The Missus saw Amityville Horror at age 7 or so. Said she had nightmares for a long time afterward.
My brother spent a few months living with my grandmother when she was recovering from hip replacement surgery, and they borrowed a lot of DVDs from the local library. The one that struck me as a surprisingly poor choice was Requiem for a Dream. I'm not sure who came out worse for watching that.
ET at age four or so. I was terrified. Mainly of ET himself. Hideously deformed croaking alien dwarf who hid in your bedroom cupboard and couldn't be killed? AAAH! I was cheering for the men in the space suits to come and take the little creep away for dissection. Because, you know, astronauts were obviously heroes: Yuri Gagarin, Aleksei Leonov, Neil Armstrong and so on.
The one I distinctly recall was the original version of House on Haunted Hill which I saw at a birthday party some time between ages 6 to 8. It took me a while to get over it; on one occasion I recall getting the fright while upstairs in the bath, and the next thing being down in the living room, naked and dripping wet.
How do US ratings work then? Here, Platoon was a 15 (were they already 15's in 1980whatever? They weren't still A and AA?) and no one would/could take an 8 year old.
We watched The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas at home, after I'd read the book. The book leaves everything to one's imagination, and I'd assumed the film would be similar. It wasn't at all, and has a horrible ending, and my younger two were very upset. That was a grim experience.
Here, Platoon was a 15 (were they already 15's in 1980whatever? They weren't still A and AA?) and no one would/could take an 8 year old.
It was probably rated R? I was the youngest, and so by then they were growing accustomed to taking us to fairly adult movies, as far as swearing and sex went. They knew I hated watching violence, though.
My best guess is that they thought it would be more MASH-like?
I don't think anyone got ID'd for movies until the NC-17 rating came out, in the 90s. I remember my younger cousins were tragically unable to watch the Beavis and Butthead movie.
I saw that horrible film about the gangster who shows up stalking this married couple because he claims to be an ex-boyfriend of the wife ... "The Great Gatsby", I think it was called.
I vividly remember being traumatized by the scene in Return of the Jedi where the droids are tortured in the basement of Jabba's palace. I was six, maybe, and ended up watching the projection beam rather than the screen.
I think my kids were 9 and 7 when we went to see No Country For Old Men. Don't recall any nightmares afterwards though.
Yes, Platoon was 'R' and there were never any restrictions on 'R' if accompanied by a parent or guardian. I will say that would have blown my mind at 8. Unlike Bridge over River Kwai which I saw at a drive-in at age 5 or so and which I came away thinking, "What a neat song".
I was a sensitive child.
Somebody took me to see Raiders of the Lost Ark when I was six, and when they got to the scene with the skeletons in the cave I got up and walked myself right out of the theater.
2001 completely freaked me out when I was 5, nightmares fo rweek safterwards. although I'm not sure if it had anything to do with the plot or just the state-of-the-art (1968) widescreen special effects and the way too loud loud orchestration.
It's probably not quite in the same league as Platoon at eight, but now that I'm on the parent side of the equation it doesn't seem to have been a great decision to take me to see Animal House when I was ten. Might explain some things, though.
The lamest media I was ever scared by as a kid was definitely the Hulk tv-show. Actually that's not even the whole story. It was the credits to that show. The moody lighting, the zoom from "DANGER" to "ANGER"? Hell no. I was out of there.
I was probably 11 or so when I saw The Shining on HBO at somebody else's house. Getting to see nudity on screen was still a honking big deal, and I was hella titillated when the woman got up out of the bathtub. Then she turned into a mouldering corpse and barely pubescent apo was a little freaked out and conflicted. Don't recall any nightmares arising from it, though.
Jaws, on the other hand, had spawned several shark-based nightmares a few years earlier.
I saw the 1959 version of Journey to the Centre of the Earth when I was seven or eight and was completely unfased by all the bits that were intended to be scary; but the scene where they found the skeleton of the guy whose notes they were following? Had me waking up screaming for months.
On the other side of the ledger, I went (pre-kid in my '20s) with someone who had their 7-year-old along to A Boy and His Dog. We left relatively early in the film as I recall.
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Is the apostropher mentioned in (3) of this comment our very own apostropher? Sure sounds like it!
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Weird. That is indeed me, and the mother in the story is a co-worker of mine.
Dances With Wolves, age 9. The slaughtered buffalo were too much for my sheltered eyes, and my dad spent the rest of the movie out in the lobby with me.
My mother took my brother and me to see John Waters's Serial Mom, which according to Wikipedia came out when I was 13 and my brother not quite 11. Oh, and our four-year-old sister was with us.
I don't think my parents ever took me to anything particularly inappropriate. The best I'm coming up with is Airplane! when I was ten or so -- I thought it was awfully funny, but completely missed all the dirty jokes.
Nothing scarring: Poltergeist was the first scary movie I ever remember seeing, and I was kind of scared, but not terribly.
(Platoon terrified me when I saw it, but I was seventeen or so. Maybe sixteen?)
I spent much of the The Devils in the lobby, but that was more a function of substance use than of age. No, not with my parents.
When I was eight, the trailer for The Exorcist left me sitting in bed with the light on all night long (the scene where the door opens to reveal the bed bouncing and stuff flying all over the place, holy shit). A while later, there was one of the Bigfoot movies that had a scene with the beast punching its fist through a window, and at that point I escaped to the bathroom and just stood there on the verge of tears for a while.
I watched lots of horror movies as a young child. Mostly, they didn't bother me. However, I've mentioned here previously, but I had one very inappropriate sitter who watched a lot violent pornographic slasher films. I only stayed with them for a few months before my mother realized it and found me a different sitter, but I have very vivid memories of laying in bed as a five year old and having elaborate... "fantasies" really isn't the right word--"daydreams"?... of, e.g., plunging a long knife into a woman's vagina and then slicing open her stomach from inside. Etc. Those were the sort of things I thought about every night as I was falling asleep for a few years. I can't say I was frightened, exactly, but I'm fairly sure that's not psychologically healthy.
Aliens, in the theater, also at eight. Wasn't as potentially traumatizing as it could have been, because I just kept my head down below my seat for most of it. I don't think I saw Platoon, but definitely Full Metal Jacket and Hamburger Hill. The domestic abuse at the beginning of La Bamba freaked me out. Also, the back-alley abortion scene in Dirty Dancing tortured my Catholic elementary school soul.
My family really didn't censor media content; they took us to see the movies they wanted to see. This is weird in retrospect, because they were very conservative immigrant parents in other ways.
27: Jesus christ.
28: Probably wouldn't bother you much.
When my sister and I were... oh, maybe 13 and 10... my mother remembered that she'd enjoyed "Runaway Train," and maybe we would too. We teased her about it for years later. (Questions to ask about the movie you've chosen for your kids: does a major character go by the nickname "Rape-o"?)
In an earlier display of questionable movie judgment, she & my dad took us to see Bambi in the theater, and then -- possibly because she was on call? -- she had to leave very close to the moment when Bambi's mama eats it. I remember screaming and running up the aisle after her...
30: yeah. The thing is, as a five year old, I didn't even think that much of it--I didn't know enough to know it wasn't normal to have fantasies every night about sexually mutilating women. When I got a bit older, I realized there was something really off, but blamed myself for it--I thought I was just an insanely fucked up and evil person, or something. It wasn't really until I was an adult that I was able to come to terms with the fact that, when a five year old has sick sexually violent fantasies, it's not generally the fault of the five-year old.
This is a banal comment, I know.
I watched lots of horror movies as a young child. Mostly, they didn't bother me.
One exception were the transformation scenes in The Howling. For some reason those terrified me.
Or, actually, maybe not The Howling. Some were-wolf movie.
32: This is a banal comment, I know.
Hardly. The observation might be considered banal if it was made by someone who had not experienced it themselves.
33: The Company of Wolves maybe? I remember seeing that as a child and it gave me the fear. Lots of flayed tissue stretching out.
