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Responsible vs. irresponsible parenting

In the wake of the murder of Kellon Hill, apparently by a gang of teenagers, there has been much bellyaching about the failure of parents to live up to their responsibilities to parent their children. This evening I had chance to see perfect examples of both responsible and irresponsible parenting when I went to the 6.15pm showing of The Dark Knight at the Little Theatre.

The Dark Knight is rated PG-13 - or to give the rating its full description, "Parents strongly cautioned: Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13". Indeed. In particular, the violence, and threats of violence, carried out by the Joker even made me feel queasy. He talks about how he put razor blades in his mouth to match his wife's disfigurement; about how his father took a knife to his face to cut him a smile; and at a couple of points in the movie puts a knife to the mouth of his victims and threatens to do the same.

In front of us was a mother with three boys between perhaps 8 and 11 years old. When it got to the scene with the Joker talking about the razor blades, they got up and walked out; I think the boys may have even expressed some disquiet and asked to leave. I applauded their mother for taking them out.

In contrast, across the aisle were a mother and father with two young girls between maybe 6 and 10 years. They stayed for the whole movie. The kids were restless through much of it (not surprising - the movie was over 2.5 hours). Their mother laughed at a couple of the more sadistic scenes (can't imagine how confused that must have made the kids feel) and would not go to the bathroom with her kids until they had stood in the aisle pleading with her for a minute or two. In short, the parents just didn't seem to care.

I was so angry that by the end of the movie I was ready to confront them about whether they really thought it was an appropriate movie for their children to see. To my shame, I didn't get to them before they left.

I can't blame the cinema for letting them in. Young children are even permitted in R-rated movies if accompanied by an adult. But perhaps the cinema should stop every family they suspect of taking an under-age child into a movie and tell them about its content in an effort to dissuade them. Perhaps there's even a case for making age restrictions on movies mandatory, even if an adult is present.

Some may say I have no right to question their decision of these parents to bring their kids. The movie was PG-13 and they had every right to take the children to it. Yes they did. But that doesn't mean their behaviour was responsible.

Parents have the primary responsibility for raising their children, and as such should always be given the first chance to parent their kids. However, when parents are unable or unwilling to do so, I believe the rest of us need to be prepared to speak up and challenge them. The principle of non-interference in parenting needs to die.

Sex and the City

I'm seriously considering never going to the cinema in Bermuda again.

On Friday evening we went to see Sex and the City at the Liberty Theatre. There wasn't much of a plot, the dialogue wasn't as sharp as it could have been, and I have no idea why the writers felt the need to give Carrie an assistant rather than having one of the other women fill that role. But as a fan of the series, none of these things bothered me too much, and I just enjoyed the opportunity to spend more time with the characters.

Alas, I missed the beginning of the movie (and the trailers that proceeded it) because it turns out that the folks at Liberty Theatre are just as inept as those at the Little Theatre. The picture was alternately stretched and squashed, sometimes spilling into the area above or below the screen, sometimes cut off. At one point they stopped the movie (to jeers and sarcastic cheers from the audience), but when it resumed the problem still wasn't fixed. It wasn't until five minutes into the movie that something approaching a stable image finally settled on the screen. Even then, however, it didn't look right, with black bars down the sides and the edges of the picture fading to black rather than being clearly delineated. The picture was occasionally juddery, and at one point the colour balance kept popping between warm and cool tones.

It's times like this when I wish I was still living in London.

Indiana Jones and the Theatre of Crap Sound

Uh oh. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is going to be showing at the Little "muffled sound is perfectly normal" Theatre.

Can anyone who has been there recently testify that their sound system has been sorted out? If not, maybe I'll just wait for it on Blu-ray or Apple TV instead.

Our first Apple TV movie rental

Just finished watching our first movie rental using the Apple TV: the HD version of Michael Clayton.

