Posts Tagged ‘Movies’

Set during the post-Parent Trap period in which Hayley Mills was Disney’s ultimate darling, Summer Magic is sweet fare for tweens and romantic little girls. The 1963 film stars Mills as Nancy Carey, a teen girl whose impoverished Boston family is about to be forced to move to a depressing city apartment.

Resourceful Nancy, posing as her widowed mother (Dorothy McGuire), writes to Osh Popham (Burl Ives), the caretaker of a millionaire’s country home whom the family met while on vacation. Nancy elicits Popham’s sympathy, and convinces him to rent the country home to the family for a pittance. Now Nancy and her whole family are tasked with turning the run-down country house into a real home, all the while avoiding the millionaire who’s not supposed to know the family’s there.

In between mild mysteries and grade-school-compliant romantic hijinks between Nancy and the local young male talent, there are songs and dances and countrified goings-on that will probably remind you of The Sound of Music. It’s all a sweet confection that’s fun to watch with an intragenerational group, as Grandma will enjoy seeing Haley again, while kids enjoy the music and old-timeyness of it all.

Summer Magic is available on DVD.

Eloise creator Kay Thompson is definitely spinning in her grave. The author was famously prickly, always insisting that she wrote her series of books for adults, not children, gave cranky interviews by the dozens, and ultimately managed to piss off onetime illustrator/collaborator Hilary Knight so fiercely that Knight refused to work with her ever again.

But before all that, Thompson’s series of books, beginning with Eloise in 1955, were blockbusters that led to an Eloise doll, an album, and a line of Eloise clothes at Neiman Marcus. Oh, and a TV special that was so disastrous Thompson refused to let Eloise be dramatized again.

Sooooo, of course, when Thompson died in 1998 her publishers immediately rushed out reprints of her old books, and someone saw to it that a bunch of Eloise movies went straight to DVD. The Eloise of features like Eloise in Paris and Eloise’s Rawther Unusual Halloween isn’t exactly like the Eloise in the books. She retains the impishness and imperiousness, but the pathos of Eloise’s life (just where IS Mommy, anyway?) is played down for a more kid-friendly sense of fun. However, Eloise’s trappings (rich-girl toys, Nanny, the Plaza) remain.

The direct-to-DVD Eloise movies range from pretty bad to not half-bad. Our favorite is Eloise in Hollywood, where Eloise comes off as a good kid when compared to the young actresses she meets on a vacation to California. Also good is Eloise Goes to School, where she learns how to cope with snobbish classmates at a hoity-toity school. The worst is Eloise in Paris, where Eloise’s behavior wanders from bratty to downright deceitful, and you might have some ’splainin to do.

Several Eloise movies are currently streaming on Netflix Watch Instantly.

Great flicks like Freaky Friday and Charlotte’s Web aside, there just aren’t a lot of movies that are friendly to the female tween audience. At least, not many without messages guaranteed to horrify mom, or make the movie a serious no-no if any younger sibs happen to be hanging around.

So the gentle tween romance Aquamarine is even more of a refreshing surprise. Made in 2006, the film features two charming 13-year-old girls who, by the way, really look like 13-year-olds, not overly made up twentysomethings, who play out a pre-teen version of Splash when they find a mermaid trapped in a beachside swimming pool. They take the mermaid, Aqua (Sara Paxton), home, hide her condition from everyone, and help her on her quest to find true love. Which, wonder of wonders, turns out to not be found in the arms of some boy, but instead within the circle of female friendship she’s found on land.

Aqua’s clothes could be a little less slutty, and the film employs the tired old “mean girls vs. nice girls” trope, with a group of harpies opposing Aqua and her cohorts. But overall the film is cute, girl positive, fun to watch, and even boasts a cool theme song: “Connected,” sung by Paxton, was also featured in another girl-power movie, Barbie and the Diamond Castle.

Sometimes it seems like Disney has a real thing for evil witches. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, even modern retread Enchanted all feature older women at war with the sweet, blank, young heroines. Ditch the subtle (and not-so-subtle) anti-woman messages with Anastasia, a little-known animated feature from 1997.

The story roughly follows along the outlines of the story of Anastasia Romanoff, who was said to be the only surviving member of the family of the last of the Russian czars. At the start of the Russian Revolution (and of the movie), the Romanoffs are assassinated (offscreen), and Anastasia disappears. Years later, an amnesiac eighteen year old girl meets up with a couple of con men intent on passing her off as the vanished princess. Yet is Anya actually the real princess? As she falls in love with one of the con men, events transpire to return her to the world to which she really belongs.

Unlike many of the more second-rate Don Bluth features, Anastasia’s animation is hand-drawn and beautifully colored, ever bit as gorgeous as Disney’s best. The performances, mainly by John Cusack and Meg Ryan, are equally winning, and the songs are Broadway-worthy. Some of the history’s a little wonky, and littler kids may be terrified of the Rasputin character, who’s a ghost trapped in limbo who keeps losing parts of his body. But the movie’s a wonderful antidote to misogynist Disney classics, with a strong, sure heroine who saves the day through her own steadfast courage.

Boys don’t come off badly in Matilda, the 1996 adaptation of the Roald Dahl novel about a telekinetic girl, but this is a true girls-in-power fantasy that’s guaranteed to resonate particularly well with little chicks. The story concerns one Matilda Wormwood (Mara Wilson), a six-year-old who’s so smart she’s read every children’s book in the library and started on the adult’s section. But she comes from a family of terrible idiots (Danny DeVito, Rhea Perlman), who don’t appreciate either her obvious smarts, or her secret power: when she’s angry, she can move things with her mind.