36: maybe! Honestly, I don't know what movie it was. But "lots of flayed tissue stretching out" is a pretty good description of the scene.
My parents are big Robert Altman fans so I got to watch such films as "Short Cuts" and "Nashville" repeatedly as a kid. Obviously only certain scenes were memorable, those being the ones involving nudity.
Also we watched "Ready To Wear" as soon as it came out on VHS. My sister was about 8 at the time and presumably the all-nude fashion show scene toward the end is what spurred her lifelong interest in theatrical makeup.
Obviously only certain scenes were memorable, those being the ones involving nudity or swearing by people who seemed highly incongruous with swearing.
Well, nothing inappropriate but my father frequently took us to stuff that was way over our heads. I see that Gandhi came out in 1982, which means I was 9...
But then everything feels like it was over my head until I was about 30. I had no experience of anything. Dad took us to Do The Right Thing, too, which was 1989 so I was 16, but I had no idea whatsoever about life in cities or really anything else, and it might as well have been avant-garde dance performance for all I could make of it.
The lamest media I was ever scared by as a kid was definitely the Hulk tv-show. Actually that's not even the whole story. It was the credits to that show. The moody lighting, the zoom from "DANGER" to "ANGER"? Hell no. I was out of there.
This is so great.
32: About fifth grade or so, I somehow came into possession of a book that had a slasher protagonist (also a Bigfoot/Yeti-type creature whose penis had a tongue, but I don't recall how those elements fit together; it's possible I'm conflating two different books). I don't remember very much about it, except that at one point the slasher guy used the tip of a knife to cut a question mark into a woman's buttock, and that scene kept bubbling up through my subconscious for quite a while.
So yeah: representations of sexual violence can really fuck with kids' heads.
I remember watching all the Monty Python movies with my family, and one episode that stuck out was that my mother insisted on fast-forwarding the scene in The Meaning of Life where the instructor of a sex ed class has sex with his wife in front of the class.
Oh, and also I wasn't allowed to watch Nightmare on Elm St. while my neighbor, who was my age, watched it several times. I remember being pissed off about that - I was about 7 years old at the time.
To reverse the trope, when I was about 16 my grandfather insisted on taking me to the only cinema in his small town, which happened to be showing Girl on a Motorcycle. My teenage enjoyment of watching Marianne Faithful and Alain Delon doing soft porn was considerably interfered with by my concern for the poor old man sitting next to me.
39.2: I inappropriately suggested Ready to Wear as our family-gathering Christmas movie. Not that there was any one young, but dreadful plus people (in retrospect) not inclined to like Altman meant I got to get my vote back 14 years later in time to recommend Benjamin Button which was maybe even worse (and loooong). I am now Christmas movie recommender emeritus, and stay home drinking if I disagree with the choice.
I vividly remember being traumatized by the scene in Return of the Jedi where the droids are tortured in the basement of Jabba's palace.
I may have mentioned the only time I cried at a book as a kid was the death of Marvin in whichever Hitchhiker's Guide book? My mother asked what was wrong and with great embarrassment I explained a character I had liked in a book had died and she reassured me this was not silly and I sort of decided not to mention that it was a depressing robot.
13 reminds me I apparently ran, weeping, out of Watership Down.
19: in my '20s
JP is older than I thought.
My parents took me to see the play Little Shop of Horrors, in a big fancy New York theater, when I was three or four. I screamed and screamed and screamed and spent the rest of the play in a very nice lobby with gilt and red and orange.
I vividly remember being traumatized because it was a play. There was a person, right there, in front of me, and they just got eaten by a plant. Like, I remember my utter certainty that this person had just been mutilated to death.
So maybe there was a precedent for the Platoon incident.
48: The JP century started in what you humanoids call the '50s.
I was a sensitive child.
I remember being traumatized watching Down And Out In Beverly Hills (I would have been 10). It opens with, as IMDB describes it, "[S]treet tramp Jerry is hungry, homeless, sleeping rough and has lost his dog. Jerry decides to end his life by drowning himself in their swimming pool. Dave rescues him and invites him to stay for a while."
I was never able to get from there to accepting that the movie was a comedy. I spent the entire film depressed, thinking about suicide, and trying to empathize with his state of mind at the beginning of the movie.
As it turns out I'm still easily disturbed by stories involving suicide attempts or serious substance abuse -- for whatever reason (and it certainly isn't personal associations) that's a sensitive emotional area for me.
I do remember having nightmares from a Conan comic book at some point, but I don't remember how old I was at that point.
I was never able to get from there to accepting that the movie was a comedy.
Jammies and I have an ongoing argument about the saddest non-comedy ever, Bad Santa. I just don't get that movie.
I just don't get that movie.
I haven't seen Bad Santa, but this seems a relatively common experience for you.
I was a sensitive child.
When I was seriously young, I used to get scared at the Scooby Doo show.
I only know this because my older sisters were forbidden to watch it (since it's not as though they could have avoided me tagging along), and they bore a grudge.
55: oh, because I don't like movies? That too.
When we had long flights over Christmas break, though, I watched like four movies in a row. (Horrible Bosses was so great!) I think part of my problem is settling down to stay in one spot for several hours. It never seems like a good proposition ahead of time.
And on the other end of the spectrum, our then-four-year-old didn't fall asleep at his usual time one night and saw most of The 40-Year-Old Virgin with us on TV. the plot was all over his head, and the small amount of sex was reasonably tasteful, so no apparent trauma. He liked the slapstick. His only observation the next day was that he knew that the Steve Carell character was a "good guy," because he always wore his bicycle helmet.
Also remember being kind of traumatized by seeing Angels and Insects, which has quite a bit of explicit sex, while sitting next to my mother-- although I was oer 30 and married many years at the time.
A friend of mine watched Spanking The Monkey with her parents. Which is all about mother-teenage-son incest.
I think my friend was even a teenager at the time, and her parents are conservative. She said it was unbelievably uncomfortable.
My parents took me to see Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein when it came out. I was seven, it was totally scary, not funny at all.
Oh I just this weekend told Bave the story of how I ended up seeing Sex, Lies & Videotape with my grandmother. Alas.
31: Yeah, Bambi was a problematical choice for me too. My biological mother died when I was two and a half. I still get twitchy about scenes where small kids get left behind as parents die or leave.
62.last: Good luck finding ANY movie for kids that doesn't include that. Mara had a total meltdown at several points in Happy Feet when the little penguin went off on his quest, screaming, "NO! DON'T LEAVE YOUR MOMMY AND DADDY!" Didn't take rocket science to figure out where that came from.
I grew up without a tv and with limited exposure to movies and was overwhelmed by watching movie violence for a long time, think I still am in some respects. I talked my parents into taking me to see Return to Oz when I was five because I'd read it or maybe just had it read to me, but the electroshock part was super scary to me and I used to get jumpy about eye exams because the machine with all the lenses reminded me of that.
In the days of the drive-in kids went to everything, I think, and passed out in their pjs in the back of the wagon. I vaguely remember seeing the Godfather this way. Is that possible? I think I would have been 2.
I have never figured out what movie this is: lost children somewhere snowy and wooded, encountering a mythic figure sort of like Santa Claus but very pagan and rough (horned, maybe), who captured the children and was planning to eat them. I think I only saw that bit, on TV at an afterschool center, but it obviously stuck with me.
I've said before that I hated and walked out on Mars Attacks, but I didn't mention that I was 12 at the time.
66: *Teo* was 2 for Part 3. I was . . . 22 or something.
53, 55: I kind of liked that movie. Who doesn't like a movie where a fucked up Santa tells a kid, "Shit in one hand and wish in the other. See which one fills up first."
67: um, right, but for Part II you were presumably around 4, right?
Suddenly I'm remembering going to see Tora! Tora! Tora! when I was five. Nothing traumatic; all I remember are planes. I'm guessing my dad couldn't find a sitter.
