Mums and bubs

Still getting used to some of the different terminology here in Australia, but this one wasn't too difficult for me to figure out: "Mums and Bubs."

I know quite well that "Mum" is short for "Mummy" which is a British/Australian translation of "Mommy," because we use it in our house. My wife is "Mummy," not "Mommy." I try very hard to always remember to pronounce the vowel as a U rather than an O, but I rarely change it when reading a storybook that says "Mommy."

"Bub" -- well, we don't use that one, but I've been here long enough (almost a month now) to know that a "bub" is a baby.

So as I was reading up on Hoyts, the predominant cinema chain in Australia, I learned that they have special Mums and Bubs screenings at participating Hoyts locations. They are twice monthly, and the ticket is only $9 for the caregiver (I am the "Mum" in this situation). The child is absolutely free, as long as he or she is under five.

Score, I thought.

I have my son two days a week, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Naturally, the Mums and Bubs sessions are on alternate Thursdays.

Un-score.

So, won't be doing that, at least for now. However, I did look to see which theaters were participating theaters, just to tease myself.

The one in Victoria Gardens, which I will be visiting again soon for more furniture needs from Ikea, is indeed a participating location. However, I had to laugh when I saw the movie they're showing this Thursday:

White House Down.

Now, I know that Mums don't only want to see harmless romantic comedies and movies that they would otherwise be compelled to see with their children anyway. But I had to laugh when I saw that they're encouraging you to bring your young children to see a movie in which terrorists take over the White House and kidnap the president.

The littlest ones will be okay. They'll cry, or be good, or sleep, probably independent of what's actually happening on screen. Though the explosions certainly won't be particularly soothing for a child who's just nodding off.

It's the older ones I wonder about. They say children under 5 get in free. My son just turned 3, and it's already been probably two years since I would have wanted to expose him, even indirectly, to a movie like White House Down. It's only PG-13, not R, but my son has ten more years before he's 13. That's ten years of understanding what's going on in a movie like that but not really being old enough to process it without giving him nightmares.

Though maybe it's just a function of the age we live in. When I was over at a friend's house on Saturday, his eight-year-old son was playing a game on the computer where tanks were blowing up other tanks. I don't mean to suggest I was some crotchety old moralist who was shocked by this commonplace reality of 21st century life ... just that maybe I'm being a crotchety old moralist now by feigning shock over the Mum and Bub screening of White House Down.

Maybe more than anything it seems like a disconnect. Are a bunch of mums with babies hanging off their teat (there's that local lingo again) really going to be that interested in a Roland Emmerich action movie?

Maybe not -- but maybe they would be interested in a Channing Tatum action movie.

And now we're getting somewhere in understanding this ...

Super 7 2/3

We parents, we just can't catch a break.

Last night was the first time my wife and I went to the movies together since we saw The Town in October, and it still got screwed up.

I say "it got screwed up" rather than "I screwed it up" because I swear I saw the time as 7:30 for our showing of Super 8 at the theater at the Howard Hughes Center. I swear.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

My dad and his wife are in town to see their grandson, and we knew that would be an opportunity to get out to the movies. In fact, it was during their visit last year that we went to see The Town. Other family members have visited in the meantime, but trips to the theater for my wife and I have not transpired. Maybe we didn't force them, or maybe we just didn't think the particular family members who were visiting would want to selflessly babysit while we took in a major motion picture.

But my dad and his wife specifically expressed an interest in being as helpful as they could be, so we had no qualms sticking them with a sleeping baby (who didn't stir once) last night as we went to Super 8. Besides, they were looking forward to watching our DVD of The Lives of Others -- which they ended up loving.

So we left the house a little after 6:30 for a 7:30 movie. The theater is about an eight-minute drive from our house, but it has a parking structure, so that takes a couple extra minutes. Then it's a couple minutes to walk up to the ticket counter. We were going to buy our tickets first, then partake in one of the many eateries in the Howard Hughes Center for our dinner.

Only when we got in line for the tickets, we saw that despite playing on three screens, none of the showings of Super 8 was starting at 7:30 as expected. There was one that had started about 15 minutes earlier, and one starting at 8:30. The only one we could make was at 7, and on IMAX, meaning a couple extra bucks per ticket.

Starting ten minutes from now.

I couldn't believe it. I remembered thinking that the 7:30 show was at this theater. I knew I'd been right. I even started to go on my blackberry to check, to see if I got it confused with another theater, before realizing that this would be an extremely poor use of time in our current predicament. Either I'd been wrong or they'd changed the times, but either way, we were stuck with the situation we were facing.

Well, there went dinner. Or did it? My wife was starving, having had to deal with my parents all day while I was at work and never having gotten her snack. The options were either to get our dinner at the theater snack bar, or go to a different movie. (I noted that Midnight in Paris was playing at 7:30, and momentarily thought of suggesting it, given that I'd made one failed attempt to see it already and a second attempt that I aborted before it even got to that point.)

