ju-awesome [dude check it out]

dudes –

For those of you who don’t know, the cheesily awesome Jumanji is currently playing on Hulu: http://www.hulu.com/watch/32648/jumanji.  If you haven’t seen it, the time is now. This is a movie so good that I don’t even hate Kirsten Dunst in it (although, to be fair, she was a terrifically poised child star, once upon a time).

--- thoughts, quotes, SPOILERS----

You know, Jumanji kind of reminds me a lot of Night at the Museum, which is basically the same narrative concept: following the protagonist around a magical CGI world of random hurdles and characters while pursuing a character-building narrative arc. The difference is that Night follows a single wacky, child-like adult (Ben Stiller) around that fantastical world while Jumanji follows a smattering of wacky, child-like adults (Robin Williams, Bonnie Hunt, and, in the performance that to me makes the movie, David Alan Grier, as an everyday police officer who accepts the on-going wackiness around him with to an hilariously impossible degree) as well as, more importantly, a pair of actual kids.

 To be honest, I enjoyed Night at the Museum, but Jumanji wins, and it has nothing to do with 2006 special effects vs. 1995 (let it be said: Jumanji had pretty bomb CGI). Having two normal, semi-miscreant children in the mix balances out the adults and actually gives the movie a little reality. What today’s Night at the Museum somehow lacks is the core sweetness of older entries in the kids-adventure genre, like, say, The Goonies, or even Home Alone. Kids must make mistakes, learn bravery, step up towards (but not into - *crucial difference*) adulthood. Night at the Museum satisfactorily ties up its plot ends and it’s a solid kid film and were I a kid, I probably would have dug it; but back when I was a kid, I could actually relate to Macauley Culkin as he learned to really love his family (after getting rid of the goofy bad guys, of course), and I didn’t need a whole bunch of comedians making cameos to thrill me. In kid-focused stories, it doesn’t matter that the moral lesson is spelled out in neon lights – what matters is that actual kids can relate to them. Which is why, despite no longer being a kid, I remain skeptical of Night at the Museum’s narrative power, especially for its target audience (which I do assume to be, well, kids).

Jumanji is for kids and about kids, and that can be easily lost sight of in writing and production and then reviews. Today as a critic, I might feel obliged in my review of Jumanji to point out that the young brother and sister protagonists are orphans, a condition which could be justly considered total narrative laziness. Even Dickens knew orphan-hood to be the ultimate symbol of emotional isolation for kids (although in this case without the woe-is-me addition of poverty, as these kids do, after all, live in an enormous mansion). But it’s hard, as a critic, to evaluate kids’ movies. I haven’t even bothered watching a whole raft of them, like Nim’s Island, Narnia and, recently, Race to Witch Mountain. Perhaps I’ll embark on an in-depth article of them; perhaps I’ll discover that I don’t really care, that the magic of my once-bread-and-butter genre is gone.

So be it. I’d say that there are two real ways to sincerely evaluate kids’ movies: 1) as a kid, or 2) with nostalgia. For Night at the Museum, I can do neither. Perhaps that is why I can respect that movie without love, while Jumanji and Home Alone and The Goonies and Homeward Bound and Caspar and every Disney movie ever made I can freely love without having to worry about respect.