Has anyone else seen The Devils?
It is on our list, CC. We've been working our way through Russell's movies, slowly,
69: I am really slow today. Yeah, something like that. But what I think I remember is the horse's head. Kiddie memories are notoriously reliable. All the cogsci people say so, right?
To the OP: Seeing a trailer for Tales From the Gimli Hospital prior to a screening of The Navigator when I was in jr. high definitely freaked me out a bit. I've always been pretty jaded though -- Raiders of the Lost Ark was great fun for me, but my aunt was a wreck afterwards.
Bad Santa was great, but it was definitely every bit as sad as it was funny. Some people seem uncomfortable with movies like that. They're never quite sure when they're supposed to laugh.
I grew up without a tv and with limited exposure to movies and was overwhelmed by watching movie violence for a long time
Me too, but I've never made an effort to get over it. My life seems plenty full without movies.
I was not that impressed by Bad Santa. I was impressed by the number of parents who had brought their small children to see a film chock-a-block full of fairly graphic anal sex jokes though.
Seeing the initial bits of Poltergeist on TV freaked me out, but then I finally watched all the way to the end, and the cheezy corpses-rising-out-of-the-lawn sequence totally de-scarified the rest of the movie for me. Some episodes of Tales from the Dark Side were really quite freaky, and the inverted color scheme of the titles was pretty effective, for all its simplicity, in setting an uncanny mood. Also, of course, the "It's a good day" episode of The Twilight Zone should be enough to scare anyone. I found it scarier than the print version.
My parents took me to Madame Rosa when I was in first grade. Not appropriate. Later that year, they took me to a double feature of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. I remember laughing so hard that I started crying.
When my son was 10 I was advised that "A Boy and His Dog" would give him something to think about. The person who advised me was a childless radical of the most Utopian sort.
Airplane at about the same age as LB. not really my parents' fault, my brother (11 or 12) and I were really take by the posters and insisted, and it wasn't obvious to them what it was actually like. I think we were expecting something like one of the Herbie films.
The film that actually scared me as a small child was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
My 4 year old is still obsessed with The Lion King -- she insisted on seeing it 5 times in the theater, and watches it at least bi-weekly -- which is frankly a super violent movie. Not only does the father die, he is killed by his uncle in a brutal Wildebeast stomping. But she genuinely loves the film, even if it's produced tons of questions about what death means, why do people do bad things, etc. I'm fine with that.
I loved Bad Santa. What is wrong with you people.
Jammies and I have an ongoing argument about the saddest non-comedy ever, Bad Santa. I just don't get that movie.
I'd give that title to "In The Loop". I've rarely been more emotionally shattered and demoralized than during the last half of that movie. Afterwards I felt like I'd felt after Abel Ferrara's "The Funeral".
Abel Ferrara
Both Bad Lieutenant and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans work better if you view them as comedies.
Somehow the only movie I recall being impressed by at a rather young age is/was The Towering Inferno, seen with my dad. This led to a sort of compact between him and me, to see epic disaster flicks together -- my mom was completely uninterested. No trauma was experienced by little me.
In my pre-teens I was afrightened by things like Omen. Yet fascinated, doncha know, by the presentation of a mythological other.
Oh, scrolling through, I was also afraid of the Incredible Hulk TV show as a kid. Frankly I find it vaguely frightening even in reruns, since it's so obviously an exemplar of that uber creepy late 70s "drug culture gone wrong" subgenre.
Like Sifu, I was a sensitive kid (although we seem to have since gone in different directions). The main story of me being freaked out by a movie is when we went down to Phoenix (which involved several hours of driving) to see The Land Before Time, which I really wanted to see because Dinosaurs! Then, a few minutes in, there was a part with a scary T-Rex that freaked me out so much I had to leave the theater and not only refused to go back but refused to see another movie in an indoor theater for several years afterward. When we moved to Albuquerque a couple years later there was still a drive-in theater and that's where we went to see movies until I finally got over my fear of theaters.
(I did end up seeing all of The Land Before Time eventually; I guess we must have rented it when it came out on video, because I was still pretty young.)
I thought The Incredible Hulk was the saddest, most deeply emotionally moving, form of entertainment I'd ever seen. Every week, he really connected with people, and saved them from stuff by HULK SMASHing things, and then he had to go walking pensively away with a backpack on, and the sad music playing, and no explanation for how he paid for all the new pants he needed. I didn't quite cry watching it, but I got a little misty.
I don't remember how old I was watching this. I'm kind of hoping I was seven rather than thirteen.
My nephew (Teo's age, I think) was also a delicate flower, and he lost his shit completely during Land Before Time. (Does the mother die? Or do the babies get separated from the mother or something?)
CA's older nephew is super delicate and had to be removed from the theater in the first five minutes of Ratatouille. I guess someone shoots a shotgun or something?
Sensitive kid, checking in. For years, my only exposure to Star Wars was at a birthday party where it was playing in one of the rooms. I happened to walk in on what I have since determined to be the garbage compactor scene and promptly fled.
Even commercials these days would have freaked out child me. Presumably, kids today are a hardier, jaded lot.
89: The backpack ending killed me. Ugh. Every time. I had PTSD when Family Guy spoofed it.
(Does the mother die? Or do the babies get separated from the mother or something?)
Both!
I love this thread.
I saw Sleeping Beauty (I think?) in the theatre as a very young child (under 4?) - young enough that I don't remember it - and it scarred me for quite a while. I refused to watch animated movies for several years, particularly Disney.
I was a weird kid.
My kids love The Land Before Time. I assume I'm not the only parent here who knows (and I also assume that no non-parents here know) that not one or two or three or four or five but TWELVE feature-length sequels have been made.
That anyone here was young enough to see as a young child (and be scared of) The Land Before Time is a little disturbing to me (release date 1988). My mind blocked out the title and I read Teo's comment as talking about a drive-in screening of this movie.
Gremlins. Return to Oz. ET. All terrified me beyond belief, all were seen under the age of 5. I just rewatched Gremlins and I can't believe it scared me so much, but there you have it. I think that was actually the first movie I ever saw in the theatre.
My family had a routine of watching the evening news while we ate our dinner. If the tv was inadvertently left on after the news ended the Rawhide theme would come on. It begins with the sound of a whip cracking, and this would make little peep cry and cry.
I just realized the only possible explanation for this is an ancestral memory of being whipped as a slave in Egypt.
95: plus there's all the porn, but obviously that's not canon.
a little disturbing to me
God, no kidding. Everybody here is supposed to be my age.
I love Gremlins and have been wanting to watch it with my kids (ages 5 and 3), along with King King, but my wife insists they're too young. OTOH, they do seem to be scared by even mildly scary things surprisingly easily, which I guess was true of her as a child as well, and I don't really want to deal with weeks of nightmares.
I have no idea what 99 is referring to, , but I'm pretty sure I'd rather remain unenlightened.
I think my friend was even a teenager at the time, and her parents are conservative. She said it was unbelievably uncomfortable.
For me, this was seeing Quills with my mom and her new boyfriend. In a tiny theatre.
I think Gremlins is moderately scary. Or, more precisely, to get how non-scary it is you need to be already familiar with the conventions of scary movies.
Actually, I haven't seen Gremlins in probably 15 years, so I love it more in theory than in practice.
Bambi also terrified me, and I can't watch it to this day. Don't make the child of a single mother watch something where the mother dies when she damn well knows her father isn't about to step in.
96, 100: Even scarier, remember that I'm now 27. There are lots of people out there who can drink and vote and stuff who weren't even born in 1988.
My friend's four year old loves Gremlins. But she's a kid that thrives on adrenaline.
My kid cries during Happy Birthday, so MMMV.
104: I think it's supposed to be moderately scary for little kids, without being overwhelmingly scary. Isn't that right? I mean, what's an appropriate age, if not five? 7? 10??
