Hooray For Hollywood

A few days ago we successfully attempted to take Maddie to her first feature-length movie at the cinemas. Happy to report she sat through the 10-12 minutes of loud, annoying and underwhelming previews; a 5-minute short and the whole hour-and-10-minute movie — Winnie The Pooh. It was great. She ate popcorn [she called them corn-pops!] and drank both her juice and the small lemonade we purchased. She was mostly quiet, although no louder than the other dozen kids in a kids’ flick. She showed enthusiasm towards the screen [“It’s POOH BEAR!!!!”] and even asked “More Pooh Bear” when the credits were rolling. She was a bit antsy and moved her location a few times [from my lap to her own seat to Mommy’s lap, etc.] but between this experience and last week’s plane trips I’d say she is a great patient kid…more than I could have hoped for anyway.

Another great thing about her first cinema experience is that I am a HUGE movie buff/geek. I literally own over 3,000 DVDs, have countless toys, books and other merchandise regarding films and drive my wife crazy with movie-quoting although I try to tell her that all my friends, really good friends, communicate via movie quote frequently. My first cinema experience I was two years old as well [The Empire Strikes Back!!] and I was really wishing and hoping that my daughter would be good in the movies as well. After the movies Maddie kept asking us to go see Pooh again and I promised her that in the coming weeks her and I will go again. I love going to the movies, always have and with a decent-sized cinema literally within 15-minute walk from us I’m sure her and I will be going countless times together. Until she gets a whole bunch of friends and I have to drop her off at the mall.

PS: Also this past week I popped in Toy Story 3 for Maddie, who funnily enough knows who Woody, Buzz and Jessie are from other Disney books and toys she owns. Besides the 20-minute TV shows she knows and loves I really haven’t shown her a feature before and wanted something different to show her and much to my surprise she really likes it. Well, I’ve only seen it once with Wendy when the DVD came out and I was told that a lot of grown men were known to get misty-eyed at this movie. Well I was no exception and held back hard at the ending. Watching it again with Maddie I’m STILL getting chocked up, not just at the ending but at other parts of the movie. It’s crazy. A movie has never had this kind of reaction for me. Maddie has watched it about 5 times now and I still hold back tears. It’s not sad tears either but I think I’m just so happy watching it with my daughter and thinking in the coming years she may have favorite toys of her own and I can’t wait to watch her imagination with playing with them. But damn, Toy Story 3 is like cutting an onion for me. It’s worse than Terms of Endearment and Field of Dreams COMBINED!