You know how people describe some kid movies as being funny for adults too? Just to give you an idea of how this played out in Despicable Me, the joke that stands out in my head involves supervillain Gru going to the Bank of Evil to take out a loan to finance his plot to steal the moon, and seeing the notice that the Bank of Evil was “formerly Lehman Bros.” So you see.[1] On the bright side, the kid part of the movie was reasonably okay. Gru, who I already mentioned is a supervillain, is in competition with the rest of the supervillain community to pull off the world’s greatest heist. Along the way, he adopts three girls for use in a cookie-selling scheme, and learns valuable lessons about the importance of placing family above work. And I mean, it really is that facile, but it was occasionally funny in ways that were not directed at adults and it was sweet as well, in the ways you’d expect a kid movie with orphans to be. I liked it well enough to regret neither the time nor money, though certainly not well enough to seek it out again. Whether my like can be correlated to the half of a 40 ounce margarita that I imbibed over the course of the flick can be left as an exercise to the reader.

[1] Dear adult readers of Shards of Delirium, please fill out this simple survey. Do you find the referenced joke a) funny or b) an eye-rollingly insulting and yet simultaneously ultra-apt demonstration of the phrase “funny for adults”? Please do not fill out the survey if you are a child reader of Shards of Delirium.[2]
[2] In the interest of equal time: dear child readers of Shards of Delirium, please fill out this simple survey. Do you love bunnies because they are a) fuzzy or b) fluffy?