The most amazing thing has happened in our house. The kids are willing to watch movies I recommend. It started a few weeks ago when there was nothing to watch on a Saturday night so I recommended we browse the movies on On Demand...under Directors...specifically, Hitchcock. We settled on Dial M for Murder, then the next week Strangers On a Train (we tried North by Northwest but it wasn't available)...and they loved them! So Friday night, Mike was out biking, Joey was across the street with his second family, and the girls and I were searching for a movie to watch. We were actually browsing all movies on On Demand, alphabetically...well, what the heck, we didn't have much else to do. We got as far as the Bs and then I saw The Bad Seed!! (If Barb is reading this she's probably got a big grin on her face and a squeeee in her heart.)
So we watched The Bad Seed. Now...if you've never seen this movie, STOP READING, cuz I'm gonna talk about the movie and it'll spoil it for you (um, yeah, Spoiler Alert, in other words).
First off, Justine always gives a heavy sigh when the movies are in black and white, I guess she's just not old enough to get that black and white doesn't necessarily mean boring. I think she might be closer to understanding after watching the movie though. The next day she even said, "That girl, mom, she was weird." And weird came out sounding like "scary weird". Watching movies with Justine is like watching movies with my older brother when we were kids. He would always ask, like in the middle of the movie, "Who's that guy?" This would be someone who is, well, a MAIN CHARACTER! Or he would ask Why? about something and my mom would say, "Mike, we've been watching this as long as you have! We don't know either." I guess maybe he thought he had missed something, or we had all figured things out and he better ask what's going on. It would drive me nuts. Well, Justine isn't that bad, but she does get lost sometimes. We usually pause the movie and just check in with her to make sure she understands what's going on. That is actually important to me, cuz when the zingers come, she won't understand if she's not up to speed. Anyway she loved the movie.
Veronica actually gasped when she figured out that the mom was adopted and that her mother was the murderer being discussed by her father and writer friend. She also really appreciated the issue brought up in the movie about Nature v. Nurture. She took psychology last year. (She's now talking about Criminal Psychology when looking at colleges.) She was jokingly saying that she wanted to girl's mom to murder someone, well, she tried to kill her daughter, but it didn't work, did it? V didn't like that it wasn't cut and dried about Nature v. Nurture, but we agreed that that was what was so good about the movie. It's supports both arguments.
Veronica will try to figure out movies. And TV shows. We would have to pause Lost all the time so she could give us her "theories"...some were pretty close to the story line. Most were WAY off...but funny to hear her try to figure things out.
At the end of the movie, after the credits...when that rotten little girl gets her "spanking", we all laughed out loud! Best part of the movie!
Last night it was me, Mike and Veronica and we talked her into watching Alien. Such a good movie...she liked it. Not quite the same as the old black and whites, but a classic.
