MY CONVERSATION with a seven-year-old kid after exiting Hotel Transylvania:
ME: Soooo… what did you think?
KID: It was good.
ME: Did you think it was funny?
KID: No.
And that is the problem with children. Because of their age, they are basically tasteless—despite adages that tout their “innocent wisdom.” They like any movie, because any movie is still better than being told to eat boiled asparagus. However, they do know “funny,” and Hotel Transylvania isn’t anything like “funny.” Nutshell: Dracula (voiced by Adam Sandler) builds a hotel to give monsters a place to relax without human intervention, as well as protecting his vampire daughter (Selena Gomez) from the outside world. A human hippie comes along (Andy Samberg) pretending to be a monster, but falls in love with the daughter while teaching the other monsters that humans aren’t so bad, and—DO YOU SEE WHERE THIS IS GOING? While this CGI flick has a pretty good pedigree (directed by The Powerpuff Girls’ Genndy Tartakovsky, with a screenplay co-written by SNL‘s Robert Smigel), Hotel Transylvania inspired yet another kid sitting near me to opine, “I want to go home now.” Ah, the wisdom of children.
