New Thing #340: Family Movie Night

There's just one thing standing between my family and a regular movie night: We don't really like movies.

Me? I think I've stated before that if I'm spending more than an hour or two sitting and watching something it's a sporting event, not a movie.

My daughters? Well, they've found that movies are often quite perilous, and they can do without the peril.

But last week we ordered in, we cooked up some popcorn, and we ordered up a movie.

As the girls get older I could see this becoming more of a regular occasion.

We watched Disney's Planes.

It wasn't the greatest movie I've ever seen, but it was short on peril.

And that fact alone means it was a great choice (though my wife and I had no idea about that fact when we picked it).

Let me make this clear - Planes was fine. It just wasn't great. But it is SUCH a family-friendly movie…and there are not a whole lot of family-friendly movies these days.

And while Planes was a New Thing, more important was the fact that my whole family watched a movie together.

(We did this a year or so ago when we watched Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, but with Planes we were able to include my youngest daughter…although to say she watched Planes would be a bit of an exaggeration. At least she was in the same room this time.)

I know of other families that do movie night. I'm hoping this now breaks the ice so that my girls will give more movies a shot and we can make it a more regular occasion.

New Thing #189: Cups

You might find this hard to believe, but here goes: Sometimes I'm the last person to know about something trendy.

This often becomes clear during the school year when the students start doing something that I think is clever, and naively I think they invented it, only to discover too late that it's the coolest thing going.

Or at least, it was the coolest thing at the time.

Such was the case when I stumbled across this week's New Thing for Music Monday on Sunday night.

I was in New York for the 4th weekend, and I didn't experience any new music, so Sunday I went searching through some sites for something new.

After a quick glance through what's been hot on  iTunes I popped over to YouTube and clicked 'music'. One of the first videos to pop up there was Anna Kendrick's "Cups", which I guess is also known as "When I'm Gone" from the movie Pitch Perfect.

I had heard this song recently on the radio, and I feel like I had heard of Anna Kendrick. She's an actress, but I just looked at her IMDB page and I have no idea if I've ever seen her in anything. Maybe I'm confusing her with the baseball player Kyle Kendrick. Or Anna Friel or Anna Faris. Anyway.

So the song's catchy, but then she starts doing this thing with the cups and clapping in the video, which the fifth graders spent most of last year doing. I thought it was something they had learned in music class. Turns out, it's from a movie.

So that's this week's new music. Hopefully I just helped you avoid doing something embarrassing by introducing you to this corner of popular culture. Maybe I should go see Pitch Perfect and write it off as a business expense.

Here's the video with the aforementioned cups performance:

Well look at this. Apparently she learned it by watching someone else. Wonder if the kids knew that.

New Thing #186: Man Of Steel

On July 4th in 1989 my dad took my brother and I to the movies (with a friend of mine and his dad) to see Batman. It was thrilling. (Probably a little more for my brother than for me - he was so excited - but if you saw that Batman movie you know how good it was. Trust me. It was thrilling.)

I have a memory of the 4th of July being the day Batman came out, but I could be wrong about that. (I also remember the line at the movies being around the block.)

24 years later, my brother and I decided to spend the early afternoon of Independence Day at a superhero movie.

This time, it was Superman.

A couple of weeks ago I was with my brother and we were talking about Man of Steel - the new Superman movie. I convinced him to wait until I was down on 4th of July weekend so we could see it together.

Somewhat surprisingly, he did.

So we saw a show early on Thursday, before we headed out for our nephew's birthday party. (The 11:55 show was the matinee! $10.25 instead of $13! When we saw Batman I bet it cost at most $8 for a non-matinee.)

I guess part of my surprise was not that my brother waited for me to see the movie - more that he still wanted to go with me at this point. Man Of Steel has gotten some pretty bad reviews, and I was going to be OK with missing it if he changed his mind. But we soldiered on.

I understand why people didn't necessarily like this movie. I didn't like parts of it. There were essentially three elements of the movie: 1) A very Star Wars-feeling inter-galactic piece, 2) Disaster movie stuff, and 3) the Superman story.

I could have done without all of the disaster movie stuff. The Star Wars stuff was unnecessary - I like my Superman battling bad guys on Earth. But I loved all of the Superman stuff.

This movie had a different take on parts of the Superman story - but I loved the flashbacks to when he was a boy growing up in Smallville. I thought the way the movie played out a lot of the groundwork was laid for good stuff to happen in the sequels of this particular Superman franchise. (I had forgotten until I was talking with one of my cousins at the birthday party that there was a very short-lived Superman franchise that my wife and I saw in the theater a bunch of years back - that one where Lois Lane has a kid? I guess, as rarely as I get to the movies, I never miss a Superman movie.)

