Can there be any greater feeling than slipping a brand-new DVD out of its plastic wrapping, cutting through the annoying security strips and popping the case open to the smell of freshly minted disc? OK, there are lots of things that are better, but opening a new DVD is one of those little joys in life that helps combat all the bad things like bumper-to-bumper traffic and moving to a state that charges a 7.75 percent sales tax.
Three years ago I had just purchased “Gangs of New York” on DVD, and I was excited. I’d never seen it before, but I figured a Martin Scorsese film starring Daniel Day-Lewis was a no-miss. Plus, my son, then about five or six months old, was napping, so it was popcorn, Diet Pepsi and movie time, baby.
I started the movie and watched Liam Neeson’s character getting his Irish hooligans ready for a brawl with Day-Lewis’ natives. Neeson marched his son through the underground tunnels of their lair, a creepy drum/cacophonic flute melody pulsing in the background, driving them along. All around them, scores of thugs sharpened their knives and fixed scabbards to their belts. Then big Brendan Gleeson (“MadEye” Moody in the Harry Potter series) kicked the lair’s door open and the music stopped. The group filed outside and faced the natives in a snow-filled square. The tension was palpable.
It was during the ensuing carnage that I noticed my son was awake, staring wide-eyed at the screen. He’s too young to have it affect him, I thought. It won’t make him a psychopath when he grows up. Then a crazed Irish woman jumped on a native and bit his ear off. OK, time to put “The Tigger Movie” in.
Since then, we’ve made quite a few movie sacrifices. We can only watch adult-themed movies when both of our kids are asleep (get your mind out of the gutter). And when on the rare occasion they are both asleep at the same time before midnight, we have to watch the movie with the lowest volume
possible and the subtitles on. Hell hath no fury like a toddler awakened by movie gunfire.
But just because I don’t get a chance to watch the movies I want to watch doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a good flick with the kids. Here’s a list of my favorite kid-oriented movies.
Pixar. OK, Pixar is a company, not a movie. But all of their movies are enjoyable for adults as well as children. The important thing about Pixar is that their films stand up to repeat viewing. “Finding Nemo,” for instance, played in our home on pretty much a daily basis for a few months straight. Once or twice a day one of the kids would inevitably grab my hand and say, “Meemo, Dad! Meemo!” If I have to pay for the kids to go to speech therapy you can bet Disney will be hearing from my lawyers.
Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. This is one of my all-time favorite movies, children’s or otherwise. When Gromit cries at the end because he thinks Wallace is dead…sniff, every time I see it, I cry right along with him.
Sleeping Beauty. C’mon, Prince Phillip throws a sword into a dragon at the end.
Pete’s Dragon. Again, dragons are cool, especially when they can toast apples with their flames.
The Iron Giant. A children’s movie in animation alone, “The Iron Giant” is a great study on the corruption of power, fear of the unknown, and why it’s always better to befriend a 100-foot tall robot that could crush a Humvee with its pinky finger or blow up a small country with its laser beams than it is to piss it off.
The Rescuers. Have you seen the way Miss Bianca walks? Now that’s a woman, er, mouse.
You really can’t go wrong with any of these movies, whether you use them to baby-sit the kids or watch them alone.
Of course, there are certain movies that, well, suck so much they make people want to jump off balconies. “Madagascar,” watched once, is relatively funny. Watching it multiple times has planted an unhealthy hatred for Ben Stiller within me. And what the hell was Disney thinking with its “Pooh’s Heffalump Movie”? Heffalumps are fake! Winnie the Pooh had a nightmare and dreamed about Heffalumps and Woosles because Tigger had scared him before Pooh went to sleep! You can’t make a movie about something that isn’t true. They would have been better off making “Pooh’s Robotic Dragon Movie.”
And don’t get me started on Dora the Explorer. If you watch one of her movies, even once, you’ll be drawn into the void until you’re forever sucked into a tortured life of wickedness and insanity. Now those are movies that will turn a person into a psychopath.
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