The Best Old Movies for Families: A Guide to Watching Together by Ty Burr (Engli

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The film critic for "The Boston Globe," Burr has written an impassioned and eminently readable guide for parents who are frustrated by today's film offerings for children and who want to start their kids--of all ages--watching classic movies.

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

If a child can watch Barney, can't that same child also enjoy watching Charlie Chaplin or the Marx Brothers? And as they get older, wouldn't they grow to like screwball comedies (His Girl Friday), women's weepies (Imitation of Life), and westerns (The Searchers)? The answer is that they'll follow because they'll have learned that "old" does not necessarily mean "next channel, please."Here is an impassioned and eminently readable guide that introduces the delights of the golden age of movies. Ty Burr has come up with a winning prescription for children brought up on Hollywood junk food. FOR THE LITTLE ONES (Ages 3—6): Fast-paced movies that are simple without being unsophisticated, plainspoken without being dumbed down. Singin' in the Rain and Bringing Up Baby are perfect.FOR THE ONES IN BETWEEN (Ages 7—12): "Killer stories," placing easily grasped characters in situations that start simply and then throw curveballs. The African Queen and Some Like It Hot do the job well.FOR THE OLDER ONES (Ages 13+): Burr recommends relating old movies to teens' contemporary favorites: without Hitchcock, there could be no The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, without Brando, no Johnny Depp.

Author Biography

Ty Burr is the film critic for The Boston Globe, and the father of two. For over a decade he wrote about movies for Entertainment Weekly, and estimates he has seen 10,680 films.

Review

"Every parent has asked for Ty Burr's book. Every movie-mad child will steal it from the parents. This is a guide to classic movies for kids, written with verve, humor, and pep. A winner."—David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film"A treasure, a delight, and quite possibly a marriage-saver as well. Ty Burr's advice on when, how, and even why to share with our children the movies we cherish from our own youth is funny, hip, and wise. My ten-year-old stole the book right out of my hands." —Julia Glass, National Book Award–Winning Author of Three Junes"Terrific, necessary, and carried out with integrity, intelligence, sensitivity, and totally without condescension. Ty Burr's book can lead to a lot of pleasure–of the life-long kind." —Peter Bogdanovich

Long Description

If a child can watch "Barney," can' t that same child also enjoy watching Charlie Chaplin or the Marx Brothers? And as they get older, wouldn' t they grow to like screwball comedies ("His Girl Friday"), women' s weepies ("Imitation of Life"), and westerns ("The Searchers")? The answer is that they' ll follow because they' ll have learned that " old" does not necessarily mean " next channel, please." Here is an impassioned and eminently readable guide that introduces the delights of the golden age of movies. Ty Burr has come up with a winning prescription for children brought up on Hollywood junk food. FOR THE LITTLE ONES (Ages 3-- 6): Fast-paced movies that are simple without being unsophisticated, plainspoken without being dumbed down. "Singin' in the Rain" and "Bringing Up Baby" are perfect. FOR THE ONES IN BETWEEN (Ages 7-- 12): " Killer stories, " placing easily grasped characters in situations that start simply and then throw curveballs. "The African Queen "and "Some Like It Hot" do the job well. FOR THE OLDER ONES (Ages 13+): Burr recommends relating old movies to teens' contemporary favorites: without Hitchcock, there could be no "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," without Brando, no Johnny Depp.

Review Quote

"Every parent has asked for Ty Burr's book. Every movie-mad child will steal it from the parents. This is a guide to classic movies for kids, written with verve, humor, and pep. A winner." -David Thomson, author ofThe New Biographical Dictionary of Film "A treasure, a delight, and quite possibly a marriage-saver as well. Ty Burr's advice on when, how, and even why to share with our children the movies we cherish from our own youth is funny, hip, and wise. My ten-year-old stole the book right out of my hands." -Julia Glass, National Book AwardWinning Author ofThree Junes "Terrific, necessary, and carried out with integrity, intelligence, sensitivity, and totally without condescension. Ty Burr's book can lead to a lot of pleasureof the life-long kind." -Peter Bogdanovich From the Trade Paperback edition.

