I just took Isabel out to a movie and I must say I had a thoroughly good time. I thought ham and cheese flavored popcorn sounded weird, but it was good.
The film was The Secret Life of Pets, and one weird thing both of us noticed was that there were no other kids in the cinema. All adults. I thought that was a bit weird, and it kind of blows my theory. Theory is a word I use over-liberally, to mean hypothesis, or maybe just a cynical observation, but I have often stated that the reason people have children is so they can go to kid’s movies without embarrassment.
Apparently, some adults don’t feel my need for an excuse. Maybe because it was in English, which is no problem for Isabel but would be for most Czech kids, or maybe the fact that it was a bit of a late show for children, or whatever.
But children’s movies are great, and the trailers are for other children’s movies, and there was a really funny Minions cartoon, they are basically an animated version of the 3 stooges, a comedy of errors and physical violence.
The film is about Max, a dog in New York City who gets separated from his walker in the park and caught by the dog catchers, along with his much bigger rival, Duke, and they are rescued by a rabbit and a pig who are leaders of an underground anti-human animal gang, the Flushed Pets, but then their friends come to rescue them, and Max and Duke wind up in the East River, and then in Brooklyn where they have a weird, psychedelic, almost totally superfluous trip through a sausage factory.
All the classic humor is there: dogs v. cats, big v. small, some great chase scenes with animals driving cars and crashing into everybody, a few poop jokes and, of course, happy endings all around, even the insane, terrorist rabbit gets adopted by a little girl and changes completely, while the pig and the alligator dive back into the sewer.
I wouldn’t rank it with the greatest of chidren’s movies. It was no Ratatouille, or Shrek, but you don’t need to rank them like that. It was a good time.
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