This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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Babies

BabiesDid I mention I was behind in posting about movies we’ve watched? Yes, I believe I did. In any case, a few months back I actually took the morning off from work for a day, and we all went to the “Mommy and Me” showing of Babies. For those not familiar with the concept, the theater sets up in a way geared toward people bringing very small children, meaning newborns up through maybe age three seeming to be the most common age. They leave the lights turned up part way. The volume isn’t as loud as it might normally be. They let you order snacks from your seat and have people bring them to you so you don’t have to gather all of your stuff, etc. Nobody blinks about moms nursing in the theater, or babies crying, or slightly older ones running around a little, etc. The whole point is letting you be able to go see a movie and not worry about that even though you have an infant or toddler. Some of the older kids may start to enjoy the movie itself to, but the main point is for the parents I think. Brandy has been to several of these with Alex, but we decided we’d all go to this one together.

It was a lot of fun. Alex payed attention for a bit, then fell asleep, then payed attention again for a bit.

So, the movie itself. For those who haven’t heard of it, it is basically a no-commentary, almost no-words documentary where they just had camera crews shadow four different babies from four completely different parts of the world for their first year or two and see what they saw. So basically you get 79 minutes of watching four babies be cute, and noticing the differences (and similarities) between the four kids and their families.

And, so, well, it was cute. As long as you went into it with the expectation that all you would be getting was an extended look at babies doing stuff, then you got exactly what you expected and you could enjoy it and go “awww” at all the appropriate moments and cock your head to the side when you saw one of the non-american babies doing something you would never (or at least rarely) see here. (For instance, fighting with a goat and a chicken over who gets a bed or something.)

Anyway, cute movie. Probably more so if there is, is about to be, or recently was an infant in your life.

This is long gone from the theaters by now, but if you are into the “hey, let me spend time looking at something cute that doesn’t even pretend to have a plot or a point” kind of thing, then go ahead and rent this. :-)

Video: Blue Planet: Seas of Life (Discovery Channel Version): Disk 4

So, yes, we did another family video thing. And yes, I’m switching how I title these posts to “Video” to recognize that in the future not all of these will be DVDs. Anyway, this took us two weeks, but it was once again “One we own but haven’t watched yet” and that meant the next disk in this series.

This time the two episodes were “Seasonal Seas” and “Ocean World”. My basic thoughts on these last few episodes were that the first few were better. I think seasonal seas has a few interesting bits, but my memories of it aren’t that sharp and there was nothing that really stuck out as memorable.

And for Ocean World… the text of the narration made it clear that in the BBC version of the program, this was the FIRST episode, while in this Discovery Channel version they put it last. It was essentially an overview of the whole series, with a lot of things like “In this series we shall see”… which of course was all stuff we’d already seen. So instead of a preview of things to come, it was a retrospective of things we had mostly seen before, although I guess not completely.

In any case, as a whole the series was a great series. I think the first few episodes were the best, but they all held up pretty well, at least if you like this sort of nature documentary. Great visuals, and you learn a few things about the ocean ecosystems. Good stuff. They were all worth watching.

There is a 5th disk, but I think it is all “making of” sort of stuff. I would be very interested in that, but I’m not sure if it will make it as a family movie night thing. We shall see.