But Super 8 had us both pumped, so we made the hasty decision to buy the IMAX tickets and live with what was at the concession stand. We knew they sold personal pizzas at this theater, and even if they were not great personal pizzas, they met the necessary criteria to qualify as dinner.

Except they didn't sell personal pizzas, not anymore. One of several recent improvements at this theater was apparently to improve the pizzas out of existence. Now the only thing that even fit in a food group you would consider for dinner was a hot dog. I eat hot dogs at the ballpark, but not at the theater -- my wife never eats them.

Now it was 6:54, and suddenly we were heading back up the escalator to get slices of pizza at the pizza place across the way. This had disaster written all over it. My heart sank as the $17.25 IMAX tickets weighed heavily in my pocket.

What followed was a master class in food-gathering efficiency. Despite a gaggle of kids and two confused-looking mothers ahead of us in line at the pizza place, we were up pretty quickly and getting our slices cooked in the oven. I was imagining myself wolfing down two slices of pizza in about a minute-and-a-half -- I might not enjoy it but I could do it -- but I didn't see my wife doing the same. But when the woman behind the counter learned of our movie predicament, she asked if we wanted them wrapped in aluminum foil. Suddenly a plan sprouted to smuggle our pizza into the movie theater in my wife's purse. She has a decent-sized purse, but it still sounded a little far-fetched to me. I thought it would be better for me to remove my outer shirt as if I'd grown tired of wearing it, and use that to shroud the slices. But before I could properly voice my idea, I was being assigned to go get us drinks at the movie theater, where she would meet me.

I half-expected not to see her down there, that she might get turned away by the ticket taker either for obvious pizza smuggling or for emanating the smells of pepperoni and cheese, but in no time she was there by my side. We each filled up our drinks at the self-serve stations they'd set up (another recent improvement). It was only 7:03 or 7:04, miraculously, so I even doubled back to pick up a box of candy for us to enjoy later on. Thank goodness the theater was dead on this Thursday night in late June.

So we got to the IMAX theater no later than 7:05 by my watch -- a watch that is a minute or so fast, if anything. I expected we'd be in the second trailer, maybe third at worst.

Nope. Super 8 was already underway.

And this is why I'm calling this post "Super 7 2/3" -- we missed at least a little bit of it. I need you, dear reader who's seen Super 8, to tell me what we missed. Of course, to do that, I need to tell you where we came in. As we filed to our seats, Joe (Joel Courtney) and Charles (Riley Griffiths) are in Charles' room, talking about shooting Charles' movie. Joe has a Super 8 magazine in his hand.

So did we miss a cool opening set piece? A great title sequence? A funny joke? Or just a really great piece of nostalgia?

I hate missing the start of a movie, so please help me out here.

SPOILERS TO FOLLOW

As for the 7 2/3 we did see, I was absolutely loving it for about 6 2/3 or 7 of that. It was at this point that I realized a lot of things that had been set up were not going to pay off in satisfying ways.

The biggest problem with the film, as I see it, is this: The fact that they were making a super 8 movie at the time of the train crash -- and captured actual footage of the alien -- ends up having almost no bearing on the plot. My wife and I discussed afterward that if you're going to call the movie Super 8 and devote so much time to the making of their film, the film should really relate to the monster in a tangible way. Like, they had to show their evidence of the monster to get someone to believe them, or their footage made them a special target of the military. In fact, they only become a special target of the military because they break into the science teacher's trailer and start looking at his old films. And yeah, that one kid (the least developed one) does show the deputy (Kyle Chandler) their footage in order to convince him, but the deputy's own belief in the monster ultimately has nothing to do with how the story plays out.

And this was just one payoff that didn't happen. How about the relationship between the deputy and the drunken no-good (Ron Eldard) who was supposed to be working the shift at the factory where the deputy's wife was killed? They team up to go find their children, but then they just drive up and there they are. They don't have to do anything, they don't have to trust each other during a key moment that requires a leap of faith. And what about the rules of the alien himself? We know he's an empathic being, because the science teacher has communed with him and learned that he just wants to rebuild his ship and go home. So why does he keep wreaking havoc and killing purportedly innocent people after he's been freed? Why does he kill some people straight away and leave others to eat later? And why does one quick interaction with Joe at the end convince him that he's able to complete the rebuilding of his ship at that very moment and lift off toward the heavens?

So even if only 6 1/3 or 6 2/3 of Super 8 were really super, those super parts were pretty super. I loved the period look and details, which certainly did remind me of Goonies first and foremost, E.T. in a more tangential way (then again, I've seen Goonies many more times than E.T.). The camerawork was all exceptional, moving in ways that really brought you into the action. The kids looked terrific, just like kids out of 1980, not like the 21st century pre-teens that they actually are. I also thought the town had a real dynamism, with its hilly landscape that really enveloped you in the time and place.

