Good Movies, Bad Movies (From the Vault, October 2009)

The Mom Weekly Volume 95: June 3, 2025

You can read this, or any other previous Mom Weeklies, by going to the home page here.

Notes:

I am queuing up several “From the Vault” selections due to travel going on right now!!!

I actually teared up reading this post, and remembering all the wonderful books we have read together over the years. I wonder if you kids remember some of our family traditions around picture books.

Also: there’s a new occasional feature here called “Mini Book Review” that can sometimes replace the “Interesting/Notable” section. Sometimes I enjoy reading a book so much that I want to share as many takeaways as possible from it.

Good Movies, Bad Movies (From the Vault, October 2009)

I am pretty careful about our movie and tv watching. l consider the DVR great for letting us fast forward through the commercials of any given show, both for time-saving and for getting past icky things. I try to get good recommendations from like-minded friends, and also look around for good sources of unusual media, whether books, movies, shows.

We especially love Netflix for letting our family watch more obscure or foreign films. Netflix suggests films you would like based on films you’ve rated. We’ve watched so many really interesting, and slow moving, foreign films to see a slice of life in other cultures. So when Netflix suggested The Color of Paradise, because we liked Children of Heaven and some other films, I added it to the queue. It was in our house for quite awhile because we haven’t found the time to watch it.

The Netflix description sounded good: “Awash in the sights and sounds of an Iranian summer, this moving family drama stars Mohsen Ramezani as Mohammed, an 8-year-old blind boy whose poor widower father (Hossein Mahjoub) nearly abandons him at a school for blind children. Welcomed home by his grandmother and sisters, the bright boy is eager to immerse himself in the world of the seeing — but his father fears Mohammed may hinder his attempts to remarry into a prosperous family.”

I got the chance to preview the first 45 minutes or so, and it was again very sweet and a little poignant. I thought, fine, so one Saturday afternoon I put it on for the kids, and I was sort of half-watching with them as I was going through some files. I’m thinking to myself, “Now, couldn’t I just have taken 30 seconds to read theWikipedia entry?” This was NOT a film for our family. Ideagirl turned to me at one point when things started going downhill (I think when the Grandmother died) and said firmly, “You did watch this first, didn’t you? DIDN’T YOU?”

We did watch it to the bitter end just because even Wikipedia made it sound hopeful, and I tried to discuss it that way, but I was assured by several of my children they would have bad dreams about it. That didn’t happen because we worked hard to completely forget about it. But I’m still feeling guilty!

I still do feel a bit guilty that I hadn’t done my homework more. I am usually pretty good about that, but I also know that we can all survive a bad media choice and move on. The next in our Netflix queue? A movie we saw a scene of walking through Sam’s Club several weeks back and the kids said, “That looks funny!” So we got it.

What fantastic and creative film did we get and watch and enjoy as a lark? Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Fortunately here, I was able to read the Plugged In online review and know the whole story, any objectionable elements, and let the kids enjoy without worrying. I will say I’m glad we don’t see every random movie that comes out, because for a day or so the kids were singing the song at the end of the movie, and it is now going through my head, “la, la, la, la, la, Chihuahua….”

So good movies, bad movies, cheesy Hollywood movies—all have a place, I guess.

Also on the topic of movies, I am still debating whether we should go see Where the Wild Things Are. I know it is getting great critical reviews, and it looks gorgeous in its cinematography, but I just don’t know.

I consider Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, the children’s book on which the movie is based, a perfect book. Absolutely, 100 percent perfect. Max is named after the character in that book (here, not IRL, but still). I have read that book so many times I can recite it. It’s such a Prodigal Son story, I tear up almost every time I read it.

Each of my children, unprompted, has added in “with his mommy and his daddy” when we read the line, “And Max ….wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.”

This book is just magical at our house, like Margaret Wise Brown’s The Important Book and The Runaway Bunny, and Virginia Lee Burton’s Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and P.D. Eastman’s Are You My Mother?

Ideagirl always demanded, truly demanded, from the time she was small, that the child characters in Runaway Bunny and Are You My Mother? be girls, so much so that I have to consciously remember to read the real words when Max and I read them together. Right now many other books are popping into my head. This would be a fun list to make.

So the idea of a movie, supplanting in some way the book by being bigger and more intense (as movies inevitably are), and different, as this one must be, because a movie based on the actual book Where the Wild Things Are would last about 2 minutes. I know that I could preview it first, and then take the kids, as Sir and I did with the first Narnia film, but I don’t even know if I want my imagination of the book replaced by a movie. So I’m still wondering.

Mini Book Review: Custodians of Wonder by Eliot Stein

Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions and the Last People Keeping Them Alive by Eliot Stein

Stein is an editor at BBC Travel, and writes a column there called “Custom Made.” Each chapter of “Custodians of Wonder” profiles a person or persons who is maintaining an old, or even ancient, tradition, and keeping alive a special tradition unique to that culture.

For instance, the chapter titled “Where Bees are Part of the Family” is all about the centuries old tradition of “telling the bees” when family events like weddings or deaths happened. Stein finds it is still going on in England to this day.

I first learned about this charming tradition when we watched “Lark Rise to Candleford” the British costume show set in 19th century rural life. In one episode, the old lady Queenie thought her husband was dead, and she went outside to her beehives to “tell the bees” that he was dead. It turns out he wasn’t, so it was a comic moment, but still.

Another chapter is “The Most Romantic Job in Europe,” and here Stein profiles a retired postal worker who was the longest-serving delivery driver to a tree in a German forest that has become a way for people to seek and find love.

If you’re interested, Stein had previously written a Custom Made article with the same subject; it’s been adapted and expanded in the book.

What I like best about the book is that Stein writes carefully about the history of each tradition in a thorough and respectful way. 

The very last words of the book, at the end of the acknowledgments, are a good sum what Stein was trying to achieve. He writes to his infant son, (to whom he dedicated the book, along with his wife.)

And to Oliver, you may not read this book for many years, but if you ever do, I hope it reminds you that the world can be a wondrous place, and that one of the greatest uses of life is to spend it on something that may outlast it.