My kid cries during Happy Birthday
You shouldn't tell her that you decided to give all of her presents to other children.
100: Right, I've been transposing Land of the Lost for The Land before Time, which I've never heard of. It works fine to read it that way.
Again, I don't push it because I don't really want to deal with nightmares.
Is teo closer in age to apostopher or to apostropher's oldest son?
, but the electroshock part was super scary to me and I used to get jumpy about eye exams because the machine with all the lenses reminded me of that.
Exactly!
(I'm reading this thread in no particular order whatsoever.)
Also, I'm glad to know that Gremlins is moderately scary. I think my mom just caught part of the trailer and thought it was a muppet-type thing.
And The Land Before Time really was hard for me to watch, as well. I did eventually see it when my sister was young and I was in my teens, but man. Why do they like to torture children?
115: Sixteen years between teo and me. Thirteen between teo and Keegan.
You shouldn't tell her that you decided to give all of her presents to other children.
Why would I say that, when she can see them burning in the bonfire?
It's probably not quite in the same league as Platoon at eight, but now that I'm on the parent side of the equation it doesn't seem to have been a great decision to take me to see Animal House when I was ten. Might explain some things, though.
My son has loved that movie since he was maybe six or seven. There are so many important life lessons -- "you fucked up...you trusted us", etc. -- that it's important to get them started early.
118: You had Keegan when you were three? No, wait, I'm sure I can work this out.
These kinds of age differences are a little freaky: my work partner is 15 years my senior, but I consider him my contemporary in some sense. A couple of years ago I dated someone 8 years my junior, who was basically the same age as my work partner's son. Hm.
I should have said "melting in the bonfire." It would have been a better image.
CA's older nephew is super delicate and had to be removed from the theater in the first five minutes of Ratatouille. I guess someone shoots a shotgun or something?
Well and there are TONS AND TONS AND TONS OF RATS EVERYWHERE. (I find life in New York creates two teams: "More Afraid of Rats" and "More Afraid of Roaches" and I am definitely in the latter, but still, THAT IS A LOT OF RATS and I don't care if they're speaking French and making soup and stuff.)
Mara still insists that The Secret World of Arrietty was scary for her, but she sat through it just fine and only required a little cuddling. The previews (all of them, I think just from the loudness) sent her shrieking out of the theater.
Also on the inappropriate movies list is that my mother insisted on going with me to see Heavenly Creatures because I was 16 and not technically old enough to watch R-rated movies alone. So it was my mom, my then-girlfriend (secret-ish), and another friend of ours watching a movie about secret girlfriends killing one's mom. Awesome.
Re: Bambi, Nemo, Snow White, and many more . . . Disney Moms' Support Group
124 last is pretty great.
We saw Arietty over the weekend, and the kid loved it. Me too.
121: I've given up. I decided you're all about my kids' ages except for Emerson & McManus, who are imaginary.
I love the ceiling collapse scene in Ratatouille. You sort of can't set up the rest of the movie without strongly making the point that actually, as humans, rats are kind of horrifying, and it does that so efficiently.
127. I think we've established that I'm older than McManus. If I could afford the fare I'd organise a meetup for people who were born before Eisenhower was elected, but I'm living on a pension these days.
I saw Aliens at home in the basement with my father when I was, I don't know, sometime between 7 and 10. It was truly horrifying--I wanted to leave, but my father told me that if I didn't stay till the end, I'd end up having even worse nightmares. We'll never know the counterfactual, but as it was, I had constant nightmares for at least six months, and recurring ones for years and years, well into high school. What made the whole situation even worse, in a subtle way, was that one of the scenes that played a large part in my nightmares, the sentry-guns-running-out-of-ammo scene, wasn't in the standard release, so often people would have no idea what I was talking about when I tried to explain, and I started to think I'd just made that part up. (I think we probably saw the television broadcast in 1989, which had some of the later-released Director's Cut footage; or perhaps the Betamax version [we stuck with Beta until the 90s] was different from the VHS ones.)
Angry Red Planet, when the giant amoeba rears up out of nowhere and starts digesting the rocket ship, and successfully eats one guy who was outside--you see him through the porthole, being swept away through the gloppy gelatinous glop, waving his arms wildly, as I recall.
Also, some alien invasion movie that was on the late late show when I was about 8. At one point someone shouted, "they've stuffed up these pipes with HUMAN GORE!!!" and that was it, I couldn't take a shower for like four years.
one of the scenes that played a large part in my nightmares, the sentry-guns-running-out-of-ammo scene, wasn't in the standard release, so often people would have no idea what I was talking about when I tried to explain
Man, that's so confusing when that happens. Someday I'll find the version of Bullet In The Head with the extended urine drinking scene (but without the extended ending) and people will understand.
Doctor Strangelove. Suffice it to say that the humor was lost on me.
129: We could come to your house, Chris.
also, 131 was me.
Age 5-6 or something so barely remember. Parents used to load us up on some kind of bed in the living room, fold-out couch? B & W TV. Scarey
1) It! The Terror From Beyond Space
(1958, which is later. All vague.)
2) Beginning of the End giant grasshopper movie
3) Some WWII low-budgeter I have been trying to find for fifty years. Pacific War, a Zulu or Assault on Precinct 13 thing. Americans in a bunker or half-dozen foxholes in a clearing in a jungle under pea-soup fog. All very quiet, is there rustling in the jungle at 2 o'clock...oh no running full speed from the far left fog the enemy comes! Rat-a-tat. Quiet again. Sarge, I can't take it anymore Shape up son we're counting on you. There's only eleven of us left. Wait is there movement at 11 o'clock. Oh no...
Oh, Picnic at Hanging Rock when I was seven or eight. The thing I remember most vividly is how the girl had her head shaved and painted with iodine or something at the end, except that when I watched it again as an adult I realized that was only something she'd described, which probably pretty much sums me up as a movie viewer.
I think that was also the visit to my grandparents' when I saw some movie that involved a guy hanging from a rope over a pit while trying to rescue a damsel or escape from a bad guy or something while two mice, one black and one white, nibbled at the rope. I have no idea what this movie was, but remember thinking it was both artistic and grotesque.
136.2 sounds kind of like The Jewel of the Nile, but I think that movie ripped off everything from other movies so who knows.
OT: And she cleaned the kitchen sink and made me moisturize and told me to recycle the cardboard boxes I have lying around and now there's girl stuff all over the Flip-cave and I hope you all are happy with your handiwork. This is your fault, Unfogged.
My mother was pretty cool about letting me see movies with sex and adult themes but I'm still unsure that it was wise to bring me along for All That Jazz and Norma Rae before I was ten. On the other hand, anything scary was verboten which was mostly not a problem but boy was I pissed when I had to be picked up early from a birthday party because I couldn't go see Close Encounters even accompanied by a bunch of adults. Aliens vs. bypass surgery, I sure know which one scares me more now.
And then there was A Chorus Line, also before I was ten. A bunch of my elementary school teachers happened to go to the same performance and saw us there, and boy did I get some raised eyebrows the next day at school.
I thought they were still on hand-holding.
Also The Meaning of Life, like Awl!
And I'm pretty sure I remember going to see Porky's with my Mom as small child...I thought it was a Porky Pig movie and I think I remember getting up and leaving after ~5 minutes. But it's possible that I'm confabulating and we never even got to the theater.
138: I think the only solution is to go on an extended hiking trip without telling her.
My main memories from The Meaning of Life were the vomiting scene and the people dancing through the stars. Both toward the end of the movie, right?
I loved how rats were depicted in Ratatouille. They had effective disaster plans and were evidently well trained to use them. They were communal and organized. They took care of each other. I was born in Rat Year, and normally all we get is disgust and rejection.
You loved Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, didn't you?
Yep. That too, although I hadn't seen the similarity until you just brought it up.
It was until relatively recently that I connected the mysterious government organization from Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and, you know, the actual real-world NIMH.