The acting was generally good as well, but I want to specifically praise Elle Fanning, whose work impresses me more and more all the time. Particularly in that scene where she's watching the old footage of Joe's mother, and tells him her father was too drunk to go to his shift that day, she reminded me of how much better she is than her (currently) more famous sister Dakota. Even as blown away as we all were by Dakota Fanning when she first came on the scene, I now see Dakota's work as more of a "performance," while Elle seems to really be acting -- which is to say that you don't see her acting. She just acts, and she always knocks it out of the park. In fact, her disappearance for a large portion of the latter half of the movie was part of the 1 2/3 that disappointed me. (If you are still following what I'm trying to do with my little number gimmick.)

A definite thumbs up for me -- a fairly enthusiastic thumbs up. But I can't discount the narrative missteps I've listed above, which only scratch the surface -- there are plenty of other things I could pick at. So in summation: acting, effects, feel, nostalgia -- all brilliant. Story? Needs some work on the structure side.

And in case you forgot the question I asked halfway through this post, let me know what we missed in those first one to three minutes when we were filling up our drinks. Maybe that filled all the holes I've mentioned ... probably not, but maybe.

Little Fockers with my little focker

When I wrote last week about how much I was not looking forward to Little Fockers, I could never have guessed I'd be seeing it in the theater within a week of its release.

Nor that I would have my son sitting next to me -- my four-month-old son, who is not suited for watching anything, let alone a movie in which a man (Ben Stiller) gives an injection in the erect penis of his father-in-law (Robert DeNiro) after the father-in-law takes a Viagra-type pill called Sustengo.

But when I discovered that there was one theater showing a Mommy Movie on my extra day off after Christmas -- I took a day off on either side of the paid holiday (Friday) and the weekend -- I jumped at the opportunity. Even if the only choice was Little Fockers.

Most cities -- LA being no exception -- have a program designed to help stay-at-home mothers (and fathers) get to the movies. In LA they are called Mommy Movies, though I was misidentifying them as Mommy and Me Movies, because almost everything else involving a mother and her child is described from the child's perspective: "Mommy and Me." The Mommy Movies play Monday mornings at 11 a.m., and they show films intended for adults. I suppose there are certain guidelines of decency -- you're probably not going to see Saw 3D at a Mommy Movie, for example. But a Fockers sequel where most of the "humor" is linguistic, and will go over the head of any children in attendance? That fits the bill fine.

We first researched these Mommy Movies a couple months ago, but not primarily for my wife -- who does in fact stay at home with our son, though she also works out of the house. We researched them for me, so I could see a movie on a Saturday morning with my son, while she enjoyed some much-needed downtime. The only problem was, Mommy Movies don't play on Saturday mornings. They play on Monday mornings, when Daddy is at work. Which I suppose makes a certain sense. If the theater is going to "sacrifice" one screening a week, where everyone has signed off on the sight of dozens of baby carriages and the sound of dozens of crying children, then they better make it the matinee screening on Monday -- when no one else will be there anyway. A Saturday morning doesn't make sense financially -- not only because the regular customers won't want to be there, but also because the Mommies won't want to be there. They'll be spending Daddy's day off either with him, or at the salon while he takes the kids.

So I figured it was pretty unlikely I would ever get to a Mommy Movie with Jasper. However, it occurred to me last week that one of my upcoming days off would be a Monday, and that the planets might actually align. In fact, Little Fockers would probably be a better choice than a movie I actually wanted to see, because I wouldn't be frustrated if my son ended up "ruining" the movie for me. With Little Fockers, there shouldn't be much to ruin.

The Pacific Theaters chain hosts the Mommy Movies in the greater LA area, at four different theaters, one of which is reasonably close to our house. But three of those theaters were not doing a Mommy Movie yesterday, presumably because many of the Daddies were off work for Christmas, reducing the utility of such a Monday morning screening (and potentially cannibalizing the theater's own regular customers). One, however, was -- the theater in Glendale, which was showing Little Fockers. Glendale is the second closest of the four, but it's still a half-hour drive under the best of circumstances.

However, the Monday after Christmas is probably the best of circumstances -- at least, it has considerably less than the regular dose of weekday traffic. Figuring this might be my only opportunity for this kind of life experience -- and thinking it could also make a great blog post -- I put the wheels in motion.

My wife had suggested I leave at 10, because I'd never been to the theater, and it would help to give myself the time to get situated. I thought 10:15 would be fine. Of course, I didn't actually leave until 10:25. And by following the directions of my GPS with unquestioning loyalty, I took a very slow route to get on the 10 freeway, which set me back further. If I had been 100% certain I'd be using the 10 to get there, I would have shaved off at least five minutes with a different route. Live by the GPS, die by the GPS.

But I ended up rolling into the parking garage at about 11:02, making good time after the poor start, and breathing a sigh of relief as I narrowly avoided an accident -- one of those jam-on-the-brakes situations where everyone slows down for an exit more quickly than you're expecting. (The car in front of me actually swerved to avoiding hitting the car in front of him).

