Aunt Amanda and the Horrible Awful Terrible No-Good Very Bad Judgement
I wandered over to Lisa & Andy's today, because it's been a while since I really saw the kids, except for that time two weeks ago when Lisa was in the hospital having an emergency appendectomy and I promised them I'd come see them "next week", and since I missed the actual "next week" I figured I'd better get my butt over there before I broke the promise even more.
It was a nice visit, but I noticed after dinner that Lisa was yawning a lot. At first I thought maybe I was just a boring conversationalist, but when she yawned while *she* was talking I knew something was up. She's been tired a lot since her surgery. I suggested a nap, but she said she wouldn't be able to sleep until the house quieted down a bit.
Well, hell, I know how to get the house to quiet down. I borrowed her laptop to look up what movies were playing. The theater is a bit of a hike from their house, and it's a school night, so the window for start times was pretty short-- we really had to pick something starting between 7:20 and 7:40 or so if we wanted to both get there and then get home in time for a reasonable bedtime. That pretty much gave us Rio, Hanna, and Your Highness to choose from. Despite the attraction of seeing a movie with her name, I deemed Hanna to be too young to see Hanna. None of us had much interest in Rio, though Hanna probably would have been okay with it (as it happened, we got there a little too late to catch the beginning of Rio anyway.)
Soooooo, I took the kids to see Your Highness. It's R-rated, but nothing in the trailer indicated that it would be much more than bad language and staged violence, so I figured it would be okay. I had a moment of hesitation when the ticket-counter girl said "nudity" but the kids live in a 5-person, 1-bathroom house where sharing bathroom space is the only way to get through the morning. Both said "eh, I've seen both my parents naked." And fantasy-setting Epic Quest (and Parody of Epic Quest) movies always have that one gratuitous breast-flash, which was probably the nudity. It's rated R, not NC-17, so there's not going to be any full-frontal male nudity. Everything else, they've seen so much on TV and what-have-you that they're used to it. This should be fiiiiiiiiine.
As an aside, I was unaware that you can get around the NC-17 label by making the full-frontal be something not human. You learn something new every day. I learned how fast I can get my hand over Hanna's eyes.
The entire movie went like this:
[scene on screen I would have preferred not be there]
Amanda, mental voice: crap crap crap. Well, too late now, and that's probably as bad as it's going to get. No point in dragging them out, it would just highlight the scene, and make them think about it even more.
[next scene is mostly okay]
[a little later]
Amanda, mental voice: God damn it! Well, *that's* probably as bad as it's going to get.
I poked each of them two or three times, asking "Are you alright with this?" and both answered that they were fine (the first time, Hanna looked at me like I was crazy and said "Yeah, why?" like she didn't understand what even made me ask.) I spent nearly all of the last half of the movie hovering on the edge of taking them out of the theater, but they're both at the age and mindset where "forbidden fruit" is often worse than riding it out-- tell them they CAN'T have/do something, and it's an obsession. Let it go, and it passes-- Hanna's sole comment on the movie on the way back to the car was "Eh, I didn't really like it."
Despite the kids' insistence that they would just tell their mother that the movie sucked and not offer up any details, I 'fessed up to Andy when we got back. He took it well.... after he got through laughing at me. (Actual exchange: "Did Auntie Amanda take you to a porno?" "Yeah, pretty much." "IT WAS NOT. It was not THAT bad. It was bad, but it was not THAT bad.") They live on a farm, and Andy's comment was "*shrug* They see how the goats do it." But Lisa was already asleep, so she hasn't heard about this. If I turn up violently dead in the next few days, you can be pretty sure that my sister-in-law did it... and that it was justifiable homicide.
It was a nice visit, but I noticed after dinner that Lisa was yawning a lot. At first I thought maybe I was just a boring conversationalist, but when she yawned while *she* was talking I knew something was up. She's been tired a lot since her surgery. I suggested a nap, but she said she wouldn't be able to sleep until the house quieted down a bit.
Well, hell, I know how to get the house to quiet down. I borrowed her laptop to look up what movies were playing. The theater is a bit of a hike from their house, and it's a school night, so the window for start times was pretty short-- we really had to pick something starting between 7:20 and 7:40 or so if we wanted to both get there and then get home in time for a reasonable bedtime. That pretty much gave us Rio, Hanna, and Your Highness to choose from. Despite the attraction of seeing a movie with her name, I deemed Hanna to be too young to see Hanna. None of us had much interest in Rio, though Hanna probably would have been okay with it (as it happened, we got there a little too late to catch the beginning of Rio anyway.)
Soooooo, I took the kids to see Your Highness. It's R-rated, but nothing in the trailer indicated that it would be much more than bad language and staged violence, so I figured it would be okay. I had a moment of hesitation when the ticket-counter girl said "nudity" but the kids live in a 5-person, 1-bathroom house where sharing bathroom space is the only way to get through the morning. Both said "eh, I've seen both my parents naked." And fantasy-setting Epic Quest (and Parody of Epic Quest) movies always have that one gratuitous breast-flash, which was probably the nudity. It's rated R, not NC-17, so there's not going to be any full-frontal male nudity. Everything else, they've seen so much on TV and what-have-you that they're used to it. This should be fiiiiiiiiine.
As an aside, I was unaware that you can get around the NC-17 label by making the full-frontal be something not human. You learn something new every day. I learned how fast I can get my hand over Hanna's eyes.
The entire movie went like this:
[scene on screen I would have preferred not be there]
Amanda, mental voice: crap crap crap. Well, too late now, and that's probably as bad as it's going to get. No point in dragging them out, it would just highlight the scene, and make them think about it even more.
[next scene is mostly okay]
[a little later]
Amanda, mental voice: God damn it! Well, *that's* probably as bad as it's going to get.
I poked each of them two or three times, asking "Are you alright with this?" and both answered that they were fine (the first time, Hanna looked at me like I was crazy and said "Yeah, why?" like she didn't understand what even made me ask.) I spent nearly all of the last half of the movie hovering on the edge of taking them out of the theater, but they're both at the age and mindset where "forbidden fruit" is often worse than riding it out-- tell them they CAN'T have/do something, and it's an obsession. Let it go, and it passes-- Hanna's sole comment on the movie on the way back to the car was "Eh, I didn't really like it."
Despite the kids' insistence that they would just tell their mother that the movie sucked and not offer up any details, I 'fessed up to Andy when we got back. He took it well.... after he got through laughing at me. (Actual exchange: "Did Auntie Amanda take you to a porno?" "Yeah, pretty much." "IT WAS NOT. It was not THAT bad. It was bad, but it was not THAT bad.") They live on a farm, and Andy's comment was "*shrug* They see how the goats do it." But Lisa was already asleep, so she hasn't heard about this. If I turn up violently dead in the next few days, you can be pretty sure that my sister-in-law did it... and that it was justifiable homicide.