All of my stories in this vein are of parts of movies that my mom censored so they wouldn't traumatize my young impressionable mind or whatever. The two examples I can think of:
-She took me out of the theater during Fantasia right before the dinosaurs died.
-She always fast-forwarded through the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the Nazis get nuked after opening the ark.
And see? I turned out *totally normal*.
She took me out of the theater during Fantasia right before the dinosaurs died
Because you thought they were still alive?
The previews (all of them, I think just from the loudness)
I always bring ear plugs when I go to the movies (which isn't often), and am particularly grateful for them during the previews which are generally much louder than the movie.
On a related note, regarding commenter ages, I'm in my mid-thirties, but temperamentally I sometimes feel like I'm 50.
I'm in my mid-thirties
Huh. I don't know why, but I had you pegged as mid-20s.
I knew 138 reminded me of something:
She picked out a nice dry Cave, instead of a heap of wet leaves, to lie down in; and she strewed clean sand on the floor; and she lit a nice fire of wood at the back of the Cave; and she hung a dried wild-horse skin, tail-down, across the opening of the Cave; and she said, 'Wipe you feet, dear, when you come in, and now we'll keep house.'
135:3 Sam Fuller's Merrill's Marauders?
There were so many of those "Son, if a man's afraid at a time like this, he's an idiot" they all blur together.
(What I got out of them is, it's okay to shake and puke, just not while pulling the trigger/using the scalpel/defusing the bomb/toasting the marshmallows/taking your kid to the ER/etc.)
153: Ha! I love the Just-So Stories.
154: There's a good moment like that in The Grey.
140: More important, have you told her about your pretend Internet friends?
my parents took me to see the original Alien when it came out.
i was 9, and wouldn't go to sleep without a light on for months afterwards.
As far an inappropriate, there wasn't anything inappropriate until around 1970. You don't take the kids to Virginia Woolf, even without bad language. And most of the adult-themed downer movies had upbeat message endings. That changed in the 70s.
"Dad, why did Jack Nicholson run away from his pregnant girlfriend?"
"Well, son, there are some very intelligent capable people who believe life is without meaning or value and might as well die. Here's Camus, Alvarez, Plath, and Celine. And you know, Mom and I will never try to force our beliefs on you."
80s? Someone, not me, decided that Moscow on the Hudson was a great movie to share with our 75-yr-old grandparents. Just flicked that sucker dead off at the bathtub scene. The second movie was Pennies From Heaven They loathed it.
157: Just so y'all know, I did tell my boyfriend about my pretend internet friends, and he does read here every now and then to see what I'm talking about. Try to be presentable, 'k?
Try to be presentable, 'k?
cockbreath fuckdozer
143: Right, come back sunbeaten and stubbly and silent. Works for me.
When I was eight, Casper was frightening enough. I think Platoon would have blown my mind.
You guys are all wimps. When I was a kid I LOVED action movies. And action TV shows. The more shooting and loud noises the better. The Dark Crystal disturbed me, but only because of the sense of failure that hung about it. Violence and violent death are fun, that's why we have Punch & Judy shows.
Fortunately, Tweety, he doesn't know what those vulgar words mean.
You have Punch and Judy shows? I have never had a Punch and Judy show.
Now I feel deprived.
160: Oh, damn, I should post something about policy. I think I had a stroke or something a year or two ago -- every so often I check to see if I've had an original (or interestingly derivative) thought about anything in the recent past, and it's never true.
166: Well, not every day. But I've seen a few in my time.
167: Well, he is in the field this week, so I doubt he'll check in here. I think he is still an intermittent reader.
every so often I check to see if I've had an original (or interestingly derivative) thought about anything in the recent past, and it's never true.
Do you have mercury fillings?
But you should still put up posts, if any occur to you.
138: Go ahead, call us "reprobates" again. It's cute.
159 is hilarious. Sadly, I can kind of imagine myself giving the quoted lecture to a little kid.
When the iPod came around to Ready or Not yesterday, I immediately thought of Our Flip. Don't let her do any of your laundry!
Is a fuckdozer what you use when a fucksaw just isn't doing it for you anymore? Surely there is something intermediate.
I'd tend to read it as a sex partner who's lost focus mid-act. "Man, the last three people I've had sex with have all been fuckdozers. I'm starting to think it's me."
Late to the thread, but the only thing I really remember freaking me out as a kid was Star Trek -- specifically an episode in which Spock goes insane from catching sight of some alien ambassador so horrific in appearance it even drives Spock mad. If I recall, it's just a box with lights on it, but the idea of Spock going mad really haunted me. I wasn't even a Trekky, it was just a show that we sometimes watched after tea. Dr Who led to the odd mild (but secretly pleasurable) scare.
As an adult, I still don't like certain types of violence/exploitation in films. I don't watch much horror as I really don't enjoy it, and Saw/Hostel type stuff not at all. I don't think I've seen any of the slasher type movies of the past ten years.
I distinguished myself while watching Sleeping Beauty in the theater sometime in the 80s -- I loved it to pieces -- by yelling "get him, Maleficent!" when the evil-fairy-turned-dragon was fighting with Prince Charming. My parents shut me down as firmly as possible, not without sympathy.
But, probably, the most acute childhood cinematic trauma for me was the (infamous!) squeaky shoe episode in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" I remember lying awake in bed crying for hours over the shoe, months after watching the film, and that there was more shoe-inspired weeping, like, *years* afterward. I've often wondered what the trigger will be for my daughter, because there doesn't seem to be any reliable way for parents to predict it. Sure, most kids are going to have some trouble with "Return to Oz," but all those cheerful movies with a random, fleeting moment of sadness -- will they make her sit awake in bed with dinner-plate eyes, thinking that in the midst of life we are etc. etc.?
179: I remember that shoe scene being traumatizing, and I just reviewed it. My God! What were they thinking?
My God! What were they thinking?
That it's not a movie for young kids?
I know that it's emphatically not a kids' movie, but that scene was especially gruesome.
especially gruesome
Huh? Are we thinking of the same scene?
I've often wondered what the trigger will be for my daughter, because there doesn't seem to be any reliable way for parents to predict it.
I remember finding The Catalog (Jasper Tomkins) very sad as a kid. I don't remember exactly why I found it sad but I do remember at one point in college that I was visiting an elementary school when Tomkins was speaking there and that being reminded of the book immediately brought back a wave of sadness and loneliness.
It wails and panics! That is a scary scene.
I apparently freaked out at the Rainbow Brite movie as a really little kid, and there was some movie with a detached hand crawling around (some sort of college prank where they all pretended to have been murdered or in a horror film or something?) that gave me nightmares for a while.
185: You never watched Addams Family re-runs? Thing was always a favorite of mine. Just the physics of it, you know? And Cousin It. Cousin It was about the goddamn funniest thing ever. Brushing your little sisters' hair over their faces to make THEM into Cousin It was even better.
It wails and panics!
ah, Christ, I shouldn't even have brought it up. The movie was rated PG, no? Parents tended not to screen those first, IME. The emotional transition of the shoe from carefree and happy to slightly concerned to tortured and dead, in about two minutes, was... it was worse than all the dead Disney mothers, who tended to die offscreen, and worse than the horse sinking into the slough of despond in The Neverending Story, which my adult sister still cannot watch without losing her shit. Whatever my sensitivity target is, that fucker hit the bulls-eye. (But I've gotten even more eccentric over time -- a well-respected German novella (not Werther) made me, and me alone, go through an entire box of tissues. I had to keep taking breaks, and I had a monster headache by the end.)
186: So, you know how Foucault looked like Uncle Fester? According to the wiki, Jacques Derrida was actually named Jackie by his parents, after Jackie Coogan. There must be further evidence that The Addams Family is the hidden substrate underlying French poststructuralism.
138: And she [...] made me moisturize
! Congratulations are in order, I assume.
And she [...] made me moisturize
Quoted in that way the ellipsis looks like a pause or catch of breath.
