Recommended Films

Recently in my search for something decent for my kids to watch I turned to the documentary section of Netflix. I have been very happy to find some really interesting, clean films that my whole family can watch together.

A quick roundup:

Mad Hot Ballroom takes us to New York City where 5th graders are involved in a 10-week long ballroom dancing course. We see the children at the start of the class kind fo shy to touch or look at each other. By the end of the class the kids do amazingly well and work very hard to be able to go on to ballroom dance competitions.

I love ballroom dance and am still holding out hope that one day I'm going to get to take lessons. This movie was really fun to watch, and my kids enjoyed it too. At first they thought they would not want to watch something about ballroom dancing, but that was for about 5 minutes until they could see how interesting, difficult, and beautiful some of the dances were.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is the story of a kind of loner man that takes an interest in a flock of wild parrots near his home in San Francisco. Over the course of a year he manages to get the parrots to trust him enough to eat from his hands and come into his house. The parrots are very beautiful and interesting in their antics and personality, and the man is very interesting (not in a weird way, either!) as well.

Rivers and Tides is a film I watched last night and I loved it so much that I am going to see what I can do to be able to offer it in my next business, Supermom's Health and Wellness. Rivers and Tides is a documentary about Andy Goldsworthy, an artist/sculptor that works with nature to create his art. This man amazed me because he would work for hours and hours under difficult conditions to make something in nature, knowing that many of these works would be lost within hours to nature itself. (for instance, washed out by the tide) Andy has many very interesting and thought-provoking things to say about nature and art, and I felt like his perspective helped enlarge my mind to some things I would not normally have thought about.

I watched the movie with my 14 year old son and 10 year old daughter, and all three of us were very enthralled with each of Andy's pieces, and the things he had to say. It's a very peaceful movie, but not boring at all.

The filming of this documentary is probably the most visually beautiful and exquisite work I have ever seen. The beauty, simplicity, and complexity of nature are shown here in amazingly gorgeous ways. It made me think that I need to spend more time observing nature and just appreciating the perfection and creativity of it.