the problem with movies today

My mother called the other day. Generally speaking, my mom isn’t up to speed on pop culture issues. The whole Tom and Nicole thing, she missed. The whole Tom and Katie thing, she’s missing.

And because of this lack of pop culture reference points, I was taken by surprise when I answered the phone and the first thing out of my mom’s mouth was, “have you heard about this Brad Pitt and Angela Joile thing?”

“It’s Angelina mom, and yes I know about it. Brad and Jen broke up and the rumor has it that Angelina was the reason they split. It happened a while ago,” I told her.

“Jen who?” she asked. “What in heaven’s name are you talking about? I mean this new Smith movie that they’re in. Did you know that this movie is about assassins?”

“Yes mom, I did happen to hear that the movie was about assassins…”

“Well,” my mother continued, “I just can’t believe all the gratuitous violence that they’re putting into movies nowadays. And Brad Pitt, of all people! He seems like such a nice boy, why would he agree to make a movie with so much violence in it?”

And I carefully tried to explain that the whole point of the movie was based on Brad and Angelina being assassins. That Brad and Angelina were, unbeknownst to the other, both assassins and that they were hired to kill the other one. I tried to explain that without this minor little detail, there would be no plot and no movie and that the violence wasn’t so much ‘gratuitously’ added in, but rather it was ‘extremely importantly’ added in.

My mom took a few seconds to mull this over before saying, “well, I still don’t understand why they both just couldn’t have been teachers…or something nice like that.”

I just shook my head and said, “yes, mom, that probably would have made for a much better movie.” And I couldn’t help but think that, if left to my mother, The Godfather would have been the epic saga of how a younger son rises to take over the family business…a pizza shop…run by the lovable Corleone family.

Hollywood doesn’t realize how lucky it is that my mother never decided to venture out West.