As if you've quoted Flip saying, "and she <sob> made me moisturize."
Old family story. Disney short before Fantasia, Peter and the Wolf, 1948 or so. The wolf appears, snarls, and I stand up and growl back at it as loudly as I could. The parents could never tell that story without cracking up.
The wolf shows up around 2:40 in this version.
The parents could never tell that story without cracking up.
No, I'd bet not. That's hilarious.
My baby sister did that (growled back at me) when she was little, two or three. I was so pleased! She has since grown up to be the only confrontational sibling, befuddling the rest of us in the family who would prefer things happen by reasonable accord, or at least obedience, and if those can't be managed, avoidance of all emotional content.
190: Pretty much. On a wild guess, Flip is very happy. Not everyone responds so well to being made to moisturize, you know.
On a wild guess, Flip is very happy.
Speaking of which . . .
This is your fault, Unfogged.
Considering the advice that was offered, I don't see how you can say that. I think you have to take most of the blame/credit yourself . . .
Yeah, we tried our best to save you from this fate, Flip. You have no one to blame but yourself.
195: Sure, but you shiftless vagrants convinced me to give happiness another shot. Without, I must note, making clear that happiness would require me to buy a bunch of cleaning products. Do other people seriously clean their refrigerators? And not heap their t-shirts on the floor in the vicinity of the bureau? What is this, Enver Hoxha's Albania?
there's girl stuff all over the Flip-cave
leftover from the Homogeneous thread.
I'm surprised you don't maintain a habitual orderliness that would have done credit to Stover at Yale, actually.
Now Flip has to avoid the whole being-yelled-at thing that he's said has been a concern in the past. Perhaps he should (gently) fight back, preemptively, against the instruction to break down the cardboard boxes he has lying about. Just so all parties realize that there are two people involved in all of this -- and maybe there's a good reason for the cardboard boxes! Who knows!
199: What is this "Yale"? Some sort of remedial community college, I assume?
Also, chaos within, dancing star, Zarathustra, mumble.
Cardboard boxes are one of the most highly preferred living spaces of the brown recluse spider.
And not heap their t-shirts on the floor in the vicinity of the bureau?
Uh. As far as I know, that means they're in the right vicinity.
I always clean my fridge by running a garden hose into the house, attaching a sprinkler, placing this contraption in the fridge, closing the door, duct taping the door so it stays mostly closed, and then firing on the hose. Then, I leave the house for an hour or two to be sure it really gets a good soak.
That sounds like a mess, Stanley. Instead of running a garden hose into the house, why not wheel the refridgerator into the yard?
... you shiftless vagrants convinced me to give happiness another shot.
But, but, but we were just kidding! No one thought you would take any of this seriously. I'm not taking any sort of guilt trip when she turns out to be one of those psychotic serial cannibal sort of single women. How lightly do you sleep?
I mean, what happens when you open the door? Does your refridgerators have an internal drain?
All fridges have drains, urple. You should definitely try this great technique out for yourself at home, because I'm not 100% totally making it up.
urple, you throw down a bunch of towels on the kitchen floor and skate around on them in your bare feet. This way you clean the kitchen floor as well.
Your refrigerator should be hooked up to your dryer vent. Geez.
186: Addams Family wasn't scary because they just said Thank you, Thing and it was very helpful. This was a scary scene in a comedy with a hand that was crawling and bloody, and I saw it at a friend's house, so I had the problem of being terrified and getting nightmares afterwards but being unable to tell my parents that I was scared and having nightmares because then they would have blamed my friend and not let me play over there any more.
If you don't hook the fridge to the dryer, it backs up your toilet.
But, probably, the most acute childhood cinematic trauma for me was the (infamous!) squeaky shoe episode in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" I remember lying awake in bed crying for hours over the shoe, months after watching the film, and that there was more shoe-inspired weeping, like, *years* afterward.
Oh yeah! That happened to me with "The Brave Little Toaster", though it lasted only a month or two. That car crusher was just so evil.
Asked two of my kids (who are 20+ years old) if there was anything that we inflicted on them. My daughter claims we specifically had her come in to the room to watch the overdose scene in Pulp Fiction at a fairly young age and it weirded her out ("I thought, what? Don't do drugs?"). I denied it. Other than that, pretty boring, Dumbo, Lion King, All Dogs Go to Heaven, American Tail and one that somewhat surprisingly has not come up yet--the original Oz. Tornado and flying monkeys for me. Monkeys and the wizard's head for my daughter. The whole last third for my son.
Oh yeah, Dumbo. That was another one for me. Apparently when I was really little (maybe 2 or 3?) I loved Dumbo and watched it constantly, more or less nonstop. Then, one of the times when I was watching it, somehow I suddenly realized what was going on in the plot and that something bad happened to Dumbo's mother, and I never wanted to watch it again. I'm pretty sure I haven't seen it since then.
215: I'd have thought the crows would be a deal-breaker.
Oh hey I forgot. Is everybody home from work? You're sure? Good. This is for urple.
215: This was actually before I developed the bird phobia.
Oh, and while we're at it the motherlode.
(Not safe for work! Really!)
Well then, I would avoid clicking on those links until later.
A video, and available as an eCard!
(OMG NSFW NSFA NSFY don't)
Nightmare movie: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, age nine.
Awkward movie. Watching Murmur of the Heart with my mom at about age fourteen, on TV. (For hose who haven't seen it - positively depicted incest between a mom and her shy fourteen year old son.)
Warping my sexuality movie, well, commercial: Oasis, on right before and after the Evening news: naked woman really, really loves her bottle of Oasis.
Also, should we now rename Lunchy Breakfasty?
Why is this night unlike all other nights? I'm grading high school essays. First prompt: What's the most significant difference between now and 100 years ago?
Stay tuned!
224:4 Or go directly to "Mealy"? Nah.
"Because the advancements in technology are constantly changing and coming out with new things, Best Buy offers customers the chance to upgrade. Say you bought the first kindle to hit stores when it came out. Well a year later, they come out with the Kindle Fire. That seems a lot better. With Best Buys new plan you can return the old, get the new, and only pay for the difference in price."
On page 2 of an otherwise nondescript answer.
What's the most significant difference between now and 100 years ago?
100 years ago if you wanted to see cartoon dinosaurs fucking you had to draw them yourself.
Cardboard boxes are one of the most highly preferred living spaces of the brown recluse spider.
Eep. Talk about nightmares.
100 years ago if you wanted to see cartoon dinosaurs fucking you had to draw them yourself.
Whereas 100 million years ago you didn't have to settle for cartoons.
Wow. Really don't ever google "brown recluse spider porn".
And it's hand-written! Somehow it's so funny to me that they wrote Best Buy spam out by hand.
Somehow it's so funny to me that they wrote Best Buy spam out by hand.
Maybe they work there.
"The list of changes is inlist and could go on forever, but there is one significant change that causes all of these other minor changes. The change in the human beings, us."
230 before I followed the herpy.net links. The animated gifs really add je ne sais ce que c'est mais c'est atroce.
People just seem very confused, see what I mean?
The list of changes is inlist
!!
What a rad eggcorn. You should send it to language log.
This student somehow used the prompt to go on a long rant against welfare, which turned into a rant in favor of FAFSA (student loans), and ending saying that everybody should use government programs like FAFSA instead of welfare, because of the opportunities.
"Overall, I believe the cost of living is the most significant difference from 100 years ago. If a family today tried to survive on a family's income from 100 years ago, they wouldn't survive."
100 years ago this was IMPOSSIBLE
"Though the internet could be used for international communication, it didn't take off until the start of social networking sites."
246, 247: Admit it; it's true! Ask your grandmother.