One of the better parts of this movie, I thought, was Amy Adams - I thought she played Lois Lane incredibly well, and I thought they wrote that character very well. She's always sticking her nose where it doesn't belong! And not unlike Lois Lane, I just love Superman. How can you not?

So, while there was a lot happening in this movie that I didn't love, I liked the movie overall. And I'm really looking forward to the next one in the series.

In fact, I've already lined up my brother to accompany me.

New Thing #55: Argo

I've failed to meet one of my New Thing goals for 2013. See, I'm bad with movies - I think I've written before that if I'm investing more than 2 hours in something on TV, chances are it's going to be a sporting event and not a movie.

But one of my New Things was to watch more movies.

And I was hoping to see a bunch (at least 5) of the 10 'Best Picture'-nominated movies before the Oscars ceremony.

I didn't come close.

But I have now seen 2, which is 2 more than most years.

Friday night my wife and I watched 'Argo'.

How we watched it was interesting too - it became available on FIOS On Demand on Monday. So we ordered it and watched it that way, which I thought was pretty neat. Because I'm willing to bet it's still in some theaters in some places. I imagine this is the wave (way? wave.) of the future - movies available through all media pretty soon after theater release. (I realize this coincides with the DVD release...but still, I'm sure it's still in theaters somewhere.)

Anyway, we watched the movie in our living room. I'm sure it loses something on our TV rather than on the big screen...but that doesn't change the fact that the movie was great.

I realize some of those details were Hollywood-ized, but just the general gist of the story being true - amazing. And I sure am glad that type at the end of the movie cleared up some of the questions that were burning me up, like "if it was classified, how do we know the details to make a movie about it?"

I'm not going to get into specifics of the movie, in case someone is planning on seeing  the movie and isn't looking for a spoiler. And if you're on the fence - see it.

There was some strong language (which was mostly amusing), but overall I was impressed too at how relatively clean the movie was. It wasn't overly violent, there was nothing gratuitous - it was just a solid, solid movie.

And I don't know about Oscar slights or snubs for direction...but I do know that when you as a viewer already have a general sense of what the ending of the movie is going to be, and you still feel all the drama and tension, well, that means the people making the movie did something very right.

I had hoped to see 'Silver Linings Playbook' before tonight's Oscars...I don't know which other two would have been on my list of 5. But it seems like the 2 I did see - 'Lincoln' and 'Argo' - are the favorites to win 'Best Picture'.

And if I didn't see the 'Best Picture'...well, I still saw 2 pretty good pictures.

New Thing #30: Lincoln

I'm hoping that a good chunk of my "New Things" this year are movies. I just don't watch a lot of movies.

My thinking is that if I'm going to spend 2-3 hours on something, I'd rather give that time to sports rather than movies. (It's not that I don't enjoy the movies - I like movies a lot. It's more about just not having the time.)

But this year is about trying new things, and seeing movies is part of that.

And last Saturday, for the first time in 2013, I went to the movies to see 'Lincoln'.

I love history, and to be honest, I felt this was a movie I had to see more than I wanted to see.

But man, am I sure glad I did.

'Lincoln' was excellent.

Best Movie of the year? I don't know - I'm hoping to see a few more nominees so I can make an informed judgment. But it certainly deserves its place in the discussion, and Daniel Day-Lewis earned all the accolades being thrown his way. Every single thing about the movie was outstanding.

I think it's especially meaningful since it's out now, when we have a black president, and you think of how far our country has come. (And reflect on how scary it is to think about what our country was like not all that long ago.) You have to see 'Lincoln'. It's that good.

When I see a good movie like 'Lincoln'  it inspires me. Sometimes it's to try to write my own movie. In this case there was a little bit of a desire to explore politics some more. But I also left 'Lincoln' thinking I need to learn more about him and the Civil War.

My favorite part of history is the American Revolution. Maybe not even the war itself, but the lead-up to the war. I know there's tons to learn about with the Civil War, but for some reason it never caught my interest as much. I've been to Gettysburg - I enjoy seeing sites like that - but maybe all of the info just seems overwhelming to me.

Anyway, that's how good 'Lincoln' was. For years I didn't think I cared to learn any more than what I already knew about the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln. Now I just want to learn it all.

Maybe Steven Spielberg can put together another movie for me.