Family Movie Night

We don't have a lot of rituals and traditions over here, but the few that we do have are precious. Giant cookie on the first day of school. Wrapped books left on everyone's bed on Little Christmas morning. Grilling hot dogs and hamburgers for Dora's January birthday.

One that we really enjoy - Family Movie Night. Jeff and I have always had a bad case of the Sunday blues, and all sitting down to watch a movie is the perfect way to chill out at the end of the weekend and before the start of another busy week. We keep a little dish with everyone's name on little slips of paper and take turns selecting who will make the movie choice. Dora rarely chooses movies - she finds most of them to be too scary - and will usually opt for Looney Tunes, The Flintstones, or Schoolhouse Rock. Clark is a big Pixar fan and Theo's favorites are Megamind and Monsters vs. Aliens. Jeff and I usually pick something that we haven't already seen a zillion times.

So, I'm going to start adding reviews of our Sunday night movie pics - here are some recent titles that have been big hits!



Dora had a party this week for the last day of her Independent Study program (the last day ever, because the program has been cut, but that's a rant for another day) and they watched this movie. She LOVED it. She was entranced. She could not stop talking about it. Happily, it was one of the DVDs included in Clark's big prize basket that he won last year, so we owned it but hadn't watched it yet. I can't say that I really enjoyed it, though it seems like the kind of magical, sappy story that is usually right up my alley (maybe I couldn't get past Dustin Hoffman's weird lisp?) but love that Dora loved it. Good news: NO scary parts at all. There's one scene where the store has a "temper tantrum", but Dora found that more funny than scary.



We watched this a couple months ago and all loved it - Clark was shouting "ham!" at random moments for days afterward. Dora was a little tense during the flood scenes, but overall a sweet movie.



This was more enjoyable than I thought it would be. I love, love, love, love this book and expected to be fairly disappointed by the movie. Happily, the alterations to the original story made sense and I appreciated how many scenes from the book had been recreated. Dora (and I) didn't like the end when they had to battle the machine - that weird tentacle thing that grew out of it was creepy - but Clark and Theo loved it. 



Yay, yay, YAY, I love this movie. We checked it out of the library last week. I realized as we were watching it that I had only ever seen the edited for tv version and there are two songs in the original cut that I had never seen before. We had to do a bit of fast forwarding - it's 2.5 hours long! But was so happy that the kids really enjoyed it. They told me the next morning how much they liked it and Clark's teacher said that he was even talking about it at school ... BIG thumbs-up from everyone! I love Angela Lansbury. I used to wish that she could be my third grandma.