Life on the Road

With Nick away at camp, we thought we’d enjoy catching up on a few “child inappropriate” movies.  We really enjoy all of us cuddling up on our bed and watching movies (and our DVDs of old TV, etc.) together, so we rarely watch anything rated beyond PG.

Yeah, we went hard-core.  We got the PG-13 stuff going! 

We love Blockbuster Total Access…  By returning our DVDs at a Blockbuster store, we were able to get a free rental with each one.  Especially nice for us, since the replacements they mail we won’t get until July 6 when we get to my mom’s in L.A.

We rented Scoop because we like Hugh Jackman.  Like most of the world, we more or less discovered him as Wolverine in the recent X-Men movies. 

Then I happened to notice that he starred in a film version of the musical Oklahoma!  He can actually act - and sing!  (I notice they’ve repackaged this movie with him on the cover.  Nothing succeeds like success.)

THEN we watched the Meg Ryan romantic comedy Kate & Leopold.  Wolf, Nick and I ALL loved it.  While that may not say too much on my part, the boys are not typically inclined that way.  It has a well-conceived and played bit of science fiction time-travel, and great acting.  Hugh Jackman is so wonderful in this role…  This is probably one of my favorite movies just for some of the priceless moments.  You should hear Nick quoting Leopold’s ranting about how ineffective the electric toaster is!

Heck we even watched Van Helsing.  Not great, I must admit…

So while we had never heard of Scoop, we figured we’d watch it just to see Hugh Jackman.

The plot was a very clever comedy/murder mystery (wow, that’s a strange juxtaposition, isn’t it?).  It really kept you going back and forth until the very end wondering whether or not he really did it.

But it was disturbing to us on another level, and we were very glad that we watched it without Nick.  Prostitution was a big part of the mystery plot, but also played up was a college girl’s rampant promiscuity. 

Does life imitate art, or does art imitate life?  It seems like a downward spiral.  People see it in movies, so they think it’s okay, so they do it…  since people do it, of course it’s represented in the movies…  As little as 50 years ago, that kind of behavior was simply not acceptable in the eyes of mainstream America.  Now it’s so humdrum that it’s in a PG-13 movie and nobody bats an eye. 

It’s not what I want to be filling my own head with, much less that of my adolescent boy.  [Off Soapbox]