"The Journey of Natty Gann" (1985)

The Journey of Natty Gann (1985) is one of the first movies I remember my parents renting when our tiny Michigan town got a video rental store.  I don't actually have a clear memory of the first time I watched it, just that I did -- I remember really loving "that movie with the girl and the wolf," and asking my mom repeatedly what it was called, but she usually didn't remember.  

We rented it again a few years later, when my brother had a stomach bug, and he ended up getting so sick that my parents left me alone to watch the movie while they took him to the emergency room.  I was probably 8 or 9, and it was the first time I got to stay home all by myself.  (Don't worry, our town was 5 minutes away, I knew how to use the phone, and I knew how to call the neighbors who lived a quarter of a mile away if I had an emergency.  The '80s were a good time to grow up.)  

As a young girl, my interest in this movie was mainly centered on how cool it would be to have a wolf for a friend.  When I got to my tweens, my attention switched more to how gutsy Natty Gann herself is.  And in my teens and twenties, I focused more on how cute John Cusack is in this.  And, now that I'm in my mid-40s, I kind of just love the whole package!  And the music!  We'll circle back to that.

The Journey of Natty Gann takes place during the Great Depression, almost a hundred years ago now.  Natty Gann (Meredith Salenger) is a tomboy living in Chicago with her widowed father Sol (Ray Wise).  Sol has trouble finding work, like so many others, and when he hears about plentiful jobs in the logging industry in the Pacific Northwest, he decides he can't pass the opportunity up, even though he doesn't have time to explain to Natty that he is leaving.  He leaves her a letter and convinces their landlady to look after Natty, and then he has to leave.

The landlady is a bully and a thief, as it turns out.  As soon as Sol is gone, she decides to put Natty in an orphanage and pocket whatever money Sol sends for Natty's care.  She hits Natty and tries to keep her locked up until someone can take her to an orphanage, but Natty cleverly escapes and sets off for Washington State to find her dad.

The bulk of the movie is about Natty's journey, as you might expect, given the title.  She helps a caged wolf escape from someone who has trapped him to sell to a dog-fighting ring, and the wolf becomes her traveling companion.  Natty and Wolf (Jed) help each other out, sharing food and shelter.  Wolf also protects Natty from a man who offers them a ride when they are hitchhiking, but then tries to molest Natty.

Natty stumbles into a hobo camp and acquires another protector in Harry (John Cusack), a young hobo a few years older than she is.  Harry helps Natty and Wolf learn safe ways to ride the rails and avoid railroad enforcers.  

Natty's dad Sol is devastated when he calls the boarding house and learns that Natty has run away.  Even worse, her wallet is found under a train wreck, and he has no way of knowing Natty escaped the wreck unharmed.  Assuming his daughter died, he throws himself into doing the most dangerous logging jobs, obviously trying to work until something happens to end his pain.

I won't totally ruin the ending for you, but you do know it's going to end happily, right?  This is a Disney movie for kids!  From the '80s!  Obviously going to end well.

Also, Wolf doesn't die.  I'll spoil that for you.  He's fine at the end.  The dog who plays him, Jed, was a Northwestern wolf-Alaskan malamute mix who also starred in the 1991 version of White Fang opposite Ethan Hawke.  

Anyway, I said I would talk a bit about the soundtrack.  The score used in the movie is by James Horner, one of my BFF's favorite film composers.  But there is another complete score for this film that was recorded but not used, which is by Elmer Bernstein, who is my favorite film composer!  I have both soundtracks on CD, and they are both amazing.  I listened to Bernstein's on repeat while writing my book A Noble Companion because it was just exactly the jaunty outdoor adventure sound I needed.  You can listen to the James Horner soundtrack here on YouTube, and you can listen to a suite from Bernstein's rejected score here on YouTube.  

