My boys and I love going to the movies together. It is one of the great blessings of fatherhood: sitting in the dark next to your children, eating overpriced popcorn, watching the glow of a screen reflect back onto faces that are growing up faster than seems medically advisable.

Over the years, we have done the usual father-son cinematic pilgrimage. Marvel movies. Superheroes. Multiverses. Explosions. Men in armor. Men with hammers. Men with shields. Men with complicated trauma that somehow still allows them to maintain extraordinary abdominal definition. This is familiar territory for adolescent boys. Give them a portal in the sky, a city under attack, and a man with a cape trying to resolve his father-issues, and they are at home.

But this past weekend, through my own scheduling creation—a kind of domestic Barbenheimer—we saw The Devil Wears Prada 2 on Saturday night and Mortal Kombat on Sunday night.

On paper, this made sense. Saturday night was fashion, ambition, betrayal, couture, and Meryl Streep delivering emotional annihilation through a whisper. Sunday night was skull-cracking, spine-ripping, blood-splattering video-game mythology. One movie asked: What does success cost a woman in a world built to devour her? The other asked: What if someone got punched so hard their skeleton briefly became public?

And yet, here is the part I cannot stop thinking about: after both movies, the boys could not stop talking about The Devil Wears Prada. Not Mortal Kombat. Not the fatalities. Not the fights. Not whatever ancient tournament of testosterone had been resurrected for our entertainment. The chick flick.

I........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)