The Projector #95: Movie Lies We Told Our Daughter (Patreon)

by Keith Phipps

Today we came clean with our 10-year-old daughter about a secret we’d been keeping from her for five years: We never had any intention of taking her to see the movie Nine Lives. For those who don’t remember, Nine Lives is a Barry Sonnenfeld-directed comedy in which a business tycoon learns the errors of his thoughtless ways after he’s forced to inhabit the body of a cat named Mr. Fuzzypants. Its trailer played in front of every kids’ film released in the year 2016, earning an enthusiastic reaction from our daughter. “Sure,” we told her, “We’ll go see that.” This was a lie.

This had nothing to do with the fact that it starred Kevin Spacey. The abuse allegations against him wouldn’t surface for another year. It had everything to do with how terrible it looked. That it earned horrible reviews didn’t help. At one point I thought, well, maybe I could bite the bullet on this one. If nothing else, it would save me some trouble if occasion ever called for me to write about Sonnenfeld’s career. But when Nine Lives hit theaters, then later VOD and cable channels, I couldn’t do it.

Here’s the thing about kids, or at least my kid: They have short attention spans, but long memories. For at least three years after Nine Lives’ release my daughter would occasionally, out of nowhere, bring it up as a movie she wanted to see. “Uh huh. Well, we’ll get to it,” I’d say, then wait for her to move on, usually recalling a moment in the trailer that made her laugh involving the cat using a purse as a toilet.

Today we let her know about our ongoing lie, as part of a longer conversation about movies and attached to another confession. At the beginning of 2020 when we didn’t know what was about to hit us, I was planning to take her to a Saturday-morning press screening of Dolittle. Unfortunately, she got sick and had to miss the screening. It’s, as anyone who’s seen it knows, a pretty bad movie, one I had no intention of watching again, but my daughter really wanted to see it, so I volunteered my wife to take her. This, it turns out, was not a popular decision, so we did the Nine Lives punt with that one, too. We fessed up to both those maneuvers today, and our daughter didn’t seem that upset (even if she did remember the purse scene from the Nine Lives trailer). In the year and a half since Dolittle’s release she’s lost the attraction to any piece of kids’ entertainment no matter how dreadful it looks. It’s not that her tastes have become incredibly sophisticated, but while Pixar and Marvel movies remain must-sees, she doesn’t get that excited about, say, Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway.

In some ways that’s a relief. We probably dodged a bullet with Nine Lives and I know my wife dodged one with Dolittle, but we took her to plenty of kids movies we might have happily missed. Being a parent means sitting through some pretty dull, often dire movies. Sometimes you get to take your kid to The Force Awakens, her first Star Wars movie in a theater; sometimes you get to take her to The Secret Life of Pets 2. But it’s bittersweet, too. I suspect we’ll have many movies in our future together, but there was a certain kind of pleasure to watching her get hyped up about any movie we took her to see, even if we had to feign shared enthusiasm after it was over. I kind of miss that, even if I don’t harbor many regrets for keeping Mr. Fuzzypants out of our lives all these years.

We’re in the middle of a pairing that finds us getting medieval with Excalibur and The Green Knight. We hope you’re enjoying that. If you want to read more about The Green Knight, and some other movies, here are a few items of note.

• At Rotten Tomatoes, Robert Daniels talks to production designer Jade Healy about the Green Knight’s striking look.

• At Polygon, Caitlin Kennedy explores The Green Knight as a sexual morality tale.

• Also at Polygon, our own Tasha Robinson talks to the Green Knight himself, Ralph Ineson.

• At Vox, Alissa Wilkinson offers a detailed look at the film’s connections to the source material, other movies, and more.

• At Vanity Fair, director David Lowery talks about the film’s ending with Joanna Robinson (in a way that undermines our own reading but, hey, that doesn’t mean he’s right).

• Moving on from The Green Knight, at Vulture, Bilge Ebiri talked to the filmmakers behind The Meaning of Hitler about what a Hitler doc has to say in 2021. At Mel, Tim Grierson does the same.

• Are you attracted to villains? That’s okay, Lena Barkin argues at Polygon.

• At Vulture, Steve Agee talks to James Greyby about supplying the body used to create King Shark in Suicide Squad.

• And, looking ahead to another pairing, at GQ Simon Helberg talked to Keith Phipps about the demands of Annette.