How to Choose a Movie for Your Family to Watch when All Family Movies are Terrible

[Music] My name is Joshua Gibbs and you're listening to In The Trenches. The classical teaching institutes, pedagogy, podcast for parents and educators who prefer experience and common sense to theory. [Music] If you do a Google search for family movies, no movie for a family is going to come up. If you do a search for family movies, what's going to come up is a bunch of kids movies. I want to say kids movies, I don't mean movies that are suitable for kids to watch. I mean movies that were commercially produced and tailored to suit the immature tastes of children. Slap sticky movies, animated movies with a zany mood, rude humor, stupid jokes, stupid parents, and so forth. It's hard enough to choose a movie for yourself. Americans spend over 100 hours every year just scrolling through Netflix menus. But choosing a movie for your family to watch, choosing a movie that you know your kids are going to be sitting there watching with you, is fraught with all kinds of difficulties that you don't encounter when you're choosing a movie for you and your spouse. If it's just going to be you and your husband or wife watching a movie, if something really awful happens in the film, you could just turn it off. Not suitable. But you worry when you're showing this kind of thing to your children that something might come up a little too quickly and you couldn't turn it off in time. And your kids would suddenly hear something or suddenly see something that would affect them in a really terrible way for weeks, months, years to come. So we're picky in a different way when we're deciding what our children are going to see. On this episode, I'd like to talk about how to choose a movie for the entire family. And I wanted to distinguish this from choosing a movie for your kids to watch more on that later. Before I get into it, I want to remind everyone that the Classical Teaching Institute is hosting the 2025 Spring Literature Retreat at the Embrose School in Meridian, Idaho March 6th through 8th. Space is extremely limited for this event. There's a few spots left open. For two days, we're going to study, read and study Frankenstein. You don't need to read the book before you show up. Bring a copy of the book, come to Meridian, Idaho, and we'll read it and discuss it together. We'll eat together in my home. I will cook dinner for you. And I will teach you Frankenstein in the same way that I've taught at 25-30 times over the course of a 20-year career. And you can take what you learn, take what you see, take what you hear back to your classroom, and implement it there. You can find out more at the ClassicalTeachingInstitute.org. But today, I want to talk about choosing movies for your family. Most family movies look terrible. Most family movies are terrible. If you pull up a screenshot of family movies on Netflix, what you're going to find is a lot of animated films. A lot of talking animal films. Or is Zany Cartrip family movies where the dad is an idiot? The kind of schlock. The kind of Zany schlock that Hollywood's been pumping out for, you know, 40 years now. And I don't think that it's fair to call those movies family movies. And the reason why is that no sane adult would ever choose to watch those movies on their own. No sane adult is going to sit down and watch Madagascar 2 on their own. That's really not a movie that's appropriate for adults. It's a sort of movie that you wouldn't absolutely scandalize showing to your children. But it's not really a family movie. It's a kids movie that adults sit by and tolerate. And a lot of times these movies are so banal, so stupid. You need a bottle of wine for every adult in the room to make it through something that's 90 minutes long and Zany with laughing, shouting cartoons and dumb jokes and so forth. So it's not really a family movie. Family movies used to exist. There's a bunch of them. You're going to have to go back a ways to find them. And I'd like to mention this a little bit later. I'd like to go a little more in-depth on this. Really, one of the reasons why so many movies that are made back in the 1940s and 50s and the early 60s are so good is because they were made for entire families to see. Or they were made with the full knowledge that whole families would be watching them. And so these films had to appeal in some way to everyone in the family, as opposed to merely being the sort of thing that adults tolerated. Or that adults would put on so that kids would shut up. They had to be films. They had to be stories that everyone could enjoy on some level. Obviously different levels. A child and an adult are going to enjoy a movie like Roman Holiday in different ways. But it is possible for a small child to enjoy it anyway, more on that later. When we choose movies for our children, some of the most common reasons that we pick a movie for our kids to watch. And I'm just commenting on what I've heard from other adults like I go over to someone's home. And the adults are going to drink wine, downstairs, and we're going to send the kids upstairs to watch a movie. One of the most common things that adults will say, like the host family will say to the visiting family, we're going to put on a movie for the kids. We're going to put on whatever film the blank. And what they'll often say is, "Have you seen it? There's nothing bad in it." They won't say it's a good movie. They'll say there's nothing bad in it. And I think the fact that there's "nothing bad in a film," which means no graphic violence, no profanity, no sex. The fact that there's nothing bad in a movie is enough for most adults. It's enough to satisfy most adults. That it's appropriate for a child. There's nothing bad in it. I think it's the most common reason that we play things for our kids. The second most common reason we choose movies for children to watch is that they have a good moral. They have a good lesson. And you often hear, again, just thinking, just remembering the way that I hear adults talk about movies for kids. We assume that no matter how dumb a movie is, no matter how zany, no matter how just epileptically edited it is, that if there is a good moral, it will do the children some benefit. And I think the logic here might be similar to sugaring up some medicine so that a child will take it without complaining. Well, on a medicine it's very bitter. Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. So what the child needs to do is ingest the medicine. And it really doesn't matter how sugared over the medicine is. If you can get the medicine into the child's stomach, it will be effective. And I think there's a temptation a lot of adults, especially American Christians, have succumbed to, to think that a good lesson, quote unquote, will work like medicine and that all you need to do is sugar over a good message. With a lot of dumb jokes and pranks in some of the animals, and that you can essentially trick children into absorbing lessons about teamwork and sharing, if they're sort of bound up in the middle of a lot of easy to accept things. So we're going to put this hard to accept truth inside this easy to accept package. And we're going to fool you into being good. Now this works on a material level. Right? You put your dogs heartworm medicine in a big glob of cheese. And the dog eats it. You put some penicillin, you powder up whatever pill it is that your child's too small enough to swallow. Into a little drink and it's easy. Where you buy the sort of, what is the acetaminophen? It's like flavored with cherry syrup. And the child looks forward to taking their medicine. Every time you get a headache you need a nice little tasty burst of sugar drugs. But I don't think good messages work that way. I don't think that good messages are. Well number one I don't think that they're all that memorable. Number two I don't think that they're all that powerful. And when I say a good message in the context of film I don't mean the subtle implications of the story because that's one way of looking at a message. When I say a good message typically when we're talking about a Christian film or a family film or a movie for kids. When we're talking about a good lesson we mean this kind of standard very simple presentation of a bumper sticker-like message and the clothes of the film. And most of the good messages in films for children aren't exactly. Well they don't revolve around piety. They don't really revolve around virtue. They're really kind of propaganda-like messages that if the children believe it it will make the adults life easier. You should try hard at school. You should share. You shouldn't bully other children. These are not really Christian messages. These are just nice secular messages. There's nothing self-effective. There's nothing terribly difficult about these messages. And they're easily forgettable. If you show a child a 90 minute a zany 90 minute cartoon that's got a lesson a message tacked on to the end about sharing. The children when it's hour they're going to run away and they're going to behave in a manner consistent with what they've seen for 90 minutes. They forget the moral. The moral. Morals linger for maybe 10 minutes, maybe 15 minutes. Scary messages might linger for a bit longer than that. But rarely. I can remember I can remember being 22 and living in an apartment where residents could smoke. And smoking cigarettes at 11 30 at night, watching Trash TV. And anti-smoking ads would come on. And an anti-smoking ad, you know some guy talking through his throat, was enough to creep me out for 20 minutes. Not light up until I had forgotten about it. In the same way the morals that we tack on to the end of zany cartoons are not changing any kids' life. Like when you meet the parents of a happy, productive, well-behaved, little seven-year-old boy, your first assumption is not wow you must have shown this kid some really great TV shows. A similar sort of example that I give in level at last. I'll be it not for children's movies, but for adults. Concerns the movie Fireproof. Which is old now, like 15 years old. There was a time when everyone had seen that movie. I don't know if that's the case anymore. Nonetheless I would wager that most of listeners to the show are at least familiar with the plot of this film. A guy's marriage is tanking. Looks like he's going to get a divorce. His father intervenes and shares a book with him. Tells him do whatever the book tells you. The guy does whatever the book tells him. He's really nice to his wife for about a month and a half. And his marriage doesn't fall apart. Now the message of this movie is entirely agreeable. You should be really committed to your spouse. You should love your spouse. You should do nice things for your spouse. That's the message of the movie. I agree entirely with the message of this movie. The problem is that the message of this movie is absolutely tacked on to the most shallow story and the most shallow characters imaginable. The makers of this film, writer of the film, had no real interest in what a failing marriage really looks like. He had no real interest in what men's marital problems look like or how men talk about their own marriage problems with their friends. Men don't talk about marriage problems with their friends anyway. Men are hard pressed to talk about anything going wrong with their relationship. Girlfriend, wife, whatever. In the movie though, "Blabby" husband tells his friends