This may be after your event already, but I thought the info might be helpful to anyone else looking into possible movies. I thought it would be great to share my faves with my kids and I was shocked to find that some of the content is less than kid-friendly than I remembered. For example, Back to the Future also has a lot of "bad words"(ex. "son of a b" is a constant)so no matter what you choose, I recommend viewing it prior to advertising the selection to be sure the content is acceptable. Even though you may feel that kids in the age group can handle mild language or brief sexual innuendo, for a PTO/PTA sponsored event, I think you need to be very careful what you choose because one complaint form one parent can cause a BIG problem if they choose to.
I know that this is a little late, but we generally try to use a movie that can be referenced back to the academic classes for our middle school. This year we were planning on National Treasure since it ties in with Social Studies/History lessons. We even had one of our 8th grade teachers offer extra credit points to any student who attended our Movie Night.
You might want to pick up a copy of Film Frenzy - it's a game that can be played by a fairly large number of people as they watch the movie. This increases the attention to the movie and provides some incentive for viewers that aren't into the movie itself to watch for the 'events' that help them win the game.
Nix Ferris...LOTS of "bad words", remember the sister with "issues"!
I would go to Netflix, they've done all the homework for you and have movies already rated and catgorized to help with this. I have learned with our babysitting room for our meetings, you can never go wrong with Finding Nemo! They start chanting "just keep swimming" and have so much fun!
We ended up using "Sky High" which was good clean choice. Our turnout was not very good for our Movie Night, which was for grades 5-8 (as opposed to Family Game Night for grades 1-4 that was HUGE). The people that did come (about 50) loved it. We decided next year we'll open it up to grades 1-8 and we'll probably have a huge response.
SHC