Excerpt from Book

I N T R O D U C T I O N I KNEW WE had passed some twisted point of no return when Eliza announced that she wanted to have a Katharine Hepburn party. With a screening of Bringing Up Baby. For her ninth birthday. My wife, Lori, and I tried to dissuade her. Maybe our daughter could gladly sit through a fifth viewing of the screwball comedy classic, but how many of her schoolmates would make it through their first, conditioned as they were to color, brightness, Shrek? Eliza was unmoved: It was her birthday, and she argued convincingly for the constitutional right to choose her own party theme. So out the invitations went, featuring a photo of Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story that Eliza personally cut out and pasted on. And in came the phone calls from the parents. To my chagrin, most of them were convinced that her father the fancy-pants movie critic had put her up to it (on a stack of the collected works of Wong Kar-Wai, I did no such thing), but their more pressing concern, which we shared, was that their child would get bored, wander off, play with knives. My wife and I assured them we were laying out a table next to the screening room, filled with books and pencil-based activities to divert those kids oppressed by the very notion of black-and-white cinematography. The books were never opened, the pencils never used. We took a half-hour intermission for cake, but when I asked if the group was ready to restart the movie, there was a unanimous roar of assent, and we picked up again with that marvelous forest-of-Arden sequence where Kate, playing flibbertigibbet heiress Susan Vance, leads Cary Grant''s nerd zoologist David Huxley through the nighttime wilds of Greenwich, Connecticut. At one point Susan breaks a high heel and teeters up and down, burbling in delight, "Look, David, I was born on a hill. I was born on the side of a hill," and the moment feels so spontaneous,so magically free, it can make your hair stand on end. (In fact, the bit was mischievously improvised by Hepburn after the 1938 equivalent of a wardrobe malfunction.) The kids had never seen anything like it: It felt more unscripted, more real than anything twenty-first-century kid culture feeds them, up to and including reality TV. When the parents showed up to collect their children, five minutes remained-Grant was still stuck in the jail cell with Hepburn dragging the wild leopard through the door-and eighteen kids sat mesmerized and giggling. The moms and dads were astounded. They shouldn''t have been, nor should Lori or I. Great filmmaking trumps all other considerations. This is even more true if you''re nine and every movie still feels like the first you''ve ever seen. Some backtracking may be necessary. I work as a film critic for a major metropolitan daily newspaper. Before that, I spent over a decade writing about movies for a national entertainment magazine. Before that, I screened and recommended films for the acquisitions department of a pay-cable movie network. Before that, I was a cinema studies major, ran a college film society, and wrote long, impenetrable reviews in the student newspaper. Before that, I was a pale teenage movie ghost who wondered why taking a girl to a double bill of Sam Fuller films never got me anywhere. This is simply a way of saying that I have seen many, many, many movies. When asked how many, I hazard the guess that I average a movie a day, and, since I''ve been watching seriously for thirty years, the total comes to something on the order of 10,680 films. On a good day, I remember seven thousand of them. On a bad day, maybe five. I am also now a father to two girls, currently nine and eleven. As any parent understands, this changes everything. I once viewed children''s films with indulgence, even nostalgia. Today I look at the movie offerings afforded my kids and am stunned into depression at the pandering narrowness. The animation industry has given itself over to the seductions of CGI; liveaction kid films have prostrated themselves on the altar of crossmarketing. If you''re a girl, the choices are thin: Shall we take in the Lindsay Lohan tweener comedy or the Amanda Bynes tweener comedy or the Hilary Duff tweener comedy? Better to go for the Anne Hathaway tweener comedy; that one costars Julie Andrews, at least. (Oh, wait, Anne Hathaway took her shirt off in a movie about gay cowboys, so I guess she''s all grown up now.) Or maybe we should just head to the video store and choose among the racks of Mary-Kate and Ashley midget consumer fantasies that continue to proliferate like head lice on the shelves. Failing that, there are untold Disney films and imitations thereof, from the pinnacles of Snow White and Beauty and the Beast to the barely acceptable tedium of Chicken Little and The Wild. It''s worse if you''re a boy: Then the choice is between bad American animation, bad Japanese animation, and Spy Kids 3-D. And those are the original concepts. When a film studio takes it upon itself to adapt a prized children''s book, the results can be even more grim, since producers feel they have to make the story marketable with fart gags, cooked-up villainy, and