Oh, Paddington!

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The other night....Saturday, maybe? It's all a blur.....Mike suggested a date night for me and the big boys.   It's been awhile since Mommy's gotten to do fun stuff - usually I'm the one nagging them to do their chores or finish their schoolwork or to just.stop.fighting.please.children, so I jumped on it.  One of my favourite pre-babies thing to do with the three big rascals was to go see a movie.  It can get downright expensive, but if the movie is good enough, I don't mind.

This one was good enough.

I was a bit apprehensive pulling up to the movie theatre.  You see, I loved Paddington Bear everything when I was younger.   I honestly don't know why, but something about this little bear and his adventures just drew me in as a child.  (It's a really, really good thing for our budget that Baby Gap's Paddington line didn't coincide with Baby Ruthie's birth.   We'd be broke).  

I was nervous that, like so many "remakes" of stories and characters from my childhood, this one would stink.   Just like those other remakes, they'd take something that I'd loved so much and tarnish it with horrible slapstick comedy and bathroom humour and innuendos to "keep the parents entertained" and I'd walk out of that theatre feeling like a little bit of my childhood had been stolen from me.

I'm happy to say that this movie didn't disappoint.  For all of my worries, Paddington was not tarnished in any way.  In fact, I think this movie manages to achieve the very rare task of taking a childhood character and "modernizing" it while multiplying the sentimentality instead of losing it.

The film itself is, in a word, gorgeous.   The sets are pleasing to the eye, and the design of each scene really shines through the movie screen.   I had my breath taken away, multiple times, just by the picture placed in front of me.   (And I totally want to recreate that front entryway somehow.   Just need to figure out how....)

The acting was great - I will admit, as a Downton fan, I had a bit of a stumbling block to overcome in order to accept Lord Grantham as Mr Brown.   Especially when he was calling Mrs Brown by her first name.....Mary.   I pushed through, though, and by about 10 minutes into the Brown family's appearance in the movie, Lord Grantham was long gone, replaced by a quirky Mr Brown.   Nicole Kidman was quite good as a villain, delicately walking the fine line between too scary and too outrageous to be taken seriously.   For my littlest one (age 6), it was perfect.  He was sufficiently scared to be drawn up into the drama of the movie, but not so scared that he couldn't sleep at night.  Perfect amount of villain-ness.

My ten year old, who was sitting next to me, probably annoyed the entire theatre with the constant laughing, but you know what?  It really was that funny!   Even I was giggling and laughing at scenes during the movie (bathtub water slide, anyone?).    I was pleasantly surprised by how entertaining the movie was, without ever dropping into the crude bathroom humour (because, let's be honest, I have 3 boys in the 6-10 age range, and I'm up to my eyeballs in bathroom humour.  I don't really want to go pay $50 to give the kids new joke material) or filling the pauses with sexual innuendos meant to "entertain" the parents (my mind isn't always in the gutter, I promise!   I like clean fun, too, Mr. Moviemaker.)   There was one instance where the word "sexy" was used, and one occurrence of the word "bloody"  (It's British, remember!), but that was all that I caught....and I was looking!

Paddington is a movie that we will be purchasing for our home library when it is made available - it's just that good.   I'm very willing to support movie studios when they make kids movies like this:  entertaining for multiple ages, without crude or sexual humour, that is beautiful to watch on top of all of that.   I would recommend it, wholeheartedly, to another family with children (of all ages!).

As I walked back out of the movie theatre with the rascals on Saturday night, I wasn't regretting the $50 I'd dropped on movie tickets for all of us.   Paddington didn't disappoint and we all enjoyed our quick trip into the imagination and fun of my own childhood.   It was fun to watch my boys experience some of the magic that I remembered as a kid, because Paddington, the movie, didn't steal away any of it.   Paddington multiplied the magic.


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You can watch trailers for the movie here.