Is this movie family friendly?  I mean, it IS a Disney movie meant for kids.  It actually has a handful of cuss words, and there's some pretty dangerous stuff here and there.  Like I mentioned, there is some physical and emotional abuse toward Natty, and a grown man does try to molest her, though that takes the form of him trying to scoot her toward him in the cab of the truck he is driving while saying things about just wanting to be friendly.  His meaning is clear to an adult and teens/tweens, but smaller kids might not understand anything more than that he's trying to make her do something and she is struggling against him.  It's rated PG.  

This is my contribution to the Hit the Road Blogathon hosted this weekend by Quiggy at The Midnite Drive-In :-)

Soon, Soon to Faithful Warriors Comes Their Rest

Today, the Christian church traditionally celebrates All Saint's Day.  The hymn "For All the Saints, Who From Their Labors Rest" by William Walsham How is a pretty traditional choice to sing in church services on or around this day.

Three weeks ago yesterday, my dad joined the throng of saints who from their labors rest.

It was the phone call you don't want to get, the one from a neighbor of your loved one saying there's been an accident, we aren't sure what happened, the ambulance is on its way, and we'll update you when we know anything definite.

And then you wait, and you put your kids to bed after letting them know their grandpa has had an accident, and you wait some more.  The neighbor calls you back, you talk to your mom, and you learn that your dad is gone.  

Somehow, your heart keeps beating, your thoughts keep progressing, your lungs keep inflating and deflating.  You call your brother to let him know.  You put on your pajamas and go to bed and cry and sleep and cry and sleep.

And you pray.  Pray for courage, for comfort, for the ability to continue.  For the right words to say to your kids, your brother, your mom.  To your best friend since high school who thought of your parents as basically hers too.  To your church family that your dad pastored for 26 years.  To your dad's last surviving sibling.

And God in His mercy grants you all that you need, just like He always has and always will.  HIs grace is sufficient.

"Mr. Mom" (1983)

Mr. Mom (1983) is one of those movies I grew up with -- I can't remember a first-time viewing because it seemed to be always part of our movie-watching lives.  I will add a little caveat to that, though: there is one section my parents always fast-forwarded through, and when we were very young, they made us close our eyes during one other part that might have scared us.  We'll get to those.

When Jack (Michael Keaton) loses his job working for General Motors because there's a recession on, his wife Caroline (Terri Garr) gets a job as an advertising executive.  Jack insists that he is very happy to get to stay home with their three children and spend quality time with them while Caroline has to trudge through the drudgery of the working world.

Naturally, because this is a comedy, nothing goes right for either of them.  Well, maybe not nothing, but a lot of things definitely go wrong.

Jack feeds the baby chili and has to deal with toxic diapers.  Jack discovers that Caroline has named their demonic vacuum cleaner 'Jaws' for a good reason.  (That's that part that my parents made me shut my eyes for.)  Jack gets addicted to soap operas.  Jack overloads the washing machine and it goes berserk.

Caroline contradicts her new boss in front of an important client.  Caroline's fresh and new advertising ideas make her the darling of said client, which means all her co-workers resent her.  Caroline's boss makes passes at her.

Caroline's best friend makes passes at Jack.  Said best friend and some other ladies take him to a male strip club (that's the part my parents skipped for us), and then the (erstwhile) best friend tries to seduce Jack.  

However!  With love, kindness, occasional dollops of patience, and a great deal of willingness to forgive and move forward, Jack and Caroline and their kids move through this season of turmoil and have a bright future ahead by the time the movie ends.

One of my favorite things about this movie, as an adult, is how much pop culture gets referenced in this movie.  I didn't really get most of that as a kid because we didn't engage with pop culture much at that time.  But now I understand the references to Jaws, Rocky, Chariots of Fire, The Young and the Restless and so on, and that adds an extra layer of fun to the whole comedic shebang.

Another thing I love about this movie is the way it plays with gender stereotypes.  Jack isn't bad at parenting so much because he is male, but because of the kind of person he is -- he's an engineer, so he tends to get obsessive over details and miss what else is going on around him.  Caroline is good at advertising not because she's female, but because she's great at combining ideas and finding unusual or quirky angles to approach things from.  There's plenty of humor about Jack not knowing how to use common household appliances, but let's face it -- who among us hasn't been stumped by the instructions on a machine we have never used before?