pop songs wedged into every conceivable crevice. Some titles survive the treatment, and even prosper, such as Shrek or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or the 2003 Peter Pan, a charming film that rescues and deepens the Barrie original. But my older daughter is still steamed at the changes wrought by Hollywood to her beloved Ella Enchanted, and I personally would be happy to see Imagine Entertainment brought up on child endangerment charges for what it did to the good and gentle Dr. Seuss with How the Grinch Stole Christmas and the genuinely hateful The Cat in the Hat. Some films aimed at children are good-excellent, even. Pixar: I rest my case. But all of them-and I do mean all of them-arrive in theaters sold out, prepackaged, and co-opted. A modern family film can''t get greenlit for production without marketing tie-ins planned in detail and in-house licensing executives kicking the tires to discern how "toyetic" it is. That''s a real word, by the way. Yes, it makes my flesh crawl too. Today''s kids'' films are built to cater to and flatter their audience into buying the subsidiary products. That''s their job. That bag of "Kelpy Kreme" doughnuts that gets a loving close-up early on in Shark Tale isn''t there by accident. And because the movie''s first order of business is to sell, the story can''t afford to challenge children in the slightest degree. So: A child could go from January to December without having his or her brain interestingly taxed-without seeing a movie that wasn''t slavishly geared toward mini-me taste in stars, fashion, music, and flippant attitude. (The moral is applied at the end, like frosting.) Hollywood has become a machine for reflecting a modern American kid''s mediated universe right back at him or her; it''s a hall of mirrors with no way out except teenage cynicism, when adolescents opt out of the cycle because they start feeling such movies are "just" for kids. Or because they''re wising up. Even then, Hollywood is there to pull them back in with an escalating sensationalism that dulls the brain. The film industry has become adept at creating brilliant CGI-enhanced nightmares and selling them as "family films" that make Psycho look like Dumbo. The studios and MPAA ratings board collude in helping films that feature rotting zombies avoid the R of death ( just as long as there''s no nudity, because we know how that warps kids), and parents often take the smallest children to see terrifying PG-13 thrill rides like Van Helsing or Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man''s Chest because the rating somehowabsolves them of having to think for themselves. But what''s the alternative? Drag ''em to Kill Bill: Vol. 1? Where''s the antidote to the Disneyfied pap and computergenerated overstimulation that passes for children''s entertainment these days? Wouldn''t it be pleasant to sit down and watch a movie with your kids that wasn''t presold on sequels and Happy Meals? Or take them to an action movie that didn''t either freak them out or weigh down their little bones with premature irony? I guess you could lock them in the attic. A better solution might be to vary their media diet, and one way to do that is with old movies. I don''t mean Grease or Star Wars. I mean old movies. The kind in black and white or Crayola-surreal Technicolor; the ones that feature stars who were in the grave before Keira Knightley was a zygote. Movies like The Wizard of Oz and Singin'' in the Rain, yes-but also Some Like It Hot and Rebecca and Modern Times and The Searchers and All About Eve and I Know Where I''m Going! and The Day the Earth Stood Still and To Kill a Mockingbird. Movies that open a door out of modern Hollywood''s hall of mirrors onto endless variations in style, behavior, morals. There is so much out there if you have the least idea where to look. If you don''t, maybe this book can help. The first obstacle you''ll face is that, in all likelihood, your kids will give you the Blank Stare of Death when you float this idea past them.Why wouldn''t they? To parents, old movies represent the recent past, but to a modern child, they''re relics from the Dark Ages, mixed up in a vague chronology that sees 45 records, rotary telephones, and granny glasses as so much weird eBay effluvia. The great flicks of the studio days, from the 1930s through the 1950s, are ghettoized on Turner Classic Movies, while other movie channels play "classics" that are fifteen years old-mere babies, with none of the timeless splendor of the real stuff. How, then, do you get kids into the rea

Details ISBN1400096863 Author Ty Burr Short Title BEST OLD MOVIES FOR FAMILIES Language English ISBN-10 1400096863 ISBN-13 9781400096862 Media Book Format Paperback Year 2007 Subtitle A Guide to Watching Together DOI 10.1604/9781400096862 Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2007-02-13 NZ Release Date 2007-02-13 US Release Date 2007-02-13 UK Release Date 2007-02-13 Place of Publication New York Pages 384 Publisher Random House USA Inc Publication Date 2007-02-13 Imprint Anchor Books DEWEY 791.4375083 Audience General We've got this

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