One of the biggest pains of being a movie nut with kids is that you really want to show them these important movies you grew up with, and more times than not, they are completely resistant to sitting and watching some old dusty science fiction movie with fakey special effects. They would much rather watch a 3 hour YouTube video of someone playing a video game.
I have found that if one of their YouTubers talks about one of my 80s classics, all of a sudden they will run up to me rearing to see something that in the past they had refused to even watch five minutes. This weekend the tide finally turned for Raiders of the Lost Ark! I had tried numerous time to show this to the boy and the elder girl, to no luck. The DVD slowly and sadly going back in the box as they run back to their precious Roblox videos.
So with Cameron's interest peaked, I wasted no time and put on the disk and cranked up the sound. The whole family piled in and we got through the whole thing and all had a great time. Sarah the elder did keep her phone out, peeking up occasionally, but that is expected. She at least came out of her room to participate.
It's been a while since I had watched it, and man I still love this movie. It holds up. It may be perfect, and it also brings to mind the dozens of rip-offs that it inspired that could not capture that same energy and imagination. The kid's reactions were great.
Abbie my youngest is a lot of fun to watch movies with because she gets so into them and is very vocal about her feelings. When Indy and Marion kiss on the ship, she sighs like it is the most romantic thing she has ever seen, until it goes on too long and then she's like, "Yuck!" There were some gory scenes I tried to cover her eyes on, like Marion getting covered in rotting cadavers in the Well of Souls scene, but she pulled my hand away and said: "That's not scary, that's dumb."
The big finally with the fire columns and the melting Nazi's, also showed no signs of trauma. The kids all braced themselves with my warning that things were about to get gross, but when the faces came running down off the bones, they snickered and said it looked like a crayon man. Cam at least was impressed.
Cam's big reaction was at the end when the Ark meets its final resting place. The room was split on if that was the right ending. I love it to death, it's perfect. Cam was outraged! They went through all that for nothing!?! It blew his mind a bit. I laughed. Later I asked him if the movie was as good as he thought it would be, and he said that it was 1000 times better.
So this was a big win for Dad. With the original trilogy, Jurassic Park, and now Raiders in their minds, I think we have hit at least the most basic of bases that I would feel I had failed them if I had not shown them these while they were still impressionable.
On a side note, I did have my first spontaneous Star Wars geek conversation with Cam last night, over the prequels versus the sequels. I was telling him about the other Indy movies and said there is a fourth one that he can skip, that it is fine, but doesn't measure up to the first three. Kind of like the prequels. And Cam was shocked, said come on, the Pod Race in episode one was awesome. I agreed but said that was all the movie had going for it, besides the Darth Maul fight. He asked me if I like Rogue One. I said it was okay. He laughed, "Ha, see you do like a prequel!" I liked the ending battle and the Vader rampage, basically, until the last 40 minutes, I was bored. He loved the horizon lifting up and becoming a solid tidel wave of destruction. It was a great two-sided conversation.
These are little victories I bookmark with Cam, where I think if he can learn to be as calm and communicative with other people as he is with me, maybe he'll be fine out there in the world. Usually, in groups he is completely oblivious to other people his age, even if they try to speak with him and befriend him, he'll ignore and wander away. I remember being similar at his age. He's not concerned about it, so I try to follow his lead. He's been saddled with the most anti-social dad on the planet, so I get it.
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