Family Movie Night

November 30, 2013 By robin elton Leave a Comment

Certain things leave you in your life and certain things stay with you.

And that’s why we’re all interested in movies- those ones that make you feel, you still think about.

Because it gave you such an emotional response,
it’s actually part of your emotional make-up, in a way.

―Tim Burton

Disclosure: I’m a member of the Netflix Stream Team, and they’ve equipped our family to stream movies for discussion.

Every weekend, we have what I call “Family Culture Night” — a movie night that involves a movie I used to love, or that stuck with me for whatever reason. Movies that have become part of my emotional make-up, that I’m hoping to also make part of my kids’ emotional DNA.

Some movies we watch because they’re funny, some because I’m forever quoting them and I’d like my kids to get at least some of my jokes, some because they had a hand in shaping who I eventually turned out to be.

This month the Netflix Stream Team was invited to watch a movie based on a book with our kids (inspired, I suspect, by the release this month of the latest in the Hunger Games series, although my older kids were more excited about Ender’s Game, which is apparently based on a book they both read and I didn’t know existed. So many games!).

I wanted to watch A Wrinkle in Time and talk about theoretical physics, as did Maverick. But I made the mistake of saying I was worried that it wouldn’t live up to the book, and I think I was sunk once I planted that idea in their mind.

Mav and I were outvoted and we watched James and the Giant Peach.

It’s funny, although I read the kids most of Roald Dahl’s offerings for children when they were novice readers, I never read any of them when I was young. Jeff did, though, so my own first experience with James and his giant peach was when Jeff wanted to see it in the theatre, back when it was first released in 1996.

It’s magical and weird, like all the movies based on Dahl’s books, but where I saw it as just plain weird at 20 years old I now see it as delightfully odd. My viewpoint has softened, having read the book and watching it with my kids’ perspective, watching Cass dance around to the songs (I had completely blocked out the fact there were songs!)

Afterwards, like with most of our “culture night” films, we talked about the movie. More etching of emotional DNA Some thoughts we came up with:

With all truly good books, you lose something in translation when made into a film. Some of the poetry. Even when the movie is fairly true, using dialogue taken from the book’s pages, it seems stilted. Some things are so much lovelier read to yourself.
That said, some books really work as movies because the visuals add something to the story, and we think that’s true of James and the Giant Peach. It does a good job of capturing the magical and weird.
James and the Giant Peach was not directed by Tim Burton (I was sure it was!). Before, I’d attributed the common denominator of Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda to being Burton films. Turns out, the common denominator is just the fact that Dahl is weird. Matilda was directed by Danny DeVito; James and the Giant Peach by Henry Selick. Selick also directed The Nightmare before Christmas (which I also thought was a Burton film), Monkeybone and Coraline.
Remember how kids in Matilda would get locked in the chokey when they were bad?
It’s somewhat surprising that there aren’t more attempts to censor Dahl books, given how many seemingly innocent books find themselves banned from schools, and how horridly adults tend to be portrayed.
Why are there so many orphans in kids’ stories?
When are they going to make a movie of The BFG? Would it be any good?

I highly recommend your own Family Culture Night, it’s fun to relive your old favorites through your children’s eyes, to see what stands up to the test of time and what movies just don’t make any dang sense once taken out of their pop culture context. (This is especially fun around the holidays!)

Start young and your kids will keep on doing it, week after week. Even when they hit 16 and don’t really want to do much with you anymore.

Movies based on books always make for lively debate… I want to say you should always read the books first, but maybe that’s not always true.

13 Movies Based on Kids’ Books,
Available for Streaming on Netflix

What movies from your emotional make-up have you shared with your kids?

What are some noteworthy (for better or worse) movies that are adaptations of books?

Do you always read the book first? Any movies where you wish you hadn’t?

Move in the Direction of Your Dreams.

November 18, 2013 By robin elton Leave a Comment

I learned this, at least, by my experiment;

that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,
and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined,

he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

-Henry David Thoreau

I went through a corn maze recently with the kids. We split up, boys and girls; my boys are hitting that age where most things are uncool when you do them with your mother.

Cass was off like a flash. I had, in retrospect, not worn the most practical shoes for maze running (Sundays are my dress up day, meaning I’m not in workout gear), and I really had to work to keep pace with her, kept calling for her to wait as she whipped around a corner out of view, her hair flying behind her.

No hesitation. At the end of each row, a quick turn to the right or the left, a desire to see how quickly she could exit the maze, a perfect confidence that she would get there. No time for uncertainty.

When it became clear that we were retracing our steps (not so much going in circles as going in tetris shapes), there was no hemming and hawing, she just pulled off an ear of corn and started dropping kernels. Hansel and Gretel in a cornfield.

It was pretty much a meaningless task— she clearly wasn’t the first to think of it as the path was already littered with kernels— but it kept her distracted and full of confidence. She was doing something.

The boys had trotted more quickly through the maze, not even trying to get to the end before finding their way to the exit. No sightseeing, no fairy tale imaginings. They just sat and waited for us to be done.

I think they missed out.

