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.
Reveal spoiler
[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
[ Gen1: Hive ]
Be part of the Hive discussion.
- Comment on the topics of the article, and add your perspectives and experiences.
- Read and discuss with others who comment and build your personal network
- Engage well with me and others and put in effort
And you may be rewarded.
An old boyfriend and I used to couple up and go to the drive in quite a bit, usually to watch a gory movie. Fast forward a few years and those movies became a reality when my sister was murdered and chopped into pieces in California's worst mass murder. Two guys living in the remote Sierra Nevada mountains lured people up there, tortured and killed them in a 8x10 concrete torture chamber on the property. I can watch scary monster stuff but I can't watch movies where humans get hacked up anymore.
That is messed up!!
Sorry to hear about your sister and this happening to anyone. The world is a pretty twisted place and is getting more so.
Yeah, he lured her up there telling her he had a beautiful ranch with horses. That was the last words I heard from her. She called and said she was going to a ranch a guy owned, it was beautiful and had horses. I was half asleep at the time, didn't pay much attention because she seemed so happy about it. Months went by, she didn't call on birthdays, holidays, and finally I told my mom that if we don't hear from her by spring maybe we should go out there looking for her. We put out a missing persons report, and before we could decide to go for sure or not, we got a call from the police saying that they had found her name written on his mailbox. We got three tiny burnt bone fragments back that through DNA testing they were 97% sure they were hers. They chopped her up and burnt her in a barrel on the property.
I was just reading about the case on wiki. Obviously not all of these things make it into the global headlines, especially from so long ago. Seriously though, this world is tiring me out at how fucked we are as a species.
Will you remember why it came to you or when it does come to you will you be trying to remember why you needed to remember that or why you were remembering this at that time? XD
This was my hugest argument against COPPA and pretty much every single "child protection" thing (especially this under 16 ban. Like get the hell out of my way you're actively preventing me from doing my job and also actively making everything a hundred billion times worse no matter how desperately anyone tries to pretend otherwise.
On the flipside of that I have had so many people I know lie about their kids' age to get them into the zoo for free (there is or at least was a day in the week when 4 and under could get in for free, it's been a while since I've been to the zoo now never mind with small kids) and if the kids overhear they protest about how they're now 5 or 6.
My kids would get mad at me coz I'd give them chores to do, and then they learned really fast to find something else to do when bored and not complain at me XD
I'm such a bad parent
I think the only movie I was probably too young to see I didn't even get to see all of, pretty sure it was a porno that my parents somehow didn't realise was a porno. This scene came on (I can remember the scene, when I was that little I just thought it was a bit weird but as an adult I was like WAIT) and my parents looked at each other and then Mum quickly got up and turned it off and said we'd go back to the video shop to borrow another one because "this one's 'not nice'."
The child protection things never work - especially in the digital space. There will always be gaps. The latest is the social media ban - which should push more people into decentralised social media hopefully.
Have you been to a zoo lately? I quite like zoos, but there is only one in Finland and while it is okay, it isn't quite what is found in Aus.
I tell Smallsteps the same. She can help me, or she can find something to do. Sometimes I play for a bit of course - but that is because I enjoy it too ;)
Was it mixed race? ;D ;D
I don't remember awkward moments like that in movies. We didn't get a video player until into the 90s, and by then my parents had split and not many were at home still.
The last time I went to the zoo was with one of the kids who wanted to go there for an excursion so some years back now. I'd like to do an art day or something there (similar with a lot of other places) but time is a thing I'm not managing very well right now (or ever).
Yeh I did play with the kids sometimes if they asked, usually it was whatever imaginative play they had going on at the time, sometimes it was Lego and sometimes it was Playstation (our favourites were the Lego games, they were so ridiculous XD and as they got older we got a few new ones like this insane cooking game that can do up to 4 players but we only have 3 controllers and because I'm not great at gaming anymore there was one level where all I can remember was trying to pass one of the kids some dish and I kept falling off the truck XD).
The characters were both Chinese (though they were speaking English as I even remember one line of dialogue leading up to that point and it wasn't dodgy at all, and I didn't have to read it and I've been able to read forever), I suspect my parents may have thought it was a kung fu movie as those were a staple in our movie nights.
btw, I hope you realise the humour in the "mixed race" comment, as it reminded me of some awkward moments in my own life, being mixed race and out with my mum :D
I'm afraid I'm entirely too dumb to "get" it in the context of the movie XD Can't quite relate in the same way to your awkward moments, my kids apparently had very contextual skin (they look "dark" compared to J and "light" compared to me, but similar enough that nothing was ever questioned, and when middle spent more time making content on social media than she does now she used to get people telling her to "stop pretending to be Asian"). One of my dear departed friends would definitely have been able to relate though, she was the very white mother with very obviously darker skinned biological kids XD
I saw a movie called, The Rose (1979). Mum dropped me and Z off there for some reason and clearly didn't know what the movie was. I was nine and say there thinking, what the everlovin' fuck is this fucken shit.
