As we settle into some seriously wintry conditions here, I felt like I needed a change: brighter, cheerier colors, and popcorn, instead of a grumpy K standing in a snowbank at the beach. What do we think?
Let's live with it a while, shall we?
K was home sick for a few days recently, and amused himself with a couple of the Star Wars movies. D and I watched the first Star Wars film from 1977, in March of '97 (er, at the Castro Theater, not to flog a horse or anything) while we awaited the arrival of K to the world. I was two weeks late and crabbily impatient and frustrated and we did all kinds of things to pass the time. Anyway, I remember thinking it seemed sort of silly, the movie, but also realized Star Wars just really isn't for me. But Keegan has been loving them, seeing them the first time around now at age 11, and they've been handy to pick up at our nearby DVD chain store that doesn't carry much of anything.
So, as we head into Thanksgiving, I give thanks to the Star Wars franchise; I give thanks to people who make intelligent movies for kids that parents can sit through; I give thanks to Netflix, a pretty great development in modern civilization (ok, if we can just get the Netflix download feature to work with K's X-Box 360, we'll be really happy), and I give thanks for Werner Herzog, again (we just watched Cobra Verde the other night).
Happy Thanksgiving, film friends.
Showing posts with label Castro Theater. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Castro Theater. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Friday, August 1, 2008
"Yondah lies da castle of my faddah”
Sometimes silence is truly golden. Hearing a young Tony Curtis wrestling with his Bronx accent in many of his films (the above line is loosely credited to 1952's Son of Ali Baba, although the actual line differs slightly) reminds us of the magic of silent films at the beginning of all this celluloid craziness. You needed your imagination and full attention to flesh out the characters in a silent film, and you fleshed them out to suit your own vision.
Silent films are great for kids. It’s a good exercise in concentration, in honing reading skills, and in experiencing something quite different from what surrounds them all day long: noise of varying kinds, and human voices -- yours and their teacher’s and their friends' and the X-Box’s and the crossing guard’s and the television’s and the neighbor's next door. Silent films force the viewer to assign a personality, a tone, a feeling to the faces on the screen, and actually create a more involved viewing experience.
When our son, Keegan, was about five years old, we took him to a special event at the fantastic Castro Theater in SF, an all-day affair with old silent films, cartoons, magicians, jugglers and I can’t remember what else at the moment. It was his first experience with silent films, and we helped him read the short sub-titles and made sure he was engaged. He loved every minute of it. That was followed shortly by another Castro visit, this time to see Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last, which I'll write about another time.
Around this time, my husband, D, told me one night that he had been discussing film with his college students one afternoon, and casually asked how many had never seen a black and white film. This was around 2001 or 2002. An astonishing 99% raised their hands. D was floored. So was I. This was in the Bay Area, for god’s sakes, a place drowning in rep theaters and performance spaces and film festivals. What self-respecting SF college student had never set foot in the Red Vic or the Castro or the UC Theater in Berkeley, to name just a few? They’d never seen The Third Man, or Casablanca or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf or Citizen Cane?
That means they never saw Mel Brooks’ Frankenstein, for that matter.
Things sure have changed.
I think that may have lit the fire under us to make sure our son grew up knowing more than Disney (actually, D is anti-Disney, so it was probably already ingrained in us)... and to ensure that as Keegan grew a bit older, films more sophisticated than Indiana Jones would enter his purview – well before his college years! D and I have always had a taste for the more underground-everything (movies, music, art, etc), but it's easy to get in a rut with your kids and just rent them Shrek because you don't have time to think about it.
Get comfy. Read on. (And click on July's "Welcome to KidsFlix" posting to the right if you didn't start there.)
(Possible comment topic: Do martinis go with popcorn?)
Silent films are great for kids. It’s a good exercise in concentration, in honing reading skills, and in experiencing something quite different from what surrounds them all day long: noise of varying kinds, and human voices -- yours and their teacher’s and their friends' and the X-Box’s and the crossing guard’s and the television’s and the neighbor's next door. Silent films force the viewer to assign a personality, a tone, a feeling to the faces on the screen, and actually create a more involved viewing experience.
When our son, Keegan, was about five years old, we took him to a special event at the fantastic Castro Theater in SF, an all-day affair with old silent films, cartoons, magicians, jugglers and I can’t remember what else at the moment. It was his first experience with silent films, and we helped him read the short sub-titles and made sure he was engaged. He loved every minute of it. That was followed shortly by another Castro visit, this time to see Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last, which I'll write about another time.
Around this time, my husband, D, told me one night that he had been discussing film with his college students one afternoon, and casually asked how many had never seen a black and white film. This was around 2001 or 2002. An astonishing 99% raised their hands. D was floored. So was I. This was in the Bay Area, for god’s sakes, a place drowning in rep theaters and performance spaces and film festivals. What self-respecting SF college student had never set foot in the Red Vic or the Castro or the UC Theater in Berkeley, to name just a few? They’d never seen The Third Man, or Casablanca or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf or Citizen Cane?
That means they never saw Mel Brooks’ Frankenstein, for that matter.
Things sure have changed.
I think that may have lit the fire under us to make sure our son grew up knowing more than Disney (actually, D is anti-Disney, so it was probably already ingrained in us)... and to ensure that as Keegan grew a bit older, films more sophisticated than Indiana Jones would enter his purview – well before his college years! D and I have always had a taste for the more underground-everything (movies, music, art, etc), but it's easy to get in a rut with your kids and just rent them Shrek because you don't have time to think about it.
Get comfy. Read on. (And click on July's "Welcome to KidsFlix" posting to the right if you didn't start there.)
(Possible comment topic: Do martinis go with popcorn?)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
