I watched it this week when I was sitting up at 5:00am with my daughter Olivia (see my post "New Life") in the hospital. Honestly the movie isn't that great. It was pretty much what you would expect: mediocre, predictable, and it had a few funny parts.
Every once in a while, though, a forgettable movie like this can have a funny quote that transcends the movie itself. Watch from minute 1:00 to 1:19 of this clip from Youtube- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6x7LkUY-ZE
In the clip Skeeter (Adam Sandler) laments the propaganda leaflets that his sister is trying to pass off as kid books to his niece and nephew.
As a father of three, two of which love reading bedtime stories, I have seen my share of crap masquerading as literature. The 1991 book The Berenstain Bears Don't Pollute (Anymore) is a great example of this. We mistakenly purchased this gem in a stack of books we picked up at a garage sale. We have since discarded the rag. The hapless father in the book is potrayed as a nature hating slob and must be reformed by his enviromentaly conscious children. Even my wife, who has accused me of being over sensitive to hidden agendas, couldn't stand this book. It is too bad that Stan and Jan Berenstain found it necessary to sully their decent series of Berenstain Bears books with this thing. In a series that extolls moral virtues such as telling the truth and sharing, this book seems awkward and ill-advised. The sad part is that they were probably just keeping up with the Jones'.
Go to Barnes and Noble sometime and peruse the kid section. The "books" there are often hard to stomach. Global warming, campaign rhetoric, and vegetarianism are all common topics. How can it be? What happened to kids books being simple fodder for their imaginations? Where did all this come from?
Every junior-Soviet with an idea knows that the place to start indoctrination is with kids. It is an old Communist idea. Wikipedia quotes a Soviet official as having said it this way:
"We must make the young into a generation of Communists. Children, like soft wax, are very malleable and they should be moulded into good Communists... We must rescue children from the harmful influence of the family... We must nationalize them. From the earliest days of their little lives, they must find themselves under the beneficient influence of Communist schools... To oblige the mother to give her child to the Soviet state - that is our task."
Perhaps, like my lovely wife, you are now accusing me of being hyper-sensitive to hidden agendas. Maybe you are thinking "he's a paranoid whacko." Well... maybe you haven't tried to read a kids book since you were a kid. It keeps getting worse too. With almost no public backlash these propagandists have gotten more and more bold with each printing. Consider yourself warned. You might wanna look closely at the next book your kid checks out from the library.
