What I can't do any longer is, well, it's a bit hard to explain.
I love movies (yes, and tea, and cars and chocolate, can you stay on topic? It's so annoying when you go off on these asides that take us off into the swirling miasma in the outer reaches of your mind), sorry, what was I saying?
Oh, yes, I can't watch movies or television where young children are in peril.
Hmmm, perhaps that was easier to say than I originally thought.
Of course, it doesn't take a rocket psychologist to connect the dots between my young daughter and a young child on screen.
The issue about issue (did you see what I did there?), became an issue (okay, now I’m just messing with you) watching the movie Looper.
I had looked forward to seeing the movie, I like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis, and, despite the claims of the Vulcan Science Directorate, I like time travel movies.
I was okay with the movie, and would still recommend it, but my discomfort watching young Pierce Gagnon (pictured above) [see, I really do know the appropriate use of parentheses] {dammit, now I’ve contradicted my original point} as Cid, was unexpected.
Not to give anything away, but in Looper Cid is a troubled child, and the question of his survival is pivotal to the plot.
I’ve heard of dramatic changes in the nature of an artist’s output after falling in love, or having children. I blame both for Stevie Wonder’s decline after his magnum opus Songs in the Key of Life, and I’m pointing my finger at you Isn’t She Lovely. She might be lovely, but then came Ebony and Ivory and that set race relations back so far we now have to contend with Donald Trump.
While doing promotion for the 2005 movie War of the Worlds, interviewer Thomas Chau of cinecon.com questioned Steven Spielberg, contrasting the parental responses of Tom Cruise as Ray Ferrier and Richard Dreyfuss as Roy Neary in 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg explained “Today, I would never have the guy leaving his family and going on the mother ship. I would have the guy doing everything he could to protect his children, so in a sense, War of the Worlds does reflect my own maturity, in my own life, growing up and now having seven children.”
To be fair, though, War of the Worlds really sucked.
I also know a few people who are sensitive to what they view, a friend could not watch the movie Saving Private Ryan after hearing about the opening sequence on Omaha Beach during the Normandy invasion.
Such things had never previously bothered me, but I knew, when I heard the story of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian boy who drowned off the coast of Turkey, that I could never look at the picture.
I respect the journalist who captured the image at the editor’s decision to publish it, but I couldn’t view it.
This was not an effect I expected of having a child. I assumed I’d gain weight, hitch up my pants and yell at people on my lawn.
I didn’t expect the compassion I have for my child to extend in anything other than a theoretical way to any other child.
So, after all this, what I’m trying to tell you is that I can’t watch the movie The Room.
Related Links
Cinema Confidential [Via Internet Archive]
No comments:
Post a Comment