JIM CARREY AND I are both to blame.
When it was time for my son to put away the Yo Gabba Gabba! episodes of childhood, I let him pick our first foray into legitimate cinema. He made his selection based on the flashiness of the poster, which is the kind of dumb thing a kid or a trained lemur will do.
This is how we ended up watching the live-action How the Grinch Stole Christmas—three times. I’ve been on LSD on the Las Vegas Strip and I’ve seen Carrey’s Grinch, and there is not that much difference between the two.
Before we Grinched it a fourth time, I declared to my son, “Nay. Nay more! From here forth we will watch only the greatest motion pictures ever made.”
Let’s get something on the table right up front: My bona fides in this area of “great motion pictures” are dubious.
I openly admit to cowriting Herbie: Fully Loaded. I have appeared in many dreadful films. Though in my defense, I’ve also been in several films that I have not seen at all—and those might be amazing.
And so this is how my ten-year-old and I ended up watching An American Werewolf in London together.
In case you haven’t seen the movie, it’s a magnificent romp through the moors in which David Naughton turns into Herschel Walker’s preferred monster of lore.
It also features—and I am still not sure how I forgot this at the time—an off-the-charts graphic love scene that starts in the shower and continues on for almost two whole minutes with the main characters licking and kissing each other all the way down to their hip bones.
As my son and I watched this scene, I racked my brain to think of a positive spin I could put on this shiteous bit of parenting I was doing. Then I blurted out some-thing that surprised even me.
“This is because they’re friends,” I said. True, it was a scene I would not have let him see if I had remembered it was in the movie. But as it is my parental duty, I had to turn what we were seeing into a Teachable Moment.
“They’re friends, and now they’re in love and they both wanted to roll around like this and kiss each other’s hip bones,” I continued.
My son replied with silence. This could have been because I taught him that we never ever speak during a film unless the house is on fire or his mother has fallen in the lake.
Oh well, I figured, here we go. With Pandora’s Redbox now open, he and I pressed on to increasingly steeper slopes: The Godfather (parts I and II), My Life as a Dog, and yes, of course: Psycho.
Do I worry that now my son will grow up and murder Janet Leigh? Of course I do. What father does not? But there’s a Teachable Moment in Psycho, too, which is that Janet Leigh’s character is not a perfect hero, because she stole $60,000 and she’s on the run, and also don’t take sandwiches from a guy with so many birds.
I stand by my decision to watch these movies with Oliver. Great films prepare kids for the nuances of adult life: Sometimes you’re going to make friends and kiss them on their hips; other times you’re going to get hit with a shovel.
And sometimes both things happen.
You can’t get that from The Grinch.
A version of this article originally appeared in the March 2023 issue of Men’s Health.
Writer
Thomas Lennon plays Lt. Jim Dangle on Reno911 (the show’s latest movie, It’s a Wonderful Heist, is out now) and is the best-selling author of the Ronan Boyle novels, soon to be a motion picture from DreamWorks Animation.
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