That proves to be a useful talent when she begins attending a school run by the terrifying Mrs. Trunchbull, a butch martinet who may be too scary for sensitive kids (get ready to fast-forward!). Trunchbull uses violence and tortures like sessions in the Chokey, a creepy closet, to intimidate the kids into behaving. Luckily, Matilda has her beautiful and loving teacher, Mrs. Honey, on her side, and by the film’s end, Mrs. Honey and Matilda have found a way to arrange their lives, together, among much more satisfying lines.

As Matilda, Mara Wilson is quirky and much less saccharine than other child actors, and DeVito and Perlman are a hoot as her parents. The obstacles Matilda faces are dark, indeed; and her triumph over them is nothing short of delicious. This one’s a winner for kids aged four and up, but stick around in case the Mrs. Trunchbull scenes send yours diving under the couch.

Matilda is available on DVD, VHS, and on Netflix Watch Instantly.

A sickening majority of children’s movies have male leads, and many have exclusively male casts (I’m looking at you, Pixar!) A young girl might just conclude that her doings and adventures are of no interest to anyone. Cast that misperception aside with films where girls are in the center of the action.

Kiki’s Delivery Service

Like many of Miyazaki’s films, a young girl is the main character: Kiki, a 13-year-old witch in training, who begins a delivery service that takes advantage of her ability to fly.

Kit Kittredge

A plucky young girl helps her mother run a boardinghouse in Cincinnati during the Great Depression, and through her resourcefulness, ends up writing for a big city paper and solving a mystery.

A Little Princess

When Sara’s diamond magnate father dies while she’s away at a girls’ school, her fortunes abruptly reverse themselves and she’s forced to become a scullery maid. Yet her kindly, princesslike nature never falters.

Annie

An orphan finds a family in a place she never expected in this classic musical set during the Depression. Warning: might ignite a passion for jazz hands.

The Parent Trap

A pair of separated twins meet by chance at a summer camp and decide to play a trick on their divorced parents. Both the 1960s version with Hayley Mills and the remake with Lindsay Lohan are charming.

Watching a movie with a young child can be a dicey proposition. What can seem like a harmless kid flick can contain scenes of animal torture (The Secret of Nimh, Babe: Pig in the City) or snuffing (Bambi), the death of parents (practically every Disney flick ever made), and a host of other horrors. If you have a sensitive kid, you’ll want to know in advance what you’re going to see.

That’s where Commonsense Media comes in. Like a Consumer Reports for kids’ media, Commonsense rates movies, games, books, music, TV shows, and websites for parents. What might give parents pause? What age is it intended for? What might parents want to discuss with kids? Commonsense flags anything that might be worrisome, including violence, sex, cursing, and consumerism.

Parents can look up particular movies or games by name or age group, or get ideas for what to consume from Commonsense’s lists of recommended media picks.

Pictured: Rodents are sucked down a vent to their deaths in The Secret of NIHM.

The new Harry Potter movie roared into theaters last week and parents who love the idea of The Boy Who Taught Them All to Read duly went to see it with the little ones. And discovered that this latest entry is dark, indeed, with the death of a major character, violence galore, scary CGI characters sure to cause nightmares, etc. etc. As the character of Harry Potter has aged in the series, so has the complexity and maturity level of the books and the movies. Unlike the first, rather lighthearted Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is not for kids under age 12.

Instead, take the whole family to see Up, a Pixar flick that’s been in the theaters a while but is still hanging on in most markets. Like Harry Potter, it’s a fantasy with eye candy galore. But it’s a lot less scary and a lot more heartwarming; you’ll be in tears by the end of the first, wordless montage of scenes of a long, childless marriage. Up has some intense airborne scenes, but is largely sweet, funny, and enormously heartwarming. It’s great for kids age 5 and up. And it has talking dogs!

Harry Potter is all fine and well, but it’s not nearly as easy for girls to find themselves in pages of his books. The main character’s a boy, his best friend’s a boy, most of the glory and adventures are experienced by the boys, while the main female character, Hermione, is often relegated to background and library searches. In The Worst Witch series, a set of six books written by Jill Murphy starting in 1974, the girls are at the center of the action.

Both the books and the later British TV series based on the books are set at Miss Cackle’s Academy, a girls’ boarding school in a stone castle atop a mountain where the girls learn the basics of broom-riding, spells, and transformation. The main character, Mildred Hubble, is a good-hearted but clumsy young witch-in-training who makes many missteps yet always makes things right in the end.

It’s said that The Worst Witch was the inspiration for the Potter books, and once you see the TV series you’ll find it easy to believe. The setting and costumes are similar, and the same lighthearted tone prevails. But The Worst Witch is both tamer (conflicts tend to resolve around misdeeds like stealing food for a midnight feast instead of life-and-death showdowns) and more fun. Both boys and girls will enjoy the series, but it’s tailor-made for girls aged 5 to 10, who will love the combination of magic and social interactions in a girlie microcosm.

The TV series is available on DVD in sets of about seven episodes each. Start with the first set of episodes, which introduces Mildred, her rival, snotty Ethel Hallow, and the other characters as Mildred struggles through her first day at Miss Cackle’s, hoping to become a real witch.

The Worst Witch, $28