Gone Baby Gone

I avoided seeing Gone Baby Gone. I can't see things about children being hurt or killed or anything anymore. I don't even like to see headlines about it. However, Disney was kind enough to send me an advanced copy of the DVD this weekend, with the request that I review the movie. So, I watched it. On DVD. At home. This is hard for me. I had to wait until my daughter was asleep so I could properly focus. Then I had do do some dishes, and tidy a little. Finally, I sat down to watch with a cup of tea. My daughter was coughing in the next room, and after five minutes I had to pause the movie to bring her some milk. She sounded terrible. I got her tucked in, and headed back out to the couch and started to watch again, although I was still half-listening for coughing. After some time passed, I got caught up in the movie.

This is a very interesting movie. At its base, it is a hard-boiled detective movie, with true twists and turns. It also is dark, with really rotten characters. Dennis Lehane has set up another morality play, like Mystic River, in which right and wrong flip around on each other, slippery like fish just pulled from the water. Patrick (Casey Affleck) quotes his priest, who gave him this scripture when he asked about getting to heaven when surrounded with so much evil in the world: followers of the Lord are sheep among wolves, and must be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. He sees Amanda McCready as a sheep among wolves, and then tries to strike his balance between serpent and dove. His associate and girlfriend, Angie (Michelle Monaghan), doesn't want to get involved for the same reason I didn't watch the movie: she is scared of what she might see.

Juno

The movie Juno, as most of you know by now, tells the story of a high school girl who gets pregnant and has to decide what to do about it. She is headstrong and independent and on her own finds a couple to adopt the child in the Penny Saver, after a discouraging flirtation with abortion.

Juno's abortion clinic scene is controversial, and in the controversy I have noticed a generational split. My mother was pissed about it, and a friend of the family said that movies like this and Knocked Up were "playing into the hands of the right wing." Maybe. But, as I explained to this friend of the family, these movies were made by people in my generation, who, as children, were cannon fodder in the culture wars of the 70's. We were the casualties of the perfect storm created by the twin risings of the sexual revolution and second wave feminism. Mom was reading Betty Friedan while Dad checked out Penthouse, and at some point one of them needed to find themselves and/or get laid. The next thing we knew, we were sitting down for a talk about how Mommy and Daddy still loved us, and still cared about each other, but they were going to be living in different places now. Thirty years later, we're making movies like Knocked Up and Juno, if not The Squid and The Whale. Can you blame us?

Age Appropriate?

A. O. Scott has an interesting piece in the NY Times today about taking kids to films that may not be "age appropriate." You can read it for yourself:

Take the Kids, and Don’t Feel Guilty

My husband and I have only taken our three-year-old daughter to see three movies in the theater: Enchanted, Ratatouille, and Mr. Bean's Holiday, all of them proper for her age group. At home, however, she has seen many things that might not be considered children's fare. She and my husband have watched The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly multiple times, and she loved Sleeper when she and I watched it together, although I had to draw the line at her request for a picture of Woody Allen in her room. What would people say?

The Ten Movies I Saw This Year in a Theater

Main Screen at the Coolidge Corner Moviehouse

In trying to put together a list of favorite movies I had gone to see this year, I had a hard time coming up with a list of ten. This does not reflect a pickiness on my part, but rather the limits of my schedule now that I have a child. For the sake of this column, I'm not going to mention the countless movies I have watched sitting on the couch at home while my family slept. The title of this column is Matineer, as in one that valiantly goes to matinees, which implies something about the movies I should be discussing.

As it turns out, after a quick scan of a list of movies that came out in 2007, I seem to have seen exactly ten movies in a theater this year. Therefore, my year-end wrap-up list is entitled:

Movies I Saw This Year in a Theater (in no particular order)

Date Night: Joe Strummer

When one finds oneself able to leave the house sans children for a night out, wasting the night on a crappy movie is pretty depressing. Ideally the date night movie should make you feel like edgy, hip single people, even if you never were before you had kids. With that in mind, I intend to make some recommendations in this column for movies that are smart without being very, very depressing, and evocative of clever youth. With any luck, it will also make you feel a little hot for your partner, which can't hurt.

I Loved Enchanted, Deal With It

Disney has a giant marketing machine set up to sell their Princesses to little girls. There, I’ve said it. Now, can we move on? Raising a kid in this country and keeping them from marketing is like raising a kid in India and shielding them from mangoes. It’s not just nearly impossible and foolish to attempt, but is detaching the child from a major part of the culture.