Once upon a time, I went to the drive-in cinema with a couple of my brothers and watched a double feature. I don't quite recall what the first was right now (it will come to me at some point), but I do remember the second. It was part of a series and it was the first I had seen - A Nightmare on Elm Street 3. As you might be able to deduce by it being at the drive-in cinemas, this was quite a while ago and I was in fact, seven years of age.
A little too young perhaps.
This evening we took Smallsteps to see F1 The Movie as we are both fans and my wife tagged along. My wife booked the tickets and then after said "but the movie is 12+ and Smallsteps won't get in". Now perhaps as you can imagine, I am not a fan of a government telling me what is or what is not appropriate for my daughter to watch. Sure, they can provide a guideline, but they can't enforce it. Especially in the culture of streaming content. But apparently, the cinema can go down three years if accompanied by parents.
Smallsteps is nine next week. We lied.
But why should we have to?
But after seeing the movie, which we liked, I checked the rating advisory on IMDB, as I don't think there was anything in there that was overly dramatic enough to have even a 12+ rating on it, other than a bit of swearing, but even that wasn't exaggerated and if anything, I was expecting a bit more. There were no sex scenes and no nudity, no death and other than a driver being pulled from a burning car, it was pretty lame in terms of what would restrict viewing.
Rated PG-13 for strong language, and action.
! [You can read about it here - but there are spoilers]
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16311594/parentalguide/#certificates
Smallsteps and I have talked about going to see it for a while and knowing what kind of things it might contain, I filled her in on the "not real" and exaggerated storyline for the cinema. We even talked about different special effect techniques to make crashes, and stunt doubles, and fire-retardant gel and computer graphics. She is sensitive to some things, especially if she doesn't understand why and how it is happening, so she was well prepared.
The movie was a bit boring for her.
She enjoyed it, but there was a little too much talking that she didn't fully understand, and it was almost three hours. But she enjoyed the racing scenes and then spotting all the drivers she know. She liked the story too, and laughed at many of the jokes, especially the ones about how old Brad Pitt is to be driving. She compared him to Alonso, who is 44 and still racing for points - in his 22nd season. And she laughed at a lot of the things that you'd have to be at least a casual fan to understand.
That was cool.
For many things, age is such a bad metric these days for judging restrictions, because there is such a wide range of content experiences in people. Perhaps restrictions were more suited when content was pretty limited, and experiences among populations were closer. But now, there is a massive difference in what people consume in their own home, streaming all kinds of content, unsupervised. Kids are watching a lot of stuff they almost definitely shouldn't watch, without supervision of any kind.
Their parents are just glad they aren't getting bothered by kids saying "I'm bored!"
We get that a lot from Smallsteps and we either play with her, or find her something else to do. But there isn't much screentime for her. Some mornings on the weekend she will watch, and when we watch a movie of some kind together occasionally. For the most part, she will play, read, draw, jump in the park with friends or whatever else. We are not the cool parents that let her waste her brain and body away on the couch.
I wouldn't take her to see a horror film, even though I was two years younger when I did, because it is just unnecessary. It wasn't a great experience for me, but also didn't have any major impacts on me, other than a few thoughts of falling through a chair into a nightmare - a scene from the movie. But I don't like unnecessary gore, because it isn't scary for me. The scariness comes from the shit that could happen in real life.
Have you ever seen a movie you think you were too young to see?
Taraz
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