When you only go out to the movies once every other year, the stakes are high.
Still, we had no idea how disastrous our movie date was going to be, that night in 2002, when my husband and I went to see The Hours.
The very first shots were of water trickling over rocks to form a stream. The stream became a river. Then Nicole Kidman, as Virginia Woolf, walked over the rocks, choosing several large ones to put in the pockets of her dress. It was unclear why she was doing this, until she continued walking right into the river, and drowned herself.
That was the emotional high point of the movie. I don’t even mean it as a pun to say that it all went downhill from there. Every character in the film was miserable, except for the ones who were desperately miserable, and a few who were about to be miserable and just didn’t know it yet.
I can’t say that my husband hated that movie. “Hate is too kind a term,” he would say. My problem is that, ever since that night, I have not been able to get him to go near a movie theater with me, unless I can first supply satisfactory answers to his questions:
Does everybody start happy?
Does everybody end up happy?
Are they all happy, all the way through?
Not even Bambi would pass that test!
And now, most crucially, I must assure him there is no running water.
“Can we please go see ‘Gravity’? I promise, there’s no water anywhere in it. It’s just two astronauts in space suits, in outer space.” Except I forgot about the everyone-happy rule. As (spoiler!) we watched George Clooney drift off into oblivion, I found myself hoping my husband had at least noted the absence of running water.
I have some requirements, too. Chief among them is knowing what I call the “whatever” point. Expressed as a number of minutes and seconds into the film, this is the point at which I will despair of following a convoluted plot any further, and instead throw my hands in the air and exclaim, “Whatever!”
You know you have arrived at the “whatever” point when the protagonist huddles up with his buddies, and embarks on a hasty explanation of why they must do – well, whatever. And I will admit that this point arrives exponentially sooner when the story involves anything technical:
“We have to [encrypt /implant /encode] this [frammis /dark metal /software] on the enemy’s [business plan /submarine /motherboard] so that we can do a reverse Trojan viral something-or-other. It’s the only way we can [steal their money /sink their ship /save our planet.]”
Sitting in the dark, I mutter “Whatever!” and fling my hands out, knocking my husband’s popcorn to the floor. On the screen, however, everybody says, “Right!” or “You got it!” or “Yes, sir!” and runs off, into the rest of the movie.
“Sir! We’ve only got 4 minutes until the whatchamahoozie explodes!”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” I lean over and quietly ask my husband.
“I was going to ask you that,” he whispers back. “Do you want anything from the snack bar? For some reason, I need some more popcorn.” “And leave me to figure this thing out by myself? Oh no, you don’t!” So we both sit there, trapped, counting the minutes until the movie is over and we can puzzle it out over dinner.
Knowing the movie’s “Whatever” point would be helpful.
There are a few other ratings that would be useful, too.
VV – Vehicular Violence. There was a phase in my boys’ lives when all they cared about were cars and trucks. That was the exact moment when the movie Jumanji came out. I still don’t know anything about it, though – except that the trailer for it, on TV, included a scene where a jungle vine reached out and strangled a car. My sons instantly became hysterical. When broadcasters came out with the “V” chip, I mistakenly thought this was what it was for.
AV – Violence to Animals. Similarly, my niece (and her mother, for that matter) is completely intolerant of any violence to animals; threats of violence to animals; hints of threats of violence to animals… You get the picture. And yet, the movie people don’t. .
And, most important of all:
RW – A warning from the Surgeon General that the film includes scenes of Running Water. ‘Nuff said!
