One of the teachers here has shown the first 40 minutes of Surf's Up at least five times. I offered to get her more movies but she got mad.
Once a year, our middle school would show a movie on all the TVs throughout the school. For some reason, they chose “Jack” one year not realizing it was fairly crude and sad PG-13 movie. Pretty sure they caught hell for that.
A teacher asked me to download The Wall for him and I clicked through the file just to see if it was real and there was nudity. So many teachers don't check.
My fifth grade teacher used to show us a lot of nature and National Geographic documentaries and there would be bare-breasted indigenous women and when we would act like you would expect a fifth grader to act and she would yell at us. I don't know what she expected.
In elementary school, I had a teacher who would have us analyze the films she played in class. I remember watching A Bug’s Life and Antz and now and then she’d pause the movies and have us think about /discuss the message being communicated in each one. Pretty sure there were other films she played. Other times, (along with analyzing the subtext of news articles) she’d have us analyze the film posters of new theatrical releases that were found in the Friday newspaper. All of which is to say the way she encouraged us to critically engage with media definitely played a vital role in how I view media to this day.
I loved Antz but also remember thinking it didn’t seem like it was for little kids lol but I also didn’t realize/forgot that it was DreamWorks, and apparently their first animated film.
In high school in some economics / business class we watched Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room at the beginning and end of the semester. I remember our teacher emphasizing several times before both viewings that “there is brief nudity in this film and I expect you all to act like adults and not make any comments or make a scene because of it” lol
One of the teachers showed Titanic and she made it known they would be skipping over that scene but it just led to a giant Streisand effect of people asking what they were missing. A real teacher would end the movie right before that scene at the end of the period so when you pick up after it the next day no one knows.
In one of my high school history classes we watched Glory, a movie I had seen before on TV. My teacher told us it was a special edited version meant to show history in the classroom. I couldn’t imagine the original was that violent. Cut to years later and I went to a 30th anniversary release in theaters and BAM!!! Some soldier’s head exploded from a cannonball.
I used to show Saving Private Ryan and I just prayed an administrator didn't decide to take a walkthrough that day. A few kids asked to not watch it because of the gore.
The soldier’s head exploding was one of my first introductions to gore and it made my stomach turn. I’ve seen far gorier things since then and have a real love for horror now, but that particular moment in Glory still makes me squeamish and I guess it’s just a muscle memory thing in the pit of my stomach. Makes me feel sick any time I see it.