forthrightly all his complaints with his wife. And the most obvious way possible. He doesn't talk like a real man. He doesn't talk like an actual husband. The problems that this couple has seem cribbed from, I don't know, it's almost like Alexa tell me about marriage problems. Okay, here are some results. And they took just the first things that came up. So it wasn't a close observation of a real problem. The solution was not radical and I don't want to fault it for that. But it was a simple account of marriage problems, a simple account of the solution to marriage problems. And it was utterly forgettable. The only reason why I bring this movie up so often is because it was so bad. And when I say that it was so bad, I mean, no one who has seen this movie ever needs to see it again. It is so profoundly simple, simple minded that you grasp it entirely on a first viewing. There's nothing more to see than what is most immediately apparent in the story in the characters. Nothing's going to occur to you on a second viewing that did not occur to you. Probably, I would say on a first viewing, but maybe even before you were done with a first viewing, you can tell exactly what everyone is going to say and going to do 15 minutes into the film. It all just kind of rolls out in this materialistic sort of way. It's less a story than it is a solid object. Now I saw this film and my response was immediate and very short-lived. I saw the film. I did a few extra loads of dishes around the house. I paid a little more attention to what my wife said at the end of a day than usual. That lasted for about three days and then I went back to business as usual. There was no point once the lesson had been forgotten. There was no point in watching the movie again because I knew everything that the movie was going to say. So if the message is really all the film boils down to, you don't need to watch the film. Somebody can just tell you what the message is. So this was a film that wanted to do good but was unwilling to take the hard road to helping anyone. The makers of this film were not interested in reality. They didn't pay attention to reality. They couldn't be troubled because it's time consuming and vexing and humbling to pay attention to reality. Anyway, might be listed as a family movie. Of course, I don't know too many parents that are going to play fireproof for a seven-year-old. When we're choosing a movie for our kids, we typically choose something that's unobjectionable or which has a good lesson and we, the adults, just white knuckle our way through it. We want our kids to be quiet. We don't want to have to invent something for them to do. And so we play a family movie for them or we watch them watch a family movie. We're not really engaged in these stories. As adults, were not engaged. There's nothing to see, nothing to know. Now the kids movie or the family movie, which is really the kids movie, is a relatively new phenomenon. Do you gonna find a few animated films back in the 40s, 50s, 60s that have become kids movies today? But they weren't kids movies only at the time. Like Cinderella was not a kids movie in the contemporary sense of that term when it was released. It was a spectacle. It was a sort of thing that adults lined up to see. Prior to 1968, 1968 is the end of the Hayes Code, the advent of the MPAA rating system. It was generally understood that most movies had to appeal to a whole family that's gonna go see them. So the example I really love to use of this is Roman Holiday. Roman Holiday in 1950's movie Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn. I started showing Roman holiday to my kids. They were like five or six or seven years old, maybe even a little younger than that. Beatrice might have been four. The first time she saw Roman holiday. And a four-year-old is not gonna understand the subtleties of the plot of Roman holiday. But for a four-year-old there's enough in that movie to keep them engaged. A four-year-old, a 14-year-old, a 24-year-old, a 54-year-old, a 74-year-old can all watch Roman holiday and enjoy it. That's true of a lot of films in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 60s. It's true of a lot of films, even back in the '30s. They weren't made prior to 1968. Most films were not made for people of a particular age group. 1968, G-P-G-N-R, is the beginning of age-segregated movies. It's the beginning of this era where adults and children are separated and adults are given adult things and kids are given kid things. Now, Roman holiday is a family movie. A whole family can watch it and adults might watch Roman holiday on their own. I can imagine watching Roman holiday with my wife. No kids. I can imagine watching it with my kids. I can imagine watching Roman holiday with my parents. My parents, me, my wife, my kids, and maybe even some kids, my kids are babysitting and could all sit down and watch Roman holiday and enjoy it. This is true of a lot of films in the '50s and '60s. Early '60s. There's enough there for everyone. But what happens as soon as movies are age-segregated is everything moves to the extreme. So if we're making movies that are only for adults, the content, the graphic content of this kind of film is going to get ratcheted up over time. And so it's really from the advent of the R-rated film in 1968 that movies rapidly progress in the explicit quality of what they're depicting. But 1968 also sends kids off on their own. And the movies that are made for kids don't have to appeal to adults because kids have their own movies and adults have their own movies. And so kids movies get dumber. They get closer. They get more banal. Like compare a film like Cinderella with Madagascar 2. These films aren't not comparable. They might both be