Hey 3.5 readers.
Me again with another Home Alone observation.
So, when this movie came out in 1990, the general consensus among the public was that if you were in someone else’s home and you weren’t supposed to be there, then you deserved to get bashed in the face with a paint can, get a nail through your foot, get your head burnt with a blow torch, get a tarantula dropped on you, get shot in the penis with a BB gun, break your back by slipping and falling on ice and toy cars, have your hand burned and so on.
I should know because I was a kid who saw this film in the theater and let me tell you – white, black, young, old, rich, poor, conservative, liberal, or what have you, every one was laughing at those two and the general consensus was those two got what was coming to them and good for Kevin for giving it to them.
Sigh. I feel bad there is so much division today when in 1990, we all were able to come together and agree that burglers deserve to be tortured mercilessly and caused multiple life threatening injuries by precocious children.
Today? Eh, people feel sorry for criminals today. If Hollywood ever remakes the movie, they might either scrap the abuse received by Harry and Mary altogether, or at the very least, they’d devote a portion of the film to explaining how “the Wet Bandits” turned to a life of crime.
You see, in the 1990 film, Harry and Marv were one-dimensional caricatures of criminals, a pair of incompetent bumbling buffoons who found great joy in ripping people off all day.
In a remake, you’d probably learn that Harry and Marv used to be pillars of the community, but alas they lost their jobs, couldn’t find work and ended up burgling houses in order to save up enough money to buy second-hand suits to wear to job interviews.
Kevin would feel bad for misjudging the poor souls. He’d give them a meal and some of his Dad’s old suits and hide them from the cops and let them live in his basement until they find jobs and become pillars of the community again.
Either that, or Kevin would be sued by greedy trial lawyers for all the damage he did to Harry and Marv.
“Your honor, my clients were just a couple of poor men who fell on hard times and while they are truly sorry for burgling the McAllister home, did they really deserve the brain damage they were caused by taking those paint cans to the face? I think not.”
Hey, if it is any consolation, this movie started a Joe Pesci-renaissance. This movie was the first time I ever saw Pesci in anything. He’d been in a lot of films before but then after Home Alone he pretty much got a part in like every 1990s gangster movie, so there’s some trivia for you.
What say you, 3.5?
Bookshelf Battle 