whole thing be metatextual and let you know how the sausage is made. My original hook was going to be along the lines of "Never has a movie been more blessed by having lowered to no expectations." It does the job. I'm going to be talking about that, so yay for me. But I also want to stress, "My goodness, Percy Jackson oh so desperately want to be Harry Potter." I think I can probably even link the two conceits together. Do you know why? It's because I'm an expert storyteller. (I don't need your comments right now, Karen.) Everyone told me this movie was terrible. Like, everyone. I think this is one of those taboo movies to like. There are fandoms out there that get way bigger than their source material. While Percy Jackson and the Rick Riordan universe aren't on Harry Potter levels, they do pull in quite the crowd. While I'm sure that there is a fandom name for the Percy Jackson universe, I'm going to irresponsibly lump in all of YA fans into one grouping. I am not a YA fan. I'm an English teacher and love when students get into YA. People are always shocked that, as an English teacher, I'm not a huge YA guy. I want to put something into perspective. Do you notice this blog? It involves me watching a movie every day and then writing a long, long post about it. I do this on the daily. I also run / bike for an hour a day, read a lot of comic books, watch a lot of TV, try playing games, and genuinely love other literature. I have a stack of books that are mocking me for not getting to them. I've dabbled in some YA. I've read the seven Harry Potter novels and, shockingly, only thought they were okay. As a Lenten commitment while I was teaching junior high, I forced myself to read the Twilight books and wanted to bore my eyes out. YA is hard to keep up with. YA tends to release a lot of a series. Even though they are quick reads, there are a million of them. That leaves me outside of the conversation when it comes to YA. I'm not saying don't be a YA fan. Please, YA fans are amazing and I will always support fandom. I'm just saying that I'm not one of them. My daughter, however, is. She's a huge fan of Riordan's universe. Oddly, she seems to like it more than the Harry Potter books. Seriously, the only book that Olivia has left to read from Harry Potter is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. That's it. How do you stop there? She even is a Harry Potter fan. But she keeps reading and re-reading the Percy Jackson books. So when we saw that the first Percy Jackson was on Disney+ and it was her family movie night pick, we all kind of agreed. Part of me was curious. How bad could this movie be to get such vitriol. And that's when I understood that it was all a fandom thing. I asked this question on my school's Facebook social media page. I told everyone that I liked it and I wanted people to argue with me about why I shouldn't like it. The consensus was that "It wasn't the book." I want to poo-poo this, and to a certain extent I will. But I also get the logic of that. I think I had that big complaint about Ready Player One. I'm not even that much of a Ready Player One fan. But I can apply the same logic to other things in the pop culture sphere. I really didn't like the big reveal in "The Timeless Child" episode of Doctor Who. I'm still coming to grips with it because I keep seeing these holes that don't really work in the storytelling. Other Doctor Who fans keep citing that Doctor Who, in its long history, has sucked at maintaining any sense of continuity and that I should just learn to accept it. The same thing probably rings true with Star Trek. For Star Trek, I'm very cool with continuity errors. With Doctor Who, it bugs me. I don't get it, but I do get fans finding the source material very precious. The books are special to people. After waiting to see the source material get adapted, it might be disappointing if major changes are made to the thing you love. I totally get that. There are things that just never made it into the film or were actively changed. That can be a bummer for people. But what it also does is put me into a position of enjoying a movie without any of the strings attached. For a movie in isolation, The Lightning Thief is kind of fun. I know. I actually like it a lot better than the Harry Potter movies. I get kind of bored in the middle of the Harry Potter films and I know a lot of people kind of just wrote me off. Like I say with YA fans, please continue being a fan of what you like. It's just my opinion and I know that I'm probably wrong about a lot of it. But my absolute zero expectations created something that was remarkably fun. This is a movie that has amazing pacing, fun characters, and just enough information about world building without becoming a slog. I never really got tired of it. It established a very concrete goal and let me know about what the formula was going to be. In fact, in terms of formula, I've rarely seen it work so well than what we see here. I know that it isn't how it goes in the book, but having Percy collect three items in a road trip across America is just the right level of pacing. There's never a moment of "Why are we here? Why do I need to see this?" It all kind of makes sense. The character development happens in the field. Yeah, I'm not advocating for a movie to be all action all the time, but for Percy...it kind of works? Sure, he's got that thing that Rey has where he's just a natural at everything he does. But that's kind of perfect for getting the story up and going. But as much as I'm gushing about the film right now, I'm not going to say that it is perfect. There are some odd things that are going on and that ties back into my Harry Potter issues. I can't help but make the comparison. I'm sure that everyone else makes the same comparisons, especially the die-hard Potterheads. The idea of getting Chris Columbus to spearhead this movie is the same attitude that brought Joss Whedon to Justice League. I think both movies kind of have the same issue as well. It's stunt directing. The odd thing is that I don't really like Chris Columbus's work with the first two Harry Potter films. It's a bit clumsy at times. Percy Jackson feels really polished. But that's all part of the stunt. It's like the movie is calling out the other franchise every time it gets. If Harry Potter infamously gets half of the British actors out there to show up, Percy Jackson got the rest, plus a lot of American actors. If the director is a stunt decision, the cast is the rest. During the opening credits, I was just marveling over the cast list for this movie. I can't actually believe who was in the film with the hopes that Percy Jackson was going to be as big of a franchise as Harry Potter. It's the same thing that happened with The Chronicles of Narnia with The Lord of the Rings. Banking on another franchise's success probably doesn't have the same weight. Some of this criticism may fall on Riordan. Again, my kid likes Riordan more that Rowling, but she's also eight. Some of those beats are pretty similar. Special kid discovers he's special and goes to magic school / camp? It's got the same bones. But ultimately, it's a fun movie. There are a lot of shortcuts taken. I can't say I love that. Probably the most noticeable shortcut I could point out is Joe Pantoliano's character. I'm not saying this is on Pantoliano. I'm saying that he's more of an archetype to bring angst to the protagonist more than anything else. But it's definitely a thing. Anyway, these are things that movies do. If Percy's stepdad was so important to the movie, maybe I would be a bit more concerned. But he's not. He's there to get Percy out of the house. He's the Durseys. If everything is a mirror, that's where that character falls. Does it ruin the movie? No. The final takeaway? I can see why people dislike this movie. Percy Jackson and the Olympians is a precious part of contemporary YA fiction. But for those people just watching a movie, it's actually really fun. |
Film is great. It can challenge us. It can entertain us. It can puzzle us. It can awaken us.
AuthorMr. H has watched an upsetting amount of movies. They bring him a level of joy that few things have achieved. Archives
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