Strike two on live action

Another Sunday, another movie my son couldn't watch to its completion.

What do you do when thematic material forces your five-year-old son out of the theater because it's too scary? You double down in the opposite direction, taking him to a movie about a dog and a penguin.

Unfortunately, this time we had to leave not because he was too scared, but because he was too bored. And then, later, because he was too scared.

Fortunately, this time "we" did not include me.

My wife got free passes to the Australian children's film Oddball through her work, and planned to take my son sometime this weekend. That sometime ended up being a 10:30 a.m. Sunday morning show. This was a nice change for me, as it allowed me to stay home while my younger son napped. I'm usually the one that takes my older son to the movies, a responsibility I obviously don't mind, but this one didn't pique my interests. And since it would serve my wife to be familiar with Oddball for her work, she was the logical candidate to take him anyway.

Once they were in their seats, she texted me that her fingers were crossed, a reference to the previous week's failed Pan screening that I somehow am now mentioning for the fourth time on this blog.

I thought all was going well, but it turned out I missed a text from my wife about 40 minutes in stating "We're out - hope to lure him back in with a treat." Boredom at too many adults talking for too long of a time, it seems.

She did this successfully, apparently -- but then they had to leave before the movie ended anyway, because my son was agitated about some part involving a girl going to the pound, where her dog was set to be destroyed. Obviously the dog emerged fine, but my son wasn't to know that, which I guess makes him kind of the ideal audience member in terms of creating narrative tension. My wife tried to convince him that the movie was likely to have a happy ending, but he wasn't going for it. The second departure was permanent.

Unfortunately, now it seems that a new factor has been introduced into my son's moviegoing experiences -- video games. He appears to have remembered that I let him play some games when he forced us to leave Paddington early last December, and he tried to pull off the same thing after Pan last week, only I was too annoyed to indulge him. When the Oddball cinema didn't have any games, he whined and grumbled about it to my wife for the next hour.

One problem at a time.

The problem of getting him to sit for a whole movie can be resolved in one of two ways:

1) Just stop going to the movies for a while, until he has clearly passed a new milestone in his maturation that would give us the confidence to try again.

2) Just stop going to live action movies.

It's the live action movies that have consistently been a failure. Starting with Paddington and now the last two, he hasn't made it through one yet. So I guess maybe that's really strike three rather than strike two. Even the ones we've watched at home, like Hop and The Smurfs 2, were movies he gave up on. These tend to lodge in my memory less because in those cases, I ended up finishing the movie even when he didn't.

Conversely, even though a couple animated movies have gotten dodgy for him -- like, he really wanted to leave Big Hero 6, but I coaxed him back from the edge -- we have yet to actually make an early departure. And in a movie like Inside Out, which definitely has a couple scary moments, leaving early was not even put forward as an option by him.

So to try to get us back on track, it looks like our next attempt will be ... Hotel Transylvania 2. We saw a trailer for this in the lobby while waiting for Pan to start, and he was really into it. He likes things that are "spooky," but also if they are more funny than they are spooky. Which pretty much exactly describes the tone of this series ... especially if you consider "funny" to mean "attempting to be funny."

We found the original at the library yesterday, and plan to watch it on Wednesday when we're home and the younger one is napping. If that's a hit, I'll have good confidence that the sequel will be too.

Because they tend not to care too much about Halloween in Australia, Transylvania 2 is not actually coming out until November 26th.

That'll give him a couple months to let the "traumas" of the past week subside in his memory, as well.

Really putting my AFCA card to the test

Like Tangerine earlier this week, Sicario is too good a movie to "waste" on talking about a phenomenon completely tangential to it, which has only to do with me and my own viewing anecdotes.

Fortunately, I wrote a review of it that should be linked on the right within a couple days, so please, check back.

Now, on with today's anecdote.

It's been a steady process of training Melbourne's cinema box office staffers to recognize my Australian Film Critics Association card without looking at it quizzically, or at first thinking it entitled me only to a $3 discount. I've never been denied entry into a film I've tried to see with it, but a couple managers have been called, and sometimes with reluctance.

