The theaters here in Logan are usually three screens at most, and so the matinees understandably take place on the weekends and consist of kiddie movies. When the wife suggested that we spend our Saturday catching up on movies, kiddie pictures were all we had to choose from. The day had unwittedly played into our blissfully distant and abstract fantasies of parenthood, as we saw and absorbed the sort of entertainment that’s being sold to our children. When our mythological child turns eight, maybe even seven, I’ve decided we’re putting parental filters on Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network. It’s fine when you’re little, but eventually a constant diet of this stuff is crippling. I don’t subscribe to the idea that violent, racist or sexist media makes children violent, racist or sexist. Not really. However, I do, very strongly, subscribe to the idea that stupid movies and TV make our kids stupid. And stupidity is a much greater threat to our youth than smut. I’d rather my kid see a good movie with cursing, breasts or decapitations than a bad movie without them. I’m not only saying Schindler’s List over "Rugrats," I’m saying Reservoir Dogs or even Pulp Fiction or Fight Club over "Rugrats." I don’t ask that they refrain from pop entertainment completely. That’s sort of hypocritical. I sure wouldn’t hold myself to a standard like that, and the school of “do as I say, not as I do” is sort of nauseating to me.

Almost as bad as the philosophy of “TV as babysitter” is the philosophy of “TV as idiot box." As well-meaning as this perspective is, the idea that we should turn off the TV and read a book is founded on the shaky premise that all TV is bad and all books are good. Books can be mind-rotting, placating and idiotic too! And PBS kids can be just as culturally inert as Nickelodeon kids. They can just as easily be sheltered into a perpetual kiddie Neverland, as a matter of fact, as anybody else. “TV as idiot box” is even rather anti-intellectual. I consider my hatred towards Nickelodeon to be a sort of compromise between the two positions, a minor affront to the marketplace of ideas. I would imagine that my prohibition would ultimately lead to my child watching another TV show, quit watching as much TV altogether, and/or watch this stuff outside of my house or find a way to support their habit without my help. Any of those outcomes would be highly preferable to having Nickelodeon running on the TV all weekend. I don’t think that kids should be forced to grow up, but it’s necessary that they’re prevented from being kids forever. There is an important distinction to be made there.

The first film we saw was Brother Bear. Frankly, this is one of the worst films of the year. It’s worse than Seabiscuit! From the Xtreme snowboarding American Indian teenagers, to the musical number involving the harvest of non-anthromorphic salmon and a puppet show with their corpses, to the cuddly old women and baby bears, the movie is so stupid that I imagine you could only recommend it to hardcore animation buffs or hardcore bad movie buffs.

Better, but still not that good, is the Will Ferrell vehicle Elf. There’s something about the premise that seems 15 years out of date. Seriously. Ferrell’s father in the film (James Caan) unknowingly fathered a child in the '60s. The mother gave it up for adoption and it was unknowingly abducted by Santa Claus and raised as an elf. Caan is now an executive for a children’s book publishing company and has grown cynical and career-driven. It’s a yuppie movie; Caan’s given up the '60s values of love and altruism for the '80s value of greed and self-interest. The movie was done better when it was called Scrooged. As for the Elf himself, Ferrell eats cotton balls, chewing gum off of railings, and spaghetti with maple syrup in the movie. We happened to see him a little earlier in Old School, where he went streaking. The thing that makes Ferrell so appealing as a comic actor is that he is more than willing to humiliate himself for a laugh. But as the critic MaryAnn Johanson pointed out, none of the other elves in the movie act anything like Ferrell does. They seem to have a little more intuition than to eat gum off railings. Caan needs to come up with an idea for a best-selling children’s book, but is constantly distracted in trying to keep his bored Elf son, who is not fit for even the most traditional employments, occupied. The film is so unbelievably stupid that they don’t come upon the obvious solution until the very end of the picture.

Elf is a lazy picture for lazy filmgoers, sadly superior, I’m afraid to admit, to the ambitiously wrong-headed Brother Bear. Whereas Elf is a Christmas movie without Christ, a disposable, occasionally entertaining, meaningless exercise, Brother Bear has a lesson to teach. It’s telling us that bears are people too. And it’s a religious movie. It’s a pop religion though, a religion without balls; it fails to exclude or offend anybody or anything, even other species. I actually love animals, and I would in fact rather preserve the existence of most bears over some humans. And I’d even go as far as to suggest that if humans have souls, then bears do too. But putting us both on the same level is stretching it. The human that’s turned into the bear is only able to talk to other bears when he is a bear. There is no way for humans and bears to communicate with one another. But why can the bears talk with the moose, the squirrels and the birds? Why can’t they talk to the salmon? Where is the film’s internal logic?

