Wes Anderson
2012
94 minutes
This is a Wes Anderson sort-of children's film with a Boy Scouts setting. There was a time at which you would treat this as the film equivalent of a Superfund site, terrified to wander near any portion of this. Wes Anderson has now earned enough of your trust where this is no longer the case. You'll enjoy this more than you would ever have thought, even though a lot of Wes fanatics aren't particularly fanatical for it.
You were never in Boy Scouts, though you briefly flirted with Webelo-dom, just long enough to get no uniform but a year-long subscription to Boy's Life. Reading that publication made you feel very excluded, like you had failed some initiation. But Boy Scouts in your town was not happening. It looked neither welcoming nor productive.
The two meetings you went to were a disaster. The first one ended before it even began because the others in the troop were so ill-behaved. At the second event you went to, the scout leaders had invited a Purdue professor to talk about Astronomy for the little dweebs trying to get their telescope badge or whatever. Your mother took you and sat next to you and ended up running into a man from her high school whose rather bratty kid was a year behind you. He was a single parent, so he greeted your mother in a very friendly way and the four of you sat together. This made you mildly uncomfortable since it made you look like a family, as though the two of you were brothers and your mother and her old classmate were your parents.
It soon became obvious that your mother's old classmate was quite intoxicated. He started friendly, but started getting sleepier and crankier as the evening went on. You were initially afraid he would fall asleep, which would be embarrassing enough. Instead he went the other direction. The Purdue professor got five minutes into his talk about what planets were visible that time of year before the man stood up very wobbly, pointed at the professor, and declared, "This is all fucking bullshit, why don't you tell these kids about acid rain!" Everyone stared at your little faux-family, and the flustered professor stepped off the podium and declared he didn't have anything else to say and concluded his remarks early.
Afterwards your mother was so upset that when the two of you went to get in the car, she got in the passenger seat. Confused, you got in the driver seat and stared at her, puzzled. At that point she started teetering on the edge of laughing and crying and you switched places and she drove you home and that was the end of your scouting adventures.
Time to choose something different: