movie: Parental Guidance
starring: Billy Crystal, Bette Midler
genre:Comedy
year: 2012
format: Netflix Canada
plot: An overprotective mom has to ask her parents to babysit while her and her husband go away for the weekend.
Billy Crystal is the show here. He manages to draw the line on balance, between being "out of date" and being completely relevant. This is as much a story about loosing faith in your own abilities as it is keeping up with the modern world.
The parents are so over-protective, that the kids are practically hermits being raised by a series of computers, literally. As the father is a computer executive creating a "safer home security" that seconds as an automated butler. As the grandparents realize they know nothing about their grand-kid's lives, we see the generation gaps shrink over the course of the movie.
There is a scene where the lot of them are outside playing a simple game of kick the can, in the mud and rain. One of the kids comments on the fact they are outside, unaccustomed to playing outside. There is another scene later on when we learn that the oldest kid has been working her fingers to the bone at a hobby she's no longer in love with because it is what her mother wants. You feel the disconnect between the mother and teenager as she learns that for all her trying to raise her kids better then she had been raised, she has failed to notice how unhappy they are.
what did I learn? Sometimes you just have to walk that dinosaur.
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