As parents, we are always learning from our kids. That afternoon I learned that sometimes being lost is half the fun. It’s where the story is, anyway. The dreaming. The living.

Also, the path is easier when you wear sensible shoes.

(But perhaps not as memorable.)

On Bullying: Taking a Stand

October 31, 2013 By robin elton Leave a Comment

Knowing what’s right doesn’t mean much unless you do what’s right.
―Theodore Roosevelt

Disclosure: I’m a member of the Netflix Stream Team, and they’ve equipped our family to stream movies for discussion.

I love movies. I love discussion. I love reasons to coerce my kids to watch movies with me and debate them after. This is winning all around for me.

It’s Halloween, so I want to talk about something scary.

Not ghouls or goblins, I’m afraid. The scariest things are the things that lurk in safe havens and look like friends.

This month, the Netflix Stream Team was asked to watch an age-appropriate movie about bullying with their kids, October being National Bulling Prevention Month. (The list of titles is at the end of this post.)

The boys and I watched Bully, a 2011 documentary that followed kids on their school buses and in their schools. Right away, Jake started agitating. He didn’t want to watch. It was going to be too sad. He couldn’t take it.

Make no mistake, this is a difficult movie to watch and a difficult conversation to have, and both are important. The first family affected by bullying that you meet— you don’t get to meet the victim. He’s gone. He has taken his own life, and as someone who has lost a family member to suicide every segment involving this family was heartwrenching for me.

He was 11. He’ll stay 11 forever. At 11 he couldn’t see how he could possibly make it through another day. He was done trying.

Every child we see featured in this movie is at or nearing this breaking point, and it’s devastating. It’s also something that’s happening to kids everywhere.

Why? Why is this happening now?

My boys assure me that they’ve never seen situations as extreme as what’s happening on the screen; in fact, they were unconvinced at first the dialogue wasn’t fabricated. Part of that, I think, is the anti-bullying measures that their schools have put into place (a no-tolerance policy that we’ve encountered firsthand— long story, not mine to tell). The part of the country we live in may be another; Bully chronicles the stories of kids in Georgia, Iowa, Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma, not places that spring to mind as hotbeds of tolerance. Mostly I think we lucked out with the kids they’re friends with.

There’s a lot to get angry about, and a lot I want to say. But I don’t want to go on all night, so I’m sticking to two main takeaways.

Bullying is a national problem that we have to tackle one on one. Policy helps, but what really matters is teaching your kids to stand up. And I don’t mean if you’re the one being bullied. I mean if you hear someone saying something mean, you speak up and say that isn’t cool, don’t be a jerk. If you hear something untrue, you call the liar out. And if you see someone getting physical, you tell them to lay off now or else you’re going to speak up to an authority figure. Zero tolerance.I’ve told my kids if it comes down to a fight, I’d rather they take the heat for standing up to a bully than stay unpunished while letting someone be bullied. I don’t know that this is a common or popular stance. What I do know is it’s important to me to raise kids that won’t let this kind of stuff stand. That instinctively react when they see someone being victimized.
Bullying may be primarily a kid problem, but adults are a big part of it. I spent half of the documentary yelling at adults in frustration. If you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem. From the counselor that chides a victim for not being ernest when she forces him to shake hands with the kid who is bullying him. With the sheriff who can’t imagine how a 14-year-old girl might feel so trapped and impotent that she might brandish a weapon to feel like she has the upper hand, just this once. With the parents who ask their kids why they hang out with kids who abuse them, as though it’s some sort of personal choice.We need to figure out a better way to monitor what’s happening so we can contain it. As parents, we really need to watch what we say and do. “Boys will be boys” and “girls are so catty at this age” are ways we excuse kids from reprehensible behavior. Criticizing and judging a girl for the way she dresses and dances (cough Miley Cyrus)? Snickering at a particularly weird kid at the mall or on the tv? Our kids hear that. They learn it’s an acceptable way to treat people.

Talk to your kids. Find out about the level of bullying in their lives. Walk through what to do if they are bullied, or if they see another child being bullied, in person or on the internet. Let them know your expectations. And make sure that they know they are not alone.

I am not anxious to be the loudest voice or the most popular.
But I would like to think that at a crucial moment, I was an effective voice
of the voiceless, an effective hope of the hopeless.
―Whitney Young

An 11 year old experiencing a suicide in their life is a tragedy of epic proportions. An 11 year old contemplating suicide… a kid of any age, with their lives just beginning… it needs to stop.

Speak up.

Some movies to help you kickstart that conversation with your kids— they’re all available for streaming on Netflix.

For more about Bully and action points as a parent and as an advocate, check out The Bully Project.

A Very Moving Argument Against Plastic

September 24, 2013 By robin elton Leave a Comment

MIDWAY a Message from the Gyre : a short film by Chris Jordan from Midway on Vimeo.

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.

― Jacques-Yves Cousteau

I got into an argument with someone once about those stupid single-serving Keurig machines. I was against the idea of all those plastic cups being thrown away, cup after cup after cup. She argued that those small bits of plastic weren’t as bad as wasting water brewing a full pot (you don’t actually HAVE to brew a full pot each time, but that’s beyond the point).

