Once a week we try to sit down and watch a flick as a family. I will periodically post my thoughts about the films we see. This week: Short Circuit.

Believe it or not, it wasn't Jen's post about a pending remake that inspired us to see this 1986 Steve Guttenberg movie.  Amazon.com has a video-on-demand service called UnBox, which you can use to download movies directly to your Tivo (or computer if you like that kind of thing).  I had been meaning to give the service a try, and there was a 99-cent sale on sci-fi movies. Short Circuit was a choice, so we figured for a buck, why not?

The UnBox service worked great. I've heard mixed reviews about download speeds, but we were able to start watching the movie after about 3 minutes while it continued to download in the background. This is with a Tivo connected to the Internet via a cable modem. (As with all things technical, your mileage may vary.)

What about the movie? Well, it holds up pretty well after 20 years. The special effects aren't anything to get excited about, but the robot, Number Five, is mostly cute and reasonably charming. Fisher Stevens plays a somewhat politically incorrect engineer with a thick Hindi accent. A lot of his laugh lines come because of his accent ("Ooh. Her pants are blazing for you, Newton Crosby.") and/or the occasional malapropism ("Newton, we are wasting valueless time here.")  It's basically the same kind of thing as Apu from The Simpsons (except that Short Circuit came out first). There are a few four-letter words, which I had forgotten about (Newton Crosby [Gutenberg]: Holy shit. Number 5 (robot): No shit. Where see shit?).  My kids didn't think anything of the cussin'; we didn't make a big deal about it and so far no one has walked up to their teacher and used the s-word. The line "Life is NOT a malfunction," spoken by Stephanie Speck (played by Ally Sheedy) sounds very pro-life when seen today. That's probably reading too much into it (although looking at the image to the right, I'm wondering if I might be onto something.)

None of this would make me not recommend the film, which is refreshingly low-key compared to what comes out today (Speed Racer, I'm looking at you, although when I do I get a headache because there are so many colors on screen.)  I like the big stuff too, but it's nice to take a break every now and then. Plus the soundtrack is so 80's I started seeing leg warmers everywhere I looked. Short Circuit is more of a "family movie" (think E.T.) rather than a "kids' movie". As for the remake, I don't see any reason to do one, but now that the kids have seen the original, they'll probably want to check out the copy as well. So like Jen said, it's probably a good business idea (though not much of an artistic one).

Bottom line: Recommended, with mild language reservations.

image: Amazon.com