Oscar Classics for Families

Posted on March 4, 2010 at 8:00 am

Thanks very much to the Chicago Tribune for asking me which Oscar-winning classics I’d recommend to families.

“It’s never too early to teach children what is possible in terms of quality of performance, writing, direction and cinematography,” says Nell Minow, author of the Movie Mom blog at beliefnet.com.

List: 10 Favorite Podcasts

Posted on February 25, 2010 at 3:59 pm

I love podcasts! I listen to them in the car and on the metro and even while cooking or cleaning the kitchen and they keep me entertained and engaged. And they all meet one of the other top requirements for a podcast — they are all divisible and interruptable witout too much bother so easily adapted to any time period available for listening. Here are some of my favorites, all free and available online and via iTunes.

The Slate Culture Gabfest is a lively conversation about the top stories in media and popular culture each week. The current episode includes John Mayer’s controversial interview in Playboy and the updating of the all-star “We are the World” for the Haiti relief effort. I like the way they invite listeners into the conversation via their Facebook page.
The Slate Spoiler Special is the kind of discussion all movie critics wish we could have because instead of explaining whether you should see a movie while trying not to give away too much it is a conversation for those who have already seen it with Slate’s sweet-voiced and always-astute critic Dana Stevens.
NPR Culturetopia is a round-up of the best of NPR’s arts, culture, and media coverage with interviews, commentary, and reviews.
The Moth has live performances of true stories told with no notes, each under 10 minutes or so. You never know what you will get — a best-selling author, a cop, a movie star, or a teenager participating in a workshop, a story to make you laugh or cry or give you goosebumps — or all three. But every single story has been utterly gripping and I have listened to many of them more than once.
This I Believe is an international project engaging people in writing and sharing essays describing the core values that guide their daily lives. Over 70,000 have been recorded by famous leaders, great thinkers, and ordinary individuals. There are Nobel Prize winners, statesmen, teachers, writers, clergy, and artists. There are two different podcasts available — one of new essays and one from the archives of the original series back in the 1950’s.
Ted Talks are brief presentations by some of the most provocative and inspiring thinkers of our time. Challenging, informative, touching, mesmerizing.
Smithsonian Folkways is an enthralling exploration of music of all kinds. Folkways Records & Service Co. was incorporated in 1948 to bring the entire world of sound to listeners. The Smithsonian took over in 1987 and now operates it as a non-profit. The podcasts, some hosted by Michael Asch, the son of Folkways co-founder Moses Asch, explore the richness of the archive and the many cultures it represents.
Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! is NPR’s weekly news quiz, funny, sharp, and of course very topical. One of the highlights each week is a visit by a celebrity, always someone very cool, who gets to chat with the host before being asked to answer three questions on a topic as far removed from his or her area of expertise as possible.
StoryCorps like The Moth, is a podcast of true stories but these are less polished and more intimate and authentic. The mission is to honor each others stories by listening and these stories of struggle, learning, devotion, love, laughter, prayers, and joy are breathtaking.
Legacy of Laughs is an archive of radio in the days before television when stars like Jack Benny, Martin and Lewis, and Edgar Bergen were as important to American culture as “Seinfeld” and “Friends” were in the heyday of the sitcom. It’s a lot of fun to listen to these vintage shows, commercials and all.

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Movie Mom’s Top Picks for Families

Faces of America with Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Posted on February 20, 2010 at 8:00 am

Families should make a point to watch “Faces of America,” an engrossing new television series on PBS. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. sits down with celebrities like Stephen Colbert, Meryl Streep, Mario Batali, Eva Longoria, and others to use their family histories to illuminate the story of America. It is touching and inspiring to watch the participants learn for the first time the details of the courage and dedication of their forefathers, those who came to America filled with hope and those who were brought here as slaves. Professor Gates said,

We were able to trace the ancestry of Native American writer Louise Erdrich back to 438 A.D. We found that Queen Noor is descended from royalty, and that’s before she married King Hussein of Jordan. We found that the African American poet Elizabeth Alexander is related to the emperor Charlemagne!

We went even further and used DNA analysis to look for “deep cousins” — common ancestors among our guests — and we found genetic connections between eleven of our twelve guests. I found that despite all our apparent differences in terms of culture and history, we are all the same.

Visit the show’s blog and share your own family’s story.

Faces of America With Henry Louis Gates Jr.

A Valentine Story from Dave Shmave of Boomerang

Posted on February 14, 2010 at 3:23 pm

Thanks to Dave Shmave of my beloved Boomerang for sharing this valentine story.
Boomerang, the audio magazine for kids, is one of our family’s favorites, funny, smart, and touching, and inspirational. Try it!

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Movie Mom’s Top Picks for Families

List: Movie Weddings

Posted on February 9, 2010 at 3:57 pm

Ann Hornaday has a marvelous article in the Washington Post about one of the most popular themes in movies: weddings.

