Movies with Kids

We watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with the kids tonight. I learned a valuable lesson: If you promise your kids a flying car, it bloody well better be flying a soon as the opening credits finish running. "When does the car fly?" "When does it turn into Chitty?"

I'm not sure why I insist on showing classic movies to the kids. I mean, I end up having to do a running commentary to answer all the questions. "Just watch and see" is not an answer that anyone seems to accept.

Some things haven't changed from when I was a kid. The Child Catcher is still very scary. It's still hard for a kid to understand why anyone would hate children enough to ban them. DD wanted the father and Truly to get married almost from the first. However, she also thought that Truly was right to give Prof. Potts heck for not taking proper care of his kids when they first met.

DS wanted to know why they kept singing. (Bwahahaha!) DD liked the singing. Perhaps I'll introduce them to Mary Poppins soon. Or Bedknobs and Broomsticks. It may amuse you all to know that I never saw that as a child, because it is about witchcraft, which is evil.

My kids don't wait for scary parts in movies to be scared. Nope, they expect a scary part to come any minute, so they tense up at almost random moments. I try not to laugh, because I was the same way.

It took DD about half an hour to warm up to a movie that you had to pay attention to to get the gist of it. DS wasn't interested until the bad guys showed up, and then he was scared and had to sit in my lap. They both sat right up when Chitty turned into a boat and when it turned into a plane, they were both hooked. Why they can't just trust me and watch, I don't know.

The big down side of all this is that I'm going to have the title song and that Up from the Ashes song stuck in my head for days now.

*****

Oh, speaking of movies: my kids want to see Shark Boy and Lava Girl. I haven't read any reviews, but the mother of DD's little friend from school says it's non-stop violence and she wouldn't recommend it for kids as young as ours. Do any of you have any thoughts on this?

Editted to add this link:

http://www.kids-in-mind.com/a/adventuresofsharkboy&lavagirlin3-d.htm

I had forgotten about this site. I'm not really sure what their agenda is. It seems to be a review site that attempts to quantify the levels of potentially objectionable material in a movie. And they do include everything. From hot steamy sex to a girls' belly button showing. I think they are trying to be fair. They also include every time someone insults someone else, and anything even remotely violent, as well as drug use and smoking.

The point - having read their review, my kids won't be seeing this movie, if only because of this:

Brains fall from the sky and splat on the ground (we hear squishes and spurts when they hit). Brain matter also splatters on the screen.

FTR I like this site. Sometimes I think they go a bit overboard, but they don't seem to be trying to feed me morals. I consider this one of the tools I can use to help make informed choices about entertainment for my kids. I'm going to stop myself before I go on about what I find objectionable in movies. That's a whole entry unto itself.