I didn't understand any of it but the popcorn and soda went down well.
I think I would still get scarred by having to watch a Bette Midler movie.
Yeah, it scarred me. My team of psychologists in the funny farm says I can blame everything on it. Fuck you Bette Midler!
The age ratings are archaic from the 90s and shoudn't be keeping anyone out of film. These days I think parents are more open with their kids about the content in the film, so the ratings should be recommendations at best.
Many parents don't monitor anything, other than their own social feeds. Kids are in the dark and don't care about the ratings. Though Smallsteps follows all the rules - but I am trying to break that in her.
That's awesome you have something you like which you can enjoy together with your daughter. I think the age restriction is flawed, but is set up as a precaution to protect the children. Smallsteps might be advanced for her age mental wise, but some kids might be behind. That is the reason for the blanket age like that. I compare it to like the school system where there are grades, but the level of intelligence of students can vary greatly within it.
I think horror was mostly the movie I was too young to see. There were a lot "Shake Rattle and Roll" films during Halloween season, and they just show it on TV. I think they were rated R13, and I was watching them when I was 7. There were a lot of scared moments after watching it, but is now a fun memory I have with my siblings.
I think that the guides and the schools are looking at the lowest level, not even the average. And then with these guidelines, there is moral judgement. Violence is far more acceptable than nudity for instance. That is pretty strange - unless in the US.
I wonder if you (and I and others) learned better lessons in life because of this kind of exposure. It wasn't overly extreme, but it gave us fear and experience. Now with the crazy shit kids watch, what kind of adults do they become?
I think that's the point. It's set up to be inclusive, and to look out for those at the lowest level since those above it can manage better. I'd like to think the guidelines were born from kindness, and is just mishandled afterwards. As for Violence vs nudity, I think it's how it is handled and its effects. We have the police for violence, but nudity can lead to sex and early pregnancies which can wreck children's futures.
I'd like to think so. As they say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Of course, it all depends on how we cultivate that experience. Criminals chose the wrong lessons to learn from those experiences.
It's all pretty arbitrary these days. They have guidelines here too, but most parents don't bother to adhere to them. Which yeah, it is their choice, but the problem is we have already determined that most parents don't always make the best decisions, so you end up having kids seeing content they have no facilities to comprehend. It sounds like you did your due diligence to make sure this would be appropriate which is admirable. I saw a double feature at a drive in when I was a young adult. One was Dante's Peak, and I think the other was Twister or Volcano.
Natural disaster junkie?
The guidelines are fine, but they are Guidelines. If with the parents, the parents decide. If Smallsteps was trying to go by herself or a group of friends, that is different.
I think a lot of times they don't even check anymore. Either that, or you can buy your tickets online ahead of time, so if the parent buys it for you, they don't even know what age you are. Yeah, it must have been some kind of theme night or something.
I really enjoyed reading it. You made a great point about how movie age ratings don’t always match what kids can actually handle, although there's some movies not suitable for kids. I liked how you prepared Smallsteps before the movie, especially explaining things like special effects and stunt work that kind of care really matters. These days, kids are already exposed to so much content especially on social media, often without anyone guiding them, so it’s nice to see how you’re setting healthy limits while still making fun memories together as a family.
Reading this reminded me of a couple of zombie movies I watched when I was little. I can’t remember the titles( Americans zombies), but I’ll never forget how scared I was. The way the zombies moved, the creepy sounds, and how they jumped out of nowhere, it was too much for me at that age. I had trouble sleeping for days, always thinking something was hiding in the dark. Looking back, the movies probably weren’t even that scary, but at the time, it felt so real. It stuck with me for years, and I avoided anything with zombies after that.
I think that they probably weren't and probably if watched again, quite lame. But, that is what is good about the old days - there was space for imagination to play a role. Now, things are so realistic, kids don't have to imagine anything.
The debate over ratings is complex. Beyond the arbitrary nature of age, the key seems to be the preparation you gave your daughter. That's the difference between conscious exposure and passive, unsupervised consumption of content. However, your own reluctance toward horror films reveals that, deep down, we all apply our own filters, which don't always coincide with official criteria.
I love the black and white photography, that look in Smallsteps's eyes as he eats his popcorn.
Yeah, I don't have a reluctance or aversion to horror films, I just don't find the gore convincing enough to scare me. I like to be scared, I like to have nightmares - but I like the psychological fear. Blood and guts is boring.
With a phone in the dark, it wasn't easy to get something clear. But, I prefer to get something I like, even if it isn't the greatest shot :)
Strangely, the only thing that scared me about Annabella III was the music... I don't know, it hit me hard, but the scenes didn't...
