Red Box Trauma

We spent the past two days cleaning up the yard and the gardens, clipping back spent blooms, and splitting perennials. It's good to be done with summer and yard work, but then again, I'm gonna miss my frogs singing and the hydrangea blooming.

After a long day of working in the yard, Saturday night brought us to the line at the local Red Box. Red Box is the movie rental machine at the local Walgreens, if you aren't familiar with it. It's kind of luck-of-the-draw renting, leaving us with whatever was left after hours of folks tapping that machine for $1 movie rentals before we got there. But it's only $1 and so we go, figuring whatever we get can't be that bad.

Yeah/no.

Being that the machine is outside, most cars pull up and park right by the machine. Saturday was no different and there was already a car there choosing their movie. We got out just to see what they had and to wait for our turn right after a mom and two little boys finished.

Mom was sitting in the car, waiting for these two kids (around 5 and 6 years of age) to decide what to get and to run her credit card through the machine. And while we were chatting about what to get, one of the kids decides he's gonna help us.

So, he's pointing out this movie or that--mostly things like "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" or "Cats and Dogs"--all pretty child-friendly fare. And when I point out Huckle from some kid movie, the kid scrunches his face up and shakes his head "no". Apparently it's too babyish for homeboy, and he points to a movie and yells "You GOTTA get 'Kick Ass'" and he says "ass" and everything.

I'm trying to be real cool and I tell him, "No way, kid! That's got a curse word and you shouldn't be saying stuff like that!" and he just looks at me. And his mom is right there and she doesn't blink an eye. So, I was telling this kid that he shouldn't be using words like that and I'm not getting that movie because I don't like curse words (yeah, right) and that movie looks awful anyway. But he kept insisting and finally he gave up and his mom screamed for him to get in the car, which he did, and we were left there with the Red Box machine and no idea what to rent.

The four of us (Colin, Emma, me, and Em's friend, Lauren) stood there debating which movie to get, which was hard because Lauren saw like all of them, and then someone else pulled up and we had to pick something quick. And before we knew it, we had "Kick Ass" in our hands and we were all laughing because some 5-year old told us to rent this movie.

Which was our first mistake.

I'm just gonna tell you that this movie traumatized me. It was the most violent, graphic, and horrible movie EVER. It was meant to be funny, I guess, but I was so freaked out by the scenes of an 11-year old girl slaughtering folks left and right, dropping f-bombs like no tomorrow, and getting punched in the face in the end. It was so horribly disturbing that I kept walking out of the room. And all that I kept thinking was that mom let her 5-year old watch this crap.

I'm not sure what is scarier--that he watched it, that he recommended this to me, that his mom let him watch it, or that I actually sat there and watched it too.

That's the last time I ask a 5-year old Roger Ebert for a movie suggestion. Sheesh.