The downside of being a movie snob

It's not that I'm really a movie snob -- I like mindless action as much
as the next person, but there are lots of categories of movies that I
don't really watch, like contemporary romances or Adam Sandler comedies.
In the past few days I had a chance to see something from each of these
categories because I was spending time with my three charmingnieces and
we chose some movies for family viewing on Thanksgiving. One of the
benefits of being a film professor is that time spent watching Click and
Rumor Has It... can actually be productive.

Click was surprising in that it was darker than I would have expected from the previews, in which a man (Adam Sandler) gets access to a universal remote that allows him to pause, fast forward, and rewind real time. Sandler's
character ends up inadvertently fast-forwarding through his entire life
because he expresses a desire to skip through illnesses or the wait for
a promotion. While it doesn't get as somber as the New Twilight Zone
episode,"A Little Piece and Quiet," in which a woman stops time with a
nuclear warhead floating over her town, the film goes well past the
point where he has learned his lesson, pushing him further and further
into the depths of misery.

Rumor Has It... purports to be a kind of sequel to The Graduate. Jennifer Aniston plays a woman whose mother was the inspiration for "Elaine" in the original. In "real life" her mother married the "boring" guy, and now Aniston goes looking for the man who was the inspiration for "Ben," believing that he might be her father. The film is largely a lesson in missed opportunities that I can use as a "how not to" example in future filmmaking classes. In scene after scene, a promising premise fails to go anywhere, often because of the wooden performances of Kevin Costner, who has all the impeccable timing of a middle school band.

It helps to see these type of movies to get a sense of where the middle
is, something I lose sight of sometimes. For example, Click was the
second kid movie I've seen lately in which the central conflict is that
a driven career-oriented parent is ignoring his family and has to learn
to put them first. While this is a cliche lesson in Hollywoodfilmmaking, the contemporary twist is that the parents don't get to find a magical solution to the dilemma. Instead, they have to actively choose to sacrifice career success in order to spend time with their kids.