While we pass judgment on movies all the time, at the end of the day, everybody has their own taste in cinema. What’s more, we would not normally be critical of what movies a professional athlete chooses to watch. They’re athletes, not movie producers. Except, therein lies the problem. LeBron James is a movie producer. He has a production company, and an office, on the Warner Brothers lot. He's bringing us a sequel to Space Jam. We’re now wondering if he should be disqualified from this. This guy recently sat down with his kids to watch How the Grinch Stole Chirstmas, Interview with a Vampire, and The Punisher. In one evening. We have so many questions.
LeBron James and his Cleveland Cavaliers have earned themselves a spot in the NBA Eastern Conference Finals. What’s most interesting about this, if you're a sports person, is the fact that to get a shot at the Finals, they may have to play James’ old team, the Miami Heat. LeBron apparently doesn’t care about this, however, as instead of watching his potential opponent's recent Game 5, he watched movies with his kids. That's fantastic. While the ESPN analyst who reported this is interested in it from a sports perspective, we have serious questions to ask about the movies King James chose for his mini-marathon.
What an absolutely bizarre combination of films. First off, who watches How the Grinch Stole Christmas in May? Secondly, while it’s possible they watched the animated special with Boris Karloff as the narrator, since the other two on the list are actual movies, we’re guessing they watched the live-action Jim Carrey movie, and there’s no real excuse for watching that one at all, even in December.
Secondly, as somebody who had HBO in his house at the age of six, I saw my share of R-rated movies long before the MPAA would have deemed it appropriate. So, if LeBron James wants to show his kids Interview with a Vampire, when his oldest kid is 12, I’m not going to argue. It's his prerogative, for sure. But that movie is pretty dark. We hope LeBron knows his kids well enough to be sure that was appropriate. Either that, or we hope he actually watched that one third, and the kids were asleep on the couch by then.
Finally, we do need some clarification on which version of The Punisher they saw. Was this the god-awful Dolph Lundgren version from the '80s, or the Thomas Jane-led one from 2004? I’m actually a bigger fan of the Thomas Jane Punisher than most people apparently are, ecauseb I think we can agree it was a great improvement over Lundgren. There's no way it was War Zone, right? LeBron... they're children!
But the broader problem here is that if you’re going to watch three movies in one night, you need to properly structure your marathon. You need to pick a genre, or an actor, or some over-arching theme to link your films together. Watching these three movies in one night would give me whiplash, and possibly nightmares. Unless…
Maybe they were having a "Shitty Movie Night" on purpose? That must be it! Do you think watching movies at LeBron’s house is like watching an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000? It would at least explain the choices. What do you think?