And why shouldn’t Hollywood love a good wedding? With its swirl of heightened emotions, its simmering leitmotifs of love and loss, fear and hope, all swathed in a frothy confection of pink roses, white butter cream and queen-for-a-day tulle, the wedding provides an irresistible trope, from the ditziest rom-com to the bloodiest gangster epic. It’s a tiny three-act drama in microcosm (the incident-filledrun-up to the ceremony, the ceremony itself, the aftermath) that can give audiences insta-catharsis. And whether a marriage is meant to be or doomed to fail, there’s something viscerally satisfying about a wedding, in all its reassuring ritual….We cherish them not just as classic examples of courtship at its most idealized but also as trenchant social commentaries. If they initially charmed audiences with gorgeous movie stars, dreamy romance and zany comedy, they endure because they’re such revealing reflections of their times.

Hornaday points out that if you search for “wedding” on the Internet Movie Database, you will find “more than 2,157 hits — happily, 500 more than the number for ‘funeral.'”

There are weddings in romance movies, of course, and in comedies and dramas, but you can find them even in gangster movies, war movies, movies for children and movies for adults. Sometimes the main character is the bride or groom but very often the wedding couple are secondary characters and the wedding is just a place for all the drama or comedy or even action to play out. Sometimes a movie wedding is the culmination of the plot because the couple gets married and sometimes it is the culmination of the plot because the ceremony is interrupted. The Baxter makes the guy whose job in the story is to get left at the alter the center of the movie. (One of the highlights is the wonderful Peter Dinklage as a wedding planner.)

Before there were movies, there were fairy tales that often ended with a wedding. Weddings are in the same category as the lost ark or the secret formula or the capturing of the bridge or winning the big game. Love is life’s big adventure and a wedding is the symbol of its ultimate expression. And it is also a lot of fun to see other cultures and traditions. Here are some of my favorite movie wedding scenes. I’d love to hear yours, too.

1. The Godfather One of the greatest American films begins with a wedding reception that gives us unforgettable introductions to the entire cast, their values, and their relationships.

2. The Deer Hunter A agonizing film about the impact of the Vietnam war on three friends begins with an extended wedding scene that establishes the foundation for what is to come by making us not just care about the characters; after that wedding reception, filmed with such intimacy, we almost feel like part of the family.

3. The Philadelphia Story My all-time favorite movie is this sophisticated and witty story about the forthcoming wedding of a wealthy woman to an executive with political ambitions. Complications ensue when a reporter, a photographer, and her ex-husband show up for the festivities.

4. The Graduate A very few movies seem to express and even shape the themes of their time. And a small fraction of those hold up over time as works of art. “The Graduate” leads that category with brilliant direction from Mike Nichols, a haunting soundtrack by Simon and Garfunkel, and superb performances by Dustin Hoffman as Ben, the title character, who symbolizes the disaffection of his generation and Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson, the friend of his parents who symbolizes the emptiness of hers. When Ben finds something meaningful in a relationship with Mrs. Robinson’s daughter, he ends up disrupting her wedding in a scene that has become iconic.

5. Four Weddings and a Funeral Screenwriter Richard Curtis based this on his own experience of finding himself at a seemingly endless stream of weddings. Charlie (Hugh Grant, in a star-making role) meets Carrie (Andie MacDowell) at the first of the weddings and their relationship evolves over the rest of the title ceremonies. But this is really the story of Charlie and his friends, all of whom find love by (but sometimes not until) the closing credits.

6. Bend it Like Beckham Parminder Nagra plays Jesminder, the daughter of a traditional Punjabi Sikh family in London who wants to play soccer. Her sister’s wedding plans provide a context for her struggles against her family’s reluctance to let her play, especially when it turns out that the soccer finals are at the same time.

7. Lovers and Other Strangers The wedding at the center of this film is the setting for a wide variety of happy and sad, healthy and dysfunctional love relationships among the extended family, played by a stand-out cast including Gig Young, Cloris Leachman, Anne Meara, Bea Arthur, and Anne Jackson. The Carpenters’ standard, “For All We Know” was written for this film.

8. Father of the Bride There has never been a more beautiful bride than Elizabeth Taylor in this affectionate comedy about the impact of a wedding on the family. Spencer Tracy plays the beleaguered father who is expected to pay endless bills and endure endless relatives on both sides. The scene where he comforts her after she (briefly) breaks off the engagement is one of my very favorites.

9. Fiddler on the Roof This classic musical based on the stories of Sholom Aleichem about a small Jewish village in late 19th century Russia. The main character is a poor milkman who has a lot of challenges in marrying off three of his daughters. The themes of tradition and change in the romances of the three daughters and in the community at large come together in the warm and loving wedding celebration (with the lovely song “Sunrise, Sunset”).

10. My Big Fat Greek Wedding Inspired by the real-life experience of Nia Vardalos, the daughter of Greek immigrants, this touching and hilarious story of a shy young woman in a big, noisy family who finds love with a kind-hearted teacher, leading to some confusion and misunderstandings but also a lot of laughter and new connections.

And don’t forget: The Wedding Crashers, The Runaway Bride, Rachel Getting Married, It Happened One Night, Goodbye, Columbus, Confetti, Cousins, and the French movie it was based on, “Cousin, Cousine.”