Anybody who has grown to the point where they can no longer stand the Teletubbies or Barney shouldn’t be able to stand Brother Bear. They should be insulted by it. But still, the cuddliness and pop spirituality of Brother Bear still afford it the chance to fail spectacularly. Elf, which I suppose is what the former Teletubby and Barney crowd will be moving up to, is simply mediocre or half not-bad. It’s emotional and intellectual atrophy of the more direct kind. Elf isn’t shameless about reinforcing your beliefs and feelings, but it still doesn’t have the courage to stimulate new ones.

I don’t mean this to turn into a review of Elf or Brother Bear, although that is, of course, where I seem to be heading. This is meant to be a review of Peter Pan, the picture we saw right after those two. Aside from Finding Nemo (which like Brother Bear anthromorphizes its animals, but unlike Brother Bear isn’t insulting about it), Peter Pan is easily the best children’s film of 2003. The film is stimulating and creative in a way that Brother Bear or Elf weren’t. Or, for that matter, in a way that the “stewed broccoli, hold the salt” arthouse kid picture Whale Rider is. Whale Rider nicely represents the audience that only watches educational shows; it’s not bad and actually sort of good, but nobody is going to really find that very challenging, are they? The reason parents would love Whale Rider is because it’s all-natural and doesn’t have any artificial additives. Peter Pan isn’t like Whale Rider either. In a way, Peter Pan is about the way that we feed our children this bullshit.

You know the story of Peter Pan. Peter Pan is a elf that can fly and takes kids off to Neverland. Neverland has mermaids, pirates and Indians and lots of adventures to be had. The director, P.J. Hogan, is brilliant in having Peter Pan being played by an American actor with an American accent. (Or maybe he’s not brilliant, I actually can’t recall a Peter Pan that spoke with a British accent.) Neverland seems to represent, in one respect or another, the New World of the 16th or 17th century, with 19th century suburban London representing itself. Wendy and her brothers are bored out of their minds with stuff like Whale Rider, we imagine, and wish to escape into the pulp fantasies of Peter Pan’s Neverland. And Neverland is an exciting place! The movie seems to be saying that popular children’s entertainment can in fact have a pulse and an edge.

The filmmakers are admittedly walking on a thinly drawn line between morally repugnant racism and morally repugnant political correctness in dealing with the Indians. Either they stay close to the source material, which I imagine was much more offensive, or they omit the Indians altogether, which would be sort of cowardly. They do a fairly good job. The Indians in Peter Pan don’t get a lot to do, but they aren’t cuddly (as they were in Brother Bear, again) and they aren’t savage. They’re human beings, who in one scene do a healing ceremony on a decapitated teddy bear. The tone of the film seems to suggest that they take the ceremony quite seriously and their healing of the bear is a nicety for the benefit of its owners. We’re laughing with them, not at them. I imagine most Native Americans would look at the movie, sigh, and say, “That's nice, but I hope there’ll come a time when we get our own pop adventure movie. And by that, I don’t mean Brother Bear! Or even Whale Rider!” Pessimistically, that’s probably the most you could ask for from this movie.

Peter Pan doesn’t have to be politically correct with the pirates and mermaids and so it’s not! Despite Wendy’s quaint preconceptions of what mermaids are like, Peter informs her that they are evil creatures that you have to watch yourself around. In the one scene where we see them, the mermaids arise from a black lake, looking like angels in the early stages of decay underwater. There is something both grotesque and erotic about them. They’re fashion models with webbed hands and a sneer hiding behind their lips. These mermaids are a wet nightmare.

Perhaps in an attempt to steal the crown of coolest pirate mascot from Pirates of the Caribbean’s zombie monkey, the movie provides us with a mangy peg-legged parrot. The very idea of a mangy peg-legged parrot is very funny, and the movie sells it well by not overstating his presence. By the end of Pirates of the Caribbean, I have to admit that even I, who loves monkeys so much that I think that their mere presence can improve any lagging film, got a little sick of the simian ghoul. The funny-cute grotesqueness of Peter Pan’s peg-legged parrot carries over to the pirates. When we first see Captain Hook, he’s harnessing his hook onto his amputated stump. This Captain Hook is a stark contrast to Dustin Hoffman’s regal figure in Hook. As a big budget live-action version of the Peter Pan legend, we realize anew how we got ripped off with a sanitary, overly glossy treatment with Hook. In showing Captain Hook’s stump, the new Peter Pan injects a much-needed jolt of morbid fascination into the mix. The pirates themselves are made childlike and frightened, and so basically they play like the mangy peg-legged parrot: so absurdly ugly and bizarre that they are really quite funny. They’re sort of cute, but they’re far from cuddly. One of the pirates bears a bit of resemblance to Alex Cox, and by association gives the pirates a bit of a punk flavor. This pirate is not a major character and basically just exists for background color. So much so that it may seem like I’m projecting, but the flavor he brings to the film is very genuine. Peter Pan is a creepy and ugly film in an interesting, controlled sort of way.

