July 16, 2011

I felt so uncomfortable watching the beginning of this film with my kids…what if they knew that I feel like Shrek sometimes?

As far as I know, my son is no junior psychotherapist…he didn’t pick up any tension as I squirmed in my seat, commiserating with Shrek’s plight. What parent doesn’t reminisce about how cool they were before they had kids? Before responsibility, before potty training and homework, before mortgages and swimming lessons and time outs and smoochies…can’t forget about the slobbery, wet booger smoochies.

Shrek just wants to get away from the stresses of family life for a little while and ends up making some REALLY bad decisions that put him in jeopardy of losing not only his family, but his life. It’s like The Hangover for kindergartners, with a bit of It’s a Wonderful Life on the side. Notwithstanding the movies, I’ve seen people pull this shit in real life, too. The girl I know who decided her husband wasn’t letting her live her life, so she ditched him and her toddlers and shacked up with a 20-something still living with his parents. All of the fucking skeevy old men (and a few women) I work with that fuck anything that moves. Casey Anthony, for fuck’s sake. The planet is full of folks that ditch their familial responsibilities, for just a few hours or days…or forever in some recently shocking cases.

Several months ago, I had the chance to skip town for a ‘girls weekend.’ We could do ANYTHING we wanted – like Shrek, we were free to go scare the villagers. We could do a shitload of drugs and drive down Central Expressway naked, steal signs and traffic cones, go watch (probably gay) men dance naked, make movies about how much we love cigarettes and sea monkeys, dress like an Indian and chase frat boys with knives, or even go pick up underage dudes working at Taco Bell. (All totally hypothetical examples that I know NOTHING about. Maybe.) We could basically do all of the AWESOME things we used to do before we had kids. You know what we did? We ate fast food…a lot…and farted…a lot. We drank a few beers and talked about our kids…and talked shit about other peoples’ kids. We said the words “fuck” and “shit” with freedom…and that’s it. That’s all we did. It wasn’t even a fear of cops or car crashes or herpes or YouTube or husbands that kept us in check…that crazy shit just takes too much energy. Plus, we’ve already done a bunch of crazy ridiculous shit, so we would have to think of NEW crazy ridiculous shit to do…and if you have to plan it, it’s not all that crazy. Don’t get me wrong, we had a blast…but we weren’t exactly scaring any villagers…maybe if we had encountered Rumpelstiltskin, our weekend would have been different. Then again, we probably would have kept our families and asked for unsaggy boobs or a house that cleaned itself.

Back to the film…Shrek has a tantrum and stomps out of his kids’ 1st birthday party. He is promptly roofied by Rumpelstiltskin and signs his old life away. He has a lot of fun at first, until he realizes that his old life doesn’t exist anymore.

Of course, by the end of the film, Shrek gets Fiona to fall in love with him again and things go back to normal. That’s the thing about magic…it’s an easy fix for problems in the land of Far, Far Away. If I got roofied by a midget and ditched my family, I’d be pretty fucked.

Is this supposed to be the last one? Isn’t a Puss in Boots about to come out? When is Mike Myers gonna do something not Shrek related?

  

Year – 2010
Rating – PG
Runtime – 93 minutes
Genre – Is Shrek its own genre now?
Director(s) – Mike Mitchell
Writer(s) – Josh Klausner, Darren Lemke
Actor(s) – Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, Antonio Banderas, Walt Dohrn
BOB Rating – Three BOBs
Favorite Quote – "Do the roar!" - Butterpants (Mike Mitchell)