I Heart Movies

“Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood.”

I love the movies.

Great films are best, but I’ll settle for good.  I’m even willing to watch bad, once… or twice.

My childhood was full of great cinema from a range of sources.  Saturdays were spent at my Grandparent’s, where my sister and I would camp on the carpet in front of an old wooden TV. It was the same size as a 42″ High Def set I would drool over now, except square instead of rectangle, and thick instead of thin.  

And no High Definition, but rather, limbo stick low resolution.  

But it was TV, and I was a kid.

Every weekend, an old film played on channel five.  The same one, four times.  This is where I learned to first tolerate, and then love, black and white.

In between the awesomeness of the Love Boat and the hysterical cool of Fantasy Island, I’d watch something like, “King Kong,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” or “Some Like it Hot.”

Weekends were made for movies, and a festival started on Saturday, often resumed the next day.  

A family tradition, second only to Sunday breakfast, was a trip to the theater to fill the final afternoon of our weekend.  

The experience ripened alongside our years.  As our literature aged, so did our cinema.

I remember the first R rated movie we saw:

Rain Man.  

I loved it because it told me a story in a way I’d never seen.

At least not on the big screen.

At home, we had a library, stocked with a wealth of R rated features.  These red stamped flix were supposed to be off limits.  Fortunately, my mom and dad were different, each with their own opinion about what best to withhold from a budding mind.

My father believed it important to shield us from coarse language and violence (though this did not slow words that rhyme with truck and sit from frequently fleeing his lips).  

But my mom’s objections could be summed up in a single word.

Nipples.

Not nudity mind you.  Just nipples… and the short and curlies, at least if they sprung from a lady.

The swollen underside of a breast, fine.  The lazy S of a damsel’s backside, sure.  Full frontal nudity from someone with a hairy chest and dangling participles, not a problem.

Nipples?

No way.

Now here’s a test:

At age thirteen, would my mom have preferred her son to see…

A movie where a guy gets a grenade shoved in his mouth, as he’s kicked off a cliff.  He rolls down said cliff, releasing a chain of curse words which link every oath with four letters to the few that involve immediate family.  As he exhales his final syllable, he is blown to a billion bits scattered in the bed of the basin.

OR

Franco Zeffirelli’s, “Romeo and Juliet,” which displays precisely two nipples for exactly two seconds.

High five if you picked the one that might warp me.

Like any kid worth their childhood, my sister and I were able to wade the waters of our parent’s particulars.  

We saw pretty much everything.  

By the time I could drive, I was ready for flix from art house to multiplex, which probably explains my love for Tarantino.  

Who are we but the product of an infinity of finely sliced seconds, where each one matters, at least to some degree. 

What we feed our brain is important. 

Was I feeding mine well?  How do you feed yours?

Writer Dad

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If you liked that post, you’ll love, “A Billion Pixels and None of Them Wasted,” “Batman Left My Wife Lying Crumpled on the Floor,” or “An Old Dream Come True.”

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