No Love for Will Smith

Okay, Mary Pols, listen up: "AFTER EARTH", THE MOVIE STARRING WILL SMITH AND HIS SON, JADEN, WAS AN EXCELLENT MOVIE. Got it, Mary? You're wrong. Before I returned it to the video store, I watched it a second time. If I wanted to, I could write a film review using the lingo that art critics use, and expound ad nauseum about why After Earth is a good movie, but I won't torture my readers with the pretentious, artsy-fartsy gobbledygook (Sorry: vocabulary) that you people use. Instead, I am going to take the low road, and accuse you of being a man-hating female who-to misquote the 1988 classic-just don't understand. Yours isn't the only review to pan the movie, but the criticism is always the same: Oh, it's so stupid. It's about a father who pushes his son around. Blah blah blah. Clearly, you critics who hate this movie are either: (a) women, or (b) men who had a shitty relationship with your fathers. Well, that's just too effing bad. Not my problem. Well, it is my problem, because your inability to understand the power and importance of the father-son relationship has so biased you dingdongs against this movie, because you hate what you don't understand. Any father with a son who is 5 years old, 15 years old, or 25 years old, will love this movie. I undertsood it, despite my love-hate relationship with my step-father. My brother, who never had a mature relationship with his father (we had the same mom) would have thought that the movie was dumb. Of course, he would. Okay, now I'm going to indulge myself, and do a little bit of the artsy-fartsy film critic thing: After Earth is a universal story of the father-son relationship, in which the son struggles with the contradiction of asserting his own identity, breaking free free of his father, while earning his father's love and respect. It is a coming-of-age story with all of the elements of The Hero's Journey. Joseph Campbell would be proud of Will Smith. So, why didn't the movie make billions of dollars? Probably because : (a) most dads like me are raising children, on a budget, and rent movies more often than we go to the movie theater (b) teenagers, who are supposed to be the big spenders (of their parents'money) in movie theaters aren't going to be interested in a story like this, because they are too busy texting and tweeting each other (during the movie, while sitting next to each other) about how stupid their parents are. Well, duh.