15+ movies I can’t wait to see with Tink

Another inspired-by-Anna list post. If it’s Monday, there’s a list.

While I would love to do a list about the ways in which I hate people who can just assume there will be another child a scant year after deciding there should be another child, I’m trying to attract readers here, and I think I’d scare folks a wee bit if I unleashed the black-hearted reserve of bitter resentment I harbor for the hair-trigger fertile. At a birthday party last week, I was one of only five parents who was not ripe with child … AND THE OTHER FOUR WERE DADS. If that weren’t enough, I can’t escape to the blogosphere to get away from blissful women absent-mindedly caressing their bellies, most of my regular reads – Jo, Jen, Jessica, even Tertia are among the so blessed.

And now I have even more reason to be wounded and indignant. My girl, my beautiful daughter, wants a sibling. Some to boss around, someone to conspire with against me, someone to hold hands with while I chauffeur them around in their car seats. For days in July after her visiting Texas cousins left, she asked me where her “brudders” were. (And, ironically, this sort of entitled whining grates on me when I read it on the site mentioned below. But the actual sentiment, of wanting something for your child you might not be able to provide, truly hurts, and that I understand.)

I do have one iron in the fire, but no one seems to know what the future holds there. (It pains me to link to that site. Next Monday’s list might well be “Ways in Which I Hate That Site and All That Goes on There and I Especially Hate Pondering How We All Sound to Those Outside the ‘Community’.”)

So, in the spirit of focusing on the positive (a strategy we’re also employing at the business, but that’s a post for another day), here are the movies I can’t wait to watch with my girl. As a mother, I take very seriously my responsibility for film literacy. Already I’ve been able to impart my love for “The Sound of Music,” specifically for Christopher Plummer in that uniform. I must be doing my job, for Tink often says, “I yike the Cap’in, Mommy.”

 

1. “Pride and Prejudice” (1995). Duuuh. The mother of mother-daughter movies. The catty Bingley sisters, tsk-tsking over Lydia’s bad choices, repeating Lady Catherine’s parting shot: “I give no compliments to your mother” … the opportunities to share abound. The looks Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy exchange while she’s turning the pages as Miss Georgiana plays the piano. And Colin. Firth’s. Wet. Shirt.

2. “A Room With a View” (1985). Florentine architecture, Rupert Graves, Kiri Te Kanawa’s soprano, Helena Bonham Carter’s hair extensions … gorgeous, gorgeous. The full-frontals around the swimming hole will be a bit uncomfortable, but forevermore you’ll be able to admonish your daughter in an English accent like Charlotte Bartlett does to her young charge: “ANSWER me, Lucia!”

3. For that matter, the entire Merchant-Ivory oeuvre. Tell the men in your home to get lost, it’s Frock Flick Night. (I was such a goner for these movies when they came out in the ’90s, one after another, that I even wanted to find the Merchant-Ivory font for my future wedding invitations.)

4. “The Parent Trap” (1998). A sassy cautionary tale for your tween: Don’t end up like Lindsay Lohan. Sure, the 12-year-old LiLo is adorably charming in this remake – with the wedding dress-designing mother and the father who owns a Napa Valley vineyard – but look at her now. Sober, perhaps. But having that hat present in EVERY picture of you and your significant other? It’s just not worth it.

5. “Amelie” (2001). Because you want your daughter to have a wonderfully full interior life, to be the slightest bit mysterious, to be self-possessed enough to dress quirkily. And speak French.

6. “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (1988). Because she’ll end up taking at least a few years of Spanish, so call it an educational film. Then you can tell her all about how you saw this movie with the first of the myriad gay men who chose you to be the first to come out to and how it now makes sense that he was so gushy about Antonio Banderas’ acting.

7. “Cinema Paradiso” (1988). I make no apologies for the foreign-heaviness of this list. Pass the Kleenex during the kissing montage scene at the end.

8. “When Harry Met Sally” (1989). Because then she’ll feel like she really knows what you were like in your pre-child career days.

9. “The Women” (1939). Rapid-fire dialogue. Everyone calling each other Mrs. Husband’s Last Name. Brassy, bawdy dames like Roz Russell. (Avoid the 2008 remake like a toothache, however.)

10. “A Walk to Remember” (2002). Soooo bad it’s good. Mandy Moore as a dying preacher’s daughter who falls for a bad boy. She sings. In the movie version of a Nicholas Sparks novel. It don’t get much better than this.

11. “The Man in the Moon” (1991). A young Reese Witherspoon crushes on someone whose brother was in “Party of Five” in this tender coming-of-age tale. Teen love in all its anguish, set during one summer in the 1950s.

12. “A Place in the Sun” (1951). Montgomery Clift. The reason poor Liz Taylor bounced from doomed marriage to doomed marriage. See him at his brooding best.

13. “Manhattan” (1979). Themes might be a bit racy for your teenager (marital infidelity, sexual relationship between grown man and high schooler, lesbian ex-wife), but there’s no better way to cultivate a love for New York. Shot in sumptuous black and white with a soaring Gershwin score.

Chapter One … He adored New York. He idolized it all out of proportion. No, make that: He romanticized it all out of proportion. …

14. “Something’s Gotta Give” (2003). More Diane Keaton. This time falling for the same man as her daughter. Lots of good one-liners and witty observations about male-female relations, but the real star is the Hamptons beach house. Never too soon to start young women on real estate porn.

15. “Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas” (1977). To be watched with children of either gender, not just daughters. Every year. Cuddled on the sofa in your matching Christmas jammies.

What’s on your list?

See the day’s other lists over at Anna’s: 

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