I have an unhealthy/wonderful habit of staying up late and watching movies.
And by staying up late, I mean until about 11 p.m. (I’m too old – by law – to stay up any later).
When my children were younger, they would often sneak up behind me and catch a glimpse of what I was watching. After they would say something and scare the breath out of me, I would whisk them back upstairs to bed.
When my youngest son was much younger (he’s in college now), he reminded me of this little exercise at the dinner table one night by saying (I think he was about eight at the time): “Hey, daddy, remember the movie you made me quit watching after four minutes where those three boys lived in this awesome hotel, and they stole that tiger from the boxer? Yeah, that was great.”
His plot synopsis was of “The Hangover” (the edited TV version, for those of you at DFCS), which he watched over my shoulder for, as stated, four minutes before being discovered and reprimanded.
I bring this up because, the other day, a lady approached me and said, “you need to write about your kids more, like you used to.”
Instead of telling her the truth, which is: As they’ve gotten older, they are less and less funny – I am going to include my son’s actual mini-reviews/plot summaries of movies we’ve seen from long ago (spoiler alert warning). Here’s what he said, verbatim:
• “Avatar” – “This guy with no legs goes to space where they make him into a blue Indian, and then he can run. Then the army man with the messed-up face tries to blow up the blue Indians.”
• “Iron Man” – “This rich guy goes to this place where he gets blowed up, then he goes in a cave and makes an Iron Man costume and sets people on fire with a fire gun. He gets rescued and some other stuff happens.”
• “Transformers” – “That boy for ‘Even Stevens’ gets a car that’s a robot and all these other robots fight these other robots in this city.”
• “Thor” – This boy lives on another planet with his sort-of brother and he gets sent down here to America through a tunnel and the sort-of brother comes down and blows up a bunch of stuff and Thor hits him with a very strong hammer.”
• “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” – “That Indiana Jones guy who you make me watch all his movies, he’s old now, and he and that boy from ‘Even Stevens’ go to the jungle to find some lost old man and Indiana Jones kills an Indian with a straw. Then they find out that the ‘Even Stevens’ boy is his son.”
• “Pirates of the Caribbean” – I don’t call it Carrots of the Pirebbian anymore. In the movie, Jack Sparrow, the pirate, takes this ship and they go to an island and they find out that on this one ship, all the pirates are only alive during the daytime. At night, they become bony. I don’t know how. It’s sort of scary, but I like it anyway because there is all kinds of sword (pronounced with the w) fighting.”
• “E.T.” – “You made me watch this movie. This boy finds his pet alien outside his house and names him E.T. His sister is Drew Barrymore when she was a baby. That’s how old the movie is. Then E.T. makes them fly their bikes, and these guys in bee helmets try to steal him, but E.T. and the boy go to the woods, where E.T. gets away while the dog is barking.”
Short, concise, and to the point. We may have found the next Roger Ebert.
• Len Robbins is the editor of The Clinch County News. He can be reached at lrobbins@clinchcounty news
