My son the old softie

As I was getting my computer set up for work on Monday and my seven-year-old was in the other room, enjoying the morning hours of his second week of school holidays, I heard him go into the ending of Luca, which we'd watched a week ago while out of town.

I thought he was picking up where he left off on a previous viewing, since he will watch movies in chunks. (The makings of a possible cinephile there, I tell you -- creating some additional immersion in a particular movie, even if you don't have time for a complete viewing.) 

But then when it ended, I heard him rewind it about five minutes to the beginning of the train platform scene between Luca and Alberto, the scene that's a facsimile of so many others in movie history.

And then he did it once more.

Awwww.

Even though I've seen the "train platform scene" a hundred times before, this is probably his first exposure to it, so he's becoming freshly acquainted with what makes this scene so powerful and -- let's call a spade a spade -- so sentimental. 

He's watched his favorite parts of movies before, but it may be that he is only just now discovering that a favorite part can be a part that makes you feel the feels -- and that feeling the feels is something he really likes. (Another recipe for cinephilia, I'd say.)

It's nice that he's not just a tad more self-conscious and self-aware, or a few years older, because otherwise he'd be embarrassed about the possibility his dad could notice him twice rewinding a movie to its most sentimental part. There comes a point in your life where you hide that shit as though you were hiding pornography. Fortunately he's not there yet. 

I could probably even ask him about it without getting a "Daaaaaaaaad!" and an immediate determination never to repeat the activity again. But I think I will just let it lie and enjoy my own assumptions.

Of course, it could also be that this scene speaks to him specifically. Much has been made (including by me in my review) about how Luca plays as a gay allegory, and who knows, maybe my son sees the parting of Luca and Alberto on that train platform in the romantic context that many people are seeing it. I already know he doesn't really like sports. (Kidding. I would never be so reductive about the signs of a person being gay or straight. Though let's just say if he does one day come out to us, it won't be a total surprise.)

Humorously, the New York Times gave the following nickname to Luca: Calamari Me By Your Name. Good one.

I'm just glad that my son recognizes the role of movies in the TV/games/movies hierarchy. Games are still on top -- for both my kids -- but my older son would never just throw on a movie, as I've mentioned before. He'll get into one when it's on, but he wouldn't usually be the driving force behind throwing it on. 

My younger son? He throws them left and right.

And it looks like he's starting to recognize all the ways they can enrich you -- not just your brain, not just your endorphins, not just your funny bone, but your heart as well. 

Perfect pauses: Luca and Murder, My Sweet

Haven't done one of these Perfect Pauses pieces in a while, so I figured, I might as well get in a twofer.

Of course, to do a twofer, you actually have to have two perfect pauses in the same evening, which I did Monday night.

The premise of this "series" -- which has had exactly five previous entries over nearly ten years -- is that when I pause a movie at a totally unpremeditated moment, and it captures a perfect frozen snapshot of some kind of sudden action or other fortuitous story moment, I consider that sufficient inspiration to write about it here. I think you can see what makes this one good, but let's get to that in a moment.

We got to our Luca viewing at the end of our first full day on holiday this week, after a lot of toing and froing about what night was actually best to project it on the wall of our holiday house. It was about 7:30 before we got started -- an hour later than we'd ideally like, so as to get our kids to bed at a reasonable hour -- but it did in fact work out best for the schedule, considering also our dinner options in the small town here where we're staying. Most of those places are dark Monday night, so eating frozen pizzas in front of a movie was the way to go. And I'd been planning to write about this screening here anyway, so now I can let this post take care of business.

The pause came during one of our many interruptions, to do things like check on the pizza and go to the bathroom. In this case I believe it was fetching ice cream. 

In any case, I think you can see why I considered it to be such a good pause. Giulia (left) is throwing a glass of water at Luca (right), and though I didn't know the actual reason she decided to do this -- I was distracted in the few moments before the pause, while working my way over to my computer to pause it -- I did know the consequences would be significant for Luca. Like Madison in Splash before him, Luca turns into his underwater form (a sea monster) when he's doused with water, and Giulia has never seen that form.

As it turns out, it wasn't quite as big a moment in the narrative as I thought it would be -- Giulia is the only one who sees the transformed Luca, and she's almost preternaturally accepting of the fact that he's a sea monster. But the pause is still great, as it catches the water in the air and Luca's hands up defending himself. In a way, it's like the final millisecond of innocence. 

Before we get to our second Perfect Pause, I'll spare a few moments to close the loop on the Luca viewing that I first mentioned in this post. 

As you will recall, my seven-year-old was inconsolable when it turned out he watched the first hour of a movie I had been saving as a surprise for this trip. I'm glad to say this did not impact the viewing whatsoever. In fact, I think he got a certain thrill from knowing certain things about the movie before we did. However, he was also really good about not saying "Oh, I love this part" or "This is the part when ..." In fact, I could see him actively resisting the urge -- a real sign of his budding maturity.

And here's a picture of him putting a smile on Luca's face:

After we finished Luca and shuffled them off to bed -- having to call them back once for a little post-credits sequence -- I left the projector up to watch my June installment of Knowing Noir. You'll get a full post on Murder, My Sweet tomorrow, so I'll only include the Perfect Pause here:

Nothing remarkable about what was going on on screen, of course. But if you look down in the lower left corner of the screen, you'll see something pretty remarkable indeed:

So yeah, when I had to pause this movie to get a Mini Coke from the fridge (I was pretty tired at this point), I happened to stop it on exactly the one-hour mark, down to the second. 

Did I time it? I might have if this were playing on my DVD player, where you can see the timecode running as you watch. I've actually been known to time a pause to an exact time landmark just for the fun of it. 

