MOVIE TIME WITH MOM
Mom rarely has enough time to watch a sitcom, let alone an entire movie. That’s part of what makes those times that she does pop some corn and sit down with us even more meaningful. Here, Postmedia writers recall their fondest film memories with Mom.
THE LAST DETAIL (1973) AND MERMAIDS (1990)
Back in the day when VHS cassettes ruled, my mom decided she had to catch up on some old films. She asked me for a recommendation. Without assessing her Jitterbug demographic, The Last Detail came up.
So my mother, trusting her only son, rented it at the local shop. A few weeks later, her review was in: “Funny,” she said, “but the language was very blue.” In fact, the Jack Nicholson film about the Shore Patrol’s rude, lewd and beyond crude. I forgot. Later, I did recommend Mermaids, starring Cher playing a nonconformist single parent with two engaging daughters defined by a young Winona Ryder and a very young Christina Ricci in her first movie role. Credibility was, however briefly, restored. Now, she tries to watch Mermaids every Mother’s Day.
— Bob Thompson (still on speaking terms with his mother)
THE COURT JESTER (1955)
With five kids and a full-time job, my mother didn’t have much time to take us to movies, or watch them with us at home. But I remember as a boy one rainy Saturday, bored and hoping for something on TV, on came The Court Jester with Danny Kaye, Glynis Johns and Basil Rathbone. It was just starting as my mother passed through the room tidying up. “Oh, you’ll like this,” she said, “it’s one of my favourites.” And from time to time she’d come back into the room to share some of the best bits with me. She was right, of course: With singing, sword fights, pratfalls and wordplay (“the pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle”), it’s become one of my favourites, too. And one that makes me think of her.
— David Barber
SUPERMAN (1978)
I was nine years old, and my mom, a friend and I took a bus (they came once an hour) all the way to Barrington Street in downtown Halifax to line up for Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel. I still remember the scene where high-schooler Clark Kent used his super speed to shock the football bullies, who thought they left him in the dust only to find him waiting by a fence as they drove home. “Yes!” I thought, fully engaged with what was on the big screen, as well as a big pop and a big bag of popcorn. Bad Guy Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) was pretty funny, and Superman’s squeeze Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) was … I can’t remember what I thought of her when I was nine years old. Superman II was a better movie, but I’ll never forget the hour-long trek into town with my mom and my buddy.
— Jim Reyno
THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)
Living in rural Ontario, our family had a small black and white TV that only got two or three channels. So despite my brother and I becoming obsessed with movies at a very young age, our actual exposure to them was limited. Some of my earliest movie memories involve watching The Wizard of Oz whenever it happened to air on a channel we could watch. After we had seen the film a couple of times, my mother took us to our grandparents’ house one afternoon to watch the movie. By that point we had watched colour television plenty of times, but this experience always stands out for me. What my mom didn’t tell us was that watching the Wizard of Oz in colour was a very different experience than watching it in black and white. We were given no pre-warning about what we were about to see when Dorothy awakens to a vibrant Technicolour world and realizes she isn’t in black-and-white Kansas anymore.
— Eric Volmers
PRETTY WOMAN (1990)
I don’t have enough fingers to count how many times I’ve watched Pretty Woman with my mom — and not just because Julia Roberts’ character shares our last name. It’s one of the few DVDs she keeps in the camper she and my dad spend the majority of their summers in. Every time I go out to visit them, I make a point of throwing on the romantic classic, even if it’s just background noise while my sons demand snacks (they’re too young to understand the whole prostitution thing, thankfully). Chaos aside, my mom and I always somehow manage to sit and watch the ending together — and both try to pretend we’re not tearing up as Richard Gere’s dreamy Edward emerges from the sunroof outside of Vivian’s apartment.
— Lindsey Ward