Naturally, it was one of those serpentine parking garages that serves the whole mall, and once you drive up several ramps to find your own spot, then you need to figure out the best route to the theater. A sign by the elevator at least told me I was in the right place, advertising the Mommy Movies, but it didn't actually direct me to the theater. I had to ask two other people before I even learned whether I'd be taking the elevator up or down. Down on the street level, I weaved my way through a very charming outdoor mall still dressed for Christmas, getting further encouragement I was heading in the right direction from various passersby, until I finally saw the facade of the theater.

The line to the ticket counter was one of those disorganized affairs that seem to perfectly encapsulate the parenting experience. It was more of a glob of people than a proper line, with each mini glob consisting of a stroller and either one or two parents fussing around the edges of the stroller. Hating to miss the beginning of movies, even movies as frivolous as Little Fockers, I started to feel the agitation of stress building up inside of me -- or, I should say, feel it even more, as stress had been spurring me onward the entire trip. Jasper was unaware of all this, sleeping peacefully in the car seat strapped into the stroller.

From my spot in the back of the slow-moving line, I called out to the woman taking tickets, to ask her if I could buy Mommy Movie tickets at the automated kiosk on the other side of the lobby. She got that apologetic/guilty smile on her face and said she didn't know. But the ticket seller at the front of his line picked up on our exchange and said I could. I guess that was probably obvious, but I didn't know whether there was a special protocol for the Mommy Movie -- whether they had to ascertain not only that I had a child, but a child who bore a resemblance to me, before they would issue me a ticket.

So I hit the kiosk, but of course, the kiosk wasn't recognizing my card as I tried to swipe it. Figures. Meanwhile, I looked over my shoulder, and somehow the impossibly convoluted line I had just been in had dissipated down to almost nothing. Just when I was about to make a second course correction, the swipe registered and my tickets were issued.

The ticket taker apologized for not knowing the protocol, but ensured me that the movie had not started yet. "Whew," I thought, passing a cordoned-off area that was described as "Stroller Parking," and had about a dozen strollers in it. For a moment I wondered if I was allowed to bring the stroller in, or would have to leave it out here. I was relying on that stroller. But there was no one there to tell me otherwise, so I went on in with it, finding numerous others inside as well.

And also finding that the ticket taker had been wrong a second time. The movie had started. In fact, the first images I saw were of Robert DeNiro in the midst of a very slapsticky heart attack, in which he was using some wires from the surveillance equipment in his basement as a makeshift defibrillator.

For a moment I was annoyed. I had hoped at least to come in during the opening credits. But then I adopted a new perspective on my lateness, for which I had only my own poor planning to blame: I had gone into Little Fockers knowing that I could be distracted for large portions of it because of my son acting up, or that I might even feel the need to leave the theater altogether if I just couldn't manage to calm him down. Coming in a few minutes late seemed to be very consistent with the kind of distracted viewing I expected to have -- in fact, you could say it guaranteed that this would be the kind of prototypical Mommy Movie viewing experience I was hoping to have. So I just settled in and enjoyed myself.

Finding many of the key aisle seats either to be taken, or to be on a riser that wasn't big enough to accommodate the stroller, I moved straight down to the front row. This was about the best front-row scenario you could ask for, as the rows of seats curve back in an arc, leaving you with a more than decent view if you position yourself near the middle. Being the only person in the front row, I had plenty of room to spread out, and had plenty of room to push the stroller back and forth if Jasper got fussy.

Which he didn't do for the first 20 minutes. In fact, he slept so soundly that I had to give him a little touch on the face just to make sure he was still with me. (It's a parent thing -- we do it all the time.) When he did finally awaken, I took him onto my lap and played with him a little bit. I knew he'd need to feed soon, so I sunk the frozen vial of breast milk into the boiling water I'd been carrying in a travel mug. It had last been boiling an hour ago, so it was merely hot at this point, but it did the job of unfreezing the milk to the point where he could drink it. You ideally want the milk to be a little bit warm before he drinks it, but the best I could do was not-cold/a little bit cold. He drank it anyway, appreciatively.

Having my son with me was not nearly the difficulty I thought it might be. He only got fussy before he had eaten, which was understandable, and once later -- and with the one time later, his fussiness was cured almost immediately with a few times backward and forward in the stroller. The rest of the time, he was simply a joy. It's no secret babies like the moving images of a TV screen, but Jasper was absolutely transfixed by the larger-than-life images of a movie screen. Not only did he stare, as I have seen him do with the TV, but he also smiled. Maybe he just thought Little Fockers was really funny.

And the funny thing is, I found Little Fockers a lot more enjoyable because I had this cute little guy by my side. The movie itself was sloppy -- more on that in a minute -- but I will probably always remember it fondly because Jasper was there watching it with me. We genuinely had fun, and he was one of the best-behaved children there.

Because I was down in the front row, I probably didn't have the immersion in the rest of the scene that I would have had if I'd been back with most of the other mommies (and daddies, of which there were plenty). But I didn't think this would be a complete post about the Mommy Movies if I didn't give you some other atmospheric details.

