**I am not sure where to put this so if it is in the wrong spot please move it MODS.
My wife and I do not have any children yet and we are both in our thirties. We are also HUGE Tolkien fans. We have all three special extended editions of the LOTR trilogy, including the extra’s from National Georgraphic on Tolkien and the 2 hour Gollum video outlining his creation…
We were thinking that by the time we have children and they are old enough to watch LOTR it’s going to be at least 15+ years old. [wow] I think LOTR is certainly timeless so we shouldn’t have aproblem there, the effects in it are amazing and look crisp and clean…but what about other movies that we want to show our children…older ones. Like the first three Star Wars, or the first couple Indiana Jones movies? Some of the graphics in those look a little dated, I wonder if the kids will think they are silly because they look so “old”?
I remember my father has a couple movies that he absolutely loves, and they are older movies shot before I was born and I simply can’t relate to their greatness as he can. Movies like Dr.Zhivago, Run Silent Run Deep to name a couple.
I think LOTR will be timeless and my children just by proxy will like them. But what about movies that I loved that are not so timeless will they get lost in the racks? I am certainly a child of the early information age, pre-internet where movies were a staple of rainy summer days and cold winter nights. Back when those laser disk players with huge laser disk cartidges were inserted and ejected - they fell out of style quickly.
Anyway, do folks who are parents have movies that they are holding onto or saving for their children? Movies that may have shaped them in some way that they really want their children to share. What movies are they and why are you saving/holding them to show your kids?
My kids are teenagers now and have enjoyed to some degree or another all of the movies I was eager for them to see (2001 and Blazing Saddles, to name just a couple), but there is no getting around the inevitable quaintness that accompanies the passage of time. Your kids will understand your sentimentality (and either indulge you or revile you for it), but the tidal wave of NEW content using ever more dazzling techniques will ensure that your children’s experience with LOTR will be pretty similar to your experience of Dr. Zhivago.
They’ll say, “Wow Dad, were all movies just 2D when you were young?”
I had been saving The Shawshank Redemption until they were old enough to cope with some of the disturbing stuff, and I showed it to them about a month ago. They loved it.
The difficulty is in finding enough time to sit down and watch together. To get my daughter to agree to watch Shawshank, I had to watch a movie of her choosing (Apocalypto–and I liked it!).
The next movie I want to show the kids is Psycho, and hopefully I can get it done before someone spoils it for them. I don’t see any two-hour chunks of quality time at home coming up in the near future though…
ETA: I was also thinking my son would enjoy the first Indiana Jones movie, but I caught part of it on TV this weekend, and I’m not sure if the pacing and special effects hold up. He liked Smokey and the Bandit, though.
You don’t think the pacing will hold up? You think it’s too slow or something? Raiders of the Lost Ark?
The effects are fine. I watched it with my daughter (who’s 10), and she went absolutely nuts for it. Same with Star Wars. We’ve now watched all the movies in both series.
Good movies hold up fine. It’s the bad ones that were only watchable because of the then-groundbreaking effects that don’t hold up anymore.
I am holding onto the movie of my now 3 year-old daughter dancing to “Shake your Booty.” I plan on unleashing it at her wedding.
Not what you had in mind?
Well, if you think it’s okay it probably is. It’s just been so long since I watched it I barely remember anything except the Nazi’s face melting off.
Forgot to mention: My kids adore Poltergeist, even though the scene with the guy pulling his face off in the bathroom made them laugh at the “lame” special effects.
That part scared the heck out of me when I first saw it. Mad Max Scared the shit out of me and there were no special effects in that movie. But then in the late 70’s early 80’s I was a budding teen and nuclear war was still on some peoples minds - I remember being so scared, thinking the “Russians” were going to nuke us.
My son saw Raiders of the Lost Ark when he was 8 and loved it.
Also, he saw a commercial for some Alien vs Predator Special Edition DVD once and remarked that his uncle let him see it. I was less scandalized by him seeing an R (?) rated action flick than I was about him seeing that piece of crap. So I had him watch Aliens
Afterwards, we watched the Special Features which showed how the aliens in the movie were just big nifty puppets and he suffered no ill effects.
