Musings - The Movie North

So I've been watching a bunch of the Nostalgia Critic lately. One of my favorites is his review of the movie North, starring Elijah Wood, Bruce Willis, and a whole bunch of other very recognizable names, including Reba McEntire, Kathy Bates, and half the cast of Seinfeld. If you've never heard of it (and are therefor a luckier person than I), it's about a kid, played by Wood, who decides he can't live with his parents anymore as they don't realize how good a thing they've got in him, to quote Willis' character. Rather than take the advice of Willis, who plays a guy who plays the Easter Bunny at North's favorite place, North decides to give up on his parents, and he divorces them. The courts allow him to do this on a kind of experimental basis, but only if he can find new parents before the end of a finite period of time. North travels the country and the world to find a new family, leading to a parade of the most blatant and offensive cultural stereotypes in modern cinema, and maybe cinema in general. Literally everything is a stereotype, including shots early on of him father's workplace, a pants factory, where apparently they set up themed rooms to test the pants in real world conditions. North doesn't find any new parents, deciding instead to return to his original parents, and just at the climax, he wakes up, as everything was a dream the entire time. This movie is terrible. My ethnicity is actually depicted positively in this movie, and I still feel offended. If you want a true impression of how bad this movie is, watch the Siskel and Ebert review, or the Nostalgia Critic episode.

We aren't here to talk about how bad this movie is, though, we're here to talk about the fact that I think, in a weird way, it actually makes sense. Stay with me guys, seriously. North is a young kid, right? So likely he doesn't know much about other cultures, or even his dad's workplace, beyond the bare basics, some random rumors and stereotypes, and what he can glean on his own. As the entire movie is just a dream, and told from North's point of view, it's very likely that the world within his dream would be made up of these stereotypes, right? Even Willis popping up several times in the role of the "mysterious mentor" makes sense, as the real Willis gave North some advice just before he passed out, and it explains why North, but not his parents, grow throughout the movie, as North can't imagine how an adult might change and grow, since he isn't an adult. The strange out-of-nowhere villains who show up later in the film make sense too, as dreams are strange, confused places where your fears become fully realized, tangible things, often resembling people or objects from your life.

It makes sense, but it doesn't mean that this movie is any good. It is still terribly written, unfunny, and one of the most blatantly offensive things ever written, let alone put to film. Acknowledging the existence of stereotypes is much different from perpetuating them, as this movie does. Ebert was right to say that this movie makes you feel unclean just thinking about it. Don't watch the movie, and don't let your kids see it ever, but if you want to laugh at something awful, check out one of the reviews mentioned above, or find a rifftrax. I'm sure one exists somewhere. This isn't the worst movie ever (Manos Hands of Fate and Garbage Pail Kids still jointly hold that dishonor), but it's definitely up there on the list, even if it does manage to be a pretty interesting look into a child's psyche, even if his psyche is horribly offensive.