A Kid's Guide to the Movies
Fed up with not really knowing whether a movie is worth watching? Need to know when to fast-forward the boring bits? Here at last is a specially written guide to films for kids themselves.
The Kid's Movie Guide was thought up by Barry Cunningham, who thought it was time that "children's movie guides" were aimed at children, and not their fretful parents. He commissioned me to come up with the 300 best children's movies, a plan hastily revised to "300 movies" when it became clear that there weren't 300 good movies around. The book includes comments on DVD extras, film facts and trivia, and several diatribes about the evils of corporate marketing. It also pointed out a really obvious blooper in the Empire Strikes Back that nobody else seems to have noticed in the last 20 years. The English edition also includes a number of adoring digressions about Nicole Kidman and Fairuza Balk, which appear to have been excised from the American version.
Deep down, the book was designed to encourage children to think about films, about the way that they were being encouraged to consume, about the motivation behind excessive sequels, and about the process of making films. For reasons I never quite understood, the book took a year from delivery to publication, meaning that some of my DVD-related comments were already out of date by the time it saw print. I would like to say it was well-received, acclaimed, or even best-selling, but nobody ever reviewed it and I have never seen a royalty statement, so who knows…? A friend of a friend once complained that I was very unfair to the My Little Pony movie, which was a result of sorts. I described it as an experience that was "…as much fun as a trip to the dentist's," which sounds like fair comment to me.