Movie Night: Tom Hanks, the World's Greatest Actor..

After holding on to The 40-Year Old Virgin and Return From Witch Mountain for about two weeks, finally got around to returning them and getting the next movies on the kid's and our lists.

First, the mandatory explanation:

The Sandra Bullock Scale© was devised to rate a movie sleepability, due to my inability to stay awake through any Sandra Bullock film since Demolition Man. A perfect score of five out of five represents a movie's a) stupifying boredom combined with b) lack of even token nudity despite hot chickage [see Practical Magic... what a waste of time, Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock and zero nudity... Rated PG-13 for sensuality my fanny...]

Anyway, we seem to have blown through every single kid's movie at Netflix and are starting to get mostly-harmless '80s PG-rated comedies of suspect intellectual heft. I hope we're not doing any permanent damage to their developing brains...

This weekend's offering for the kids was Turner and Hooch, a typical odd-couple cop movie from Tom Hanks' unfortunate "I'm getting paid for this, right?" period (The 'burbs, Turner and Hooch, Joe vs. the Volcano). The only twist being Hanks' partner -- a large, ugly, slobbering dog. The Hooch of the title.

I'm not going to bore you with the plot, you've undoubtedly seen it before, so let's get right to the digressions:

First, if you look up "Turner and Hootch" (note the different spelling of Hootch) in The Urban Dictionary, you get slang for something very dirty. I'm not going to spoil it for you, but the kicker is the whole humming the Sanford and Son theme. That just makes the whole thing, if you ask me.

Second: decent "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" potenetial in this one. For instance, I was looking up the career of bit player Clyde Kusatsu (he played a grocery store manager) and was too lazy to type in "Tom Hanks" in the search bar and managed to get to him in five steps (with bonus points for actually using Kevin Bacon). Kusatsu was in a couple episodes of M*A*S*H with David Ogden Steirs, Steirs was in Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame with Demi Moore, who was in A Few Good Men with Kevin Bacon, who was in Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks.

You've also got Urkel's next door neighbor (who was also in Die Hard) and Craig T. Nelson for your Kevin Bacon game needs.

Third: Did I miss the three and a half weeks where Mare Winningham was romantic lead material?

All in all, a fairly inoffensive bit of late '80s buddy genre. Nothing to write home about, but gave the kids a couple of chuckles.

(The Boy just wandered down, here's his take: "I liked... Umm... Ummm.... Uhhh.... DAD! Don't write the Ummms!...." okay, okay. Here, after much prodding: "I liked that the dog wrecked the really organized guy's house. And I like Daddy's stinky feet")

(Uh, thanks. I think he just wanted to see if I would put that down. No editing here, babe. We're blog veritie!)

Anyway, I'll give it three out of five Sandra's, as I didn't fall asleep, but probably because I was surfing the net while watching it.

(The Boy's rating: Zero! And he wants to remind you all that he likes my stinky feet.)

(Yes, he's truly a delightful child.)