So I’ve never been a fan of scary movies. And by scary I mean any point that is slightly uncomfortable or at all slightly suspenseful. AT ALL. Which pretty much takes out just about every possible movie out there. Winnie the Pooh might qualify as a movie that I’m ok with.
But as I have mentioned before I am married to a Hobbit. Minus the hairy feet. And so we have watched a lot of Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit movies throughout our married life. Nice thing is is that we can turn one on, watch for 45 minutes or so and then go to bed and it takes over a month to get through the film. Of course Clint has learned that we have to fast forward through any scene with Golum in it. And I may spend a majority of the movie with my eyes closed and fingers in my ears, but all in all I really like them.
It seems that my movie watching likes/dislikes have been passed down to my boys. Well except Edric, but he’s only two and so no matter what’s on he isn’t interested at all and usually spends the majority of the time playing with toys on the floor with his back to the TV. So as he grows we’ll see if via osmosis he inherited my movie likes.
Let me set the stage here. We maybe watch a movie once every couple of months. The only other thing we watch is the Broncos and the Olympics. The movies we have watched so far are Cars, Planes, and Wall-E. When we watch Cars there are still lots of tears (ie-“he’s going too fast”, “he’s going too slow”, “they are being mean to him” etc) throughout the movie. In Planes it is kind of the same thing (“that plane is mean to him”, “the planes made him crash” and so on). Inevitably with both movies there is at least one boy if not multiple boys in tears. Wall-E is pretty tame (its about two robots that don’t really talk throughout the entire movie) except right at the end when the computer tries to take over the spaceship, but luckily that dramatic scene is fairly short lived.
This last Friday night we decided to have a movie night for really no reason other than “just because”. Clint and I talked about it and thought that maybe we should expand our movie repertoire. We started going through movies trying to figure out which ones would not be scary and would cause the least amount of tears. Nemo, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Frozen, were all thrown out. Finally we came to my all time favorite movie (ie the one I watched at my 16th birthday party because I’m just that cool (or not)), Cinderella. We talked about it, there are really no scary parts to it, the step mom and step sisters are a little mean, and the cat isn’t nice at all, but all in all we couldn’t come up with anything that bad or scary in it. We thought we had a winner.
And we were wrong. Big Time. It took all of 8 minutes into the movie before I had one boy sitting in my lap and another snuggled up next to me. Edric meanwhile was trying to climb off the back of the couch and had no interest whatsoever in the movie and spent the rest of the movie upstairs with Clint playing with trains.
Yes the step sisters are mean. And so is the step mom. And the cat tries to eat the mice. I figured we might have a few tears at bedtime. I didn’t plan on 2½ hours of crying and being scared after bedtime. So yes, I scarred my children for life by watching Cinderella with them.
Maybe by the time my children are in their 40s they can venture beyond Wall-E for movie watching. Maybe. And until then we’ll keep it pretty simple and boring around here.
Hiking Mommy 