« Monday's | Main | Katie Couric Going Down in Flames »

September 12, 2006

Ferdy at the Movies - This Hoot Movie is for the Birds

by Ferdinand T Cat

I suppose the most horrifying thing about the movie Hoot is that they were showing it at the Gremlin's school. Taken on its own it's no sillier than screwball kid comedies like Spy Kids or Matilda. The problem is, at the front of the DVD menu are two commercials about how to get involved in your community like the kids in the movie, and the kids in the movie are sabotaging a construction site. Toward the end of the film, they kidnap and tie up the guy who owns the land. This is not how I would want my children to get involved in the community.

The kids get away with the kidnapping because there is an endangered species living on the property-- burrowing owls. Burrowing owls are wonderful creatures. If you plant yourself outside their nest during the daytime, it's free lunch at sundown. Given, however, that most humans prefer their food cooked and prepared, it's hard to see why they'd object to replacing the owl habitat with a restaurant.

The film deals with this motivational disconnect by having the main character taken on a tour of the Florida wilds by the head saboteur. This opens the kid's eyes, just like in socialist fiction where the protagonist becomes a liberal because he finds out there are poor people. I suspect that years of reading books where people change their politics after a three-hour tour is why Democrats go into a blind panic over docudramas. I can see Howard Dean remembering the Everglades scene in Hoot and concluding that the entire country would shift to the Republicans when they found out Madeleine Albright was more worried about committing an act of war in Pakistani airspace than killing a terrorist.

There is a subplot about the kid being bullied. At one point he strikes back against the bully and is forced to write a letter of apology. A similar thing happened to one of Bruce's daughters, but instead of demanding a letter of apology, Bruce delivered a long lecture on the importance of not having witnesses when you need to teach somebody how to behave in the presence of a lady. I suspect it might be different if the child involved is a son, but nobody has ever tried to bully Nate, because they're too afraid of his sister.

Anyway, this is a silly movie with a silly plot, and trying to turn it into Important Social Commentary was a huge mistake. If you want to watch a screwball kid comedy, try Spaced Invaders. It's funnier, it has the same melodramatic underpinnings, and in an odd way, it's much more realistic.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

Trackposted to Common Owls Using Common Sense, The Business of America is Pancakes, Right Spaced Invaders, Stingray: A Blog for Salty Building Contractors, Planck's Hoot, Third World Habitat, The Burrowing Yak, Outside the Nest, Jo's Pancake House, and Basil's Guide to Acheiving Social Justice Without Committing a Major Felony.

# At Tue 8:15 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (0) | More Ferdy at the Movies | Tags:

Trackback Pings

Comments

HTML is not allowed in comments; however, if you put in a raw URL (http://www.somewhere.com/page.html) it will automatically be converted to a link.. Also, it is likely your comment will not appear unless you refresh the page manually after posting it.

Post a comment