What about the Miyazaki movies? I’ll try to check in with my wife, 18 year old (screen studies major at Temple), and 16 year old to see what they suggest.
A tall fellow, who is an anime friend of Thing 2, dressed up as No-Face, from Swept Away, for the company Halloween dress-up. Just lurking, but our HR lady was showing a prospect around, wasn’t looking where she was going, bumped into him, and almost died.
There might’ve been five of us who got it.
Some movies I enjoyed when I was a preteen or in my teens (but aren’t as depressing as Falling Down, Little Boy Blue, The Ice Storm, The Professional, Strange Days, Kids, or 12 Monkeys):
Empire Records
Legends of the Fall
The Wizard (not of Oz)
Gettysburg
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
Princess Mononoke
Beetlejuice
Foxfire
Clerks/Mallrats
Legend
Young Guns
Dead Poets Society
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Hamlet
Fried Green Tomatoes
Innerspace
Mermaids
Peggy Sue Got Married
Posse
True Lies
My Girl
Fern Gully
Much Ado About Nothing
Sleepy Hollow
Jurassic Park
Maverick
Clueless
Stargate
Challenging??
Bless The Beasts And Children.
The Bad Seed.
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The Flight of Dragons was a silly, fun, animated fantasy movie with a fantastic ending. It also features James Earl Jones as the villain. Highly recommended.
If they seemed to like Shyamalan, how about Unbreakable? Not as good as The Sixth Sense, but better than The Village.
The Time Traveler’s Wife or Time After Time might keep their minds working. I always liked time travel paradoxes when I was a kid, and a lot of kids I’ve known get into them too.
I agree. That was a couple of hours of my life I could have put to better use. (But wasn’t the title just Cube? Or am I thinking of a different film?)
MP&tHG may not have nudity, but be prepared in case they have questions about this scene.
I thought you meant this.
My daughter took AP World History last year. Her teacher had never seen Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. We gave him a copy and he immediately made it part of his post AP test material (when it doesn’t matter).
Netflixing The West Wing at about that age is good thoughtful screen time if you are interested in a different format and they enjoy snappy dialog.
Pirates of the Caribbean - they are young enough to have missed it when it was released - and its a really tight well written movie (the sequels all suck - but the first one is masterful).
That’s what I came in to say. Good call.
Three Amigos is kinda fun. And pretty kid-friendly. Super Troopers is also kind of fun, but maybe just for the older kid. I’d hate for you to have to explain what a “mustache ride” is to an 11-year old.
Its nice you spend time with your kids. Mine hates me.
I just rewatched it for the first time in…probably 20 years. It really does hold up amazingly well. It’s still arguably the most realistic depiction of hacking in mainstream movies. You have Matthew Broderick at the height of his precocious charming period, Barry Corbin chewing the scenery with extra ham and cheese, and a surprisingly relevant look at nuclear politics and war. Plus, just about any young man is going to be happy to watch Ally Sheedy because…well, that should be obvious. I also finally understood the reference to sensimilla and Thia stick in the opening scene. The last time I saw it I thought they were actually taking about cooking.
Actually, that entire first scene is really stunning. “Skybird, this is Dropkick…” Chilling.
I have to agree with Real Genius, though there is a fair-amount of off-color comedy if you are worried about that. Val Kilmer was so damned talented, William Atherton playing the asshole authority figure that he always did so well, actual smart science comedy. Great stuff.
Two Irish ones about silkies:
The Secret of Roan Inish
The Song of the Sea (animated - excellent)
Moonrise Kingdom
Very funny and very quirky, with Bill Murray - set in an idealized 1960s America. Two kids run away from home together.
Trailer
Baz Luhrmann’s version of Romeo and Juliet
West Side Story
Catch Me if You Can
That Thing You Do
You son loves Science Fiction -
He may very well like Dark Star (1974) by John Carpenter. It’s a kind of black comedy SF, but very thought-provoking, and even moving in parts.