For us it was The Wizard of Oz and the original Frankenstein. The Wizard of Oz is timeless, and Frankenstein…well, 'nuff said. We turned the young 'un on to these at around 5 years old.
I’d be intersted to hear what some of our younger members (under 20) think of some of the movies we consider classics from the 70s & 80s and if they hold up.
My wife saw the Godfather series for the first time a few years ago when she was 25. She thought they were “okay” but nothing she hadn’t seen before in a mafia style drama.
I also had a friend who at age 30 (also about 5 years ago) saw the original Star Wars trilogy for the first time (yeah, I’m not sure what planet he grew up on).
He wasn’t impressed but could understand why children enjoyed them. He thought for an adult sci-fi/action/fantasy they fell way-way short.
I saw Psycho for the first time in it’s entirety in the mid 80s. Of course I had already seen the key murder scenes multiple times on tv clip shows so I knew what I was in for. But it blew me away watching it from beginning to end. So simple yet so perfect and effective.
My wife and I had family over last weekend and we watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. My youngest cousin, 18 was unimpressed. She said the movie looked “grainy” and the special effects were … get this… non-existant. :eek:
She could barely watch it because she thought it was silly. I was a little sad at that.
After temple of Doom we watched the new movie Juno about a teen who get’s pregnant and has the baby and gives it up for adoption. When the movie was over my little cousin said she liked that movie a lot…I looked at my wife and said, WOW -I didn’t understand half the things those kids were talking about in that movie…
The lingo just vexed me because I didn’t understand it. My wife agreed and confirmed we were getting old.
Princess Bride and Breaking Away - both favourites of mine (my wife only likes the former), and I had a great time watching my (now) teen boys see them for the first time.
Considering that my parents got my brothers and me completely hooked on MGM musicals, film noire, and Hitchcock - all filmed well before we were born - I think it’s completely possible to successfully introduce kids to older films.
My father used to complain about movies larded with “too many” special effects - FX to the exclusion of all the other parts of the film - and I reminded him that the “costume spectacles” of the 40s and 50s were equally guilty. It has to be a good film, one that still gets talked about today, and it has to have some substance to it. If that’s there, I think the kids will like it.
Well, the stuff I’m not letting Sophie see now is because she won’t be old enough to watch them for at least another decade… Tarantino films and the like.
Most of the stuff I decided was OK for a kid to watch she has already seen - LOTR, SW, stuff like that. She enjoys black and white movies (Yankee Doodle Dandy being a favorite she requests quite often, she also got upset when her mother turned Mitchum’s Cape Fear OFF), musicals, shorts… she likes them all and will pretty much watch anything described as a “movie”. She doesn’t care for foreign films too much as she can’t read the captioning fast enough (Sophie is six).
However, films that I’m waiting to show her… Aliens probably tops the list. Sophie will just LOVE that one. Guaranteed.
Well, if it puts your fears at ease at all, nobody actually talks like the kids in Juno. Some lingo might have gotten picked up from it like it did with Napoleon Dynamite, but the dialogue in Juno practically felt like it was designed by committee to sound “hip.”
Anyway, I remember when I was a kid that it wasn’t so much the special effects that got to me (I’ve always had an appreciation for movies with goofy special effects), it was the pacing.
My dad loves the old Universal monster movies (which were ancient even when he first saw them), and I remember being bored to death by most of them because of how slow they were. Same thing with Godzilla movies - the special effects were my favorite thing about them, it’s the rest of the movie that’s boring as can be.
On the other hand, he showed me Psycho when I was about thirteen (around 1997), and I was enthralled. And it scared the crap out of me. Likewise, I first watched the Godfather when I was eighteen and loved it in spite of some horrendously bad special effects (like Sonny beating up his sister’s husband) that didn’t bother my dad.
Oh, and LotR will look hopelessly dated to your kids. Aspects of it look embarrassing even now.
