12/21-Home Alone (1990)

Obviously this is not the first time I've seen this movie.  I don't think there's a person born in the 80s or early 90s that hasn't seen this movie.  But there's always things to see that you've never noticed before.  Sometimes those things are as simple as paying attention to the credits.  For example, did you know that this movie was written by John Hughes?  The same John Hughes who did The Breakfast Club as well as many of those other quintessential movies from the 80s.  Or that it was directed by Chris Columbus, who I always associated with the two worst Harry Potter movies, but also directed some less bad movies like Mrs. Doubtfire.

So Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) plays a kind of bratty little kid who is the youngest of like five.  I don't really know, because it's hard to tell based on how many kids are staying at the house at the beginning of the movie.  Everyone treats Kevin like shit, saying how everyone always has to do everything for him and he's what the French call, "les incompétents" (the family is leaving for France in the morning, so one of them spewing French is not weird).  In trying to secure some pizza at dinner, a soda gets knocked over onto the passports and such, requiring a quick cleanup and the accidental disposal of one of the tickets.  This is a tiny little detail, but becomes relevant soon, and then the next time you watch it with someone, you can point it out and act all superior.

They hand-wrote his name because this was before tickets were assigned to specific people

After this incident, Kevin is sent up to his room, despite everyone else in the family being the real asshole.  His brother ate the one flavor that Kevin likes, his uncle called him a jerk, which is insanely hypocritical because a grown man calling an 8-year-old a jerk is about the jerkiest thing I can think of.  So in his annoyance, he tells him mom that he wished he had no family.

Cue the next morning and due to a power outage in the middle of the night, everyone overslept.  In their extreme rush to get ready, they accidentally count a neighbor boy instead of Kevin (who no one bothered to wake up).  Upon arriving at the airport, they get everyone in and don't notice that they are missing Kevin because there is no extra ticket (because it was thrown away!  Just like in the picture!)

Kevin, on the other hand, wakes up to an empty house, with the cars still in the garage (because they took cabs) and makes the marvelous assumption only a child would, that his wish came true and he made his parents disappear.  Upon this revelation, he does all the things any kid might do when realizing he has the whole house to himself: run around screaming then watch inappropriate movies while eating a truly obscene amount of ice cream.  It's a little strange that in his first viewing the movie, he gets freaked out and covers his eyes while the gangster kills a guy with a Tommy gun, but he does nearly equally as harmful stuff to the robbers later in the movie, but I'm getting ahead of myself.  He also plays with shit in his older brother's room, typical little brother stuff.

I'd also like to point out that he is afraid of the furnace in his basement and repeatedly sees it as a scary monster, although later gets over his fear as part of his story arc.  I only bring it up because that fucking furnace freaked me out so much as a kid.  It made me fear my basement and didn't have a furnace that was accessible in the main part of the floor.  Whether I felt chills on this viewing due to pure nostalgia or if it actually is scary even as an adult, I'm not sure, but the scene is still very effective to this day.

In the mean time, Harry and Marv, a pair of professional thieves, have been plotting to and robbing the other houses on the block.  We actually see them to be fairly competent in both the planning and execution of several of the robberies, as they had cased the houses and know exactly who is on vacation and when they're automatic lights come on.  Unfortunately for them, they don't know that Kevin is home alone (just like the movie title!).

Kevin begins to see these guys hanging around the neighborhood and starts to get concerned, especially because he saw one of them dressed as a police officer just a few nights prior.  At one point, he's spotted by the thieves and followed for awhile until he gives chase and manages to lose them, but gets even more scared because he runs into the supposed murderer, the shovel man.

Old and creepy?  Must be a murderer.

At the same time, Kevin is becoming self-sufficient.  He's bathing, fending for himself, he even goes to the store to get a new toothbrush.  "Are you here by yourself?" the clerk asks him.  "Do you really think a boy of my age would out and about alone?  No, my dad is just outside getting the car."  Kevin really shows himself to be a cunning manipulator when it comes to adults in his community.

And finally, in what is way later in the movie than I ever realized, the two burglars make an attempt of Kevin's house, but he is able to booby trap the place to keep everything safe.  It's seriously the last half hour of the movie before he even begins to set the traps.  And what was once my favorite part of the movie now just makes me feel kind of bad for these guys.  Like I know they are trying to rob the place, but does that really mean they deserve to die (obviously they don't die because this is a kids' movie, but based on all the injuries they should take, they should have died)?  He also is able to clean everything up all by himself in seemingly like an hour, which doesn't make much sense, but that's okay, it's a movie.

In the end, his family returns and he's glad to have them home.  They're impressed that he was able to survive for like two days on his own, having no idea about robbers.  This is a nice ending, but the story with the shovel man reconnecting with his son is much more endearing than anything with Kevin, although Kevin is the reason for the reunion, so technically he is involved.

Rating on the feel-good-o-meter: 6 out of 10 hugs