I still think I’m right. Small bits of plastic are just as bad as big bits of plastic. They all, in time, degrade into itty bitty pieces of plastic that don’t go away, they just absorb pollutants and become incorporated into our water and our land.

But small pieces of plastic also fall by the wayside, unnoticed. Until they’re picked up and eaten.

Remember how we used to worry about plastic six-pack rings getting caught around wild animals’ beaks or throats? It gets oh so much worse than that.

What happens when a bird mistakes a small bit of plastic for something tasty? What if they’ve eaten something tasty that has in its time eaten its own plastic pieces? They swallow it and it just sits there, in their small stomach, undigested. It’s joined by more. Until eventually, their stomach doesn’t have enough room to hold the food they need to eat to survive.

This is something I knew, having seen some photographs that seared the information into my memory. The photographer, Chris Jordan, is working on the film MIDWAY, slated to premiere in 2014. I hope you’ll remember and take time to see it and spread the word about it.

The MIDWAY media project is a powerful visual journey into the heart of an astonishingly symbolic environmental tragedy. On one of the remotest islands on our planet, tens of thousands of baby albatrosses lie dead on the ground, their bodies filled with plastic from the Pacific Garbage Patch. Returning to the island over several years, our team is witnessing the cycles of life and death of these birds as a multi-layered metaphor for our times.

Our trash. Traveling the ocean to kill off birds on a remote island. It never goes away.

Reduce, reduce, reduce. Recycle, recycle, recycle.

3 minutes. Please do me a favor and watch it.

Went a little crazy with Pick-Your-Own? APPLE CRISP, BABY

September 18, 2013 By robin elton 1 Comment

“I’ve never seen such a bunch of apple-eaters.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

We’re totally a bunch of apple eaters.

Not quite in the way J.D. meant, but that’s beside the point. I love buying up all the different varieties of apples at the farmer’s market each week; I love finding the most perfectly-perfect apples to pick off the trees; I love eating apples. Apples with caramel. Apples with cheese and crackers. Apples all by themselves.

And apple crisp. Holy carp do I love me some apple crisp.

Apple crisp is the best way to quickly and happily eat your way through an apple picking excursion gone loco. It’s not as healthy as eating your apple straight or maybe cooked into some turkey sausage, but frankly apple season is only here for a few glorious weeks of the year so eat ‘em if you got ‘em, you know?

It’s also not terribly fussy like a pie or a tart— no crust to assemble— and with a pair or two of helping hands the prep goes crazy fast. Like usual, I kind of play it fast and loose with the recipe here, it depends on what size pans I have clean.

It’s not beautiful.

It’s a great way to use those imperfect apples.

It’ll melt your heart served warm with some vanilla ice cream.

Homemade Apple Crisp

Ingredients:

Apples. Firm, tart apples like Granny Smiths or Stayman are best so the crisp doesn’t seem overly sweet, but those are some of our favorite eating apples, so we tend to use Galas and Fuji and the like and pull back on the sugar a bit. The number will depend entirely on the size of your apples.
1/2 cup flour (I use 1/4 cup unbleached white, 1/4 wheat. Sometimes I throw some oats in there too)
1/2 cup sugar (less if you’re not using tart apples)
1 tsp cinnamon
dash of nutmeg
bit of salt
6 tablespoons butter (3/4 stick)

Procedure:

Throw your butter in the freezer. Preheat oven to 350°.
Peel skin off apples and cut into chunks. Now, we have one of those apple spiral things where it peels the skin and then you can keep on going and have one big apple ribbon. This makes it easier, especially for kid helpers, but I think you get the best texture with chunks about 1/2 inch thick.
Dump all your apple chunks into a buttered glass dish (go ahead & use one end of the stick to butter the dish, you’re going to wind up using it all anyway.) The ingredients listed above are appropriate for about a 8 x 8 x 2 dish; I usually make a double (15 x 12) and scale the crisp accordingly.
In a bowl, mix together your flour, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt. Take your cold stick of butter and slice small pieces off (like whittling a stick) with a sharp knife over the bowl holding your dry materials. Stir every once in a while so the butter pieces are covered with dry, but don’t overdo it. You want them to stay intact and separated from each other.
Dump dry-mix-containing-small-bits-of-butter over top of the apples and bump on the counter once or twice so it settles in.
Bake at 350° until the top is golden and apples are soft, about half an hour. The perfect texture here is up to you. I prefer the top to be a bit more on the caramelized side and the apples softer. If you like your cooked apples toothy start checking on them sooner.
Take baked crisp out of oven. Smack hands of children who attempt to serve themselves while it’s still blazing hot and not yet photographed. (Seriously, it took 3 crisps to get a pic because they kept eating it before I could take a photo of the full pan.)
Allow to cool about 10min, then serve warm with vanilla ice cream. Bonus points for french vanilla.

Reheats great in the microwave. Maybe for breakfast, I don’t judge. It’s got apples in it. Apples are good for you.