Surprisingly, many critics have picked up that Hogan has left some subtext in the film. You expect Walter Chaw to pick up on this, but MaryAnn Johanson and Roger Ebert? The film is sexual. It’s about sexual discovery. The film has three interlocking love triangles. Peter Pan likes Wendy and Tinkerbell likes Peter Pan. Peter Pan doesn’t NOT like Tinkerbell back, he just feels something different for Wendy. He feels that Wendy is a girl and Tinkerbell is one of the guys. Meanwhile, Wendy is seduced by Captain Hook. She feels that he is the man that Peter Pan isn’t. Captain Hook doesn’t have any sexual feelings towards Wendy, however; all that powers him is revenge against Peter Pan for taking his hand and feeding it to a crocodile. And so Peter Pan must eventually choose between Tinkerbell and Wendy, Wendy must choose between Captain Hook and Peter Pan, and Captain Hook has already made his decision: he wants Peter Pan.

None of these relationships ever feel arbitrary, however. Elf includes a romantic subplot where Zooey Deschanel falls for the Will Ferrell character. We never really understand why, and so it feels like it’s simply an attempt to thicken the broth. In Peter Pan, we understand that Wendy is bored and is looking for an adventure. At first she sees that in Peter Pan, but convinced that he can never develop anything like real romantic mushy love, she goes to Captain Hook, an adventurer who she thinks can. Something in Peter Pan is stirred by Wendy. It isn’t the case that he wants to grow up in order for her to love him; his desire for her to love him is proof that he is growing up. He’s torn. Growing up means that he will win Wendy, but it also means that he will go to school and get a boring job in an office. Tinkerbell doesn’t have a choice to grow up. If Peter Pan leaves her, she’s going to be alone. And so she has something REAL invested in her relationship with Pan. And Captain Hook, of course, just wants revenge for his hand.

Hook and Pan are two sides of the same coin. Both leaders of a troop of lost boys, both alone, and both swashbucklers. Captain Hook flies in this movie when fighting Peter Pan. As you have to think about happy thoughts in order to fly, Captain Hook thinks about puppy blood. (It was definitely a laugh-out-loud moment for me.) The difference between the two lies in that Pan is naive and Hook is cynical. Hook hasn’t grown up, but he is beyond sexual feeling. He can’t feel, much less return, love. All he feels is vengeance. What Wendy doesn’t realize is that Hook can’t love any more than Peter Pan can, but Hook knows what love is and he knows how to manipulate Wendy into thinking that he can provide it for her.

The film takes this all very seriously, and you realize that the relationships in this movie are far more developed than the vast majority that we see in the cinema. They have brought psychology back to sex, thank God. This, more than any of the admittedly impressive action or special effects, gives Peter Pan a real jolt of life. Going to the Internet Movie Database I’ve come upon a distressing comment from a man who thought that there was something about the movie that just didn’t feel right. He didn’t think that it was appropriate for children. Well, no shit! He apparently thinks that anything that produces a feeling other than a low mellow high in kids is inappropriate. It’s condescending. I’m glad that the liberal left has begun reinforcing the belief that sexual feelings are not evil or destructive, and again reinforcing the belief that we should certainly not force our kids to grow up, but we shouldn’t keep them from it either. The fact that the idiotic Elf and Brother Bear have far outgrossed Peter Pan, and Pan is going to be seen as a big budget folly, is frankly depressing. It’s not just that we’re making our kids stupid and painfully uneducated; we’re making them boring.

While Peter Pan is a children’s film, it is good enough to have been a film for adults that you just want to take kids to. Peter Pan has a rather strange but significant flaw, a flaw that really spoils the movie all the same. This is a very good film that has cut itself off into the ghetto of children’s film. The picture is relentlessly fast-paced from the get-go, like it’s afraid that the kids are going to get bored. Most of the stuff in England is fairly silly. It’s at its worst when involving a pointless subplot with the family dog. I frankly prefer French star Ludivine Sagnier’s condescending overacting as Tinkerbell, to the condescending overacting of the Mary Jo Buttafuoco-mouthed Lynn Redgrave. Redgrave has grown very comfortable into the children’s fantasy film genre, and Sagnier, most famous for giving us some of that gratuitous French nudity in Swimming Pool, can still maintain a bit of a subversive edge. Keeping with stage tradition, both the father and the pirate Captain Hook are played by Jason Isaacs, and, well, the father in this movie is not worthy of an Electra complex. I did however appreciate the narrator informing of us how Wendy always wanted the kiss in her mother’s mouth.

Perhaps Hogan is making us think that this is going to be a really awful children’s movie when we are in England to articulate the feeling of kiddie ennui among the children. The bad moments really do seem to be contained in these sequences. Ultimately though, the film feels unsatisfying. It’s not as much that it’s too short as much as I just want to stay in Neverland a little longer and explore it some more. It’s just too good to be contained in this overly speedy movie. Peter Pan is the sort of film that makes you want to read the books.