animated. But these are not comparable films. I would probably enjoy watching Cinderella this afternoon. I don't think I've seen that film in 35 years. I'm a little intrigued by what I don't remember. There's probably some subtleties in it that would be genuinely impressive. I am unwilling to say that about Madagascar 2. I also highly doubt that anyone's going to be watching Madagascar 2 in 70 years. Cinderella is still good. It's still good because it was made to satisfy a broad number of people. Not to amuse them, but to delight them. Choose movies for your family to watch that you find a life. Choose movies for your family to watch, for your kids to watch. That you would watch on your own that you don't mind watching with your children. Children love it when adults watch movies with them. I have never known a child, my own children, any other child, to send an adult away so that they can watch a movie on their own. Children love to feel the validation of an adult sitting down to watch something with them. There's something obviously dismissive that even a child can pick up on. In being shown something and the adults just leave, like I'm not interested in this trash. So choose movies for your kids to watch that are worth your time. If you do that, your children will rewatch those films over the course of their lives. If you watch movies that are worth rewatching, whereas if you put on a movie for your family movie, a kids movie, and then walk away, your children understand that you think their interests are stupid. Give your kids the good stuff and let your children see you giving them the good stuff. Take out a movie, put it on. Are you going to watch it too? Absolutely. This is an amazing film. So don't watch it with them. Now, if you're looking for the kinds of films that 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12-year-olds can watch that you're interested in watching too, you're probably going to have to show them films from the 1940s and 50s. Because as soon as that rating system kicks in, there are very few films that are suitable for children in terms of content, and which are sufficiently interesting for adults, such that they're willing to rewatch them again and again. So go back to the films of the 1950s, and I think another benefit of showing kids films from the 1950s, 40s and 50s, especially, is that you can trust the film to teach your children or to show your children imitative patterns of behavior that they will not get from contemporary films. So if you have the main kind of thing that you show your kids, is garbage like Madagascar 2, your children are not having images set before them that they can imitate so far as speaking in a dignified manner, engaging with adults in conversation. Madagascar 2 is not going to teach your 7-year-old how to talk to your friends when they come over for dinner. Madagascar 2 is not going to teach your children how to dress. It's not going to put an image of what a dignified human being looks like before them. If you show them it's a wonderful life, they will get all of that though. If you want your children to dress in a dignified manner, show them dignified adults from a very young age. Start showing them Jimmy Stewart movies and carry grant movies. Let them see the way that intellectual people speak. Let them glean from the vocabulary of better red human beings. Let them learn something about subtlety. Let your children feel that there are, let them understand that there are things in the adult world that they are or will slowly come to understand. Like offer them, I think that showing your kids movies from the 40s and 50s. 50s especially, is a pathway to adulthood. Someday you can dress like carry grand. Someday you can dress like grace-kelly. Someday you can allow stylish dignified people to inform the way that you present yourself to the world. In the meantime you're just collecting ideas. You're looking forward to it. Given the intellectual powers of children, before you watch a movie with your kids, before you set a film in front of your children, it might be helpful to think about this. What would my kids absorb from this film if they watched it on mute? Is there anything to delight them here? Is there anything that I want my children to absorb from this film if they're watching it on mute? If you showed your kids room and holiday on mute, there'd be a lot of fine things for them to pick up on. Dress like him. Dress like her. Learn to interpret the subtleties of body language. Look how he walks across the room. Do you see what a dignified way that he carries himself? Whereas if you show your kids Madagascar 2 on mute, there's nothing about what they're seeing that you want them to imitate. I don't mean to insult children. Yes, they understand far more than most adults probably realize. But they're not picking up on subtleties. They're not absorbing blandly stated messages and lessons. Children have far more subtle intellect than we give them credit for. The sort of things that they pick up from the world are far more subtle than we want to admit. I think I'm going to close with a quote from James Baldwin. That might be worth bearing in mind when you're next choosing a movie for your family to watch. Children have never been very good at obeying their parents, but they have never failed to imitate them. So your children are going to imitate the things that they see in the films that you show them. They're not going to believe what they hear. So show them things. Let them see good things. You could have been listening to an interesting podcast about the legendary George Sank hotel, but you chose to listen to this one. Thank you. Your students will become like you, so you must become like God. Until next time. [Music]