The Sprout is almost two-and-a-half and last week I decided it was high time she had her first trip to the movies. Some people might say two-and-a-half is too young for the cinema but I disagree on the grounds that I suspect I’m raising an already highly verbal film buff. If the Sprout finds something really amusing, she drawls, “That’s funny, Bullseye!” (a line from Toy Story 2) and the other day while I gave her a ‘‘horsey-ride’’ on my leg she called me her “noble steed” (a phrase from Shrek). And her list of movie quotes is growing, hence my decision to keep her away from all of Quentin Tarantino’s work.
So on a tightwad-Tuesday morning we headed to our local movie theatre and upon discovering that Underworld: Awakenings was sold out* we saw The Muppets. I am a huge Muppets fan and no, that doesn’t mean I’m one of those weirdarses you see on trashy talk shows acting like a toddler while wearing adult-sized nappies. I only do that in private.
The Muppets is an exercise in pleasant nostalgia and so was the experience of taking the Sprout to see it. With my kid sitting next to me, wide-eyed and wondrous about the “big TV” in front of her, I couldn’t help but recall my own first taste of the cinema: at age eight I was treated to The Care Bears Movie, an animated film with a running time of 77 minutes. I don’t remember anything about the movie other than the plot being difficult to follow, mainly because, thanks to the giant Coke I’d asked for, I had to duck out to the toilet about 77 times.
The Muppets, on the other hand, ran for an hour and 38 minutes, during which time the Sprout didn’t duck out to the toilet once. This may have had something to do with the fact that she’s still in nappies, which I guess technically makes her one of those weirdarse Muppets fans.
In the lead-up to our cinematic outing I’d tried to familiarise the Sprout with the Muppets by showing her The Muppets Take Manhattan on DVD and it paid off. In the cinema, she yelled out the names of all the Muppets she recognised the minute they appeared in the movie. So when I say it paid off, I mean she made me proud despite probably annoying everybody else there.
At least this meant that for once I wasn’t the most annoying person in the theatre. Mine is usually the voice you can hear whispering questions like “Who’s that guy?” or “So where does this chick fit into the story?” and not just because I drink large beverages and then miss plot points during trips to the loo.
No, I didn’t have to ask the Sprout any plot-related questions in The Muppets. Just bot-related ones: it was the first (and hopefully last) time I’ve ever had to turn to the person sitting next to me in a movie and ask, “Hey, have you pooped?”
*As if I would take a two-and-half-year-old to see this film. It’s about vampires. I’d wait until she was at least three.
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