I've been a dozen times now, though, and the last five or six times, it's been a breeze. And sometimes I don't even need to sign the little free ticket voucher, which they probably just stick in a drawer and never look at again anyway.

Like Friday night. Friday night, I decided I was really going to push the bounds of the ticket sellers' good humor.

It was my night to make my second attempt at Pan, the movie I had to leave early (very early) on Sunday when my son found it too scary. I was still expected to review it -- by myself, if not my editor, who would have gladly let it pass without a review -- and I wanted to get to it soon after its Thursday opening, so it wouldn't become too stale. (And more later on further discoveries of why he thought it was scary.)

But I thought it would be a waste of a night out only to see the 6:50 showing. I had been expecting to wait until Tuesday night to watch Sicario, which I was also reviewing (as I told you above). But Sicario also opened on Thursday, and the same logic of trying to get it up on the site as soon as possible applied here. So the perfectly timed 9:15 screening at the same cinema was a great option for me.

The trick was that I had never tried to see two movies in the same cinema in the same night using my AFCA card. I'd watched Trainwreck on the back of One Floor Below at this very cinema about six weeks ago, but One Floor Below was a MIFF movie, for which I'd paid my full $19.50. I thought the wrong kind of ticket seller could become grumpy over such an apparent abuse of the system, and there was no option of waiting until after Pan to buy the second ticket, because I didn't want to risk Sicario selling out on its second night open.

Then there was another complicating factor, which was that the 6:50 showing of Pan was in 3D. Some of the cinema chains participating in AFCA strictly forbid the use of the card for 3D, while others just charge you just the additional fee. Palace Cinemas, of which Cinema Kino on Collins is a member, did not seem to specifically forbid 3D, but it could certainly be a source of confusion or calling of managers if I got a squeamish ticket taker who sensed I was trying to get away with something. And given that I was on a pace to arrive only five minutes before the show started, there wasn't particularly time to wade through red tape.

Fortunately, the woman I got couldn't have had a friendlier smile on her face when she rung up both tickets. I didn't need to tell her what the card was, and we didn't have to wrangle over whether it was free or just a discount. I was just handed two tickets and told to enjoy my night.

There was a bit of confusion, I guess, in that somehow the woman thought I had asked to see consecutive showings of Sicario. I couldn't see any logical reason why a person would need to do this -- and that really would be an abuse of the spirit of the system -- but she was only too happy to produce me two tickets for the same movie. "That'll be in the same theater," she told me.

"Really?" I said, unable to imagine why Pan and Sicario would be sharing the same screening space, but only too happy myself to shrug and go along with it. It was then, of course, that I noticed that both tickets said Sicario on them. "Is that okay?" I asked, thinking she was circumventing best practices even more than she was.

The confusion was quickly sorted out, and she produced me two distinct tickets for two different movies.

And once Pan started, I finally learned why my son thought that a pirate was going to kill everyone, as discussed both here and here. It turns out that in the movie's actual foreword, so to speak -- a short bit of female narration that never repeats itself during the movie -- it says as much. In trying to explain to us that we're seeing a prequel to the events in the Peter Pan timeline that we're familiar with, it talks gently and poetically about "the boy who could fly and the pirate who wanted to kill him" starting out as friends. The tone is so gentle, and the images are a bunch of stars in constellations twinkling and taking on shapes, that the word "kill" went in one of my ears and right out the other. Not my son, I guess. It lodged right in there and colored those crucial ten minutes of the movie that made him want to leave.

Wish I could say that this was Pan's only misstep, but I surely cannot tell you that in good conscience. In fact, this was one of my least favorite movies of the year, as the review (which will also be posted in the next few days) on the right will tell you.

How glad I am that my son didn't end up seeing this junk, I can't even tell you.

Next up in testing my AFCA card: three consecutive movies.

In IMAX 3D.

