By skyforbes My 11yo kept quoting 'absolute cinema' to me, and rather than just say "You don't know Scorsese" I decided we should watch the one kid oriented movie he's made.
The movie itself is a homage to early cinema. Which lead to us having so many great discussions. "Is it true that when people first watched the movie about a train arriving at the station that they screamed?" "Wait, that rocket in the eye of the moon was from a real movie?" (Yes kids, and that movie not only came out decades before the moon landing, but before the first aeroplane.) We talked about all the real life stunts Buster Keaton nearly killed himself for, we talked about silent film. We talked about physically cutting out frames as film film editing.
All those fun discussions arose from the plot of the movie. It sent their minds racing about how movies work in a way they've never thought about before.
The search function on our Google TV occasionally stops working, so I had to navigate to the movie in the first place by playing six degrees of Kevin Bacon. OBAA (which was on the home screen) to Leo, to Marty, to Hugo.)
My eldest was shocked, he didn't understand how I got there so easily, so I got to explain to him what six degrees of separation is, and how to play it. I gave him a few easy ones to work out, using his favourite movies, (link FNAF to The Hunger Games, absolute layup) which was a fun way to introduce him to movie trivia.
But then I got to cap it off by telling him that I could link him personally to this movie within six steps. We live in regional Australia, so we don't have many Hollywood connections. But in 1947, an actress called Jean Simmons (not the one from Kiss) was touring Australia and wanted to see a sheep get sheared, went to a farm in the middle of nowhere, where my great grandfather was a shearer, there's a photo of them together while he's working a sheep. So the link is: Kids –>Me –> Bupar –> Jean Simmons, –>(through Howl's Moving Castle – they play old/young Sophie) –> Emily Mortimer who is in Hugo. His mind was blown.
One other great movie moment was that my younger child, quiet morbidly, always asks if any of the actors have died since the movie came out. So we got to talk about exactly how cool Christopher Lee was.
Like I said, the movie was very fun. But the moments that sprung from it, and discussions we had together, were absolute cinema.