Good Movie Manners Cost Nothing

[forever1267]

Also, parents, taking 5 y/o to a PG-13 movie where children murder children for entertainment, might not be the most appropriate movie for them to fully understand. Which could explain why he was banging his hands on the arm rests during all quiet scenes in the movie. Couldn't you wait 3 more days and see Frozen instead of ruining it for the quietly squealing fangirls in the audience?

[Neurochick]

I don't understand some people. I once saw an elderly couple taking their grandchild, who looked to be all of four years old to the first Lethal Weapon movie. No shit. Now, my mom took me to see The French Connection when I was about ten but Lethal Weapon, really?

[Ginger]

When I was a little kid, my parents only took us to movies they wanted to see, which meant mostly Rochelle Rochelle-style European art films. They got a lot of dirty looks and sometimes nasty comments from people who assumed we were going to misbehave - which we didn't, because we were used to sitting still (or nodding off if it was something really beyond us). I enjoyed the hell out of Lawrence of Arabia, Chariots of Fire, Amadeus, and Ghandi when I was 5-8 years old. I think people underestimate how much little kids can understand & follow. Sadly, I think I had a way better attention span back then than I do now...Although when I was 10, my dad tried to make me watch the 5-hour version of Fanny and Alexander on video - after already having suffered through the 3 hour version, and that may qualify as child abuse.

[proper stranger]

Ginger, my parents were the same with us (LOL @ "Rochelle Rochelle"). I appreciate it because I saw a lot of great movies as a kid. And we knew to be quiet and still during a movie. Still, if a parent has a kid that can't sit still/be quiet/handle something in a movie, yeah, they shouldn't bring that kid to that movie.

In other movie manners news, everyone in the theatre was ready to throttle the idiot whose effing phone started ringing during the final scene of 12 Years a Slave today. And this was at a theatre where one of the ushers does a little spiel before the movie that includes the words, "TURN OFF YOUR CELL PHONE". Why is it so hard to double-check? And then she just let it ring for a few rings, as if no one would figure out it was her. If my phone started ringing (which it wouldn't, because I obsessively check two or three times before the movie), I'd rush to turn that crap off, rather than let it continue to interrupt the movie.

[sumire]

Dec 1, 2013 0:29:49 GMT -4 Ginger said:

When I was a little kid, my parents only took us to movies they wanted to see, which meant mostly Rochelle Rochelle-style European art films. They got a lot of dirty looks and sometimes nasty comments from people who assumed we were going to misbehave - which we didn't, because we were used to sitting still (or nodding off if it was something really beyond us). I enjoyed the hell out of Lawrence of Arabia, Chariots of Fire, Amadeus, and Ghandi when I was 5-8 years old. I think people underestimate how much little kids can understand & follow. Sadly, I think I had a way better attention span back then than I do now...Although when I was 10, my dad tried to make me watch the 5-hour version of Fanny and Alexander on video - after already having suffered through the 3 hour version, and that may qualify as child abuse.

I really wish 5-8-year-old Ginger could meet 5-to-8-year-old Sumire and explain to me what was so great about Gandhi, because oh my god, that movie bored me so much. I can still remember sitting in the theater and wondering when the hell it was going to be over and hating my parents so much. At some point, I was so desperate, I closed my eyes and tried to go to sleep, but the blessed release of sleep would not come. (That probably didn't help my comprehension of the story any.) I was a fairly well-behaved kid, though, and my resentment was of the silent, seething variety.

Chariots of Fire, I at least pretended to like because my dad and all his friends were runners and the theme music was super-popular. Reading a synopsis now, though, man, the whole thing went over my head except for, like, there are guys who run, and they want to win the race, and when they do, they're happy.

My parents tried to avoid taking me to anything erotic--I guess in Seinfeld terms, our movies were less Rochelle, Rochelle and more The English Patient.

[chonies]

Butting in: I LOVED Amadeus in elementary school--I'm a musical idiot, but I was lucky to have had passionate music teachers in school (Jam Handy films and all), so hello? a movie about Mozart? Sign me up. I even asked my parents to rent it for my 4th grade sleepover. I still love that movie.

[narm]

Butting in on butting in: I LOVED Amadeus too! Like a big old dork. I think I may still have the soundtrack on vinyl somewhere.

Topic: I want to go to a movie. I don't remember the last movie I saw in a theater that was not a kiddo movie. Oh yeah! It was Bridesmaids, and I snorted.

[DaisyNukem]

Last night I went to see The Sound of Music at a local theater that plays classic movies. There was a young couple seated down and to left of us. The girl was either stoned or drunk. Loud, inappropriate laughing through the whole movie. At one point her date left and went and sat somewhere else, it was that bad.

[ladyjane]

DD and I went to see Frozen last week. Kids movie at prime kids time. We always choose to sit off to the side in the row of two-only seats at every movie we see, to avoid the annoyances of other people. I have no complaint about noise etc during the movie. We watched it without interruption, although the women in front of us was a movie-texter.

But OMG the mess! Kids are messy. I know it. I had two of my own and now two grandchildren. But the level of mess in that theatre afterwards was not due to 'kids being messy', it was due to kids being allowed to do whatever they wanted and the parents participating in/enabling it. When we were waiting for the movie to start, we saw a man and woman come in with two kids. They had the largest size of popcorn available (huge) plus another container of popcorn. I said to DD then that I didn't think they could possibly have eaten all that popcorn. Needn't have worried. Most of it was on the floor where they'd been sitting afterwards. Seriously, it looked to me like almost every kid in that theatre had just been given a container of popcorn, which they subsequently just reached their hands into and threw on the floor and very little actual eating of popcorn had taken place. Two women and one child sat in front of us. They left behind all of their drink containers and yes, the ubiquitous popcorn. There was no way that the parents could have cleaned up the mess their children left because some sort of equipment was going to be necessary. But why let them make that mess in the first place?

As we were leaving, in my best disgusted voice, I said very loudly "People are utter pigs!" to my daughter. I also made a point of loudly apologising to the teenagers who were waiting at the door with industrial scoops to clean up the mess for the pig-sty that they had to clean up. I'm probably the biggest bitch in the world to the parents who were within earshot, but perhaps one of them might take a hint. Kids don't make that much mess naturally. They make it because you let them.

[hushhush]

Chiming in as another kid who got taken to "grown-up"/arthouse movies growing up and didn't cause any problems. (I even remember that I got extra-credit at school for writing a little summary about Amadeus.) The only one of those movies I remember being a bit of a slog was The Last Emperor. I remember understanding most of the basic plot, but my working knowledge of Chinese history and culture was about nil. The politics and those long sequences of ceremony and decorum flew right over my head.

I distinctly remember getting the side-eye from some people when my father brought me to see Platoon. He is a Vietnam vet, and he had seen the movie prior to taking me. He said that it was the most realistic Vietnam film he had seen to date and he wanted me to see it to better understand what it was like over there.

ladyjane, I am to the point that I will not go to see an animated movie unless it's a late show and the film has been out for about 3 1/2 weeks because I can't deal with those types of kids (and the laissez-faire parenting of said kids!). The last time I went to an afternoon show this kid a few rows in front of me loudly slurpped the dregs of his soda ceaselessly for about 15 minutes during the movie. Someone in the theater finally yelled "IT'S EMPTY!!!" which prompted the parent to take the soda away or make the kid quit before a riot broke out.