Over all, Mr. Mom is a funny, heartwarming, ultimately hope-filled good time.

This has been my contribution to the Familyathon Blogathon hosted by 18 Cinema Lane this weekend.

She IS Family: "While You Were Sleeping" (1995)

While You Were Sleeping (1995) came out the weekend I turned fifteen. A couple of months later, I went to a sleepover hosted by a girl I was gradually becoming friends with. The next morning, the hosting mother took us to see this at the local second-run theater. It was the first movie I had seen in the theater since I was eight. I was enthralled by the experience. I can still remember exactly what that theater looked like: a tiny auditorium with only maybe a dozen rows of seats, covered in worn pseudo-velvet. My friend’s mom let us sit together wherever we chose, while she and her little son sat in the very back. He fell asleep clutching Skittles candies that dyed his hands all sorts of colors. 

To this day, nearly twenty years later, Skittles always make me think of this movie. Of a grainy filmstrip image interrupted now and then by hair and lint. Of sharing popcorn and giggles with three or four other teenage girls, two of whom are still my close friends. 

But, nostalgia is not the main reason why I love this movie. I love it because it gave me my first real taste of the idea of a “found family.” I grew up in a very close-knit family, and I’m very attached to the idea of having people who love and accept you; people you belong to and who belong to you; people to be with in troubles, celebrations, and everyday life. So as the movie began, my heart ached for Lucy (Sandra Bullock) as she struggled to celebrate Christmas alone, with no family at all to share her joy, no one she belonged to. With both her parents dead, no siblings, and really no friends, she embodied a loneliness so potent it felt contagious. 

And then the Callaghan family embraced her, literally, giving her a giant group hug when they learned she was their comatose son’s fiancée. Which she wasn’t, but they believed she was, and before Lucy could gather the courage to explain the truth, they made her part of their family. They gave her the love, acceptance, and belonging she’d been missing. (She then fell in love with their other son, Jack [Bill Pullman], but I’m not going to go into the whole plot because you’ve probably seen this movie a million times, too. And if you haven’t, go rent it, stream it, borrow it, or buy it.) 

I was fascinated by this idea of finding a family if you didn’t have one, of joining other people and forging the bonds that are so dear to me. I’ve been drawn to stories about “found families” ever since: Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, the X-Men movies, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, The Avengers, and Lost. One of my favorite television shows from childhood, Five Mile Creek, also dealt with this theme, though it took me years to realize that. 

While You Were Sleeping first brought the idea to my attention, and made me wonder, “What if I didn’t have a family?” I’ve often imagined myself ending up like Lucy: alone with a cat and plenty of acquaintances, but no one I belonged to. What would I do? Would I go find or create a family for myself? How does one even go about that? 

I make friends fairly easily. If you like books or movies, I’m happy to hang out with you and discuss them. We can totally be friends. But close friends, friends that feel like they belong to you—I make those very slowly. It can take me years to get to the point where I’ll feel that bond of kinship, not just friendship. It does happen eventually, if I let it. I’d like to think that, had I never met my husband, never gotten married, and for some reason not lived anywhere near my parents or brother, I would have formed a family of sorts around myself. Not quite the way Lucy does, of course—I’m pretty sure I would never have the opportunity to rescue a man from an oncoming train and then pretend to be his fiancée. But somehow, I would find people to be my family. 

Toward the end of While You Were Sleeping, Lucy’s boss tells her, “You are born into a family. You don’t join it like the Marines.” I like to believe he’s wrong, that if you need a family, you can find one… or one will find you.

(This post originally appeared in the November/December 2014 issue of Femnista magazine.)

Why am I a Lutheran?

I had these big plans to do a post every month for all of 2017 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing the 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenburg church.  And then I kept letting those plans slide, and now here we are in October, and the Big Day is just a few weeks away (it's October 31st, if you don't know), and I've done one post.

