Yeah, so a couple of months ago, we had this conversation at work. I’m a teacher of 7th Grade, by the way.
**Fellow teacher: We should take the kids to see a movie. They’ve been great kids and we should reward them.
Me: Yeah, I’m cool with that. Last year, we took a group to see How To Train Your Dragon and connected it to Science and English requirements. The kids loved it, it was a great movie, and everyone had a blast.
Fellow teacher: We should take them to see “Gnomeo and Juliet.” It looks cute.
Me: I think that movie is for little kids. Like 4 or 5 year old kids.
Fellow teacher: Nah, it looks cute. We should go see it.**
Anyway, it happened. We took all the kids to the theater, paid the premium for 3D(waste of money, by the way) and saw Gnomeo and Juliet.
It’s a very lame movie, designed for kids aged 3-5 years old, and was a very boring and rather pathetic way to spend 80 minutes or so. It plays like a series of little 20 minute sketches all edited into one movie. It’s not one of those kids movies adults can sit through and even mildly enjoy.
It was terrible.
And I was right. It’s for little kids.
I can’t believe we made tons of 7th Graders sit through it.
I nearly saw the actual movie, last week - girls’ night out with a friend. We decided on No Strings Attached instead (phew). We had wine with dinner beforehand but not enough to make Gnomeo and Juliet palatable.
At least the kids got the cool 3D effects, and I suspect they enjoyed the change of pace if not the movie itself!
I actually kind of liked it. Not great, but the silly sense of humor worked for me, and a movie with American Beauty and Brokeback Mountain jokes isn’t entirely for little kids. And there were quite a few sight gags tha required some familiarity with the works of Shakespeare which not many 6 year olds will have.
However, while I am adult enough to admit (with minimal sheepishness) that I enjoyed it as a 36 year old man, when I was in the 7th grade I probably would have found it insulting to be taken to it (though we never had “to the theater” movie excursions, the closest we got was year end assemblies with an old movie projected against the gym wall).
As for the ending, the movie does acknowledge they’re departing by having Gnomeo discuss it with Bill Shakespeare.
I liked it. The “death scenes” were a bit much for the Celtling (3yr old) and she really didn’t recover even though she was laughing by the end. She had kind of a cry-y afternoon because of it.
Gnomeo appears to die a few times, actually, but turns out to be alright in the end. Juliet also appears dead at the end, but comes out of the rubble with Gnomeo
It was not gentle enough for the Celtling, and not funny enough for me. But there was a definite attempt made to include “grown-up” jokes; and I didn’t think it was awful, it just wasn’t up to the Pixar-level standard. A decidedly horrible fit for 7th graders.
Not worth taking even a younger kid to. (Took two 4th graders.)
They gave a nod to the real ending by having a discussion with a statue of The Bard who said what happened next in his version that the goings on reminded him of and Gnomeo saying what a horrible ending that was.
Meet Me in St. Louis for my class. Highlight of the film was when the class clown yelled out a perfectly-timed “but where did you bite him?” MSTKesque shout out to a line by Judy Garland.
The next year we went to Six Flags, and the year after that was high school and the completely worthless pep rallies. But that’s for another thread…
After seeing the commercials for it, my 6-year-old and my 4-year-old both said, “That looks stupid.” I’m quite happy that I won’t have to sit through it.