A thread to follow up on my obligations to Shuichi so he doesn't get mad at me.

It was about this kid named Henry who was like this super genius, annoying so actually, like that one scene in Jimmy Neutron where Jimmy says "no it's not salt, it's NaCl" or whatever but stretched out for the entire length of the film. And the other subplot is there's this family next door consisting of a girl and her father, and the father is very abusive to her, and he can't be reported on since he's a police officer, or at least closely linked to him. So Henry starts to get really sick and dies (I think he ended up being too smart or something, maybe it was some kind of brain tumor?), which is a fairly gripping moment, not too much so, but really it's an about average kids film at this point... until we get to the book. See, Henry had this book where he was concocting some sort of secret plan, and it was soon revealed that this secret plan was... murdering the next door neighbor. Yes, seriously, the main plot point of this light-hearted family film involves the mother going around collecting supplies and building inventions in this really elaborate plot to kill their next door neighbor, and he also pre-recorded some stuff on a tape recorder to help her out and stuff. I mean, I guess technically the goal is to free the child of her abusive father, and she does try to at least report him and other sensible solutions before resorting to pre-meditated murder, but jfc is this whole plot just ridiculous. Long story short, the mother stops just before she pulls the trigger, thank God, but I guess he finds out anyway and confronts her, but I don't think anything actually comes from it. No, the really turning point comes when this teacher senses something wrong in the child due to judging her emotions or whatever (?), I don't really remember, and then I guess the teacher believes her and the cop/father actually gets reported, and when he hears the news he ends up commuting suicide anyways, which is like some nice. quality PG content right there (OK, fine, it's actually PG-13, but really it feels more like a PG standard kids movie with like pre-meditated murder and suicide mixed into it, and it's like a super weird tone clash). So, yeah... I don't remember very fond things about this movie at all.

Anyyway, back to the actual video. OK so the plot was pretty much how I remembered it, go memory! Except there's this cheeky thing I didn't mention where like the mother acts like a child and the child (Henry) acts like a proper adult and does all the finances and stuff, as if this movie couldn't get any more annoying. OK, so now I finished it. It basically just rips the whole movie apart and critiques the major problems and shortcomings of the film, and lot of which I mentioned in the summary above. I mean I guess it didn't do too much other than remind me of how bad it was, maybe it would've been better if I'd come into it not haven seen it prior. It's surprising how like none of the characters undergo any development or significant hurdles once it's broken down. Every character is pretty much terribly written, and it doesn't even seem like the Mom even learned anything from the whole murder plot since everything goes according to plan even without her following it through. And like the commentator mentions, I also felt it centered way too much around trying to kill Glenn instead of actually trying to save his abused daughter, and it's just a huge mess overall. I do find it kind of funny how the director himself admitted it was a struggle getting the tone down because it clearly was just a mess all around.