Okay, guys. I’ve really been thinking a lot about this trailer right here. It’s a marvelously-edited bit of canned slickery, with non-diegetic train noises (that don’t figure in the film itself at all, natch), an elegant focus on the ’sexy’ adultery plotline (rather than the thoroughly unsexy and ridiculously played pedophilia plotline), and lots of faux-poetic images of suburbia which we will come to see is hiding a dangerous, dark underbelly. This trailer is selling this movie to a lot of people, and I’m very concerned that this awful little picture is going to be the next American Beauty. Or Crash.

As much as I’ve tried to rid my mind of this thing, Little Children remains. It’s insidious, it’s incompetent, it’s wince-inducingly overwrought. There are scenes and narrative strands of stultifying banality and laughable storytelling - scenes where grown men play football by night, where a man in his early thirties, anticipating a midlife crisis, decides to go skateboarding! It’s boring, too. But there are times when I think - maybe I just don’t get it? Maybe the near-universal acclaim streaming out of Todd Field’s suburbia-is-hell idiotfest is right, and I just can’t comprehend the masterful level on which this film works?

No. This is not the case. This isn’t working on any level ‘above’ me - after all, this is the new film from Todd Field, whose idea of subtlety is grafting an entire film around an extended lobster-catching metaphor. People, this movie is shit, and I’m charging you with making sure it does not become the next universally acclaimed Oscar-winning slice of horsepucky. For the sake of narrative American cinema, we cannot let whatever idea the American public has of ‘independent’ and ‘original’ voices in film be tied to this embarrassment. Please, America. Don’t let this happen:

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