I don't know what's wrong with these kids today

It was B-movie day for me again, this time Catch That Kid, in which high-tech preteens rob a bank. The surprising and appealing presence of a 40-year-old (ulp) Jennifer Beals notwithstanding, I sort of hated the movie while I was watching it. It seemed weirdly amoral, and amorality is one thing in a heist movie about adults like Rififi, quite another in a kids' movie. Or so went my thinking at the show.

But afterward it occurred to me that many fine kids' narratives have a kind of amorality, or at least separate spheres of morality for kids and adults. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a good example, and when I was a kid I much preferred Tom Sawyer to Huckleberry Finn, I think precisely because of Tom's (obviously not total) amorality. Huck's moral clarity obviously is the better template for living life, but at age nine or so I admired how Tom uses cunning and imagination to outsmart the adults in his life, who anyway are inattentive at best and deeply corrupt at worst.

There are elements of these themes in Catch That Kid, though of course it's no Tom Sawyer.

I had a moment to kill at the movie theater before the film, so I played a round of a Simpsons-themed bowling video game. I chose to be Groundskeeper Willie (my Scottishness again), and although the game wasn't hard--I rolled a 259--I enjoyed hearing Willie say things like, "Those pukes said I had no class!"