First, a gratingly long list of mediocre R-rated movies:
Blindness (rated R): Completely hopeless film about people catching an infectious disease of blindness and getting rounded up in a mental asylum.
Quarantine (R): Completely hopeless film about a TV news crew getting trapped in a Centers for Disease Control quarantine of a building where everybody catches a version of rabies and dies. (What is this, a trend?)
Burn After Reading (R): A dippy personal trainer gets caught up in a government plot, doesn’t know what he’s doing, and gets shot in the face, and so much for Brad Pitt.
Body of Lies (R): Leonardo di Caprio pretends to be a rugged CIA agent and we're lectured again about the moral rot of American foreign policy manipulators.
Righteous Kill (R): Serial killer takes out violent felons who've fallen through the cracks of the justice system. Nothing more than a ripoff from that perverted TV show "Dexter."
Miracle at St. Anna (R): Spike Lee tries to make a war movie without any wacko claims about the federal government blowing up levees in New Orleans.
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (R): British satire of celebrity journalism, complete with a pig urinating on a woman at the British version of the Oscars. Ha. Ha.
Religulous (R): Who'd give two nickels to Bill Maher to watch him rant against God?
Appaloosa is a Western that I might enjoy on my own, but it’s an R.
Then there's the PG-13 gunk to consider:
Flash of Genius (PG-13): Son, let's see a whole movie about the inventor of intermittent windshield wipers. I think I’d skip that even on a rainy day.
Lakeview Terrace (PG-13): Samuel L. Jackson plays a psychotic next-door neighbor-slash-cop threatening an interracial couple after he sees them having sex through the windows.
Nights in Rodanthe (PG-13): Richard Gere and Diane Lane in a sappy, adulterous, beachside soap opera, and I’d rather gargle Drano than watch that.
The Duchess (PG-13): a British costume drama about an unhappy arranged marriage. Interest level for an 11-year-old boy? Zero.
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (PG-13): Teenage indie-music nightlife hipster movie. Pass.
Eagle Eye (PG-13): This action thriller might have appealed to us, until critics suggested you'd need a full-frontal lobotomy to enjoy it.
He didn't think at 11-year-old boy would thrill to see a movie about a crumbling marriage in "Fireproof." I did take my wife and my 10-year-old daughter and they loved it.
Boys can be tough customers. When my son was young, I used to always get a laugh when someone would say "Have you seen [insert cool adult film here]?" and I would say dryly, "No, but have you seen Power Rangers: Turbo?"
