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As I wrote earlier this year in a post about Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, I can never bring myself to hate inane family comedies like Parental Guidance because I’ve witnessed firsthand how happy they make people with developmental disabilities. Movies like these operate on the simplest level in terms of visual content, regularly depicting characters performing familiar actions (making toast, starting a car, watching a baseball game, etc) with little to no conflicting detail in the frame. The close-ups are comparably bare and, heightened by the broad acting style, have the effect of spelling out a scene’s emotional content in all capital letters. The stories tend to be simple too. Characters state outright how they’re feeling or what lessons they’ve learned (and, by implication, would like us to learn); the villains tend to be the characters who say mean things.