WOW:
"The women of the world are now stronger, well-placed, respectful, well-spoken, educated forces behind the world. Their voices can now be heard everywhere and can never be shut down. The homosexuals are now free to roam around the world without much discrimination from people. They are still viewed as dirt and vile people of the earth, but their freedom can be exercised now more than 100 years ago."
when I was really little (maybe 2 or 3?) I loved Dumbo and watched it constantly
Kids these days. We had to wait for the Disney movies to come back to theaters on their seven-year re-release cycles. I saw Pinocchio during what Wikipedia tells me was the 1971 re-release (I was 3) and apparently got pretty freaked out by the whale scene.
My son made me fast-forward past the spider in The Thief of Baghdad.
Shorter heebie's students to their imaginary internet mockers: "Screw You, We're From Texas".
226: That is simultaneously a very simple and devilishly complex question though. Consider my day today: I hung out in bed, in a house built in 1900, drinking orange juice-and-7Up, fooling around on the internet and taking calls on my cellphone. Obviously, the internet and cellular telephony are the big changes, but the roots of both of them were already at play in 1912. Likewise, I'm recovering from laproscopic surgery, which is a pretty huge innovation, but I'm suffering from gout, which is pretty much the same as it ever was, taking opiates and NSAIDs, both of which were around in 1912. Listening to MP3s is pretty newish, but of course there was already plenty of portable recorded music in 1912, it just wasn't quite as borderless and hi-fi.
And what vector is most important? Obviously, socially, the status of women is a huge, overdetermining change of the last century. But so were the world wars and their after effects. Decolonialization is a big one too, especially if you live in a former colony. Then too, the social changes occasioned by industrialization and urbanization are pretty far-reaching and hard to prise out of all the other stuff. Are all of the essays like 10,000 words long?
When I was 14, my younger brother and my mom and I had to spend an evening stuffing envelopes for my dad's political campaign. My mom had rented Parenthood. My little brother bailed first, and I think I made it past the vibrator-when-the-lights-go-out scene before pretending to be too tired to watch the rest. I always felt guilty about not helping finish with the envelopes, but the strain of pretending not to notice hilarious sex jokes was just too much.
250: The homosexuals are now free to roam around the world
It's true, they can go to China and everything, those homosexuals!
254: I hate this question. I have graded these for enough years to know a mile away that this would be a terrible question, and that all the kids would gravitate towards it. About 60% of them picked it, out of three.
Also, 254 is an exponentially better essay than any of these.
"Graphing calculators being one of the most useful advances, have changed the math and science fields in so many ways. You type in your problem, and without the slightest use of your brain you have solved multiple equations that would have normally needed a few minutes of your time."
258: Well, I am a high school graduate, although my diploma is still sitting in a file, about a mile from where I type this, because I was late returning my graduation gown, and I never seemed to be able to get in touch with the right person to dig it up for me later. So, bureaucracy hasn't changed much either.
261: No, Nixon.
260: That is very amusing.
I'm assuming there's no way that 250 could have been a conscious B-52s reference, but it would be sweet if it was.
"100 years ago, it was unthought of having instant access of communicating with someone."
I just like the phrasing.
One of the most fascinating files I found while hanging out in the Polish archives was a collection of essays by ten and fourteen year olds from the mid sixties on 'how do you imagine [your city] in the year 2000. It was all about space travel, water pressure sufficient for running water above the fourth floor, pretty window displays with all sorts of wonderful items, and lots and lots of bright neon signs.
266: Well, 2 out of 4 ain't bad.
I saw 2001 when I was fairly young. As a result, I've never been able to listen to the Blue Danube again.
These essays are cracking me the fuck up, which I sorely need.
"As humans, we tend to evolve as time progresses. In the beginning of history we were hunters and gatherers and lived in caves. Therefore it is correct to say that the world has changed in the last 100 years in many ways."
YOU ARE MAKING THIS SHIT UP. But I love you for it.
Okay, Pinker. No more pretending to be an undergrad.
When I was 10 years old, I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed at the second act of Waiting for Godot, and it was uncomfortable, anxious, non-cathartic crying. What specifically bothered me were the parts when one of the characters (don't remember which -- Estragon?) can't get the others to affirm his memory of events that happened in the first act, and is totally alone in his version of reality.
I still call times when people confusingly and frighteningly fail to validate your version of events "second act of Waiting for Godot shit."
"Technology has made such a significant difference in our world in the past 100 years that it's hard to imagine where we'd be without it."
Perhaps like we were 100 years ago?
Tia! No, you don't know me. I was lurking in the first act.
This is kind of sweet?
"Racism, gay hate, and a general disapproval of all who don't fit into one's society or agree with one's views was popular one hundred years ago. Because of activist groups throughout the years such as the black panthers and feminists in America and John Lennon, America and the world in general has began to search for peace with each other."
I will not confirm or deny allegations that tidy hand-writing and left-wing slants affect my grading.
'Post-show reception Waiting for Godot shit' for me is eating too much sheet cake and drinking too much cheap sparkling wine and having to bang on the back window of the pickup truck to be allowed to puke green in the gutter on the way home. But that happened when I was 23, so it's not really a formative experience in the same way.
My parents were terrible at age appropriateness. I remember seeing Fanny and Alexander at about age 5-6, and having nightmares about the bishop and his aunt. The first movie I remember seeing in the theater was The Adventures of the Baron Munchausen, and I think I screamed out loud at one point in the movie. Also at age 5 I saw Beetlejuice in the theater, which considering I had nightmares easily was a bad decision on my parents' part. At around a similar age I watched Cabaret, and had no fucking clue what was going on, given that I didn't know anything about Nazism or Weimar Republic cabaret libertinism. I watched La Cage aux Folles around the same time and really liked it, but lots of the sexual innuendo I'm sure went over my head. At 11, my older brother convinced my mother to take us to see the Shawshank Redemption, which I don't really remember all that well, but is apparently extremely violent. In general, my parents didn't really have any sense of 'age appropriateness,' which is either the cause of or explained by the freakish precocity of their children.
"We have become greedy, crime rates have sky rocketed, and we have left religion in our everyday lives. We "do for ourselves as ours would do for themselves". "
In general, my parents didn't really have any sense of 'age appropriateness,' which is either the cause of or explained by the freakish precocity of their children.
Or neither.
281: they might to write "as oars would do for themselves".
"they meant to write".
So hard to be mean to college students without typos in this modern world of ours.
Sifu Tweety,
Fair enough. The two could be correlated and not exist in any sort of causal relationship (although I would think in general you'll have more success expecting your children to act like mini-adults if they have mini-adult interests/attention spans).
New prompt! Should old-timey scientists who were proponents of now-defunct ideas be retroactively deemed right or wrong? (I'm paraphrasing.)
Ah, but back in the good old days before greed, crime, and irreligion, you would've overshared over the gate of your picket fence...they were simpler times.
287: Maybe? Are we sorry we called the old-timey scientists mad, mad they tell us?
I cried when I saw Platoon. I was in high school at the time.
"Scientists with older beliefs may not always be wrong because of lesser technology."
"The man who invented the light bulb usually is not credited for it, and for good reason too. The light bulb did not work! He had good ideas, they just did not pan out the way he thought they would. However, it was his failed ideas that aided Benjamin Franklin in creating the first working light bulb."
73 -- Stay away from the green acid, is my advice.
Checked with my son: he didn't have any stories of age inappropriate movies. We were recently on a group trip, and I came back to the hotel room to find him with the only teenaged girl of the group watching Fight Club. She's a sophomore, and I have no idea how protective her cattle ranching parents are. Not so protective that she was precluded from being in a hotel room with a boy. I'd don't like the movie much, but the girl was in a total swoon, so it worked out.
293: okay you have to have made that up.
"Science is a vague topic, and those scientists that discover an item to clear the haziness of the subject need to be rewarded."
(This one kind of redeems itself by talking about successively clearer theories. But in isolation, that line is funny.)
"Okay, so I'll put the key in a glass bulb, and then attach *that* to a kite..."
