A Hollywood Education

When my son, Jesse, was just shy of his 16th birthday, I allowed him to drop out of school. It was not an easy decision. I am a teacher, and know well what the world has to offer a young man with only a ninth-grade education. But I had no choice. Here was a happy, healthy, gregarious kid who simply loathed school. It was killing him: the failure, the bad report cards, the guilt because he hated making his parents so unhappy. I couldn't watch him suffer anymore, so I freed him. (Story continued below...)

But there was a condition: he had to watch three movies a week with me. I picked them. Watching movies together, it turns out, gave him what he needed most, what I think every teenage boy needs: time with his father.

I also hoped I could slip in a little education. High school had already killed Shakespeare for him; I didn't want to do that to movies. The question is: what can we learn from films? To be frank, I'm not sure you learn anything that sticks from art. A novel, a film, can change how you see the world for a few hours, maybe a week, but soon, like gravity, who you are reclaims you. Still, I hoped he might get something beyond entertainment from the more than 350 films that we watched during those three delicious years. To my surprise, I found all sorts of buried treasures. Even in the most pilloried, implausible or forgotten Hollywood movies, there was gold: life lessons not just for an adrift teenager, but for everyone.

Don ' t trust popular failure (even someone else ' s).
For a long time now I have adopted "Ishtar" (1987) as my pet injustice. It was a box-office disaster, flogged by critics, most of whom were furious with Warren Beatty for having so many girlfriends. During the 30-second introduction I gave Jesse before each film, I suggested that the affaire "Ishtar" served as proof of the unreliability of popular condemnation. "Ishtar" is, in fact, a lovely movie with a flaw in the middle, when the two failed songwriters wind up in the desert. But you have to have a chip on your shoulder the size of Colorado to remain uncharmed at the spectacle of Beatty and Dustin Hoffman singing and dancing a two-step.

But the tour de force, what makes "Ishtar" worth another look, is a scene in a restaurant somewhere in the Middle East. Explaining local politics to a woolly-headed Hoffman, Charles Grodin's CIA agent alludes to a situation in Libya. Hoffman stops him: "Libya? That's near here, right?"

Watch Grodin's double take, a dazzling bit of timing, before he says, almost inaudible with dismay, "Yeah, that's near here." How such an exquisite comedic moment got lost under an avalanche of hostility is depressing but instructive. It means that wonderful work gets ignored every day for reasons that have nothing to do with the work itself.

Nobody loves a weenie.
I wanted to be careful not to spawn a snob in my living room, an obnoxious teenager who watches only black-and-white Japanese films with subtitles. It was my job, I felt, to teach my son how to have a good time watching a bad movie. So I showed him "Pretty Woman" (1990) with Julia Roberts. Here is a movie (call girl meets dreamy guy and "changes") where there is not a single moment of truth, of life as we experience it. Yet it's a skillful piece of storytelling. If you love movies, I told Jesse, you must learn to surren-der yourself to the idiot grasp of films like "Pretty Woman."