Bedtime Stories (PG)
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This came out in 2008, but I didn't see it until 2024. There were some things about it I couldn't stand, and other things I kind of liked. Overall, I would say it was worth watching, but I don't feel like I would have missed anything if I hadn't.

It's narrated in the beginning by a man named Marty Bronson, who owned a small motel, where he lived with his two kids, Skeeter and Wendy, who also worked at the motel. And Marty would often make up bedtime stories to tell Skeeter. But he couldn't make a go of the motel, and eventually had to sell it to a guy named Barry Nottingham, who promised that if Skeeter worked hard and showed promise, he could eventually run the motel himself. Meanwhile, the motel was torn down and a larger hotel built in its place.

Flash forward 25 years, and Skeeter (Adam Sandler) is working as a handyman at the hotel, still hoping that someday Nottingham will let him run the place. But Nottingham seems to take little interest in him, and is now planning on moving the location of the hotel to a new site, which would require tearing down an elementary school, which Skeeter is unaware of. (I mean, he knows the hotel is moving, he just doesn't know where.) And Nottingham decides to let a guy named Kendall Duncan (Guy Pearce) run the new hotel, because he is dating Nottingham's daughter, Violet. There's also a woman who works at the hotel named Aspen (Lucy Lawless, whom I somehow completely failed to recognize). And it seems like Kendall is secretly involved with Aspen, so I thought that situation would eventually complicate his relationship with Violet, but I guess she never found out about it, and it amounted to nothing.

Anyway, Wendy (Courteney Cox) is now the principal of the school that is going to be torn down, but because of Nottingham's plans, she's going to loser her job. So she has to go out of state for a week to secure a new job, and asks Skeeter to look after her son Patrick and daughter Bobbi, while she's away. He'll only have to take care of them at night, because during the day they'll be taken care of by Wendy's friend Jill (Keri Russell). Or at least she'll pick them up and take them to school in the morning. I'm not sure how much time she was going to spend with them beyond that. Skeeter gets a bit of help looking after the kids from his friend Mickey (Russell Brand), a waiter at the hotel. Anyway, Skeeter is distressed to find that Wendy doesn't own a TV, so instead to entertain the kids, he starts telling them bedtime stories, which are obviously just fantastical, fictionalized versions of his own life and the people in it. Oh, I should also mention that the kids have a guinea pig with giant eyes. Um... and the kids make up details to add to Skeeter's stories. He soon discovers that the parts they add end up coming true, one way or another, in real life. This includes Nottingham giving him a chance to run the new hotel, if he can come up with a better theme for it than Kendall. So he starts trying to use the stories to his advantage, encouraging the kids to have him win in the end, though they have no idea the stories are coming true. Over the course of the week, Skeeter starts out thinking he'll have to replace Kendall as Violet's boyfriend, to get the job, but she's pretty clearly not interested. And despite not getting along with Jill at first, he quite predictably ends up falling for her.

Well, I guess that's all I want to say. I'm leaving out some pretty important details, and it doesn't end the way you might expect it to, but it is a happy ending. I want to say I was considering putting my review under "weird movies", but ultimately decided "family" was the best fit. It was weird, though, and some things didn't really make sense. (Like, most of the silly details the kids put into the stories came true in ways that actually did make sense, but at least one thing definitely didn't.) And I don't know what else to tell you.