Finish What You Started: Paddington

This is the fourth in my 2020 bi-monthly series finishing movies I had to abandon the first time.

I almost forgot to do this series this month. Halfway through the day on Sunday, the 30th of the month, I realized that I had blithely let the entire month elapse without watching my one movie for this series. Which seems even more ridiculous when it only involves one movie every two months.

But remember in time I did, and watched it that night I did. Thank goodness, as the world would have surely exploded had I failed to watch it in time.

Paddington is a bit of a cheat in this series, as it is the first movie I've watched for Finish What You Started that is actually already on all my movie lists. That's right, I gave myself credit for a full viewing of Paul King's movie back over Christmas break in 2014, when the movie was released in Australia a couple months before it hit American theaters, and in a few moments you'll see why.

My older son -- who was only four at the time -- and I went to see it in Tasmania, where we were visiting his grandmother. But we had to leave the theater with about 15 minutes left in the movie.

Not because he had to go to the bathroom, though at least that would have been something. I mean, we are all prisoners to the tyrannical needs of our own bodies, especially when we are four.

No, we had to leave because he was too scared.

In a Paddington movie.

It seems illogical, but maybe I shouldn't tease him. I mean, the main villain, played by Nicole Kidman, does want to actually kill Paddington. She's a taxidermist, and taxidermy requires more than just stunning your target.

I wanted to explain to my son that Paddington was not in any real danger, because that's not how these movies work, but you can't explain away the fears of a four-year-old. She does actually shoot him with a tranquilizer dart, so I wouldn't be surprised if his mind translated that as a fatal shot, even with the irrepressible bear appearing again on screen almost immediately afterward.

So, with me grumbling probably more than I should have, we did leave.

Ordinarily I don't give myself credit for a viewing I don't finish, but with so little time left, and so little doubt how it would resolve, it seemed warranted in this case.

A little less than six years later, I finally did see that ending on a Sunday night during the great pandemic of 2020. It involves all the characters on a rooftop and Paddington creating a diversion by throwing his "emergency marmalade sandwich" (the one he keeps stashed in his hat) in range for a bunch of pigeons to kick up a storm in their attempt to eat it. The fluttering causes Kidman's character to lose her balance and fall of the building when Imelda Staunton unwittingly opens a trap door at her feet. Of course, in keeping with the non-fatal overriding principles of the entire movie, Kidman is left hanging on a pole, and ultimately, shoveling shit at a zoo.

The value in this second viewing, and first complete viewing, was not in finally seeing how the movie ended, which I probably could have easily predicted. (Rooftop endings are always a good fallback, don't you know.) It was in realizing that this movie is much better than I've given it credit for.

I'm not sure why I wasn't totally enjoying Paddington the first time around; I was mildly biased against it even before the premature departure. I remember not particularly liking the scene where Hugh Bonneville dresses up like a maid to infiltrate the historical society, but it's harmless enough.

This time, not only did I like it much better, but I don't even see how it is significantly less delightful than the universally beloved Paddington 2. So now I guess I like the sequel slightly less than most people, and the original slightly more.

One takeaway was how Wes Andersonian the whole thing is, which I don't remember thinking the first time I saw it. There were two main style elements I thought King had "borrowed" from Anderson, one being the quick pan and return, to action on the side of the screen before coming back to the original focus of the shot. I'm sure there would be a way to describe that more articulately, but I'm guessing you know what I'm talking about. Then perhaps even more explicitly, King twice includes scenes where we look into a miniature version of the Brown household from the perspective of a removed wall, as the camera travels around to see the different rooms and their occupants. This is direct out of the submarine in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and Anderson has used that same trick elsewhere. Instead of accusing him of total theft, though, I was charmed by it.

Then I found myself marvelling over exactly how adorable Sally Hawkins is. She's not what you would call traditionally beautiful, but there is something so quirky and alive about her face that you can't take your eyes off her. I've certainly noticed this before, but it was like I was having a moment with it during this viewing.

Okay, I've got two more candidates to watch and two more slots to go in this series. See you in October ... if I remember..

And the award for Father of the Year goes to ...

On New Year's Eve Eve, I heeded my son's request to leave early from Paddington because he was too scared to continue with the movie.

Yeah, I wasn't letting that happen twice in the space of two weeks.

And so it was that I squelched not one, not two, not three, but four separate requests yesterday to leave our screening of Big Hero 6.

Father of the year, indeed.

I knew Big Hero 6 might have some intense moments in it, but I ultimately thought my four-year-old would ride it out better than he had Paddington. On the surface, Paddington seems like the safer bet, but the sadistic taxidermist played by Nicole Kidman was understandably pretty scary. It was also only the second live-action movie I'd ever asked my son to sit through, the first being the Easter bunny movie Hop, which we watched at home and which he gave up on, long before the ending. (Not because it was scary, but because it was a "grown-up movie.")