For one, I was very surprised at how little the other children bothered me. Yeah, there was some crying, but not as much as I expected. Yeah, there was a girl two rows behind me who got her head stuck between two seats, and needed to be extricated by her mother. And yeah, there were mothers walking up and down the aisles, holding children in their arms who wouldn't shush in a stationary position. But I think I actually could have been watching a movie I cared about, and not had that experience significantly diluted by the environment. Maybe all those kids were also transfixed by a 20-foot-tall Ben Stiller.

A couple other funny things: 1) In the final scene, which takes place at Christmastime, a little girl walked to the front of the auditorium and yelled out "Merry Christmas!" which got a sprinkling of laughs; 2) Immediately afterward, about four sets of parents were seen changing their children on changing tables that had been set up between the back section of seats and the front. Since my son was not showing any signs of a dirty diaper, I just hightailed it out of there.

And a couple thoughts on Little Fockers as a movie:

1) Teri Polo has been working regularly since Meet the Fockers in 2004, but she was so underused in this movie, it was like they'd had to bring her out of mothballs to play her part, and only for the sake of continuity from the two previous films. Jessica Alba, as the woman trying to tempt Stiller's Greg Focker into adultery, has twice as much screen time.

2) This movie is barely about little Fockers at all. Yes, there are five-year-old twins, the children of Pam and Greg. But the plots barely involve them at all, focusing more on the shenanigans between Jack (DeNiro) and Greg, and on the potential that Greg and Pam's marriage is threatened.

3) Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand appear so briefly in this movie, if you blinked you'd miss them.

4) Owen Wilson is on-hand as a temptation for Pam, but this too is handled sloppily. He starts out dating a Russian woman named Svetlana. Is it just me, or is every impossibly hot Russian woman in the movies named Svetlana?

Okay, I've taken up enough of your time.

In conclusion: I already know you're a movie fan, since you're reading my blog. If you're also a parent, try the equivalent of Mommy Movies in your city. We go to the movies first and foremost to have fun, and even though Little Fockers wasn't good, it was fun -- thanks to my son.

The era of unsocial movie watching

If The Social Network is a movie for our era, collectively, then it's also the first movie of our baby era, personally.

Not the first first movie, but the first movie that my wife and I each watched separately in the theater. And it gave a pretty good preview of what's going to be involved in watching movies unsocially for the foreseeable future.

She saw it on Saturday while I watched the baby. We got her out to an 11:45 show so that I could spend 2:30 onward at the LA County Fair with a couple friends. The baby was actually quiet for the most part, but in the last half-hour before my wife returned, he turned inconsolable. I knew what time her movie had started and I knew its running time, but I also knew she had talked about possibly stopping for a coffee on the way home. I knew I could give my son a bottle, but I also knew that the breast milk she had already pumped would be a precious commodity, meaning I should save it if at all possible. Suffice it to say I was dancing around outside with the baby when she got home, having come straight home from the movie. Which I immediately realized was somewhat cruel, because it meant she had to get back into the thick of mothering right away. Next time I'll use the pumped milk.

Then I went yesterday after work. She told me she'd check in with me around 3, to make sure it was still feasible, and that she didn't need me to come home right away to relieve her from baby duty. Her 2:50 email gave me her blessing, but then she wrote at 3:19, 11 minutes before I was scheduled to leave, saying she'd almost had to change her mind because he'd started screaming uncontrollably again. I should have latched on to the word "almost" and postponed my trip, reading through her words to realize she needed me now, not 3+ hours from now. But my male obliviousness took over and I went to the movie. What made it worse was that I made an ill-advised trip to the Trader Joe's near the theater, to try to pick up some food for dinner. It was ill-advised for multiple reasons, starting with the fact that the place looked like it had been ransacked, and wasn't carrying the entree I wanted to pick up. When the lines were also long, I just decided to abort. But the more important reason it was ill-advised is that it tacked on another 25 minutes or so to the time I should have been home. When I got there, my wife told me I needed to take the baby out, that he had been crying all afternoon. So I took him out for the next 75 minutes, even though it was almost 6:45 when I got home, and on the verge of sprinkling -- which it never quite did, fortunately.

So, this is what getting both of us to a movie will entail?

Yup, I guess so. And it only gets more daunting from here. The fall schedule seems littered with films I want to see in the theater, which I'll need to see in the theater if I want to be able to count them toward my year-end rankings. Not to mention there are at least three films currently in the theater (Easy A, The Town and Let Me In) that I want to try to see before they leave.

Oh well. No one ever said parenting didn't involve sacrifices.

As for The Social Network ... I loved it. It's been dancing around in my head ever since I left the theater. Part of that, I'm sure, is due to the fact that the score is more familiar to me than it is to a person who's only seen the movie. The score's composers are Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and his regular collaborator Atticus Ross, and I bought the soundtrack a week ago on Amazon.com. Nine Inch Nails being my favorite band, I was naturally drawn to the project, and enjoyed being able to place the score in context after watching the movie last night. I'm a bit biased in terms of my advanced prejudices, but I think the score accompanied the film brilliantly and was used judiciously. I was afraid that the score might dominate or might seem to call too much attention to itself (two ways of saying the same thing), but it was quite complementary.

