Other reasons not to watch "good" movies

"It's an R-rated movie made in Denmark," I said. "What did you expect?"

My mother wanted to see a movie my sister-in-law recommended. She watched some of it and turned it off and complained about a graphic sex scene. Does a couple's wedding night really need to be dramatized? In some cases it does, but we can usually guess at it.

My mother liked the movie Midnight Run and now wants to watch Robert De Niro in everything. She asked if Taxi Driver was good.

"You wouldn't like it," I said.

I remember back when my grandparents were offended by Kramer vs Kramer, and I tended to agree with them. I don't want to listen to Dustin Hoffman going to the bathroom. If was less offensive when the kid did it, but I don't want to hear that, either.

My aunt thought about recommending E.T. to them as an inoffensive G-rated movie, but she hesitated because of the use of the term "penis breath".

I knew this middle aged couple who sent the husband's elderly mother into the basement to watch a highly regarded but mostly plotless movie about a gypsies in New York. They didn't watch it with her. I don't know if they were actually surprised that she either didn't understand it, or didn't realize that there was little to understand.

My grandmother was born in the 1890's. My cousin took her to see Bonnie & Clyde and was offended when she didn't care for it. My sister later took her to an early '70's sex comedy and was surprised that she didn't find it hilarious.

Our grandmother, meanwhile, thought that her brothers and son who survived the horrors of World Wars One and Two should have been more open to the Civil War epic Gone with the Wind.

I saw a man and his 5-year-old leave an arthouse theater in Cambridge. Not surprisingly, the kid was frightened by Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress. I was at Enter the Dragon once. I heard a child in the audience say, "What's that noise?" The child's mother said cheerily, "That's the sound of the bones breaking."

I knew a tough, foul-mouthed, streetwise 12-year-old who was upset when his friend's father took them to Conan the Barbarian. He said it would have been fine with less violence.

When I was eighteen, my friends and I were concerned about another friend's 14-year-old brother watching The Exorcist with us. He was insulted. He watched it with us and we kept laughing at it, so that took the edge off.

So. I guess the point here is that nobody cares if a movie is "good". There are other matters to take into consideration.

I was at a video store one time. There were these two middle school boys. They were talking about literature. They were shockingly well-read. And they picked out a couple of Disney movies.