Ice Cream and Movies
There is a tub of chocolate ice cream waiting in the freezer for me. I bought it during a trip to the local store with our youngest daughter this evening. She appeared quietly in the junk room and quietly asked if I might accompany her. After asking why, she whispered somewhat conspiratorially that we were running out of a particular sanitary product that she needed. I quietly smiled, dropped everything, and pulled my shoes on.
On the way to the store I received a crash-course in female sanitary products. I love that our daughters have so few filters. Any game of “I spy” in our car devolves pretty spectacularly if anybody says “I spy with my little eye something beginning with B”. The immediate responses will invariably include “Bits?”, “Boobs?”, “Bums?”, and “Bogeys?”.
If anybody says “nipples” in the presence of our eldest daughter, she still dissolves into giggles. It's kind of her kryptonite.
Anyway. What best to do with a tub of ice cream? My plans probably involve a rubbish movie, and staying up really quite late.
I was thinking the other day about movies, and how the kids don't understand how signficant movies used to be. These days they turn on their phone, tablet, laptop, or whatever, and a world of movies fall out of the air in front of them. I'm old enough to remember BEFORE video recorders were common. There was a real sense of loss if you missed something when it was broadcast on television. There was no “catch-up”, “plus-one”, or “on demand”. You couldn't buy the box set. I wonder what my grandparents would have thought of streaming movies, radio shows, and podcasts? They all died before the internet really took off.
Movies are becoming strangely disposable though. After getting home from the cinema at the weekend – watching the Godzilla movie – I had a look to see if any of the old Godzilla movies were available to download. If I had chosen to, I could have downloaded every monster movie ever made in the space of one night. On the way home from the cinema I assured my daughter that as impressive as the new Godzilla movie was, it wasn't quite as good as watching some Japanese guy in a huge rubber suit stomping on cardboard houses. To prove the point I downloaded the original “Gojira” movie from the 1950s – after watching a few minutes of it, she saw my point.