Time to change that.  Over on my book blog, I've started reviewing some Reformation-related books for different ages.  And I have some things I want to write about over here too, starting with... what are Lutherans, and why am I one?

I'll start with the second question.  When I was a kid, the answer would have been easy.  My dad is a Lutheran pastor, so of course, that's where I went to church.  Obvious.

As I grew up and learned more about the Bible, about various different Christian denominations and what they taught, and specifically what different Lutheran synods taught, that answer started to change.  When I was in my teens and knew that I wanted to be a wife and mom some day, I realized that I might possibly meet my future husband in college.  And if being a Lutheran, marrying a Lutheran, and raising my kids to be Lutherans was important to me, it might be a really good idea to go to a Lutheran college.  So I did.  I went to college hundreds and hundreds of miles away from home because I found a college that fit me personally but that I also was pretty sure would attract the sort of guy I might want to marry.

Which, as you probably know, it totally did.  Cowboy and I met in college, got married a month after I graduated with my BA, and so on.

But why was I so focused on finding a Lutheran husband?  And not just any brand of Lutheran (there are several), but what is called a "confessional" Lutheran husband?  What is a Lutheran, anyway?

Well, I'll tell you what a Lutheran isn't.  It's not somebody who worships Martin Luther.

Martin Luther was just a human being.  A sinner like you and me.  A brilliant, brave, flawed, stubborn, weird, angst-ridden, unhealthy, outspoken, generous, angry, loud German who loved beer and sausage and probably told fart jokes.

Martin Luther does not save sinners.  Only God does that.  Martin Luther did not die for my sins.  Only God did that.  Martin Luther did not create faith in my heart.  Only God did that.

In fact, Martin Luther did NOT want people to call themselves Lutherans.  He wanted them to call themselves Christians.  But a lot of their detractors would call them Lutherans, and eventually, those who followed his ideas adopted the name.

So anyway.  Lutherans are Protestant Christians who follow the ideas of Martin Luther and his cohorts.  Confessional Lutherans are a particular branch of conservative ones who are kind of... I don't want to say militant, so maybe I'll just say stubborn... they're stubborn about adhering to these things called the Lutheran Confessions that are basically statements of belief about various doctrines that were drawn up by Martin Luther and his fellow reformers -- they're collected in something called The Book of Concord, which is not about tasty grapes (Concord grapes are my fave, just so you know), but about agreement -- "concord" can mean "agreement," you see.  If you want to learn more about it, this website has lots of amazing information as well as the full text.

And basically, the Lutheran Confessions are just all about how the Bible is the basis of our faith, not people's ideas.  If someone has an idea about God and it doesn't agree with what the Bible says, then it's a wrong idea.  That's kind of a simplistic explanation, I know, but this is a blog post, not a thesis or something.

So, yeah.  I'm a Confessional Lutheran because I believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant word of God; that I (like all people) was born a sinner and cannot save myself from my sins; that the only thing that can save me from my sins is the loving grace of God; and that the Bible is the only place I can learn about God and his forgiveness.

Okay, that's enough for today.  More about the Reformation and Luther later.

Happy Independence Day!

Happy birthday to the land of the free and the home of the brave!

We're having friends and family over for a cookout this evening, and to shoot some fireworks off (if it stops raining), so Cowboy and I have been busy getting some goodies ready.  Here are my two contributions!  Fruit kabobs and a bluebarb pie :-9

I hope my fellow Americans are all having fun celebrating this weekend too!

2016 Container Garden

It has rained nearly every day for over a month.  We've had a few moments of actual sunshine lately, though, so I seized the opportunity to take some photos of this year's container flower garden on my deck.  Here it is!

