Every now and then Husband and I will treat our boys with a Family Movie Night. Usually this happens on a Friday, because boys don’t have to get up for school the next morning, and we can all take our time getting to bed once the movie’s done.
Sometimes Husband and I will sit on the couch and snuggle with our boys during the movie. Sometimes we’ll take the opportunity to catch up on a bit of work that needs doing, while the boys laugh their way through the newest Pixar or DeamWorks release. This means that sometimes our boys get to watch a movie before we do.
The most recent movie our boys watched without us was The Good Dinosaur. Husband and I were trying to get ready for a book launch, so we sat in the kitchen while our boys crowded on the couch and asked for popcorn. By the way they laughed through much of the movie, I knew it was one I wanted to see.
So, another week, we sat down to watch it with them.
We settled onto our couch, and I tired to ignore the elbow that was jabbing into my side, but it didn’t take me long to forget that annoyance in light of another. It soon became quite clear that I would not be able to watch The Good Dinosaur without a running commentary from all three of our older boys.
“Don’t worry. This isn’t where he dies, Mama,” one of the boys said early on in the movie, in a particularly tense part where a dinosaur is trying to outrun a storm. “He dies in another place.”
Well, thanks for letting me know he dies at all. I appreciate the spoiler.
Not only would they spoil just about every tense scene in the movie, but they would also insert things like, “Watch this,” as if we weren’t already watching the screen, and “This is a funny part,” as if we wouldn’t know we were supposed to laugh, and “he’s not very nice,” as if we couldn’t figure it out for ourselves.
[Tweet “Watching a movie with kids is like having your own personal narrator, complete with spoilers.”]
They would explain jokes to us and tell us what was happening or would happen and introduce the characters before they’d introduced themselves on the screen, and it was like having my own personal narrator, which would have been nice if I were visually impaired, but I could see the screen just fine, and the only thing my kids’ commentary did was make it really hard to hear what was said during the movie.
I get it. The boys had already seen the movie, and they remembered every part where they felt a little afraid or a little sad or a little concerned. They didn’t want us to go through the discomfort of all that. They didn’t want us to feel as shocked as they did when someone died or as sad as they did when someone remembers the someone who died. It’s sweet, when you think about it.
It’s just that I’d like to watch a movie, please. I’d like to enjoy the tension of not really knowing what’s going to happen. I’d like to hear the dialogue the first time it’s executed. I’d like to be surprised now and then.
But I guess I do sort of get to be surprised, because I remember that, at one point, a boy said, “There’s another storm coming,” so I was waiting, on the edge of my seat, to see if someone else gets hurt in a storm, and it turns out the storm wasn’t coming for another forty-five minutes. So I got to sit on the edge of my seat for forty-five minutes. There’s nothing like sitting on the edge of your seat for forty-five minutes, let me tell you. I got a ridge line in my cheeks I was clenching so hard.
Still, at the end of the day, I have to admit that watching a movie with my boys is one of the best things about being a family. To have a seventy-five-pound kid crawl into your lap because this part makes him a little nervous is priceless. To have a 4-year-old snot your leg when he doesn’t want to get up to get a tissue because he doesn’t “want to miss this part” is priceless. To have a 5-year-old whisper in your ear that the dinosaur makes it back to his family in the end (whoops. Sorry about that. Spoiler alert!) is priceless.
If anyone needs an aid for the visually impaired, I learned that my boys are quite proficient a play-by-plays. They’re so good at it, in fact, that by the end of the movie, I became good at something, too: The Art of Not Listening to My Children. For those of you who haven’t learned how to do this yet, I just sort of turned off the ear that was facing a boy sitting next to me. They didn’t seem to notice, because the drone in my right ear kept right on buzzing.
I also figured out that this is the very same skill I use when the 9-year-old starts talking about Pokemon.
The things you learn during Family Movie Night. Priceless.