Why Pan scared my son so much

As parents, we make certain assumptions about our children that sometimes prove to be faulty.

One recent assumption I made about my five-year-old was that he knew the difference between a movie and reality.

Not so much.

Other than Pan, the movie that has been of most interest in my son's life lately is Everest. This is because my son has early aspirations of becoming a mountain climber. These aspirations express themselves in a little routine he does every day when I pick him up from school. He has to run down this raised dirt area next to the walkway, climb out on a few feet of railing at the end, climb back, then reverse his steps back around the bend. He then walks as though on a balance beam on a brick wall next to the walkway. For the second, inclined portion of this wall, he gets down on his hands and knees and inches up that way. The fall on the outside is only about a foot or two, but on the inside, it's more than six feet. He's done it so many times and he's so careful that I don't really worry about him falling -- but I hover in the area below just in case.

I recently pointed out that his climbing -- not only here, but also on structures at parks -- indicated to me that he might one day want to become a mountain climber. He latched on to that idea right quick. I guess that's probably about the dumbest thing that a parent could suggest to their child, short of recommending they become a shark trainer, motorcycle daredevil or chainsaw juggler. But I want my son to follow his bliss. I'll cross that bridge of him falling off Everest if we come to it.

At another, unrelated time, he saw me looking at the review I'd written of Everest online. Yes, that's me, spending countless hours just sitting there, adoring my own writing. Anyway, this particular instance gave me the opportunity to tell him a little bit about what I do. I told him that I'd seen this movie and that I'd written these words to tell people what I thought about it. It seems that he thought that was pretty cool.

Then Sunday, when we were at Pan, we saw the trailer for Everest playing in the lobby, and he saw some of the things that actually happen in it. A sanitized version of those things, of course -- fortunately, kids are a bit less susceptible to a sustained sense of dread than they are to the physical violence/gore. Anyway, he saw people scrambling around on the snow-covered slopes and fighting for their lives. Although he didn't say anything more about it at the time, those images nestled themselves in his little brain. (Little only compared to an adult brain, of course.)

Then yesterday, when he was involved in his usual routine along the daycare center walkway wall, he asked me, "Daddy, is that movie you saw about the mountain climbers--"

"Everest," I offered.

"Evist. Is that movie real?"

I suddenly understood something about my son that I hadn't understood before.

If he had had the language to express himself this way, what he would have said was, "Daddy, is Everest a documentary or a fiction film?"

Suddenly I found myself in a discussion of terms I was sure he understood, like "actors" and "entertainment." I had always just assumed he knew what an actor was, but it turns out he does not. Or did not. Or may still not.

I tried to explain it in terms that I thought he would understand. I decided he was hung up on the idea that real people might be, you know, real people. It was part of my faulty explanation of the difference between Pan and an animated movie. You know, Pan featured real people. As in, people who were walking around in the daily world, like him.

So what I tried to tell him about was when we went to see The Wizard of Oz performed by the year six through year 12 students at the school next door to our house. "You know that those were just girls at the school playing those parts, right?" He doesn't know what a "part" is. "Playing those characters?" Did he even know what a character was?

"I don't know that," he said. Which sounded a bit like a lawyer using his oratory skills to parse semantics, I noted with a little mental chuckle.

So I guess my son thought he was actually watching a lion, a tin man and a bunch of flying monkeys. In a gymnasium at a school next door to our house.

Hey, stranger things have happ -- no they haven't.

To extend that logic to Pan, when I told him the movie contained "real people," he thought he was about to watch a snuff film in which a murderous pirate would start killing everyone on screen. I would be scared to watch that, too.

The part I can't reconcile is that he thinks we live in a world where this is okay. Where a parent would willingly -- nay, eagerly -- take his child to watch a pirate actually shooting and actually stabbing people. That this would pass for entertainment -- a concept with which he was not familiar, as such, anyway.