Featuring robots, superheroes, and a protagonist who was basically a young boy (early teenager, it turns out), Big Hero 6 seemed perfectly timed to catch my son at the ascendancy of slightly older tastes. He's big into superheroes now, and has been into robots a bit longer than that.

But I could tell this one was going to be pretty heavy. Like most Disney protagonists, Hiro Hamada has lost his parents, and the actual D-word is used in referring to what happened to them. Then pretty soon, two prominent characters also die. My son has been asking questions about death recently, saying things like "I don't want to be dead," so this worried me. When one of these characters died during the story, and my son asked what happened to him, I was silent for a moment before finally saying "He got caught in the fire." "But what happened to him?" Gulp. "He died," I admitted.

This did not faze my son, or at least not in any way where he seemed to be dwelling on it. But abstractly scary things are no match for physically incarnate scary things, and unfortunately, this is what the Big Hero 6 villain looks like:

Perhaps a tad scarier even than a sadistic taxidermist.

The first time he made his appearance, my son started to squirm up into a squatting position, as if he were trying to retract himself into the corner of his seat as much as he could. At first he seemed like he was going to weather the storm, but pretty soon he started moaning "Daddy, I want to go home now."

Drat.

This was a much different situation than Paddington. While that movie was in its home stretch and I can say that I pretty much saw the whole thing, Big Hero 6 was probably not even 40 minutes in when my son made his first request to leave. If we were to leave now, this would not just be "leaving early." This would be "not seeing the movie."

I had to think quickly. I knew the right thing was to immediately grant the wish. But two factors weighed heavily into my decision to stay, listed in order of their importance to me -- but I'd reverse that order of importance if ever cross-examined in a court of law: 1) If I left now, I couldn't add this to my 2014 movie rankings; 2) It would be a sad waste of $37.40.

That's right, a ticket for an adult and a child to a movie, plus the service fee of ordering online, comes out to $37.40. Highway robbery. But to be honest, it was the first reason listed above that was bothering me more.

"Shh shh shh," I told him. "You're okay. Just don't look at the screen."

Other things I tried at other times: having him sit in my lap, telling him it was all make believe, telling him it was just a man wearing a costume, telling him it was like his Bane action figure from his Gotham City Jail playset (the character does actually bear a striking resemblance to his toy). Each of these worked in calming him down, though the eventual unmasking of the villain -- which I had been praying for from the first outburst -- did not mean there were no subsequent episodes.

In fact, it was only because he was so easily calmed that I could carry out such a self-serving and blatantly inhumane strategy on my own son. He was spooked by this guy on each of his appearances, but never spooked enough that he started to have a real meltdown. He moaned the words in a voice that sounded on the edge of tears, but whatever I said as a follow-up truly worked. He always calmed down and continued watching the movie with great interest.

After the fact, my actions proved themselves justified. He told me he loved the movie, and when we got home, he excitedly explained as much of the plot to his mother as he could babble out. When I asked him if it had been too scary, he said "Nah. Well, it was a little bit scary. But not too scary."

I don't want my son to grow up too fast, and I don't want him to start being blase about people trying to kill each other on screen. But I do want him to confront his fears, and I think yesterday we took a step in that direction.

And if I got to see my movie all the way through to the end in the process ... well then bully for me.

Straddling years

I was straddling quite a bit this late December-early January. In this post, I'll let you know about each instance of that -- and also exactly what I mean by "straddling." (Sounds pretty dirty.)

Paddington

I know the storybook Paddington has British origins and is big with British little boys and girls, but it was something that got read in my American household as well. I think there are a lot of other American households of the late 1970s and early 1980s who could say the same.

Yet the release of the Paddington movie is straddling a regrettable line between 2014 and 2015. In the U.K. and Australia, it was released as a holiday family movie, way back on December 11th. In the U.S., though, it won't come out for another two weeks, making it part of the studios' January dumping grounds.

It's unfortunate, because Paddington might have done well during the U.S. Christmas season -- from what I saw of the movie, anyway.

See, Paddington also straddles an unfortunate line between little kid movie and big kid movie. We went to it on December 30th when it was raining in Hobart (Tasmania), scuttling or at least delaying a bunch of our plans. The theater was not set up for the big crowds, apparently, as we barely made it in to the movie on time despite arriving a half-hour early.

