Watching Movies With Children

Like any young person, my daughter loves to watch movies, and like most fathers, I enjoy watching them with her. Granted, she watches her own fair share of Disney movies and similar films geared to children, but she also will watch a wide variety of other things and usually we'll all watch something together for the first time if it's a little outside her usual range. However, once we caught her watching twenty-minutes of Working Girl because, as she said, she was waiting for Han Solo to get in his spaceship.

Sometimes her impressions are the best part of the entire film, especially when they involve her trying to put new phenomena into her existing understanding of things. So, for example, last weekend TCM was showing a bunch of movies from the 1980s and my wife challenged me to identify a movie based on my daughter's description of what was happening:

"There is a boy trying to make orange juice in a funny machine and it's not working and he made a big mess and he got some on his dog. The boy's younger brother is the boy from Goonies."

My wife laughs in the background and asks my daughter for the name of his "dog."

Answer: "Gizmo."

Or, later, my daughter and I happen across a few minutes of Jaws. It's the scene where Richard Dreyfus is preparing to enter the water in the shark cage. My daughter has already seen the shark swimming past the boat a few moments earlier, so she knows what the movies about, and I explain what Dreyfus' character is trying to do. My daughter immediately becomes concerned for the safety . . . of his glasses. "He will lose them!" she cries. She breathes a huge sigh of relief when he hands them off to Roy Scheider and descends into the depths.

Love it.