But in this situation, on an iTunes rental, the amount of time passed/remaining is not even visible until you actually press pause, at which point it jumps up on the screen. 

It puts one in mind of The Great Last Days in the Desert Pause of 2016, when I made an unpremeditated pause that exactly bifurcated the movie -- 49 minutes and 12 seconds on one side of the movie, 49 minutes and 12 seconds on the other. (Or whatever the case was. It's a 98-minute movie, in any case.) 

For some reason, I guess I did not see it fit to write about that. 

After a night of such twin perfection, I slept well. 

Mourning the loss of a surprise

I made my younger son cry yesterday morning.

Oh Vance, you cruel, cruel man.

No, it's not like that. It wasn't scolding him, yelling at him, or getting on his case.

I merely told him that he had jumped the gun on something and messed up my attempt to save it as a surprise.

Poor kid, he was just trying to watch some Disney+ because the power had dwindled down on his device and I told him he needed to let it charge for a while. Hey, I'm not magician, I cannot instantly zap a battery back to its full life.

I didn't notice what he was watching until I walked through the room almost an hour in, at which point it looked familiar -- and I got a sinking feeling in my stomach.

It was the new Pixar film, Luca.

"Oh no no no no no!" I said, realizing a grave error in the natural order of events.

See, we're going out of town next week, back to Nagambie, where my wife and I went for her birthday back in February. We both have to work, but we need a change of scenery after our recent lockdowns, so we'll just work remotely from a different place. We were supposed to actually go down to the Mornington Peninsula to stay at a friend's beach house while they were out of town -- even though it's not beach weather -- but they couldn't make their own trip interstate as a result of borders still being closed between states as there are more COVID outbreaks around the country. The falling dominoes left them in their own beach house for the first week of school holidays and us out of luck.

Enter Nagambie, where we will try to make it as much like a holiday as we can while we still both working. My wife works three days a week (Tuesday through Thursday) for her current job, then does freelance work on Mondays and Fridays, which means she'll have some flexibility to entertain the kids on those days, while I'll take Wednesday off and entertain them that day. I guess Tuesday and Thursday it'll be screens, screens and more screens for them. They'll be so disappointed.

But enough of our holiday logistics.

We like to incorporate a number of fun things into these trips out of town, and on this trip I'd planned to bring along our projector and have a family viewing of Pixar's latest. You may recall that we did a similar thing when Soul came out on a trip out of town over Christmas. 

My younger son loved that experience, which was scheduled for the night of his birthday, making it all the more special. And making this prospective projector viewing of Luca all the more special by association.

So when I told him I'd planned to have us watch it as a family out of town next week, he started crying.

Now, you might think I'm an unreliable narrator here, making myself look better than I actually was. You might think my tone of voice was all scoldy or annoyed, like he should have known better. 

In truth, that's not the case. He shouldn't have known better. We've never even talked about Luca, even though Disney+ is advertising it very prominently on the landing page for the obvious reason of its newness. Part of keeping a good surprise is not talking about the thing in question too much before you launch the surprise. 

But the risk of that is that your younger son decides to watch the movie on his own while he's waiting for his device to charge back up so he can keep playing Brawl Stars.

So I swear, the only tone in my voice was disappointment at my own failure to properly prevent this from happening. But that was enough.

He started crying and he was basically inconsolable for the next 15 minutes. My immediate attempts to console him were so strenuous that they drew my wife out of the bedroom where she was enjoying her morning tea. Neither of us could console him, as much as we tried, and even an hour later he was still looking miserable.

He stopped watching Luca and will finish the final 30 minutes when we all watch it together in a couple days. But it's a sign of how much he's enjoyed these movie-related surprises that he mourned this like he'd mourn the loss of a favorite toy. The only thing lost here was the ephemeral experience of consuming a possibly beloved new movie for the first time together. But that was enough.

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that this may be the real cinephile among my children. The older one is the one I've worked on harder, just because he was the first one who became a sentient creature capable of consuming movies, and just because, sad as it is to admit, the older child tends to get more of your attention on any area where you are trying to indoctrinate them. He's also the one who always tells me that the latest movie we've seen is his favorite of all time.

But the older one does not gravitate toward the experience of watching movies like the younger one does. He would never fire up a movie during his free time, which the younger one does do, as evidenced by the current example. The younger one might be the one following in his old man's footsteps, who sees a couple free hours as the perfect chance to add a new movie to your list.

And like him, I'd probably be a bit crushed too if I'd inadvertently spoiled a movie-related surprise someone had curated for me.

Alas, I hear Luca is not so great. So maybe it wasn't even the right movie to have scheduled for this sort of surprise.

And you know what? I was actually going to sneak in an early viewing of the movie, even if he didn't.

I need to watch new movies as close to their release date as possible for the purpose of reviewing them for ReelGood. So I actually tried to get Luca on the books last weekend, just after it had been released, and long before any idea of watching it on our holiday occurred to me. 

My wife put the kibosh on this proposed Sunday night viewing due to the fact that we already had a busy Sunday afternoon hosting a play date for my older son. I was nursing a sore foot, so I thought there was a chance she'd take both of our kids out, plus my older son's friend, for a couple hours in the afternoon. She left the younger one back with me, as I should have expected, but if she hadn't, I was going to throw on Luca in order to write up my review -- not telling anyone I'd already watched it when we eventually watched it as a family.

If I'd shared this with my son yesterday, that I tried to watch it before he even did, it might have saved a few tears. 

But then my wife would have known that I had schemed to spoil our family viewing, and I can't have that.