So I ended up explaining that Everest featured "actors" who were "reenacting" (yeah, that word was too big) a story (he got that one) for our "entertainment" (think we got that one squared away). I explained it was their job and that they went home to their families each night, just like his mummy and daddy did. I explained that the "actors" were not in any danger as they were filming the movie -- that although the mountain-climbing was "real," in a certain sense, the "actors" couldn't get hurt while doing it. I didn't explain that it was not really Mt. Everest or get into any kind of technical details like that -- I already felt a bit like I was telling him there was no Easter Bunny.

Then I tried to explain that although the stuff that happens in that movie was not anything that was actually happening to those people, it was based on things that had happened to other people at a different time. I don't know if he completely grasped that one, but he didn't ask any follow-up questions.

I told him that almost all movies are this way, but then I said that there were some movies where the people were real, but they were boring grown up movies that he wouldn't watch for a long, long time.

Fifteen minutes after arriving home, he developed a fever and promptly went to sleep. I discovered this only after going to his bedroom to notify him that his fish sticks and carrots were ready. Maybe these revelations were all too much for him after all.

Damned if I did, damned when I didn't

When I'm at a movie with my son, my duties as a parent come in direct conflict with my first instinct as a cinephile. That instinct is: to watch the whole movie at all costs. That means I'll try to keep him in the movie, even when he's scared, through some combination of soothing, cajoling, bargaining and pleading. If he wants to leave, I must convince him that he shouldn't -- or die trying.

It worked in Big Hero 6. It didn't work in Paddington, and we left the movie with less than 15 minutes to go.

The pleading to leave started much earlier in Pan, a family-themed advanced screening of which played Sunday at Jam Factory in South Yarra. In fact, it started less than two minutes into the movie. So even though I was supposed to be reviewing it, I did my reluctant parental duty and escorted my son out of the theater ... and paid for it in a way I never would have expected.

But let's back up a bit to the beginning of the day.

Remembering how a charity run had screwed us over the last time we tried to get to this cinema via tram on a Sunday morning, as described here, we got a nice and early start, allowing ourselves nearly two hours to make what should have been an hour trip max. In fact, we needed less than hour to get there, and arrived 45 minutes before seating was even set to begin. Even better, the digital passes that we might have needed to get in, though probably not, finally arrived at the last minute on my phone while we were in transit. Things were going so swimmingly, in fact, that I allowed us the indulgence of having pancakes and a milkshake at a classic American 50s diner that was down the street from the cinema. (And yeah, that's an indulgence -- that's not what I feed my son every day.)

Although I had explained on the tram ride over that this would be a movie starring "real people," trying to distinguish it from animation, and he seemed okay with that, I was nonetheless worried that this might be too advanced for him. Then we saw the tall pirate ship set into the side of the staircase going up to the cinema, that kind where one strip of the picture appears on each step, creating one complete image if you stand back and look at it. "I want to see that movie!" my son, a renowned pirate fan, said. Imagine my pleasure in getting to tell him that this, indeed, was the movie we were seeing.

It gets better. At the top of the stairs, my son was immediately handed a red balloon in the shape of a pirate sword by a man in full pirate regalia. Moments later he was having a blackbeard moustache and beard and red bandanna painted on to this face. He was ready to watch Pan if ever a kid was ready.

The first sign of possible trouble occurred when we were going in to the theater, and I realized something that had escaped my notice during the cursory scan of our invitation: this screening was in 3D. My son had never been to a 3D movie before. How to properly prepare a child for 3D?

He seemed to enjoy wearing the glasses, though, and I recalled that at the Lego Museum in Boston, we'd watched a short 3D Lego adventure. So the experience would not be entirely unprecedented. I again relaxed into my luxury seat -- the screening was playing in one of the so-called "Gold Class" theaters -- and enjoyed the first kernels of the complimentary popcorn that had been there waiting for us.

The first test was the single trailer that played before the movie, for the Jack Black vehicle Goosebumps, another movie pitched at about the same aged child, with about the same potential scare factor. This trailer featured an abominable snowman, a werewolf, a large bug, and any number of other creepy crawlies. My son didn't bat an eyelash at the content, but as the ad was in 2D, the 3D had yet to be tested.

