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I couldn’t in good conscience do a column with a title card bout between the second installments of two of the most popular action series of the last quarter century without referencing… my mother? Indeed, it was she who accompanied me (me being a minor and all at the time) to Lethal Weapon 2 its opening weekend in July ’89 and Die Hard 2 almost a year to the day later. Both played at the now-defunct Mountain View Mall in Bend, Oregon., and, as I recall, both were spur of the moment decisions on her part, while we were running errands for the family business and (most likely) doing some early back-to-school clothes shopping. I suppose the presence of Mel Gibson and Bruce Willis had something to do with her decision regarding this, but it’s memorable for me because neither was a film I had planned at seeing at that particular moment and I had never been very spur of the moment in regards to anything, particularly movie watching.

This got me to thinking about all the films in general mom (and dad) had endured and enjoyed with me during the era in which I was too young to see them without a parent and/or legal guardian, and wasn’t quite sneaky enough to pull off a switcheroo nor mature enough looking to get in on my own “merits”. Attached at the end of this week’s column is a comprehensive but by no means exhaustive list of films seen theatrically by me with mom and/or dad (though usually both), most R-rated, and seen by us between 1980-1993 when I was between the ages of four and 17. As evidence of my ever-declining faculties, I really had to ponder over some of these, not only wondering whether I saw this with just one or the both of them, but did I see said film on the big screen? (All those years of no notes come back to bite me in the ass.)

As much as I love tangents, I would drift even further from the topic at hand than I normally like to allow myself, if I began even rudimentary reminisces about the nearly 100 films. Best to leave it as an appendix for perusal, featuring many films already lost to the fogs of time (some unfairly, others… perhaps more fairly).

In keeping with a recurring theme of this column and the recurring motif of my forgetfulness, it is highly likely that I had seen neither Lethal Weapon nor Die Hard when I saw their respective sequels on the big screen. It has only been a few years since I last saw Die Hard 2, but approximately 20 since my last viewing of Lethal Weapon 2. I have seen all four installments in each series, each one multiple times with the exception of Lethal Weapon 4 (the latter was perhaps my worst experience ever attempting to watch a film in a theater, with the projector breaking down no fewer than five times. It took about 150 minutes to watch a 127-minute film.)

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