Of course, the score is only one small part of the film, and everything else is excellent as well. It's basically a Citizen Kane story, where a man is driven to build an empire as the result of a very relatable set of psychological needs, becomes someone he probably never imagined becoming during that process, and at the end of it all, still finds those psychological needs essentially unfulfilled.

That's all I really care to say about The Social Network at the moment, in part because I'm still processing my thoughts on it, in part because everyone and his brother has probably written an in-depth Social Network review on his/her blog, and in part because writing in-depth reviews is not the aim of this blog anyway.

But the fact that this one will surely stay near the forefront of my thoughts for the rest of the week is as much endorsement as I need to give it.

If only every movie we have to coordinate our schedules to see in the theater would end up being this satisfying.

Best of paternity leave

Because my wife's family lives in Australia, my family lives in New England, and we both like to discover new destinations when we don't have to visit our families, my vacation time is pretty much spoken for.

It was like its own kind of exotic destination, then, to dream of a break from work in which I'd just sit at home watching movies, eating bad food.

This past week, I reached that exotic destination, albeit with help from a baby who needed changing and cradling at regular intervals.

That's right, watching movies was a major component of my so-called "paternity leave" -- which actually was a vacation, in the sense that I had to use vacation days to do it. My company doesn't give you any paid family leave -- you just get a guarantee that your job will still be there when you get back. You can actually take up to six months, but then you have to figure out how you're going to pay for diapers while you're not working.

I watched 21 movies in 9+ days home from the hospital. (Just to make things a little easier, I'm going to include the 2.5 movies we saw in the hospital -- The Proposal, The Baxter, and half of Ghost -- as part of my "hospital stay," not as part of my "paternity leave.") Why so many? Well, your options are pretty limited when you have a baby. Fortunately, they can also sleep through almost anything. So we just plunked our son down in his cradle in the living room, and made use of our streaming Netflix and the physical DVDs and BluRays we rented from the library, Netflix and Blockbuster. Under normal circumstances, we would have watched a fair amount of TV during this time as well, but it being the end of the summer, our DVR had been pretty much picked clean. This suited me just fine, as I'm always more interested in movies anyway.

You know I like ranking things, so why not rank the movies I saw while I was out of the office?

They fall into three categories: 1) Movies that my wife and I were both seeing for the first time; 2) Movies that one (usually me) or both of us had already seen; 3) Movies that I watched by myself, most likely because I had to review them. And when I'm ranking them, I'm not necessarily ranking them only on their absolute quality, but how they fit into our needs at the time we watched them.

So, here goes:

Movies we were both seeing for the first time:

1) Date Night (2010, Shawn Levy). Big mea culpa here, as I was a big doubter of this movie. We watched it Sunday night after our first full day home, which was a very good day, even though we should have been dog tired from our recent ordeal. But Steve Carell and Tina Fey -- and the many hilarious cameos -- made us laugh and laugh. A real winner.
2) Chop Shop (2008, Ramin Bahrani). Strange choice for second on this list, as this serious indie didn't fit into our quest for light and comedic entertainment, and I had to stop watching after 15 minutes yesterday afternoon in order to take a nap. But upon completion, I really liked this movie set in Queens, in which a 10-year-old boy works five jobs in order to save enough money so he and his sister can buy a roach coach.
3) I'll Believe You (2007, Paul Francis Sullivan). Although I'm reviewing this, my wife watched it with me, so it counts in this category. A small indie comedy about aliens and conspiracy theories starring some familiar comedic faces (Patrick Warburton, Chris Elliott, Ed Helms). Low-budget and funny only in spurts, it was nonetheless more enjoyable than the other films on this list.
4) The Runaways (2010, Floria Sigismondi). Stylish rock biopic that had no substance that interested me at all. Though I liked Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett, neither she nor Dakota Fanning (who's in the midst of an awkward growing-up phase) made me feel the emotional journeys of their characters. In the end I found it pretty tedious and boring.
5) Legion (2010, Scott Stewart). Only good scenes were in the trailers, and those scenes were not even very good. This movie is scattershot and boring. I wish I had anything positive to say about it, but I don't. Although, I guess I sort of liked that scene where the grandmother scampers up the wall of the diner. We had been "saving" this -- for no good reason, it turns out.
6) The Back-up Plan (2010, Alan Poul). Insipid, predictable and charmless throughout. I may devote an entire post to why I think Alex O'Loughlin sucks so much.