Then Hugh Jackman came on, introducing us to the movie in a 60-second promotional segment. The seeds of what would end up happening may have been planted here, though I'll get to that in a minute.

The movie started, and I could tell right away that my son was ill at ease. It's one of those movies with a drab color scheme that starts out with London being bombed during World War II. (I say "one of those movies" because The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe starts out almost the exact same way.) He immediately started asking questions about what was going on -- not the kind of questions you ask as a genuine attempt to understand the narrative, but the type of questions you ask to abate a mounting panic. It wasn't two minutes in when a small voice escaped him that said, "I don't want to watch this movie. I want to go home."

I swallowed hard and asked him to stick it out for another few minutes.

The next time this voice escaped him, it was a little bigger and a little more insistent. And this time he added that the movie was scary, which was implied but not previously stated aloud. I advised him to look away or to sit on my lap. He wasn't going for either.

I asked him to give it two more minutes again. He might have given it one more minute.

I soon reconciled myself to the fact that this was a losing battle. In reality, my son was one of the youngest children there, so this may never have been a good bet. And it became clear to me that he'd begin ruining the movie for the other kids if he couldn't get into its groove. At this point, there was little chance of that happening.

So with a big sigh of resignation, I gathered our stuff and directed us toward the exit.

In another sign of what was to come, though, as we had made it down to the front row, he looked up at the screen and asked me about something that was happening. Sensing that he might be getting a second wind on his potential to handle the movie, I asked him again if he wanted to stay. He assured me he did not. This did not prevent him from pulling the same routine as we were actually reached the exit. Again, I asked him if he wanted to stay. Again, he said no.

He had the gall to ask as we were leaving if he could play one of the video games in the lobby. Even if I hadn't already shoved three wasted dollars into a pinball game at the 50s diner, back when everything seemed so promising, I would have said no. I was in no mood. We descended those lovely stairs, the ones with the image of the ship set into them, the ship that had once seemed so hopeful, and he ran over to one of those cars that you sit in and put two dollars in, that move and shake for about 45 seconds before stopping. I denied him this as well. I was officially sulking.

When we left the shopping complex a few minutes later, I asked my son why he had been so scared. The content we'd seen wasn't inherently scary, though it did feature some wicked nuns, who seemed a bit grotesque in the eyes of our protagonists. And yeah, the city was getting bombed, but that kind of thing doesn't usually bother my son. He likes guns and stuff. He's scared of monsters, not violence per se.

He told me that he was scared because there was a pirate who wanted to kill everyone. We had met no such pirate. The only thing I can conclude is that Hugh Jackman, who had made some reference to his character of Blackbeard in the promotional video, had given my son the impression of being a pirate who wanted to kill everyone. As you can see in the poster above, Jackman appears with a gun and a sword -- both things my son likes. How he made the leap that this pirate wanted to kill everyone is beyond me.

And then it happened: My son said he wanted to go back in.

Goddamn you, kid. 

I'm not sure if we had missed ten minutes or 15 minutes at this point. It might have even been less than ten minutes. But it was enough that I had been entirely thrown out of the movie, a movie I was meant to be reviewing. In the minutes since we'd left, I'd already mentally decided to go to a nighttime screening later this week (it opens on Thursday here, October 9th in the U.S.), just so I could write the review. I wasn't about to go back in now, which would take another five minutes of getting back up to the screening room, plus a possible explanation of why we had left the building entirely and then come back.

But more than anything, I just didn't want to do it.

There are times when you need to teach your kids about consequences. If you make certain choices in life, you have to live with them. That's okay if you're scared -- I get that. Even if nothing particularly scary has happened yet. But once you've decided to leave -- once your dad has asked you six times if you're sure you want to leave, and you still say you want to leave -- then we leave. And we don't go back.

