The stay-at-home dad: The Academy Awards - kids edition
To celebrate Sunday’s Academy Awards telecast, I asked my four kids about their favorite movies from the past year.
In an encouraging moment, they all said they liked the two Pixar entries, “Onward” and “Soul,” which are both nominated in the Animated Feature category at this year’s Oscars. My kids love ALL the Pixar movies, probably because I told them I would kick them out of the house if they didn’t. I’m a very stable human.
However, my kids then mentioned a few more questionable titles. The most popular and apparent Best Picture winner for the Team Wilson household is a Netflix movie called “We Can Be Heroes,” directed by Robert Rodriguez (“Spy Kids,” “Desperado,” “Sin City,” etc.).
It’s not very good, but the vote was decisive, and I respect that. One vote for “Nomadland.” One vote for “The Invisible Man.” Four votes for “We Can Be Heroes.” It still won even if the 3-year-old wasn’t peer-pressured into it.
“We Can Be Heroes” is very much like Rodriguez’s other kid-centric adventures like the “Spy Kids” franchise and “The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lava Girl” (those characters even appear in this sorta-sequel). It centers on superpowered kids who must save the world from alien invaders after their hero parents are captured. It looks like almost every other live-action “kids” movie on Netflix - overlit and uncinematic - but this also adds some junky, cartoonish CGI on top of it.
While I credit Rodriguez for making a career out of “big” movies on modest budgets, very little of “We Can Be Heroes” appeals to me, so it’s much easier to pick out its technical shortcomings. My kids, however, LOVE the premise, and, because they grow up in this HD age, they identify this ultra-crisp, creatively vacant cinematography as “new-looking.”
A common refrain in my house: “We don’t want to watch anything old-looking, dad.”
This is infuriating, as they tend to enjoy the “old” things I show them.
We’re not even talking about things that I would constitute as old. They groaned when I recently turned on “The Emperor’s New Groove” (2000) and the original “Jumanji” (1995), then sat entranced by every single minute of both.
Still they prefer the new stuff. They’ll scroll through the immense and delightful archive of titles on Disney+ with a shrug, then land on some recent Disney Channel teenie-bopper show about kid wizards not named Harry Potter.
Some other recent favorites they listed on their Academy ballots: “Pets United,” “Wish Upon a Unicorn,” “An American Girl: McKenna Shoots for the Stars,” “Bigfoot Family,” “Yes Day” and “Secret Magic Control Agency.”
I was at least in the room for all of these titles and here’s what I remember: McKenna was a gymnast or something, the Bigfoot movie lacked proper bigfoots, “Yes Day” somehow tricked Jennifer Garner into it and “Secret Magic Control Agency” had something to do with Hansel & Gretel.
The kids loved “Secret Magic Control Agency” so much they wanted to watch it again immediately after it ended. So I’ve technically seen this movie twice, and I can’t describe anything about it without looking at the synopsis.
I won’t give up hope, however. After they saw a random clip of the new “Space Jam” trailer, I showed the kids the underrated “Looney Tunes: Back in Action” from 2003. They complained… at first. “Bugs Bunny is old,” they said. Jerks.
Anyway, as I predicted, they loved the movie. It’s one major flaw is the lack of screen time for Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote (the movie was originally released with a new Road Runner short that played before the feature in theaters, plus you can find it on the DVD). When I told the kids how much I loved Road Runner, they asked to see more. So, thanks to HBO Max, I fired up some of the original Road Runner vs. Coyote shorts by Chuck Jones and Martin, including the first short, “Fast and Furry-ous” from 1949.
They loved them. Ha! 1949, kids! Take that with all your OLD talk!
Maybe they gravitated to the over-the-top cartoon violence that’s not really prevalent in modern cartoons. Maybe they were just trying to make their dad feel good (YOU’LL LOVE ROAD RUNNER OR YOU’RE OUT OF THE HOUSE!). Or maybe they wanted to keep watching because it was well past bedtime. Whatever the reason, I felt like there was still some hope for these modern kids after all.
The next morning they turned on “We Can Be Heroes” again. Eh, at least it’d be a better Best Picture winner than “Green Book.”
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Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer and stay-at-home dad to four kids, ages 3-9. He is tired. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.