Anchor ads are not supported on this page.

4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs

The Boss Baby gets its kids just right

Diapered disruption

The Boss Baby: The corded toy phone and sock garters aren’t the only old-fashioned glories on display.
The Boss Baby: The corded toy phone and sock garters aren’t the only old-fashioned glories on display.

The first sign that The Boss Baby will be a pleasant surprise — and not simply an exercise in sticking Alec Baldwin’s Scotch-mellowed tycoon’s rasp in the mouth of a CGI infant and chuckling at the juxtaposition — shows up right at the outset. Instead of meeting the titular baby as he makes his way through the automated celestial mechanism for delivering newborns to Earth (that bit gets saved for the opening credits), we get an extended encounter with his older brother Tim and his expectant parents. Right away, we know the Boss Baby is not the point; the point is the world he disrupts — the ordinary world of childhood. The world governed by love and animated by imagination.

Sponsored
Sponsored

A word on that imagination: Tim is forever building worlds for himself, using a decidedly lo-tech assortment of hats as inspiration: explorer, diver, ninja, etc. It’s no accident that the toys used throughout the film — both the regular kind and the magically functional sort the Boss Baby uses — are old-school material instead of digital. There’s no imagination required to see new worlds on your smartphone, and no real incongruity in seeing a modern-day baby with an app-laden tablet. And imagination — particularly the febrile, unfettered inventiveness of youth — provides the film with much of its visual wit, forever bouncing the viewer between the world and the world as seen by Tim. It also powers its dramatic resolution.

And a further word on the love: when the diapered disruptor does show up, he’s not just stealing the spotlight with a baby’s standard-issue selfishness; he’s importing a marketplace mindset into a culture of community, making a pie chart out of parental love and espousing the notion that the new model is always more desirable. Small wonder that he was designated as management material (as opposed to family material) when he failed to giggle after being tickled. Some human feeling has to be missing if you can cast all creation in terms of competition. And it’s love — uncommodified and indivisible — that gives form to the film’s (spoiler alert) happy ending.

Movie

Boss Baby ***

thumbnail

Surprise! Dreamworks’ latest is not simply an exercise in sticking Alec Baldwin’s Scotch-mellowed tycoon’s rasp in the mouth of a CGI infant and chuckling at the juxtaposition. Instead, this story of a boy’s troubles when his baby brother arrives serves as a rousing defense of familial love as a good that can’t be commodified, and the family itself as a community that can’t be corporatized. Most magical of all, it’s a celebration of childhood imagination — that old-fashioned force that imbues ordinary life with extraordinary significance and wonder, all without the benefit of any sort of digital device. (It’s telling that the parents’ cameras are old-style, and even The Boss Baby’s hotline to headquarters is a corded, rotary toy.) Director Tom McGrath has the good sense to treat all this serious stuff with the lightest of touches, instead guiding the kiddies in the audience to focus on a battle between puppies and babies for human affection, the grown-ups on Baldwin’s quippery, and everybody on the oft-crossed line between fantasy and reality in the mind’s eye of a child.

Find showtimes

All that may seem like a lot to heap on the slender shoulders of a children’s movie. Perhaps it will help to think of it instead as terra firma: the solid reality from which the story can be launched into the silly stratosphere. Because the plot here concerns the Boss Baby’s mission to stop a plot to make people want puppies instead of babies, and there’s an action-movie confrontation with the bad guy set against a rocket ship’s countdown, and there’s the usual avalanche of kiddie-clever quips and gags, plus a line or two thrown in for the old folks (“Cookies are for closers!”). It’s too silly to be a slog, but it’s also too smart to be a whiz-bang, emptyhearted bore. I could have done without the kewpie-doll faces and oversized eyes, but for the most part and where it counts, The Boss Baby gets its kids just right.

Here's something you might be interested in.
Submit a free classified
or view all
Previous article

A poem for March by Joseph O’Brien

“March’s Lovely Asymptotes”
The Boss Baby: The corded toy phone and sock garters aren’t the only old-fashioned glories on display.
The Boss Baby: The corded toy phone and sock garters aren’t the only old-fashioned glories on display.