I thought I was sound in my logic, but in case I wasn't, I also told him that they don't let you back in once you leave. I said that if you have to go to the bathroom, that's okay, but if you leave the building you can't come back in. In reality, of course they'd let us back in, especially in Australia, where people tend to be pretty lackadaisical about strictly adhering to rules in general.

But more than anything, I just didn't want to do it.

Well, either my kid saw through my logic or didn't consider it to be as insurmountable as I did, because he spent the next 20 minutes crying. That's right, 20 minutes. Fifteen of which were on a tram riding back to the city, as I did my best to soothe him while imagining the combination of sympathetic and annoyed looks people were probably directing at us. He was so distraught about the perceived injustice of the situation -- a situation he was solely responsible for, mind you -- that the only way he could think to express it in words other than crying and wailing "Mama" was to tell me that Santa wasn't going to bring me any presents this year.

And yeah, my heart sort of went out to this poor kid, hurting to the core of his being, his tears causing his pirate makeup to run down his face in rivulets. But dang it, we protect our kids too often from the consequences of their actions. The next time we go to the movies -- and I'll be pretty hesitant about that, given the outcome of this experience -- I want him to remember how sad he was this time before he asks us to leave next time.

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending.

Now that we were done a good two hours earlier than we expected to be -- and than my wife, getting some time at home to herself with my other son napping, expected us to be -- I had to figure out another way to spend some of this beautiful spring day. It was only 11:30, and indeed, it was about the nicest day we've had since winter officially ended at the end of August. (The seasons change on the first of the month here. Let's not get into it.)

So we went to the botanical gardens, a place that seems like a hardship to get to on normal days (but isn't really), but which was much more convenient to us now that we'd gone all the way down to South Yarra. They have a beautiful fenced-in spot called the children's garden, which has some grassy areas, some woodsy areas, some sandy areas and some climbing areas, all bisected and trisected by tributaries of man-made water. My son immediately perked up upon entry. Not only was he eager to play, but he was eager for me to come along with him on his adventures. He still had the balloon sword and he still had the pirate makeup, so he was still going to have some kind of pirate adventure, gosh darn it.

So we went traversing through the various areas of this children's garden, the forest of bamboo shoots and the tree with its hollowed out center, the spot where you can take off your shoes and stomp in the water and the part where you can watch the water trickle out from a fountain, the sandy part with its bridges across little moats of water and the tower in the trees that you reach by a spiral staircase. He was having a grand old time, and my God, was it a beautiful day.

And we stopped for two picnics as well. My son was touched to learn that I'd saved his popcorn from the movie theater and loaded it into my backpack on the way out, as we weren't even there long enough for him to eat any of it. So we had popcorn, "crunchy bars" (granola bars, which are called muesli bars here), apples and drinks -- he a juice box, me a diet lemonade soda. We just enjoyed the surroundings and the weather -- and each other's company, I suppose. That's right, all the previous enmity he had shown toward me, he had now sublimated into love and affection. He probably knew, on some level, that mine was the righteous case and his was the faulty one. But we're men -- we don't admit to things like that. 

I took a bunch of good pictures of him, including the one above. A couple of them seem like candidates for this year's Christmas card. And all of this would never have happened if we'd just seen the movie and gone home, as was supposed to happen. Maybe this was nature's way of telling us to get out and enjoy the beautiful day. We also spent time in and around a war memorial, by a fountain, and in a play area outside a shopping center where we needed to pick up some groceries later on. In the end, we were out until 4:15. 

But I'm jumping ahead again. By the time his balloon sword popped -- something I had warned him would happen sooner or later, especially if he weren't careful, and especially if he were swinging it in and around tree branches -- it was kind of like the trauma from the morning had all been forgotten. He didn't even get too glum about the loss of his trusty weapon, though he did ask me if I could blow it back up for him. I explained to him for probably the half dozenth time the essentially ephemeral existence of balloons. 

Proving he was still a kid, and that the movie hadn't entirely left his thoughts, he did ask, "Daddy, can we go back to the movie and get another balloon?"

Fortunately, he took the gentle rebuffing of this request in stride as well.