A Sentence in Which No One Gets Whacked

One night this summer, my kids and I began The Godfather-- a movie we greatly anticipated watching together, because we all enjoyed Goodfellas so much-- but then I left for a few minutes to pick up some pizza and when I returned they had turned off The Godfather; I entered heroically with the take-out, and they were sitting there giggling over an episode of How I Met Your Mother and so I asked just what the hell was going on, they said, "It got a little slow and mom said we could turn it off" and I took great umbrage at this, very great umbrage, I ranted and raved a bit about taste, aesthetics, the nature of art, the problems with the American youth, the short attention span of the cell-phone generation, the demise of the great film, and the fact that some things in life are difficult and require perseverance; my wife concluded that I was completely insane, but I shut off How I met Your Mother, sat my kids down with their pizza, and forced them to finish watching The Godfather and even though Ian said he enjoyed it thoroughly, everyone was pissed off at me and thought I was a lunatic . . . of course, the reason I wanted my kids to watch The Godfather was so that they could watch The Godfather II, which is a far better movie (the middle movie in a trilogy is usually the best because the characters are established, but you don't need to wrap everything up in a contrived bow . . . Rocky II and The Empire Strikes Back and The Two Towers are all good examples of this phenomenon) but I knew I couldn't reenact the whole Godfather enforced viewing fiasco, or I would end up divorced or worse, so instead I negotiated with my children . . . I told them if they watched Godfather II with me, then they could finally watch Deadpool, a movie which I had forbidden them to watch because my students described it as crass, gratuitous and disgusting, but I figured watching a cinematic masterpiece would balance out watching some perverse trash and I'm proud to say that everything worked out for the best: they loved and appreciated Godfather II-- or at least they pretended to do so-- and then they had a friend over and watched Deadpool on Friday night, and I stayed out of the TV room and never saw a second of it, which suits me just fine, and we solved our differences diplomatically, without having anyone whacked.