"Sixteen dollars!" I remember the bad casino-like carpet, the stairs with the little lights, and the look of absolute disbelief/disgust on my dad's mustachioed face as he lamented the fleecing he endured for four of us to see Ghostbusters. Sixteen bucks for four people. I don't think that candy bars were a nickel, but that's about how old I feel whenever I think about that moment... and sadly, I think about that moment almost every time we go to the movies and the prices seem crazy. I project into the future when my kids laugh about their parents spazzing about $15 movie tickets and then feel like Dr. Evil when he can't wrap his brain around the money flux of one generation...
There is one consistently good movie theatre deal in this town. At the Lincoln Center Film Center they have a little theatre with a fairly small screen where they show family movies. It's $6/ticket and they show children's foreign movies (often they will have somebody sit in the back reading the subtitles into a microphone for the little ones who can't read -- depending on the reader it's either a) cool/funny b) neutral or c) distracting/irritating). I like thinking that hearing all the foreign languages is giving the kiss of life to my kids' foreign-language-specific neurons that otherwise might wither, die and look like microscopic Easter grass. They also show classics (i.e. it was at this theatre that we saw Elvis in all his politically-incorrect/sexist, yet highly-likeable glory in Blue Hawaii... If there are sexy-sneer neurons we're keeping those alive, too).
Today we went and saw The Blue Tiger. It was made in the Czech-Republic and absolutely beautiful. The sensibilities were all inline -- the poor, nerdy, artsy, nostalgia-channeling, naturalists were the heroes while the money-grubbing, modern, clean-lined folks were the bum-holes. The child actors were great. The occasional overlay of animation was fun. Perhaps one of my favorite elements was that the children consistently brought their parents into whatever was happening. So often it seems like movie-adults are bumbling idiots who can't be trusted with what's going on. While I get that this is the construct that works so that the movie-kids can have their adventure, I worry that it's a missed opportunity to teach not-movie-kids to partner with their folks. Today the movie-adults didn't do anything superhuman -- they just offered ideas and support and were cool. In one scene the overweight, badly-dressed mom with bad teeth was chatting with her daughter and The Boy leaned over and whispered, "She kind of reminds me of you." I took it as a major compliment -- hoping of course that he was referring to the insightful things that she was saying to her girl.
We came home and looked up where the Czech-Republic is on the globe (I mentioned that "when I was a kid" it was called Czechoslovakia...). We also found out that there is a Blue Tiger -- a Maltese Tiger that is a "blue" slate grey color (and might be extinct). We talked about how maybe somebody heard about the book Blue Tiger written in 1924 by an American explorer... and their brain started playing around and came up with the loveliness we saw today.
Brains are weird, but often do cool things.