Also, down to the left we have my two bigger pots that used to have my lavender plants in them.  I got those in the ground at last (we'll see if they manage to grow or not), so now we have blueberry bushes in these pots, since those didn't do well in our clay-y ground.  So left-to-right here, we have blueberry bush, blueberry bush, a few lilies-of-the-valley left over from when I divided the patch of those out front, and some magenta petunias that Tootie chose at the store.

Moving on up, we've got these two lovely double-layered pots.  I planted purslane in the top of both of them, and then it never came up, and it never came up, and I gave up on it and bought some pretty purple lantanas for the tops... and when I planted those, I discovered the purslane is coming up at last.  So left that plenty of room in both pots.  I planted marigold seeds in the bottom of the left pot, and bachelor buttons in the right one, but the buttons never came up, so I put in some petunias that Sarah (yellow) and Sam (purple) chose instead.

My three biggest pots are a delight this year.

The ones on the left and right have yellow pansies and purple johnny-jump-ups that are from last year!!!  They stayed alive over the winter and started blooming in March again.  They're huge and bushy and great.  I stuck some pale-ish blue lobelia in those pots too because they each had an empty spot where something last year died.

The center pot is all new stuff.  I stuck a "bandana" lantana in the very back, flanked by a yellow dahlia on the right and a "starsisters" dahlia on the left that had a gorgeous two-color bloom on it when I bought it, which promptly snapped off in the car on the way home -- but it has lots of buds, so I'm hopeful.  Anyway, directly in front of the lantana are 4 celosia, one of which has already died off.  I tried them a few years ago and was disappointed by them, but my dad grew them really well in his container garden, so I thought I'd try them again.  We'll see what happens.  Then in front of those is a yellow "sunsatia" with delicate flowers I love.  Flanking that are two "Aloha Kona" calibrachoas, which should get drape-y and awesome like the ones I've had previous years.

Finally, to the right of that trio is another double-decker pot with a purple lantana and some tiny purslane shoots on top, and more marigolds coming up in the bottom.  The yellow pot in the foreground has another lantana (I got a little nutty with those this year -- usually I just have one or two, but now I have five).

And the three on the stand belong to Sam, Sarah, and Tootie, arranged according to their age, with Sam's on top, full of bachelor buttons we planted as seeds.  Sarah's middle pot mostly has these succulents called portulaca that seem to have reseeded themselves from last year.  She planted a few marigolds in with them, though, because Sam and Tootie were getting to plant seeds.  The bottom one is Tootie's, with different bachelor buttons from seeds.

Now I'll share a few close-ups just because I love taking pictures of flowers :-)  Here are the johnny-jump-ups:

The lobelia:

The sunsatia:

The calibrachoa:

The dahlia (and yes, I totally chose these because of the Alan Ladd movie The Blue Dahlia):

The "bandanna" lantana:

And here are a few of the johnny-jump-ups and some roses from the bush by my front door, which I stuck together in a jug to decorate our table when we had some company over for supper last week:

I don't know much of anything about arranging flowers, but a bunch of fresh blooms stuffed in a little jug almost always turn out pretty, I think.  We were celebrating my mother-in-law's birthday, so I wanted to dress the table up a bit.

Guest Post about the "The Adventures of Robin Hood" (1938) Soundtrack

Today I have a guest blog post up here on James' blog.  This one is about the rollicking, joyous soundtrack for The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).  If you read my recent review of the movie, you know how much fun it is, and the soundtrack totally matches that.

This is also the first soundtrack I've bought at the request of my children.  They love it when I listen to soundtracks, and are always asking me what happens in different parts of whatever we're listening to.  So they're very excited when we listen to the music from a movie they know well, because then they can tell me what's happening during the music.  And they're way better at that than I am -- they're very observant :-)

Our Valentine's Day Adventure

We celebrated Valentine's Day yesterday, because today we'd be busy with church and Sunday school and such.  So we drove up into the Shenandoah Valley and visited our favorite little restaurant-and-gift-shop, The Apple House, for lunch.  They serve the most amazing apple butter doughnuts -- made from the same recipe they used in the 1960s when they first opened.  It's a family-owned-and-operated place, with lots of other yummy food besides the doughnuts, including the best barbecue I've had north of North Carolina.  Also, the best bacon I've ever had anywhere.  The kids usually want breakfasty stuff involving pancakes there, so we got them that.  I tried their tomato-basil soup for the first time yesterday, and like everything else we've ever had there, it was delicious.