The picture was pretty good - the stubble on George Clooney's face seemed particularly sharp - but without the SD version to do a direct comparison with, it was difficult to tell whether it was sufficiently better to justify the additional $1 premium. That said, the HD version did come with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround surround too.

I set it downloading when I went to bed at midnight last night, and by 8am this morning, it was done. That was much faster than I was expecting, although the movie was only 2 hours long.

At $5 for a new release, it's a little pricey compared to the $2.50 you'd pay to rent a DVD from Leisure Time, but the convenience, and the absence of any late fees (which we inevitably end up paying when we rent a movie at the weekend) just about compensate, I think.

As for the movie itself, we enjoyed it, but thought the plot was entirely predictable.

The Little Theatre

Had the misfortune to go and see Vantage Point at the Little Theatre last night.

I say "misfortune" not so much because the film was bad (it wasn't as good as I was expecting, but it was entertaining enough), but because it was blighted by both sound and picture problems.

As soon as the first trailer came on, there was a noticeable vertical judder in the picture. I expected someone would correct it before the main feature started, but no-one did. After putting up with it for the first ten minutes of the film, getting increasingly aggravated, I finally went to find someone to complain. In short order, someone came into the theatre and went back to fiddle with the projector, but it didn't seem to help.

Then the film just stopped, and the lights came up. No-one bothered to come in and apologise or make an announcement about what was going on though.

A couple of minutes later, the film restarted, the juddering still present, but a couple of minutes after that it stopped. Things were fine until the credits rolled, whereupon the juddering started again, making me wonder if someone had been holding the projector still the whole way through the movie.

As if the picture problems weren't bad enough, the front right speaker was playing up too. Most of the time it was fine, but every now and then the sound coming out of it would become muffled. It was annoying, but I tolerated it until the end, when I thought I'd better go tell one of the staff members about it.

"That speaker was only serviced a couple of weeks ago," the guy told me. "But yes, it does that. It's perfectly normal."

So there you have it. Crappy sound is perfectly normal in the Little Theatre. They know about it, and evidently don't really give a shit.

It's made me think twice about going to see anything else at the Little Theatre any time soon, particularly as my home theatre setup is now so good.

Apple TV

Picked up a 40GB Apple TV when I was in Atlanta.

It's a sweet little device, that lets you stream your iTunes audio and video content from your PC to your TV. We often buy episodes of TV shows from the iTunes store (usually when our DVR fails to record them for whatever reason, or we miss the start of a new series), so now we'll be able to watch them on the big screen in the comfort of the living room. It also makes it easy to play all our music on the living room stereo, and even internet radio too. There are a bunch of other nice features too, like the ability to browse photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube directly on the TV, and easy access to movie trailers.

Setting it up hasn't been plain sailing, however. When iTunes tried to sync the first episode of Heroes to the Apple TV, it crashed iTunes and blue-screened the PC. Not good. I had to work around this by disabling automatic synchronisation, and manually excluding Heroes from the list of TV shows to sync. I can live with this, but it's irritating.

The other problem was with Radiohead's In Rainbows. For some reason it synced the album metadata over OK, but when I tried to play any of the tracks on the Apple TV, I got an error message, even though they all played fine in iTunes. While trying to fix the problem, the Apple TV back-synced the album to iTunes, rendering the album unplayable there too. So I deleted it from iTunes and plugged my iPod in, expecting it to copy the album back into iTunes from the iPod. Instead it just deleted the content from the iPod. That was when I discovered I didn't have a backup of the album anywhere. In the end I had to download a new copy of the album from BitTorrent, import that into iTunes, then resync the Apple TV and my iPod.

The other issue is that video content doesn't play back properly on our 4:3 TV (it gets stretched vertically to fill the screen). I knew this would probably be a problem when I bought the Apple TV, however. The solution? A trip to M&M tomorrow morning to buy a large, flat-panel widescreen HDTV. I've been looking for an excuse to buy such a beast for a while, and I'm happy that the Apple TV has furnished me with one!