Difficult Kid

Problem Child (Dennis Dugan, 1990)

My parents were so angry I watched this. I was at a friend’s house and we spent the afternoon laughing our rear ends off about this. There’s a scene at a fair in which a clown is punched. We rewound and replayed the scene at least four times. Laughter until it hurts. I wish I had more of that in my life these days. Not to say I don’t laugh, but that level of absurd guffawing is pretty seldom.

I immediately wanted to watch the sequel. Mom pulled out Leonard Maltin and read a sentence that ran something like “any parent who lets an impressionable child watch this movie should have their head examined,” and that was that. This was an Enormous Injustice, I felt. The third film was already being advertised on the back of my Donald Duck comics, and I needed to catch up. Actually, I would have taken the third one, too. Continuity and spoiler-obsession weren’t things then.

My desire to watch the second movie waned. Now, today, October 2016, I can confidently say that I would actively refuse to watch it. I sort of wonder if I maybe did get to see it? I have vague memories of a film that was a little dull and had none of the original’s perceived anarchy. I don’t know if I thought that at the time. But I was maybe six or seven; my opinion was hardly so developed and the movie is really just entertainment.

In the end I only remember one part of this: that stupid scene with the clown. It made me laugh very hard once. Probably that’s enough.

Laser Cages Everywhere

Entrapment (Jon Amiel, 1999)

Mission Impossible (Brian De Palma, 1996)

Mission Impossible II (John Woo, 2000)

This is the first movie I ever rated on Netflix. It was and is a forgettable caper movie with a kind of creepy love angle between Catherine Zeta-Jones and Sean Connery, which mostly shows my own ageism. The only scene I have clearly in my head is the totally stupid “laser trip wire training sequence” that involved Z-J doing some pretty extreme cat suit yoga and which was in all the trailers. Why do security companies leave holes in their laser trip wire cages large enough for humans to squeeze through?

This last is also a problem for Mission Impossible, which I recall seeing in theaters, but not really understanding. Hardly strange, since I was ten at the time; I believe I subsequently rewatched it and was even surprised by the twist ending. The video game was one of the few N64 titles I actually played all the way through, even getting to, but failing to complete the final auto-scrolling turret section (we didn’t call it that in those days). Or am I conflating the film with the game? Did the film have lasers that Tom Cruise couldn’t have fallen through and they needed deactivating? The video game involved dodging laser grids.

I have checked. No lasers. Or rather, they had to be dealt with differently. I am coming to the realisation that this may not have been such a silly movie as I thought it was. The sequel Mission Impossible II annoyed me deeply. I remember little else than it wasn’t an interesting watch. It involved a virus that was called chimera and some part of it was set in Australia. I have not watched another film in this series.

My music teacher often remarked that the original series’ theme tune was in 5/4 time and thus “impossible” to dance to and that the films recomposed it to fit into 4/4.

As a final note, Tom Cruise’s character is called Ethan Hunt, which may explain my habit of confusing Ethan Hawke with Tom Cruise.