The first sign that The Boss Baby will be a pleasant surprise — and not simply an exercise in sticking Alec Baldwin’s Scotch-mellowed tycoon’s rasp in the mouth of a CGI infant and chuckling at the juxtaposition — shows up right at the outset. Instead of meeting the titular baby as he makes his way through the automated celestial mechanism for delivering newborns to Earth (that bit gets saved for the opening credits), we get an extended encounter with his older brother Tim and his expectant parents. Right away, we know the Boss Baby is not the point; the point is the world he disrupts — the ordinary world of childhood. The world governed by love and animated by imagination.

Sponsored
Sponsored

A word on that imagination: Tim is forever building worlds for himself, using a decidedly lo-tech assortment of hats as inspiration: explorer, diver, ninja, etc. It’s no accident that the toys used throughout the film — both the regular kind and the magically functional sort the Boss Baby uses — are old-school material instead of digital. There’s no imagination required to see new worlds on your smartphone, and no real incongruity in seeing a modern-day baby with an app-laden tablet. And imagination — particularly the febrile, unfettered inventiveness of youth — provides the film with much of its visual wit, forever bouncing the viewer between the world and the world as seen by Tim. It also powers its dramatic resolution.

And a further word on the love: when the diapered disruptor does show up, he’s not just stealing the spotlight with a baby’s standard-issue selfishness; he’s importing a marketplace mindset into a culture of community, making a pie chart out of parental love and espousing the notion that the new model is always more desirable. Small wonder that he was designated as management material (as opposed to family material) when he failed to giggle after being tickled. Some human feeling has to be missing if you can cast all creation in terms of competition. And it’s love — uncommodified and indivisible — that gives form to the film’s (spoiler alert) happy ending.

Movie

Boss Baby ***

thumbnail

Surprise! Dreamworks’ latest is not simply an exercise in sticking Alec Baldwin’s Scotch-mellowed tycoon’s rasp in the mouth of a CGI infant and chuckling at the juxtaposition. Instead, this story of a boy’s troubles when his baby brother arrives serves as a rousing defense of familial love as a good that can’t be commodified, and the family itself as a community that can’t be corporatized. Most magical of all, it’s a celebration of childhood imagination — that old-fashioned force that imbues ordinary life with extraordinary significance and wonder, all without the benefit of any sort of digital device. (It’s telling that the parents’ cameras are old-style, and even The Boss Baby’s hotline to headquarters is a corded, rotary toy.) Director Tom McGrath has the good sense to treat all this serious stuff with the lightest of touches, instead guiding the kiddies in the audience to focus on a battle between puppies and babies for human affection, the grown-ups on Baldwin’s quippery, and everybody on the oft-crossed line between fantasy and reality in the mind’s eye of a child.

Find showtimes

All that may seem like a lot to heap on the slender shoulders of a children’s movie. Perhaps it will help to think of it instead as terra firma: the solid reality from which the story can be launched into the silly stratosphere. Because the plot here concerns the Boss Baby’s mission to stop a plot to make people want puppies instead of babies, and there’s an action-movie confrontation with the bad guy set against a rocket ship’s countdown, and there’s the usual avalanche of kiddie-clever quips and gags, plus a line or two thrown in for the old folks (“Cookies are for closers!”). It’s too silly to be a slog, but it’s also too smart to be a whiz-bang, emptyhearted bore. I could have done without the kewpie-doll faces and oversized eyes, but for the most part and where it counts, The Boss Baby gets its kids just right.

Comments
Sponsored
Here's something you might be interested in.
Submit a free classified
or view all
Previous article

Hip-hop artist Don Elway makes movies for his music

Not Ordinary EP tells a story of life on the streets
Next Article

Pet pig perches in pocket

Escondido doula gets a taste of celebrity
Comments
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed Big Screen — Movie commentary Blurt — Music's inside track Booze News — San Diego spirits Classical Music — Immortal beauty Classifieds — Free and easy Cover Stories — Front-page features Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts Feast! — Food & drink reviews Feature Stories — Local news & stories Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore From the Archives — Spotlight on the past Golden Dreams — Talk of the town The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it Letters — Our inbox Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news News Ticker — News & politics Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated Poetry — The old and the new Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers Reading — The hunt for intellectuals Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds SD on the QT — Almost factual news Sheep and Goats — Places of worship Special Issues — The best of Street Style — San Diego streets have style Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves Theater — On stage in San Diego this week Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads Your Week — Daily event picks
4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs
Close

Anchor ads are not supported on this page.