I haven't seen it, but from what I saw it looks a bit like Chucky. I found them childish. Good music adds to the suspense though.
Please excuse me, I made a mistake in the previous sentence. Instead of "his," it should have been "her." That's what I get for writing in two languages at once.
I love the black and white photography, that look in Smallsteps's eyes as she eats her popcorn.
And yes, I think it was inappropriate to watch Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" and "The Birds" when I was just 10 years old back in the 1960s; I had nightmares afterwards where I would wake up crying, ha ha ha...
I'll never forget being in a video store (yep) and this Mum was asking about SAW for her kid. Her 13 year old kid. For a sleepover.
When I was about 13 I saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre at a sleepover. I had to call my Mum to come get me - I felt so sick watching it.
There HAS to be guidelines for viewing, because not everyone are responsible parents, and kids aren't always ready to watch shows that have particular content.
Not everyone is as careful and responsible as you guys, Taraz.
Guidelines for viewing are fine - enforcing them as law is not imo. Parents can do with the guide so then they can DYOR, but otherwise, I don't want a government making decisions on how I parent with some outdated heuristic.
Parents need to step the fuck up though.
I am yet to see any of the Texas Chainsaw movies - but I have seen SAW (first only), just because it was Australian. Not bad as far as they go, still not my thing.
This week I went to the cinema with my children to see the film Superman. They really enjoyed the film, and I didn't get bored either. There were only three of us in a 500-seat theater. In the city where I grew up, few people go to morning shows. We were allowed to choose any seats we wanted and we sat comfortably on the soft sofas. I remember this cinema in the 80s and 90s, when the hall was always full to the end and people stood to see the film.
The film for which I was too young in my school years was the Soviet film "Come and See" about the burning of Belarusian villages by punitive forces. Also, the only book that I wanted to finish reading at 40 and could not - a book on the same topic, the memoirs of surviving eyewitnesses of the destruction of villages in Belarus in 1942-1943.
There weren't many in this showing either. It is so bloody expensive these days. Was Superman worth it? I haven't seen much, but the actor doesn't seem Superman-ish in the pictures.
Have you seen the film as an adult?
In our small town the tickets are very cheap, 2 euros. I saw "Superman" in the late 80s, I haven't seen the subsequent films. I liked the film, now I like the same films as my children 11 and 15 years old :)
Too many times... I remember as a child that my parents often hurriedly switched to other channels, when some explicit images (sex) appeared on the TV screen on which they were watching a movie, which I also followed (I only watched the picture because I didn't know how to read 😃).
And I still remember today, I went to the cinema with my friends, I was no more than 10 years old, to watch the horror movie "Demons".
https://g.co/kgs/jWRsdHM
In our country, we were not restricted by the law at that time, and it should have been, because the introductory note stated 17+ 😱
The action of the film begins in a darkened cinema hall, similar to the one we were sitting in, when the screen is torn and demons rush from the stage into the front rows. Creepy and definitely not for boys of that age.
I don't remember my parents changing channels, but we didn't watch much TV at that time, and there was no remote! :D
Lol. I just watched the trailer. It is so 80s :) Have you seen it again since?
I don't think so.
That movie gave all of us such fear that we had a hard time going to the cinema again 🙂
Those Demons were creepier to me than the rattling of Freddy's "nails" or Jason's mask.
Since those horrors, I treated myself to the Goonies at the cinema, a real movie for teenagers, which I re-watched many times, the last time was a couple of years ago.
And the hairstyles were pretty scary too!
As kids are frequently exposed to various media at home, it is normal for parents to need much more control over what their children can manage.
At a time when most parents are disengaged as parents.
Film and cinema industries, for example, issue these kinds of warnings to ensure they comply with the law. They know they'll face penalties otherwise, and children may not care much about them.
A 12+ warning for profanity is unnecessary. In fact, it might be more beneficial for children to learn about profanity in movies. After all, they'll encounter these profanities more often as they get older.
I watched a horror movie at home before, when I was a kid. I wasn't old enough to watch that movie, and I should have heeded the warning.
Parents shouldn't care much about them either - if the parent is engaged. Swearing is a healthy part of life.
If you buy it on bluray / dvd no one is going to check the age of the people in the room.
so that pg rating is nice as a guideline thats all .
Yeah. Guidelines. Not rules.
An honest and entertaining presentation that opens up discussion about the meaning of parental controls and the limits of age classification in an age of open viewing.
Congratulations @tarazkp! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain And have been rewarded with New badge(s)
You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPCheck out our last posts:
I feel like ratings in itself can be so arbitrary sometimes. Parents should be trusted to judge what’s right for their own kids, especially when the content is not strong content