C. Everett Koop says movies are great for you.

Four-year old lad in hoodie runs through a field with abandon

Yeah, me and the the Surgeon General too.

"Daddy, I think I prefer the kind of pipe that brings hot water into our house more than the kind of pipe that people smoke with."

— anonymous four-year old

Archimedes, Euclid, Newton.

Come on guys, I need you to hurry up so we're not late!
I yelled angrily.

He groaned; melodramatic theatrics cranked to 11:

But Daddy!
he moaned.
I wanted to do more mathematics for school!

Maybe,
I said.
If you're not horrible and not very bad, we can study some more mathematics later.

You gotta hold the line somewhere.

Waiting room.

I saw, from my eye's corner, one of them look at me. From my other eye's corner (I have two), I saw the other look at me, and then I could feel them make eye contact with each other.

Then they started smiling. Smiling furiously. Not furiously angry, but furious frenetic. With me in the middle. And I could tell they were laughing at me.

This was a mother and daughter.

I’ll always wonder what it was, and always wonder if they remember that moment, because I’ve already forgotten.

Films

I love film. Chaplin to Wilder, Antonioni to Truffaut, Hitchcock to Fincher. Love cinema. Some days - for example, every day - I just want to snuggle up with my family on the couch and watch a good film. Because they love film too. And of course we run hard and deserve it.

But. As with many things, the special and the commonplace occupy different places in our lives, and I like to think that try, as with many and much - we try - to strike a balance that is not in the mundane boring middle, but is at least deftly positioned to offer a range of activities, a range of stories, a range of books, a range of cinema…and I am resolute on this point as well:

we watch films together.

Not every film. Becca and I gotta have our own deal too. But we watch films as a family. There is something beautiful and glorious about planning and making special cinema evenings where we can engage with exciting stories and interesting characters and find all kinds of launching-off points for further conversation and discussion. Film is a language too. An important one to learn.

And it’s a language you don’t get from simply breezing through television solo - which is fine sometimes, I suppose. In the sense that scrolling through a social media feed or even rolling through headline news articles isn’t really reading-reading, absorbing television that jumps all over the place isn’t really watching-watching something of value.

But cinema, together, is beautiful. There’s a lot of latitude under what constitutes cinema, or film, or simply movies. It’s a big tent.

But the important variable is watching, experiencing, and discussing together.

There’s a difference between sitting a child down to watch an episode of Sesame Street by themself (which is fine, and we do sometimes), and between all sitting down and watching the 1979 Sesame Street road comedy movie together. A story with a beginning and an end and all the grammar and syntax and joy and magic of moviemaking held aloft in its 97 minutes.

It’s a shared experience, and I’m excited to someday experience Die Hard, Amelie, and Casablanca with them.

For now though: here are five non-animated classics everyone should see while they’re young (and then again when they’re older than young):

Mary Poppins (1964)
Modern Times (1936)
The Muppet Movie (1979)
The Sound of Music (1965)
E.T. (1982)