The Sting
I know because my parents took me when I was a kid and I was bored to tears.
Trying to remember what movies I hated as a child and The Goonies is top of the list. Nothing but annoying screaming children running from one place to another to scream at a different thing. Even at 7 I hated the shit out of it.
As much as I love, The Sting, I have to agree with you — there’s nothing in that movie for kids.
Solaris was my best friend’s favorite movie. When he was in high school. But then, he is a unusual guy.
Re: The Sting, I must’ve been a strange child. Even then I loved that film.
Yeah. I guess I saw it when I was about 13. I didn’t understand it—the world of con games, the merry-go-round as the front for a brothel, and fancy race books, were completely beyond me. The movie did entertain me though, mainly because of the card sharping skills (basically, it was like watching a magic act), and because I knew a little about wagering on horse racing.
I wouldn’t necessarily call it boring for a child, but a lot of it would be confusing.
Now, this is just silly.
Two other films that I love, but I believe kids would find extremely boring are “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966)—Liz Taylor and Richard Burton at DEFCON 1. And, Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage” (1973) – an introspective, slow-burn dissection of a marriage, mostly shot in claustrophobic interiors.
I would nominate Spotlight, which as I recall is mostly about journalists waiting for something exciting to happen that never does. It’s way more boring than All the President’s Men.
I might also nominate Good Night, and Good Luck, which was about a real television journalist (Edward R. Murrow) but was otherwise so unmemorable I couldn’t even remember without looking it up what the central conflict in the movie was a couple decades after seeing it.
For a journalism trifecta, I would nominate Frost/Nixon. No kid in the world is going to want to listen to Richard Nixon drone on about what a great president he was.
All three are, in some sense, important films without managing to be the slightest bit interesting. Other than All the President’s Men, real life depictions of journalism don’t seem to make for exciting film.
I have to laugh at this one. . I worked for many years as a motion picture projectionist. I recall showing Barry Lyndon at one theatre, and not being even the slightest of interested in the film.
Likewise I recall seeing “Sound of Music” with my mother and grandmother in a very nice theatre back in '64 or '65. I don’t recall being greatly taken with it at the time, but then I was only 5 or 6 at the time.
Citizen Kane as a child confused my 5 to 10 year old mind. . .
2001 A Space Odyssey, as a kid actually did hold my imagination. As did Colossus, the Forbin Project
I did have an older friend as an early adolescent (10 to 12) who was a big biker movie freak. The endless fare of Hells Angels unchained,Satans Sadists, Glory Stompers ad nausium, was a bit much for me. . I worried about our family running into those clowns on our trips out west (in the 60’s. . never saw any real live bikers though! Of course his happy A$$ is in the slammer these days and I haven’t heard from him since '73.
And then, I had an aunt that was an uber feminist back in the 60’s. . She was always on some rant. . “Don’t buy Dow chemals oven cleaner. . they make Napalm!”. . .And she liked some wierd movies that I could no more relate to at age 7 than I could to differnential calculus. Damn it! I wanted to see Godzilla v. the Smog monster!
A lot of other movies I remember seeing, not understanding, but being intreagued with over my youth. . To Kill a Mockingbird, Panic in the Year Zero, and a few others that are now quite meaningful to me. . .
Oh yeah, and then there were movies like “Whatever happened to Baby Jane?” Scared the hell outta me as a kid. . I just recently purchased it on Blu Ray, but still can’t watch it. . Betty Davis is one of the true greats, and she does unhinged almost better than Bruce Dern, or even Jack Nichelson. Still. . I’m friggin 65 now!
Well, there were certainly movies from the 60’s and 70’s that I just could not get into. . .Irma la Douce comes to mind. Valley of the Dolls comes to mind. I could no more get into that than my then female cousin’s ballet shoes. Christ, I can love a good movie about gladiators and even Turkish Prisons (Think Midnight express or Mel Brooks “History of the world” and the Bickus Dickus scene.
Still, Whatever happened to Baby Jane. . still haunts and taunts me. It will never go away. Aargh!
For some reason I associate “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” with actress Virginia Gregg, the stern looking bespeckeled iron maiden that Jack Webb used in Dragnet as an incidental. Liz Taylor was pretty darn amazing though! There is just a certain class of women who thirve on intimidation of men. . and seeing that one as a kid leaves marks for a lifetime.
We’re not all Harvey Milktoast, but geez!
To add to this, I think just anything that would be described as ‘talky’ would qualify. Kids like (cheap) gags and action. Long conversations, less so.
I think Taylor’s performance in Virginia Woolf wasn’t just Oscar-worthy—she blew past that. Raw, unvarnished, absolutely gutting. She morphed—body and soul—into a bitter, middle-aged woman trapped in a brutal dance with her equally broken husband. Wild to think this was the same woman who played Cleopatra. Legendary. No filter, no vanity—just brutal truth. Too brutal for kids, while still being too boring a topic for them (the degeneration of a marriage).
And I loved her delivery of “What a dump!” She out-Bette Davised Bette Davis. Even Davis gave her props for owning that line, making it iconic.
When I was in junior high we had an all-school assembly where they showed “El Cid”.
All 184 minutes of it.
Good pick. With the exception of maybe Planet of the Apes any movie with Charlton Heston is a mind numbing bore.
I found All the President’s Men to be more boring than Spotlight, personally.
I have to admit, those in charge of education for adolescents, especially those students between 7th and 9th grade, were so often totally out of touch with reality.
They totally failed to consider the attention span of such individuals. Worse, regardless of the literary content offered, such long productions were guaranteed to alienate young minds to such pieces.
It is analogous to assigning 7th graders to read the totality of Dante’s inferno. . .Can it be done? Yes, will the students learn a damn thing? No. . Will they forever recoil from said literary work? Absolutely and for the rest of their lives.
I had to read Dante’s inferno in my second year of college and struggled with it after the second page. Even then, it came across as overly wordy, boring and totally unrelatable.
Indeed, Virginia Woolf was quite the study of unhinged adults in their natural environment. . and in the 60’s and early 70’s, for kids, that could be a very scary place indeed.
I have actually never made it through all of the first Mission Impossible movie without falling asleep. Including when we went to see it in a theater on release. So perhaps that.
I’m going to suggest Bug (2006). Shortly after it was released, I saw it with a couple friends who expected it to be a horror film. It was and is, in spite of the director’s claims to the contrary, but definitely not the type of film that a child would be likely to understand or appreciate. My friends found it a hard slog. I still quite like it.