"Imagine you are in a field with some friends and one looks down and finds a four-leaf clover. The excitement grabs hold of you and gives you a sense of discovery. You and your friends begin to look closer at the ground to find something more. This is the same with scientists."
"In science, there is rarely a wrong or right answer. Time develops as the world changes. The people who decide on these changes in the scientific world are not more correct than the original scientists, just more precise. The scientist that originally comes up with something is right."
I get what they intended to say in 302, but it's phrased so ridiculously wrongly.
302: that's sort of charming, and astute in its way.
OT: The Drug War: Objectively Stupid
My pain pills are Percocet 5-350s. Instructions are 1 or 2 every 4 hours, not to exceed 4000 mg of acetominaphin in 24 hours. Based on wikipedia research, it appears that the 1 mg of IV dilaudid every 2 hours that I was getting in the hospital translates to something like 12 of these orally delivered Percocets every 4 hours in terms of analogous analgesic effects. And as those of the 'foggetariat who have met me can attest, there's quite a bit of Natilo to titrate that scant amount of opiate into. As I said before, I'm very cognizant of the potential for abuse here, but why even prescribe the goddamn things if the oxycodone is down around placebo levels? I can barely tell the difference, pain-wise, before and after taking a couple of them. Thankfully, a very, very good person dug up the house crutches from the farthest reaches of the basement, so now I can hobble around a bit better. Fucking puritanical drug warriors though. I have to suffer because some other asshole can't hold his drugs? That's bullshit.
305: and why prescribe a drug of potential abuse mixed with a drug that is deadly in mildly higher than recommended dosage.
Ben Franklin aside, students are writing much more intelligently with this prompt.
306: Right, that's the even stupider part! My liver is so fucked anyway, it probably doesn't matter, but the principle of the thing!
A friend co-TAing a class on Hungarian history at a supposedly selective school got a final exam answer on Kossuth where he was apparently the founder of psychology and played some key role in WWI plus some other stuff that I can't remember anymore except that this imaginary Kossuth had quite an exciting life as well. We didn't give him points for imagination. On the bright but scary side, a student who argued that Bela Kun was morally flawed because he didn't just go out and massacre people randomly, or the guy with a thing for the Nazis.
Last prompt: (blah blah background, watching gamma waves in people's brains when they are compassionate.) Some researchers argue that compassion is a biological function that can gain strength with exercise. What do you think?
(not many answers to this one.)
"Acts of the heart are one of the rare, unexplainable things of the earth. No matter how hard we try to avoid it, compassion and feelings get the better of us, overriding logic every time. That is what makes us human."
[That was too obvious, wasn't it?]
Did we already note this bullshit denouement?
http://www.wtnh.com/dpp/news/fairfield_cty/tonya-mcdowell-plea-norwalk-school-residency
306: Because they want you to die rather than become an addict. The war on drugs is insane.
"That is why when a typical culturized human is neurologically tested we cannot see the compassion. On the other hand testing a monk would clearly show the compassion muscle. It would be clear as comparing a NFL linebacker to a business man in America. The linebacker works out his muscels daily unlike the business man. This is exactly how the monk works out his compassion muscle. Wars can be won with pure physical muscle but lives can be saved with another muscle, the compassion muscle."
Just try to read that without giggling at the phrase "compassion muscle".
312: aww!
Many of these are really not at all bad for high schoolers.
And I'm skipping the good ones, for lack of something to mock. I would even say that these are better than in years past.
317: I was just reading a paper on that.
I'm also skipping the extremely religious ones, because I think I've mocked that to death.
Done! Thanks all, for humoring me.
Thank you, professor, for humoring us with your compassion muscle, since the dawn of history, as a scientist you are right.
Acts of the heart are one of the rare, unexplainable things of the earth. No matter how hard we try to avoid it, compassion and feelings get the better of us, overriding logic every time.
They're rare, but they happen every time. I agree: unexplainable.
I think the student meant that the compassion and feelings are not fully cooked, hence the popularity of the phrase "heart-rendering" to denote well-done feelings.
Man, if only Darby Crash were still around...
I maxed out and racked up 500 in my watch later Netflix queue, before adding alternative personae and growing my queue again. So I'm behind. No spoilers please.
238: I saw 2001 about 11 years ago. I think most of us did.
I can hobble around a bit better
Oooh, that reminds me! I was kinda freaked out by Roots, in the 2nd grade or so when it first aired.
Kossuth/Kohut was my thought too but he isn't even that important in psychoanalysis. Self Psychology. Feh.
OK, can't afford to read the thread, sorry, but it's traditional, you know.
1) mom took me to times square porno as a 9-month-old? 1 year plus? unclear to me but not 2, anyway. not like I was going to care, but I really have no notion of what she was up to. fucking with the dudes in the audience? the ticket selling guy? my dad? the whole world? we may never know, because we can't trust her answers.
2) brother (6) and me (10) to death in venice. anytime you start wondering whether we just expected kids to stay still longer back then or what, consider this story and its improving moral.
OT: drama club mercenary is excited about US military drawdown in afghanistan. it's not because of everything's going great, either.
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Because I don't pay any attention to car racing, I didn't realize this happened until just now.
There is no way to really explain to racing fans what just happened at the Daytona 500, so to non-racing fans this is going to sound fucking crazy, but... a guy who hasn't won a single race in 397 times might win after a car crashed into a truck FULL OF JET FUEL and exploded. Yes, you read that right. A truck full of jet fuel on a race track. This is because NASCAR cars can't race in the wet (which is why this race has been delayed for more than a day). So they have trucks full of jet fuel pulling a helicopter jet engine to dry the track.
So racer Juan Pablo Montoya was driving around the track during a caution, the car got loose, and then he slammed into the jet drier causing a massive crazy Michael Bay explosion. About 200 gallons of jet fuel (and diesel from the truck itself) then poured onto the track, onto the grass, and then set a gigantic fire.
The video is pretty crazy. Extinguishing a flaming truck full of jet fuel appears to be a difficult undertaking.
|>
334: I was just reading about that crash and being fascinated by the details. They do what with jet fuel?!
I love how the announcers' main concern seems to be what effect the fire will have on the racetrack.
Just remembered another one: when I was 7, I watched Play It Again, Sam with my parents. I probably understood about half of it but really liked it. The next day in school, our film class teacher decided we would reshoot one scene from a movie of our choice. When he asked who had any suggestions, I started waving my hand frantically.
He had apparently never heard of the movie, so he asked me to describe the scene I was thinking of. Suddenly, though, the only scene I could remember from the whole movie was a sex scene, so I just clammed up and blushed and didn't respond to his questions while the whole class stared at me.
Huh. I must have had extremely relaxed parents because with the exception of the slasher porn, these all seem pretty tame to me. Despite having much stricter certification rules/laws in the UK, I watched a ton of ostensibly age-inappropriate movies as a kid through the magic of TV and video. After I was seven or eight, which was when we first got a TV, I was allowed to watch whatever I wanted to. I got Spinal Tap for my birthday around then.
Anyway, I can only really think of four movies that traumatised me as a child and looking back they're pretty arbitrary, considering what I watched that didn't have any impact. I'm pretty sure I've already mentioned here how much the end of Howard the Duck freaked me out when I was really little, and I had a similar reaction to the cat being tortured in Cat's Eye a couple of years later. The shot in Robocop where Murphy's hand is blown off. And some random modern day vampire move I can hardly remember anything about and have been unable to find as an adult.
Random points:
1. You Bad Santa haters are crazy. It's hilarious. Sad as hell, but hilarious.
2. I presume the film Cala is thinking of with the hand is one of the Evil Dead movies, probably 2.
One of my sisters got freaked out by the Banshee scene when we were taken to see "Darby O'Gill and the Little People" as kids. I think she was around 5 at the time, and had nightmares for months.
334: I watched the last two hours of the race (i.e., approximately 10 minutes of actual racing). Given the sheer level of disaster over the course of the 500, I'm just relieved that no one died.