Movies at least one of us had already seen:

1) Parenthood (1989, Ron Howard). I don't know for sure that this was the best of the following movies, but I do know that it was the most pleasant reminder of how good it is. I turned to my wife and described it as a "perfect movie" after the credits rolled. It holds up incredibly well for a 21-year-old movie, and each plot is well-developed, heartfelt, and insightful. Bravo, Parenthood.
2) Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988, Frank Oz). Another Steve Martin starrer (we actually saw three Martin movies on my paternity leave) that was better than I remembered it being, even though I'd remembered liking it. It was a fight to get this started, as we originally couldn't get good enough Netflix streaming on it, leaving it pixelated and unwatchable. But we finally bested that obstacle and were richly rewarded with a movie that's hilarious and exquisitely unsentimental -- mainstream comedies rarely get to be so unsentimental these days.
3) Step Brothers (2008, Adam McKay). My affection for this movie runs so high that I can't believe I am ranking it only third here, but I have to admit that I was not quite as enthralled on my third viewing as I had been on my previous two. That is probably inevitable. I still think this movie is absolutely freaking hilarious, and it was a fun headliner for my final Saturday night of paternity leave.
4) Star Trek (2009, J.J. Abrams). As I already wrote about, looked great on BluRay. A truly fun movie.
5) The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985, Woody Allen). The only movie on this list that my wife had seen but I hadn't. I found this delightful, funny, and bittersweet in its unexpected coda. Something I had been meaning to see for years finally got watched on Friday night.
6) Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009, Phil Lord). Actually more fun than I remembered it being. But it's still a relatively minor animated film in the scheme of the last couple years.
7) Boys on the Side (1995, Herbert Ross). One of my favorite true chick flicks of all time. I was eager to show it to my wife, and was glad she seemed to like it as much as she did, as I felt myself just a wee bit impatient with it this time, on my third or fourth viewing.
8) It's Complicated (2009, Nancy Meyers). A bit too long, probably, but this is one of Meyers' most likable and most observant movies, with a terrific cast (Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin, John Krasinski). Never has divorce seemed so richly, well, complicated, and so full of fond laughter.
9) Waking Up in Reno (2002, Jordan Brady). That this is last on the list says more about the quality of the list than it does about this modest little romantic comedy with the likable foursome of Patrick Swayze, Billy Bob Thornton, Natasha Richardson and Charlize Theron -- two of whom, I sadly realized, are now dead. Miramax shelved this wife-swapping road movie several times before mercifully releasing it, but it's actually pretty fun, and the characters are sweet if flawed.

Movies I watched by myself:

1) Zulu (1964, Cy Endfield). Already extensively praised this in this post, so check there for my thoughts. A great film.
2) Hairspray (2007, Adam Shankman). Simply delightful. It's probably a tad too long, the consequence of being an adaptation of a Broadway musical, but I found that this movie oozed cuteness throughout. That can be a backhanded compliment, but it's not here -- "cute" is strong praise in this context. Loved the production design, loved the performers.
3) Machete (2010, Robert Rodriguez & Ethan Maniquis). Wrote about this one here.
4) Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns (2008, Tyler Perry). The best of the movies I watched in order to review them. And because my wife wasn't watching them with me, that usually meant I was watching them in pieces, while up at 2 a.m. or 5 a.m., rocking the baby to sleep. Aside from an utterly pointless Madea scene that I will be sure to harp on in my review, this is a nice story about a single mother (the always wonderful Angela Bassett) trying to make it, with help from a well-meaning former basketball star (real-life former basketball star Rick Fox).
5) Left Behind: World at War (2005, Craig R. Baxley). The third and final movie in the series starring born-again Christian Kirk Cameron, about the Rapture and its aftermath. I reviewed the first two, so I thought I'd make it a threesome. These are not good movies, but they are not as bad as you'd think they are, either. The third movie continues in that vein, and is probably slightly better than it should be because of a fun appearance by Lou Gossett Jr. as the president of the United States.
6) My Summer Story (1994, Bob Clark). You'd hope the sequel to A Christmas Story would be better than it is, but it's just not. Jean Shepherd is back narrating, and everyone else is a reasonable facsimile of the actor who played the character in the classic original -- with one glaring exception. As the old man, Darren McGavin's large shoes are filled terribly by Charles Grodin, who submits one of the worst cases of over-acting I have ever seen and absolutely torpedoes the movie. It doesn't help that all the little vignettes are pointless.

Faces who kept on showing up: Steve Martin, Mary Steenburgen, Whoopi Goldberg, Michael Caine, Tyler Perry. Okay, with Whoopi, I'm cheating a bit and including that half of Ghost.

Okay, back to work ... and back to all future vacations involving ridiculous amounts of travel.

How important is going to the theater?

Entertainment Weekly just put out its Fall Movie Preview double issue last Friday. This is the one that always whets my appetite for what is traditionally the strongest season of the year -- for films with aspirations toward actual quality, that is. Most of the Oscar nominees come from the fall season, as well as most of the cool indies from indie directors who have received broad acclaim, but still make cool movies.

