"Igby Goes Down," a corrosively sarcastic comedy that lifts the lid off the gleaming casserole of post-yuppie American culture, establishes Kieran Culkin as the movies' Boy Brat of the Moment.
He'd risen to the occasion, rallying and leading the troops into a battle that meant his sure death, for the sake of his family's honor (boy brat King Joffrey having fled the scene).
My husband and the boys had brats from the German food truck while I nabbed some falafel and an order of decadent feta fries at the pita truck.
It's an archetype that's survived any number of invasions: the Brits, disco, boy bands, the Brat Pack, more boy bands, the Disney Channel, TMZ and more.
But it was also grimly appropriate that the boy-prince of the brat generation should die complaining of a tummy ache.
It was easy to think, "Well, boys will be brats" and go on about one's business.
So, while I saw in him a physical parity that made him a more realistic and attainable role model than, say, Indiana Jones or the Brat Pack pretty boys, there was also the aspirational quality inherent in any act of hero worship.
Reading his ghostwritten autobiography, Scandalands, it's possible simultaneously to feel sorry for the lost boy and dislike for the spoilt brat.
"At first I wasn't going to vote for her, but during the debate he acted like a spoiled little brat, like a teenage boy who couldn't get his way," she said.
Kids are brats sometimes, but this little boy sounds like the Devil incarnate.
"Given Shkreli's inexperience as an inmate, the fact that it's public knowledge that he still has a lot of money, and his overall spoiled-brat, rich-boy attitude, he'll make a nice target for the press game," Robert Rosso, a former prison gang member doing life for drugs at FCI Terre Haute in Indiana and has written for VICE, told me in an email.
