As mentioned previously, I love my son. How much? Enough that I’ll take him to go see crap movies that I have negative interest in seeing when he doesn’t even understand 95% of the plot or dialog (oh, what I would have given to have that ignorance for an hour and a half!) Welcome to parenthood. If I thought he’d sit through The Help without repeatedly pointing to the screen and loudly informing me “Mommy, no good! No good!” I would have taken him to see that instead.
Disclaimer: I grew up on The Smurfs. I spent most every Saturday morning in front of the television, watching cartoons — Gummi Bears, Fat Albert, the Snorks — but The Smurfs were my favorite, probably because it was aired in a two-hour long block that allowed me to totally space out while thoroughly digesting my third bowl of Lucky Charms. When I think back on the countless hours that I spent, watching stock animation and trite storylines that sought to impart life lessons while providing mindless entertainment, it makes me clench my fists and vow for a better life for my son.
I like Neil Patrick Harris. I haven’t seem him in anything since Doogie Howser, but I hear he has a thriving television career and he’s a well-adjusted gay man who has enough mainstream acceptance that he can star in kid-targeted cinematic offerings. But… why did he? I wondered as the lights dimmed and the movie started. And then I realized: because he’s a television actor, and this is The Smurfs. None of them belong on a big screen and I have pity for everyone involved in this project, because how can you possibly make a movie called The Smurfs that children and their parents would want to watch?
That’s a rhetorical question. These are real ones: How do the Smurfs know English? How does Gargamel know English? Was there always a Crazy Smurf? In the original series, every time Brainy opened his wise-ass little mouth he ended up getting tossed to the village outskirts on his head… because being smart begs violent retaliation… but in the movie, Brainy was toned down and treated like a pitiful blathering idiot… why? And why does Grouchy Smurf talk with a Latino accent?
So Papa Smurf, Brainy Smurf, Smurfette, Clumsy Smurf, Gutsy Smurf, Grouchy Smurf, and their arch-nemesis Gargamel and kitty Azrael end up in Manhattan, all because of that freaking Clumsy. Around the time that Gargamel constructed a laboratory in the basement of the Belvedere Castle in Central Park in order to extract “Smurf essence” and increase his wizardy powers, I developed a crushing yearning to watch bloody, gory, gratuitous violence. This was satisfied the other night, when Mr. P took the Little Boy swimming and I poured myself a beer and watched From Dusk till Dawn.
I’ve read things saying you should never take a child younger than 4 to a movie because he or she will essentially ruin it for everyone around you with their incessant jabberings, but my Little Boy is princely. We’ve been to three movies (Cars 2, which blew his mind; Winnie the Pooh, which was more for Mommy; and The Smurfs) and each time, aside from a few delighted giggles at something slapsticky, he has been as silent as a stone. I even tried to engage him by looking at him and laughing at something on the screen, hoping to share a brief moment in the aftermath of something that should have amused a 3 year old, and he shoots me a look like “Shut the eff up, Mommy! We paid money for this!”
