Last night my husband and I went to a movie. I seem to remember a long-ago practice called “Date Night” where you did things like go to a movie, but that’s so far back in history I don’t recall much else about it.
Anyway, we went to a movie. We saw The Hangover, which was laugh-out-loud funny for the entire length. After the week I’ve had, I really needed that.
Walking back to the car, it suddenly occurred to me that when I told my mom what movie we’d seen, she’d want to know if she and Dad would enjoy it. That’s the point at which I would have to tell her that it had a good bit of, well, language in it. You know, to sort of discourage them from going, because they would be offended.
There were a lot of movies I didn’t see as a kid because my parents (read: my mother) wouldn’t let me. I missed Porky’s the first time it came out. For the life of me I still don’t know why my mother would never let me go see Grease. Because I’ve seen it many times since I was a kid, and I don’t know what she found so wrong about it back then. Probably her 1950’s sensibilities were offended, since after all, she was Class of ‘57 and the story depicted teens in the ’50’s. And of course her generation was not like that at all. Prim and proper, that was her bunch.
Come to think of it, there were a lot of books I didn’t read either, because my mother deemed them too titillating for my young mind. Not that (in retrospect) I missed a whole lot, since my mother favored bodice-rippers and my tastes ran decidedly more toward vampire novels.
At any rate, my generation seems to fling the F-word around quite a bit (including myself, I must admit) and if anything is going to offend my parents’ aging sensibilities, that would be it. Ergo, The Hangover is not going to entertain them the way it did me.
It’s come to this — me prescreening movies for my parents, like they did for me when I was a kid.
– Mox





