Film · Prime Video · 1988

Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School

A Saturday-morning kindness. The monsters' children are the neighbors. Fine for a young house, thin for anyone else.

Shaggy takes a job he is not qualified for, which is the joke, and then he stays, which is the only moral the picture has room for. The girls are not a twist to be unmasked. They are students. Their fathers are the old monster names, played as worried parents rather than as a hunt. Revolta is the actual villain, and she is a villain because she would use the girls.

It is television animation from a cheaper decade. The songs are filler. The idea is sound enough for a child who is learning that a strange classmate is still a classmate. Do not pretend it is a story you discuss at supper. Put it on, then go meet someone.

The eight

Industry
4/10
A job accepted, mostly by accident, and then actually done.
Household
5/10
Fathers who come for their daughters. A found crew that does not bolt.
Piety
2/10
Magic as the furniture. No reverence.
Courage
5/10
They stay when the school gets dangerous.
Republic
5/10
A school is the unit, and the plot is about not handing the students over.
Temperance
6/10
Mild. The scare is a costume.
Truth
5/10
The girls are what they say they are. The fraud is the woman who flatters them into a trap.
Stewardship
5/10
It hands a child a first practice in hospitality.

Live historicallyLet a child be polite to someone the room has already decided is frightening.

Film · Walt Disney · 2018

Avengers: Infinity War

They show up, and they lose. His theory is a massacre with a sentence attached.

The snap is not a twist to cheer. It is a man finishing an argument with a corpse count. The film knows he is wrong. It also builds the whole evening toward his success, and it asks the audience to feel the scale of it as awe and then as loss. The loss is the truer of the two.

A teenager can watch it if the house is in the room for the end. Say that a theory of what the world can afford is not a license to spend people. The repair, if they watch the next one, does not make this hour smaller. The people were gone. That was the bill.

The eight

Industry
5/10
A great deal of competence is on display, and almost all of it is spent on a war that does not feed a house.
Household
4/10
A daughter is the price of a stone. The film is horrified, and it still makes that murder the climax of his quest.
Piety
3/10
Fate and stones stand in for conscience. Almost no one is stopped by a duty older than the fight.
Courage
7/10
They go, knowing the odds, and the film lets them lose. Showing up is not nothing.
Republic
4/10
There is no people here, only teams. A universe is the backdrop, not a country anyone is keeping.
Temperance
4/10
The scale of the dying is a spectacle. The quiet after it is the only restrained minute.
Truth
7/10
It tells the truth that they fail, and that a reasonable-sounding theory can be a reason to kill half a world.
Stewardship
3/10
Half of life is spent to prove a point. The film disagrees with him and still gives him the hour.

Live historicallyWhen someone in this house says a hard choice is necessary, ask who is being spent.