The standard trailer is really bad, and doesn’t do any justice to the movie, but here’s the first 5 minutes - I think it will get you hooked!
Thanks all the same, GreenWyvern, but my unfavorable view of *Dark Star *is documented in this forum.
(I can understand the appeal, and agree it has some good aspects, but generally, not by cuppa tea, and I’m sure the kids would be bored out of their skulls.)
I honestly found *Bless The Beasts And Children *embarrasingly cloying when I saw it as a teenager. *The Bad Seed *looks like it might be worth hunting for, but it sure looks creepy. Not too disturbing, I hope?
Been toying over this one. It’s got a lot of what they like, including Samuel L. Jackson, but the brief kidnap-murder-rapist part might be a tad disturbing.
That is precisely the scene that has kept me from showing it to them yet.
Some other movies mentioned above that the kids have seen and enjoyed:
The Rear Window (Kept them both quite engaged.)
Hugo (Agreed, this movie meets all the criteria.)
Groundhog Day (Was glad to finally see this earlier this year.)
Pirates of the Caribbean (Liked all three, but haven’t bothered to show them 4, because why bother.)
A couple of folks have recommended Jumanji.
From seeing just parts of it on TV, I’d gotten the impression it was just a zany Robin Williams comedy, but I might have to give it another chance.
And sorry,** Little Nemo**, the kids much preferred the remake of Willy Wonka/Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
(On the bright side, they did prefer the original *Ghost Busters *to the remake.)
Anyway, thank you all for some great suggestions.
Went to the rental store today and got the following:
Time Bandits
Moonrise Kingdom
The Great Escape
Mary and Max
Attack the Block
TokyoGodfathers
This will take us several weeks to get through, but it should provide us with some quality viewing and give us a lot to talk about.
I see that anime is acceptable (even applauded!), Not Carlson, and it looks like you’ve already covered Studio Ghibli, so here are my (additional) suggestions:
[ul][li]Patlabor - In the near future, when heavy work and military operations involve 30-foot tall robots called labors, someone is inevitably going to turn them to criminal purposes. That’s why there are Patlabor (“Patrol” + “Labor”), the Mobile Police, with their own police labors, to combat them. The first movie is a fantastic detective yarn, full of intricacies and cleverness, with just enough giant robot action to keep the story moving at an acceptable pace.[]Summer Wars - Young genius mathematician Kenji Koiso is temporarily hired away from his job as a software tech at Oz, the global on-line virtual supercommunity, by his classmate Natsuki Shinohara. She (secretly) intends to present him as her fiancé to her grandmother during the latter’s 90th birthday celebration. At the same time, Kenji may have accidentally exposed Oz’s security system for takeover by “Love Machine”, an experimental artificial intelligence. Can Kenji and the combined attendees of the birthday celebration defeat Love Machine before it does something really nasty? If you’re not cheering (Koi-Koi!) for the Jinouchi Clan by the end, something is wrong with you. I should warn you that there is a little bit of adult language involved, but it’s less vulgar than the original Ghostbusters (something my children also waited to see) if you need a point of reference.[]Lupin III and the Catle of Cagliostro - Hayao Miyazaki had a big hand in the feature-length movie about the grandson of the fictional French cat-burglar, and it shows in all the best ways. Lupin and his gang travel to the tiny European principality of Cagliostro, seeking to uncover the secret behind one of the world’s most notorious currency counterfeiters. They end up trying to rescue the country’s young heir from marriage to the domineering Count instead! This is my favourite animated movie of all time - one of those films I could watch any time it comes on. [*]Robot Carnival – When it was released, Robot Carnival was a pretty big deal as a monumental collaborative effort. It’s a collection of short stories – most of which have no dialogue at all - that involve robots one way or another. Each story is presented in a different style by various famed animators and character designers, including Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira), Yoshiyuki Sadamoto (Neon Genesis Evangelion), and Hiroyuki Kitazume (Mobile Suit Gundam).[/ul][/li]For live-action movies… any chance you could get your hands on The Last Flight of Noah’s Ark?