TDM: Total Dad Movies with Tooky, Dave, & Mike Mike Dorval, Tooky Kavanagh, David Rabinow

Perhaps the most Dad-spirational movie of all time, this movie features beautiful people doing cool stuff in a fantasy city.  Every Dad sees himself in a cool suit talking the racket, or tugging on our bucket hats at the track, ready for one big score. But the truth is: most of us are Julia Roberts: blissfully unaware of the danger at the edges of our  existence until it's too late.

ClooneyPittRobertsDamonCheadleReinerGarcia in Steven Soderbergh's 2001 heist comedy remake of OCEAN'S ELEVEN!

Well, I believe in the small of a woman's back... 
The hanging curveball... high fiber... good scotch.
I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
I believe there ought to be a Constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. 
I believe in the sweet spot, soft core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve, and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days. 

Dads everywhere have this tattooed on their khakis. This week: Ron Shelton's 1988 minor league baseball comedy tone poem BULL DURHAM.

Leslie Neilsen is your dad's favorite actor, and probably his second favorite actor as well. 

Leslie Neilsen carried a handheld fart sound machine wherever he went. 

Leslie Neilsen's gravestone reads "Let 'er rip".

Leslie Neilsen is the Chuck Norris of Dad humor, except he actually did all the stuff that we celebrate him for. 

THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD makes for a complicated watch after, say, 1994 (the Dads get into it), but in this space, we're just celebrating the simple gift to Dads that is Leslie Neilsen as we dig into Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker's 1989 dadjokeapalooza THE NAKED GUN.

This movie needs a Dad! But I guess if it had one, it wouldn't really be a Batman, would it? Aren't most Tim Burton movies about missing grown ups in one way or another? He's got some stuff to work through, but then again, don't we all? Bruce Wayne certainly does; so does his counterpart Jack Napier/Joker in this astoundingly awkward mash-up of ideas, tones, and styles. We'll take you deep into the Freudian undertones of Timmy B's 1989 weirdly massively successful blockbuster (Keaton! Nicholson! Basinger! PRINCE, FOR CHRISSAKES! And...Jack Palance?), BATMAN!

Look! Up in the sky! It's our childhood!

If you read comics as a kid, you read some Superman. And, love him or hate him, you knew who Superman was, and, secretly, you probably wished the people around you could be a little more like him. Granted, it's easier to have an unbendable moral code if you don't need to eat and nothing can ever hurt you, but still, you had to respect the guy. And if you are a Comics Dad (tm), I bet your kid knew something about Superman before they could say the word "Batmobile".

Now, I have nothing against messrs. Cavill and Snyder, but that *woosh* you heard in 2013 was every Dad in the world sucking in a breath to exclaim THAT'S NOT WHAT SUPERMAN DOES! IMO, they didn't get it.

You know who got it? Christopher Reeve. And Margot Kidder. And Richard Donner. And, while Marlon Brando didn't totally get it, at least my man got paid. Join us as we spin the Earth backwards to review Donner's 1978 ur-superhero film SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE.

When you're a dad/
And you want to watch/
A film/
GHOSTBUSTERS!
As the Ghostbuniversters expands, we visit Ivan Reitman's ur-text, the 1984 classic that started the whole michegas.