And I think this fall will be a good one. Just look at some of the movies we've got in store:

Machete - The expanded version of a funny trailer from Grindhouse, directed by Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis (September 3rd)

Never Let Me Go - That interesting looking trailer you've seen starring Carey Mulligan, which looks halfway between a period piece and science fiction (September 15th)

Easy A - Teen comedic parody (or sorts) of The Scarlet Letter, starring one of my favorite teen actors (Emma Stone) (September 17th)

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps - Oliver Stone's sequel to Wall Street, which should have plenty to say about the new circumstances Wall Street finds itself in (September 24th)

Buried - Ryan Reynolds in a coffin for an entire movie (September 24th)

The Social Network - David Fincher's Facebook movie, starring Jesse Eisenberg (October 1st)

Let Me In - One Hollywood remake I'm looking forward to, of the brilliant Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In, directed by Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) and starring Chloe Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass) (October 1st)

And that just takes us through the first release date in October. The movie whose poster is featured above -- Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola, whom I love -- is not coming out until December 22nd. And there will be dozens of other interesting movies coming out in between those two dates.

The difference between this fall and the ones that have come before, however, is that this fall, I will have a child. That child is due right around the time Machete comes out. So, I may wait for video on that one.

But waiting for video does not seem like an option with all the movies listed above, let alone all the other great movies that will come out in October, November and December. It's especially difficult because I'll need to see these movies in the theater in order to be able to rank them on my year-end list, which I finalize in late January or early February.

Everyone who's become a new parent, even the hardcore film buffs, will tell you that their theatrical screenings inevitably dwindle a bit after the birth of their child. Of all the lifestyle changes that will accompany becoming a parent, this is the one I fear the most.

But it's not necessarily because I don't think I'll have the time. Both my wife and I will need/seek out breaks from the child, and each of us will certainly be capable of covering for a few hours in the other's absence. In fact, I am sort of looking forward to these periods when I'm the one at home. As long as the baby doesn't immediately need me, I can throw in a quick 90-minute movie without worrying whether it's something my wife wants to see or not.

No, the big problem is that almost everything I want to see is something my wife also wants to see.

Having such movie compatibility is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, I always have a movie buddy for almost any movie I want to see, not to mention a person always willing to discuss film in general. On the other hand, with almost every movie I want to see, it makes sense to wait until my wife can also see it. Every time I want to take a solo trip to the movies, I have to make sure it's something suitably crappy -- either that, or my wife just has to give me permission and let that particular title go.

So I imagine there will be a bunch of solo trips to the movies this fall, where we each see the same movie, by ourselves, a week apart. However, I also imagine that I'll be a lot more motivated to make these trips than she'll be. And that a pressure will start to build -- a pressure for me to just wait until we can both watch them on video, together.

This is what I really want to talk about today. Namely, how do you decide which movies you need to see in the theater, and which can wait?

It's pretty obvious that there are certain movies that demand a theatrical viewing. Let's take two examples from the past year: Avatar and Inception. Neither would be quite the same movie viewed at home, right? Even with our increasingly sophisticated home theater setups?

But there's no Avatar or Inception in the movies I've listed above. The fall is generally a time for smaller, more intimate movies, and that describes most of the movies I've listed above. (How much smaller can you get than being confined inside a coffin for 90 minutes?) I certainly don't need to see Buried on the big screen, and it's coming out early enough in the fall that it will probably be available on DVD by the time I finalize my 2010 film rankings.

But that's where the intangibles come in. The window between theatrical release and DVD release becomes smaller all the time, so if you skip a movie in the theater, the gratification does not have to be delayed very long. Yet there are certain movies you feel like you just need to see on the big screen -- partly because you want to remain current in film discussions at parties, partly because you want to help support the kind of risk they're taking by rewarding it at the box office (Buried being one example), partly just because it seems like the right thing to do.

Let's take Somewhere, the movie I am possibly most excited for this fall. It's just a small movie about a movie star (Stephen Dorff) whose partying lifestyle is curbed by the arrival on the scene of his estranged 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning). I love Coppola's Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette -- the way she uses music and composes shots is absolutely dreamy. Yet I have to be honest with myself and acknowledge that I didn't see Marie Antoinette for the first time until DVD. (I have since seen it a second time.) Seeing it on the small screen did not, however, prevent me from becoming passionate about it. My favorite film of 2008 (The Wrestler) was also something I saw for the first time on the small screen (through an awards screener, which is how I saw it in time to count it for my year-end rankings), as was my favorite film of the 2000s -- Donnie Darko.

Yet I feel like if I waited until video for Somewhere, it would be some kind of cosmic insult to the cinematic universe. (Never mind the fact that I wouldn't get to rank it for 2010, since it comes out so late in the year.) It would mean some essential part of the movie fan I am had been broken, betrayed. Some movies need to be seen in the theater just because ... well, because it's how it's supposed to be. Because seeing movies in the theater is our way of differentiating between what we're choosing to see, choosing to call our own, and what we're just passively consuming when it becomes available on DVD, when it doesn't represent such a conscious decision.

So how do you decide which ones you can wait for, and which ones you must see straightaway? Is it just a matter of the way the scope of the film will be enhanced by seeing it on a big screen? Or do you feel the same intangible factors I feel?