My four-year-old sat rapt the entire time, never saying a word and only asking me for an atypically small amount of the Pods (chocolate cookie treat) we had purchased at the concession stand. Then, with no preview whatsoever of his mounting horror, he told me that the movie was too scary and that he wanted to go home. The big finale was already on and the movie would be over in ten more minutes, but he had to go now. And I knew that this is what parents sometimes had to do, so reluctantly, I left a movie before it was over for the first time in as long as I can remember. Is it possible it was the first time ever?

In truth, a pretty charming movie had started to sour on me by that point, and it didn't much matter that I missed the ending because by then it was easy to predict how it would finish. (What movie isn't, you could argue.)

Where it made its biggest mistake -- other than having Nicole Kidman as a murderous taxidermist, that is -- was the false advertising of the poster you see above. Paddington most definitely should have been set at Christmastime, in the snowy London on that poster. In fact, shouldn't every movie set in London be filmed in the winter, making everything look all the more magical? But it's not. In fact, this is how Paddington is being advertised in the U.S.:

What's oddest about this, when juxtaposed with the Australian poster, is that it looks like a summer movie to Americans and a winter movie to Australians. While it is actually summer in Australia and winter in America.

Had they actually set it at Christmas, the studio would have been compelled to release it in December in the U.S., positioning it as a prestige holiday family release and getting the tons of bucks that go along with that. Instead, it's coming out Martin Luther King Day weekend -- the best January release date, to be sure, but still a January release date. Maybe they thought the holiday season competition from Annie and Night at the Museum 3 would just be too stiff.

The real problem for me, with this release date, was that I was unsure whether I should even bother to see it in the theater. Based on interest alone, we'd see it, since we've read the Paddington book to my son upwards of 20 times. It's one of our only stories, in fact, where I've bothered to perfect voices for all the characters. But at a time of the year when I'm packing in viewings for my year-end list, I didn't know if I should properly count it for 2014, since most American critics (with whom I compare and contrast my year-end lists) will be counting it as a 2015 movie.

The decision was taken out of my hands, however, when my wife and mother-in-law worked up a momentum to have me take my son to the movie when the rains started falling. Big Hero 6 was also an available option, but before I knew it a showtime had been identified and a plan was in place. Maybe he would have actually sat through the entirety of that one.

The Trip to Italy

I engaged in a different kind of straddling on New Year's Eve. My wife had made it clear, earlier in the day, that she did not expect to still be up at midnight. This was certainly a first in our ten years of knowing each other ... but it was also the first New Year's we've had two children. (In fact, last New Year's Eve we spent in the hospital, ready to give birth to the second just hours later. Happy birthday, D!)

Having two children has taken its toll on my wife, and since we were out of town and none of our friends were around anyway, she saw it as just another opportunity to catch up on sleep. I'm glad to say that she did awaken for the midnight fireworks, having still been awake for the 9:30 edition, and we watched those together from my mother-in-law's porch, overlooking the harbor. It was pretty magnificent.

So if this were going to be just another night for her, I decided to make it just another night for me -- and queued up a movie on Netflix.

I didn't figure to finish The Trip to Italy before the clock struck midnight, but by starting it around 10:15, I would make it pretty close. Alas, two beers at dinner did their work on me, and I engaged in a nap of maybe 30-40 minutes when the movie was about 20 minutes old. Awakening at around 11:15, I knew that there was no chance I would finish the movie in 2014.

As my New Year's Eve plans have always been more lively than this, I had never previously faced a situation where I didn't know whether to credit a viewing for one year or another. That kind of thing doesn't matter in the slightest to your average person, but to listmakers and their ilk, it can take on greater significance. I keep track of the total number of movies I see each month and each year, and just for the purposes of record keeping, I needed to know whether to file Michael Winterbottom's film under 2014 or 2015.

I normally have a fairly straightforward system for determining on which day I've seen a movie. If I start it before midnight but finish it after, the movie will be credited to whichever day I watched more of the movie. If it's too close to tell, I give preference to the first day. The one clear exception to this is that if I start a movie one day, but then don't finish it until another day and have watched another complete movie in the interim, the movie is always credited to the day I finished it -- even if there are just five minutes remaining. It's not a perfect system but it's the one I'm comfortable with.

Because of checking Facebook and preparing for the countdown to midnight, to the extent that I did so (I watched the seconds tick off for the final minute), I ended up watching less than half of The Trip to Italy before midnight. Yet I wanted very definitely for it to become my 212th new movie of 2014, rather than my first new movie of 2015, because a) it would break the tie with 2005, which also featured 211 new movies, and b) it would tend to deemphasize the fact that, yes indeed, I spent my New Year's Eve watching a movie and doing little else.

But I ended up having more than an hour of the 108-minute movie remaining, and I ultimately had to acknowledge that I'd need to settle for 211 movies in 2014 and get myself going on 2015.

And this is now far, far more than you ever cared to know about how my mind works.