Last night I saw Mandy Moore’s Chasing Liberty because I happened to be in a romantic kind of mood.  Besides, I thought the lead guy was very cute, with that English accent of his.

Anyway, I remember the first time I actually got to see this particular movie.  I think it came out when I was still in high school, and I had this friend who was all about Mandy Moore at the time and he insisted that I must see the movie.  So he lent me a bootleg copy to take home with me over the weekend.

Times were different back then, we only had one DVD player inside the house, and that was in the living room where the big TV was located.  I popped it in after dinner, thinking that my parents would just retire upstairs when they saw that the TV downstairs was occupied.  But, to my surprise, they plopped down on either side of me on the couch and watched the movie with me. 

The movie was okay, it wasn’t going to win any awards any time soon but the places they visited were just beautiful.  It’s probably one of those movies that fueled my desire to go to Europe someday and just walk through the streets laden with so much history. 

The plot wasn’t bad at all.  I mean, at the time, I totally could relate to the lead’s plight for freedom.  I totally could relate to her whining about having each moment of the day planned out exactly to the dot, because hey, back in high school, that was my life.  I would wake up every morning knowing exactly where I would be when a particular time struck.  It was all so predictable and so boring that I actually envied the lead when she just upped and hitched hiked through Prague, Venice and Germany. 

I remember actually sighing when the credits rolled.  But my parents had a different opinion of the movie that I loved.  My mother and father both had knitted foreheads as they went upstairs to their room, grumbling about immature, ungrateful teenagers who knew nothing of the world.  It seemed that they thought Mandy Moore’s character to be young and stupid, extra emphasis on the stupid.  They didn’t think that what she did was brave; they thought that she was ungrateful and bratty. 

I’ve heard of differing opinions but that was just ridiculous.  I guess I won’t ever understand that particular point of view until I have kids of my own and I guess it’s one of those inevitable things in life but I don’t ever want to have such opinions about the world.  I can’t imaging looking at the world through the prescription glasses that my parents are looking through because for me, it almost seems bleak.

I guess it’s just one more difference between the Generation X and Generation Y.