Daddies in the Dark

There are many reasons to be thankful for being a dad. One more became obvious this past weekend with Kung Fu Panda cashing $60 million of tickets, the week's highest gross in the American movieplex market.

The key to the movies success — based on purely nonscientific research (i.e., a dad's gut feeling, which should but usually isn't allowed to trump "a mom's intuition") — is that daddy could legitimately (and in the dark) get in touch with his inner boy. Men are deemed silly when going to cartoons alonbe, but fathers had a ready companion, uncles had a legitimate claim and other adult males will just seem creepy trying to entice a kid into attending KFP with them.

In contrast to Panda, a movie for kids that may really be for adults, there is "In Memory of My Father," a movie for adults that is really a celebration for kids of how they could be gloriously juvenile, if only "selfish" dad would get out of the way.

And on a tangent, a combination of dad and child, is found with news of Tom Bupp, pere and fils. Papa was a kiddy extra in 1930s American cine and son devotes his retirement (thanks to eBay, et al.) to collecting memorabilia featuring the oeuvre.

** No father, no matter how he is portrayed on the screen, is ever only two-dimensional. **