And they have a gift shop with quirky, wacky (and sometimes a little off-color) stuff for sale, like signs and t-shirts.  They have different stuff every time we go there, and yesterday I took pictures of a bunch of the signs I liked best:

I was really tempted to buy that last one.  But I bought a sign last time we were up there a couple months ago, one that says "I should have been a cowboy."  It's in my living room now, because "cowboy" was my dream job when I was little.

They sell lots of yummy food items in their gift shop too, some of which you can see in the above photos.  We came home with only two things yesterday (besides doughnuts for breakfast):  a bottle of hickory syrup (which we've had before -- so amazing!) and a jar of "traffic jam," which we bought because here in northern VA, we have a lot of traffic, so the name made us laugh.  Here's a shot of all of them beside the flowers Cowboy gave me for Valentine's Day:

Yellow roses are my favorite, and have been ever since I was a teen, thanks to the movie Indiscreet (1958) and the Bobby Darin song "18 Yellow Roses."  Cowboy gave me 18 of them the day he proposed, we had them at our wedding, and he gets them for me on special occasions when he can find them :-)

So anyway, that was our day-early celebration of Valentine's Day.  Not sappy-romantic, just lots of fun, which is how I like it!

"The Adventures of Robin Hood" (1938)

I really love this movie.  I didn't grow up with it, but I wish I had.  My sister-in-law gave it to me for my birthday a couple years after I got married, and I was super excited to finally get to see it!  It was one of the first DVDs we owned :-D  This is now one of my kids' favorite movies -- we've been watching it about once a month of late.

I love Robin Hood, and collect movies and books about him.  This is one of my top 3 favorite movie versions!  But only the Disney animated version from 1973 captures the same joyous, rollicking tone that this one has, which is so much a part of why I love both.  Lately, filmmakers and writers have been trying to make Robin Hood be Very Serious, but it never quite works (for me, anyway) because Robin himself is just such great fun.  (For more of my thoughts on lots of different Robin Hood movies, you can read my Femnista article from last summer here.)

Don't you love movies that start with a written-out prologue?  I certainly do.  Look at these beautiful opening title cards!

Yup, we've got the usual Robin Hood villains in this movie.  Prince John (Claude Rains):

Guy of Gisborne (Basil Rathbone):

And the Sheriff of Nottingham (Melville Cooper):

We have the full complement of heroes too!  Robin Hood (Errol Flynn):

Little John (Alan Hale):

Will Scarlett (Patric Knowles):

And also Friar Tuck (Eugene Pallette), Much (Herbert Mundin), and various and sundry other Merry Men, some of whom make excellent arm rests:

And, of course, we have Maid Marian (Olivia de Havilland):

As you can see, Maid Marian starts out really friendly with Prince John.  In this version, she's not Robin's childhood sweetheart.  Rather, she's King Richard's royal ward, and a bit snobby about being a Norman.  We first meet up with her attending a sumptuous feast for Prince John at Guy of Gisborne's castle.

It's not long before Robin waltzes in uninvited.  He'd had a run-in with Gisborne earlier that day over a peasant killing this deer, and he's here to have a discussion with all the nobles about how cruel and unfair they've been lately.

He confronts Prince John, Guy of Gisborne, and the Sheriff of Nottingham...

...cracks lots of jokes at their expense...

...makes himself entirely at home...

...and generally shocks Lady Marian with his audacity.

His jokes don't last long, however.  He's actually here to be Serious, as you can see:

After some thrilling heroics, in which he single-handedly outfoxes a whole castle full of Normans...

