Smart House

Book Retorts

This week it’s Sam’s turn to share a Disney Channel original movie with the 1999 movie Smart House. Ben Cooper is your average 13-year-old kid completely distraught at the loss of his mother and so desperate to keep his family from changing further that he sabotages his dad’s attempts at dating. You know, healthy stuff. Ben isn’t only a severely troubled kid, he’s also a computer nerd and spends all his free time entering online contests, the most recent of which is to win a smart house. Ben, of course, wins, and this smart house his family moves into is amazing and can do pretty much anything including using its terrible tentacle arms to harass the local paper boy. It was apparently entirely built and programmed by one woman, Sara, working for a company that does…something, though nothing related to this house it seems since they basically give it away and never look back. At first, Pat, the house’s AI, is amazing, making smoothies and cleaning up messes, but when she starts to glitch Ben’s dad calls Sara in, and uses that as an excuse to date her. Ben is not having this and decides to reprogram Pat to be all the mother they could ever need (yikes!) and, setting aside how a child could reprogram this technological marvel, Ben clearly needs immediate therapy, as is common for most of the characters in our media. Things, predictably, go haywire from there, and then we are left to wonder if Ben’s family can survive Pat’s intense mothering, and if Ben will ever address his deep grief and trauma over the loss of his mother. But as this is a Disney movie, instead of therapy we get the delightful 90s pastiche that warms our hearts, including Ben and his friends performing a choreographed boy band dance. Even better, there’s a rat named Butler here to help!

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Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

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