At the movies

For $13 we can take our entire family of 8 and Grandma to the movies on the base. This weekend’s fare was The Princess and the Frog, and since we had infected our grandpa with a stomach bug, we gave him some peace and quiet by going to the show.

I’m not a real connoisseur of animation, but I appreciated that this was not the 3-D computer animation that has become de rigueur over the past few years. On the other hand, it was pretty standard Disney fare of “wish hard enough and your dreams will come true.” Initially, the main character, Tiana, sings about the idea that hard work was the route to making her dream of owning a restaurant come true, but she still needed to wish on a star for a lucky break and a prince to make her restaurant a reality.

And maybe in a sense, that’s the way things are: you really do need a lucky break, or a friend in the know, to achieve the fantastic. I don’t mean this in a cynical way – that lucky break is really providence at work. And I really don’t expect Disney to make a movie about the mystery of God’s hand in our lives. But it means that I have to give my daughter, who said something about wishing hard enough on Sunday, a spiel about how we should pray instead of wish for the things we want, and not to expect to marry princes, even though I did.


I think I enjoyed the movie a little more after our visit to New Orleans, although the movie stereotypes the bayou folk and glorifies the city. And the villain thoroughly frightened my kids away from voodoo fortune tellers, even ones like the potbellied guy in a t-shirt and jeans who had set up his card table in front of St. Louis with the other gauze and velvet draped fortune tellers. They had preprinted signs advertising tarot and palm readings; he had torn cardboard on which was written with sharpie marker: “Fortunes. Professional. All true.”