December 4, 2008 / Brooklyn news / Parenting / Dooley Noted

Hey, Hollywood! Turn that noise down!

By Thurston Dooley III

for The Brooklyn Paper

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I may be an old man, old enough to remember movies before they succumbed to the fad of sound, but I am not so curmudgeonly that I cannot be objective about the “talkies.”

That said, the aural assault one experiences before the feature presentation at today’s moviehouses makes me wish that one of the stars of the Silent Age was running these Hollywood studios rather than the children of the “Star Wars” generation who think movies are only entertaining if they are loud.

I bring this up because of a disquieting (yes, that’s a pun!) experience I had when I took my great-granddaughter to see a bit of trifle called “Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa.” I could quibble with the film itself — though David Schwimmer’s Melman is a bold triumph of American neurotic cinema — but my problems with my afternoon at the movies began long before the zoo animals got aboard their rickety plane.

The trailers are just too loud! No, I didn’t have my hearing aid turned up, whippersnapper. It was actually turned off!

My young charge literally cowered in fear as each of the trailers unspooled before her, their excessive volume pounding through the hi-fi speakers like “Earthquake: In Sensurround!”

And whilst I am on the subject, am I the only movie buff to notice that the trailers that are shown before G-rated movies are rarely, if ever, suitable for the younger children who are being brought to the sweeter-than-PG fare?

When my great-granddaughter is preparing to watch “Horton Hears a Who!” need she be assaulted by a trailer — which is nothing but a glossy advertisement, lest we forget — for “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”? When we sit down to enjoy “Wall-E,” why are we being asked to go see “Hancock”?

What’s next? Telling kids at “Barney’s Night Before Christmas” — many still clutching their binkies — that the movie they really gotta see is “Nightmare on Elm Street 14”?

©2008 Community Newspaper Group