Movie Night (And Day)
Last night the family watched Eloist, an enjoyable children’s film about the hilarious hijinks of a precocious, hyper-privileged, blonde-haired, six-year-old Hebrew redactor who lives in the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Based on a children’s book by the same name, I think. Considering the all-too-common dual foibles of children’s movies (annoying, saccharine sweetness or snotty, ill-mannered protagonists), what I saw of this movie was really pretty cute. I wouldn’t mind it if it found its way into the home library, as jaundiced an eye as I typically turn towards redaction-critical methods in biblical studies.
NOTE: My wife has just informed me that the name of the movie was in fact Eloise, and it was about the the hilarious hijinks of a precocious, hyper-privileged, blonde-haired, six-year-old little girl who lives in the Plaza Hotel in New York City. I was wondering why the blonde hair. It didn’t exactly make sense.
If you get the joke, and you don’t post under the name pentamom or Adeodatus, you really should stand and be recognized. This is high-brow punnery, man.
If only there were a good pun for Pretty In Pink. Surely the second worst film of the entire 1980s Molly Ringwald corpus, it is at least redeemed by its fairly cool soundtrack and the nontrivial doses of nostalgia it will give a couple of young gen-Xers who started dating just a couple of years after it was released. We watched it together Sunday night, in a pleasant break from homework and other evening responsibilities.
To what enduring cultural artifact in the Ringwald corpus does it take a backseat, you ask? The 1988 atrocity For Keeps, of course, co-starring the inestimable–and I mean that more or less literally–Randall Batinkoff. To be fair, I’ve never seen Tempest, but against For Keeps, I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
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- Posted by Tim on Thursday, June 10, 2004 at 1:34:24 pm PDT
- Category: Miscellany
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10 Responses to “Movie Night (And Day)”
Three cheers for bilingual punnification!
Comment Permalink | Posted on June 10th, 2004 at 3:56 pm |Here I was giggling beside myself, and then you had to make all that lightheartedness self-absorbed. High-brow punnery indeed.
Comment Permalink | Posted on June 10th, 2004 at 9:55 pm |It’s just that I already knew you’d get it.
Comment Permalink | Posted on June 10th, 2004 at 10:33 pm |May I suggest that you had to work WAY too hard for that one?
You couldn’t have convinced me of it at the time, but you’ve supplied yet another reason to be thankful I never had any dates in high school.
Comment Permalink | Posted on June 11th, 2004 at 7:56 am |I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree with your assessment of For Keeps as the worst of Molly Ringwald’s body of 80s work. That dubious distinction must, without a doubt, be given to Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, which released in 3-D, no less. I saw this in the theater as a nine year-old, and am still experiencing PTSD. [shudder]
Comment Permalink | Posted on June 15th, 2004 at 4:56 pm |Okay, vague memories of Spacehunter are kicking around in my head now. You may be right about this…
Comment Permalink | Posted on June 16th, 2004 at 10:45 am |“Spacehunter” is a pretty good call. I don’t even remember that one.
I was going to say “The Pick-Up Artist.” As Dan Aykroyd’s Leonard Pinth-Garnell character would say, “That was terrible, now, wasn’t it?”
Comment Permalink | Posted on June 21st, 2004 at 10:05 am |Wow, so much Molly Ringwald awfulness. I had forgotten all about The Pick-Up Artist. Robert Downy, Jr., right? Impressive, John.
Comment Permalink | Posted on June 21st, 2004 at 10:50 am |Spacehunter is, indeed, teeth-gnashingly bad.
My suggested tagline for the poster would have gone something like this:
Spacehunter 3-D: a bad movie and a migraine - all for $3!
I’d forgotten about The Pick-Up Artist. Bad, but no Spacehunter…
Comment Permalink | Posted on June 22nd, 2004 at 8:40 am |As bad as she was in Spacehunter, shouldn’t Betsy’s Wedding hold the top spot for Worst Molly Ringwald Movie Ever…?
Comment Permalink | Posted on June 29th, 2004 at 6:28 am |