Our legend of awesomeness
For the first time in seven years, Jack watched a movie at the cinema. Then, having conquered one of his greatest fears, we went back three days later and watched it again.
The film is Kung Fu Panda 4, and fortunately it stands a rewatch, particularly if you’re engaged in near constant whispered chatter with a nervous twelve year old wearing earmuffs, causing you to miss important plot points the first time.
The most commonly asked question, and the fulcrum of his fears, is ‘are they running away?’ Whenever we’ve tried to get him to watch movies, that is always the primary concern — ‘Will there be running away?’ ‘Is there running away in Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs?’ ‘Is there running away in David Attenborough’s Planet Earth 3 (of course there is, a leopardess drops out of a tree on some deer) Do the feelings in Inside Out do any running away?’ The answer, we have discovered the hard way, is that almost every movie has running away. We think the running away phobia might have been sparked by the scene in Frozen where Elsa runs away from the palace shooting ice cords out of her wrists. Certainly, Jack’s Frozen phobia is at the apex of his movie fears, so much so that he can’t even cope with Joe Daniher kicking goals at the Gabba to spark an ironic round of ‘Let it Go’.
But this week we found out that Jack’s love for Jack Black outweighs his fear of running away in movies. It began with School of Rock many years ago, a film Jack can recite word for word, and which doesn’t have much running away in it, unless you count the kids running away from school to perform at Battle of the Bands, which Jack doesn’t. It also doesn’t have ‘movie music’, the intense soundtrack stuff that I think is at the heart of tension-building scenes that Jack can’t handle. Instead it has classic rock riffs scattered throughout, including the greatest montage in movie history when Dewey Finn teaches the kids how to rock to The Ramones ‘Bonzo Goes to Bitburg (My Brain is Hanging Upside Down)’.
For a couple of years, we watched School of Rock nearly every day, until Jack decided he could try other Jack Black movies. We sampled them all, and had most success with Jack Black as the voice of Po in the Kung Fu Panda series. He is also obsessed by Jack Black’s comedy rock band, Tenacious D, and we are going on July 20th at Rod Laver Arena. Hopefully he won’t sing the lyrics to ‘Fuck her Gently’ in class the next morning.
The Tenacious D song we’re loving at the moment is their cover of Britney Speer’s ‘Baby One More Time’ which plays under the credit roll to Kung Fu Panda 4.
Jack made it the credits both times, the first wearing his noise reducing headphones, the second experiencing the Rosebud cinema’s full surround sound unadorned. He made me illegally bootleg the audio to the second session, and even as I type he’s listening to a voice recorder version of himself watching the film, and I can’t tell if it’s Jack in the cinema asking me questions on the recording, or Jack in the room asking me questions about the recording. As Po says at the end of the film, when life gives you lemons, make pear juice AND BLOW THEIR MINDS!
it will be interesting to see if this is a breakthrough. Jack still has his quirky phobias. he wouldn’t enter either cinema until the ads and previews had finished. Jack’s older brother, Harry, had to text me for the first session, and we listened from outside the cinema for the first notes of the Universal Pictures theme yesterday.
But Jack expressed interest in Despicable Me 4, while asking of course if there was any obvious running away. ‘Maybe we can go and see that’ he said last night. He was even more enthusiastic when I told him Despicable Me 4 was written by Mike White, who wrote School of Rock and played Ned Schneebly.
But really, it’s Jack Black who gets our Jack over the line. Of all the slightly too loud whispers in the cinema yesterday, the one that made me laugh the most was:
‘Dad, can you get me an acting agent so I can be in Kung Fu Panda 5 with Jack Black?’
We can do the first bit, probably. The second might be more of a challenge. Although who am I to squash dreams. As a great panda philosopher once said, ‘You have to believe in yourself. That's the secret.’
He just won’t be able to act the running away scenes.
If you like the Jack pieces, you might enjoy this one about his fear of sirens.
Jack is also featured on this episode of my Speakola podcast (2nd half)