...he and Much make their escape, and we get treated to some gorgeous cinematography:

This movie is out to hit all the beats you expect from a Robin Hood story.  So of course we have to have that confrontation with Little John on a log bridge.

And then we have to gather the unhappy peasantry to us under the greenwood tree.

And then we have to start waylaying rich people and collecting the ransom that's supposed to free King Richard from prison, but which of course, Prince John wants to use to make himself king for keeps.  During one of those waylayings, they capture Maid Marian, who you can see Does Not Like Robin Hood One Bit:

You know that's not going to last long.  I mean, Robin Hood is played by Errol Flynn, and she's played by Olivia de Havilland, and obviously they're going to end up together because That's How It Goes.

See?

Next must come the great archery tournament, you know.  With plenty of joyous Technicolor spectacle!

Drink in all that color, would you?  Now, I mentioned that my kids love this movie.  How much?  Sarah says she wants me to make her Maid Marian's Archery Tournament Dress for Halloween this year.

(I don't blame her, do you?  It's suuuuuuuuch a pretty dress.  I kind of want one myself.  However, the question remains whether I'm capable of making such an intricate thing.)

Okay, obviously Robin Hood wins the tournament, even though he's disguised as a tinker.  I'm not sure what about this outfit says "tinker," but it's got such a nice, slouchy hat, don't you think?

Of course, everyone realizes he's Robin Hood once he wins, and various plot things happen that I'm not going to go into very much right now.  I'm going to skip over about half an hour so I don't spoil Absolutely Everything, and rejoin our hero here, where he's pretending he's Romeo and Maid Marian is Juliet:

Well, come on, you can't have de Havilland and Flynn in a movie without them making with the smoochies for a bit, right?  It's their third film together, and audiences would be very disappointed if we didn't have a passionate (yet Code-approvedly chaste) clinch or two.

Anyway, there's more plot stuff, and then toward the end, we get treated to some spectacular sets that incorporate gorgeous matte paintings

And then we have some more thrilling heroics.  It's hard to screen-cap such things because everyone is jumping around so heroically and thrillingly, I'm afraid, but I did manage to grab this moment between Gisborne and Robin.  I really love watching their duel because of course, Rathbone was an accomplished swordsman for reals, so he doesn't need a fencing double, which just... makes me grin.

And then we're all happy, because we should always all be happy at the end of a Robin Hood movie, right?  I mean except the bad guys, they should be unhappy, or at least feeling chastened and remorseful.  Or be dead, there's always that, too.

And that's the end of a joyous romp of a movie!

Now, I'm reviewing this for the Period Drama Challenge, so of course, that's not the end of my review.

Oh no, not the end at all!  Now 'tis time to share some more costumes.  I have no idea if this is at all like what people actually wore in England during the Middle Ages.  But I'm firmly convinced this is what they wanted to be wearing.  Feast your eyes, my friends!

This is the only one of Marian's outfits I'm not nuts about:

 Oh, and remember how I said my kids loooooooooove this movie?  This past Halloween, Tootie insisted I make her "Maid Marian's stripey dress that she wears when Robin Hood jumps off the thing and they all have a big, silly fight."  I didn't remember Marian EVER wearing a stripey dress.  At first, I thought she meant this one:

But nope!  She meant this one:

Now, Marian only wears that dress once, and we never see her full-length in it -- there are only 4 or 5 shots of her in this scene, and they're pretty short.  But Tootie remembered that dress.  And sure enough, Marian wears it when Robin Hood jumps off "the thing" and they all have "a big, silly fight."

Here's what I came up with:

She was super happy with it, and still wears it a ton, so yay!  I win!  Hee.

Is this movie family-friendly?  It is!  No bad words.  No more than a couple of sweet, mostly-turned-away-from-the-camera smooches and one moment where a bad guy grabs a servant girl and makes her sit on his lap, then bends over her like he's forcing a kiss on her, but nothing is shown and my kids have never commented on it.  There's obviously some violence involving bows and arrows, quarter staffs, and swords, but it's all very vague and stagey.