Rated PG for Parental Gaffe

A (Shocking) Walk Down Movie Memory Lane

It starts like this. You're chatting with your kid when a familiar phrase pops into your head. A line of dialogue from a favorite movie of your youth. "Eat my shorts" from The Breakfast Club, perhaps, or "Son, you got a panty on your head" from Raising Arizona. Maybe you're calling the family to the dinner table, Junior is unresponsive and you find yourself blurting, "Bueller? ... Bueller? ... Bueller? ..."

Then you realize, with a cold blast of horror, that your child has no idea what you're talking about. No frame of reference through which to recognize your superior cinematic literacy.

How can this be? (And this is where the faulty thinking begins.) No offspring of yours is going to go through life without studying the classics, without paying proper deference to the heroes of your adolescence, the big-screen giants whose vast wisdom and extraordinary wit shaped your psyche: Mel Brooks. Eddie Murphy. Long Duk Dong.

So you rent a movie, tell your kid, "You're gonna LOVE this" and plop down on the couch for a family movie night. Which is exactly when the cursing begins. And the full-frontal nudity. And the powder-snorting, pole-dancing, cop-killing and flagrant cracking of jokes so racist they actually make your jaw clench.

People, what the (rated R for language) were you thinking?

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