Posted by
Jason Drexler on Wednesday, July 11, 2007 2:01:12 AM
A while back the L.A. Times ran a story describing the new Fantastic Four and Nancy Drew movies as square, in response to which I wrote a blog post stating my hope that their claim was true. Young Miss Drew is still on my to-see list, but I made it to Fantastic Four Land and came away from it – though pleased overall – wishing that the movie’s edges had been just a bit more pointy.
Maybe I’m just being picky, or expecting too much from Hollywood – a place that generally views anything cleaner than "Something About Mary" as Cleaverish. To be fair, Fantastic Four 2 is one of the squarer movies I’ve seen in a while – no sex scenes, no f-bombs, no using the Lord’s name in vain (as the first movie does once). But there were still, by my count, three minor cuss words and a bit of sexual innuendo, and I find myself asking: “Why? Why bother? Why include any of that stuff?” If you’re going to make a square movie, why not be all-the-way square? If you think you can successfully leave 99% of the movie free of cussing and sexual innuendo, why not 100%? It would be one thing to include cussing and innuendo if you weren’t using the “wholesome” factor in advertising the movie, but if you’re marketing it as family-friendly, why not truly make it so?
I mentioned in my other FF post that America could use more square movies. Some people these days view Andy Griffith and the Beave as so passé, what with all those silly conservative notions such as the nuclear family, traditional gender roles and slapstick humor. But Fantastic Four 2 did well at the box office – and I strongly doubt that the few cuss words and innuendos contributed to that success, or that their removal would have diminished it.