Jumanji
It’s Home Alone if directed by Spielberg: all about the daddy issues for boys, girls are just a sideshow. Speaking of sideshows, black people are that too, even if they come up with some Air Jordan.
The protagonist is some richie rich kid, the heir to some massive fortune. But he doesn’t really care about that, he just wants to be loved by his absent father. He is bullied by some poors, and his father has nothing but stern words for him. He just needs a hug from his pop, that’s his main problem.
Anyway, the film itself is really like Home Alone with a jungle theme. The kid finds a mystical board game in the mud, brings it home and convinces his girl friend to play with him, but he is sucked into the jungle (akin to Monopoly prison). Everybody just thinks he was murdered by his father, his friend turns into some wiccan, and nothing happens for 26 years.
The parents go bankrupt trying to find him, and without their noblesse oblige, the town turns into a shithole country, just a mass of unemployed hobos, adult book stores, and vacant storefronts. Some woman and her adopted nephews move in to the mansion, the kids lost their parents a while back. While the girl is wicked as all females, a silver tongue she-devil, always making up stories, the boy is the replacement hero.
The kids want to skip school, so they play that game with the African drums. The game already has two tokens in there, it’s the same game the other kids started to play all those decades ago. They release the older boy from his Monopoly prison, he fetches his old girl friend, and they all play the game. Hijinks ensue, the fish-out-of-temporal-water aspect is glossed over.
One of the obstacles of the game is an African explorer, complete with pith helmet and elephant gun, trapping the most dangerous game: the old kid. He’s literally a representation of his father, played by the same actor, and his big climax is telling him to shove it.
He manages to win the game, and all goes back to the start, that evening when the kid found the game. They do remember everything, it’s their story. He makes up with daddy, ditches the game in the river, and remains with the girl forever.
Eventually, he hires the little kid’s parents to work on the shoe factory, avoids their deaths, and befriends the kids (in a creepy way, if you didn’t know better).
This is clearly for kids, Robin Williams does not go to any extreme, the rest of cast doesn’t have much to do either. Kristen Dunst is sassy, but she’s a sideshow at best. The comic relief black guy who invented the Air Jordan and then got fired for being close to the boss’s kid is quite annoying, but it’s for kids.
I haven’t seen Zathura in ages, but it stars Kristen Stewart so it must be much better.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.