5 best nature movies for kids

When looking for great nature films for kids, we focus on five areas:

– Appreciation of nature
– “Just say no to drugs” education
– The science of nature
– Spiritual values
– Family values

Here are the best in each of these important categories:

5. Wet Hot American Summer (2001) – It’s about having fun at a summer camp in a place where it’s quite warm and probably rains a lot.

4. Alice in Wonderland (1951) – Good warnings for kids about the gateway drugs tea and tobacco, as well as hallucinogenic ‘rooms and pills, and gambling, all in a natural setting.

3. Godzilla (1954) – A reminder for kids that there used to be dinosaurs and that they might come back if we just keep fracking around with radiation like we are.

2. 2012 (2009) – What could happen if God gets mad enough.

1. Good Morning… and Goodbye! (1967) – Not strictly for kids, according to Russ Meyer, but it’s full of heavy-breasted women running around naked in the woods, which to me says “Mom.”

Honorable mention: Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus (2009) and AVP (2004).

5 worst kids movies for nature

Only our kids can save the world. What are the top five things that we want to teach them?

1. Stop using plastic.

2. Eat less meat.

3. Plant a tree.

4. Share your car.

5. Have fewer babies.

With that in mind, the worst kids movies for nature:

1. Star Wars (1977): Darth Vader and all his minions? That looks like plastic to me. And the action figures? It’s an outrage!

2. Red River (1948) – Two hours and thirteen minutes about driving cattle to the boxcars, and then on to Chicago and steak dinners for everyone! I say, return the prairies to the buffalo, even if a theory documented in the latest Scientific American suggests that bison crossing the land bridge from Asia caused the demise of North America’s megafauna.

3. Sometimes a Great Notion (1970) – Cutting down trees, spotted owls be darned. Plus Henry Fonda’s dismembered hand, flipping a bird. Plant trees, don’t cut them down; although I guess it’s OK for a kid to go out and start a forest fire every once in a while, due to the overabundance of brush and low cover in many woodsy stands around the nation.

4. The Hitcher (1986) – What kid is going to want to give anybody a ride after watching this travesty?!? This movie should be banned from all countries that don’t at least have a bullet train. And when your kid gets his or her driver’s license, give him or her a 9mm Glock to hide under the front seat or stick in a cup-holder.

5. Yours, Mine, and Ours (1968) – Eighteen kids. Desilu should have kept the original title, “Two Prolapsed Uteruses.” When this movie arrives from Netflix, if you’re under 21, the envelope ought to include a dozen condoms.

Honorable mention: The Mosquito Coast (1986) – A fun way to gets kids thinking about self-sufficiency!

5 worst nature movies for kids

Nature’s hardest organic material is the tooth, which Nature invented a long time ago. My question is, why aren’t we up to our necks in teeth? Do the math: the shark maintains multiple rows of teeth. The teeth push forward as new ones grow in and the front row drops out. The shark has been around for 420 million years, minimum. Let’s say sharks average out at a billion total population at any given time on Earth (in the water) for 400 million years, with each shark growing and ejecting, say, 5,000 diamond-hard teeth in its lifetime. You can pack 1,000 shark teeth into a cube 8 inches on a side. Which all means that that thin, Earth-girdling black schist-like layer of compacted shark teeth 1850 feet down in the stratums, or stratii, is not thick enough, by half. What happened to those missing teeth?!?

And that’s not counting the teeth of the numerous species of Ichthysaurs over the millenia, or millenii.

Ask any school child this missing-tooth question and you’ll get either a blank stare, a reference to the fifth day of God’s creationist activities, or a confused discourse on why separating your waste into buckets of different colors is “green.” My question is, how come children cannot answer the shark-tooth question? Answer: children’s nature films and their demonstrable deficiencies.

The worst offenders:

5. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004) – Hey, don’t get me wrong. I love SpongeBob.  But how many teeth does a sponge have? Plus, the movie lulls children into a false sense of security with respect to Nature and shark’s teeth. Movie’s message to kids: you won’t drown.

4. Bambi (1942) – Bambi is never shown eating meat, but I have a feeling that there is a subtle message present in the film. I just watched the scene again where Bambi’s mom buys the farm. Funny, I always thought she got roasted in a forest fire. But no. It’s a venison thing. Movie’s message to kids: there’s good eatin on those deer.

3. Deep Throat (1972) – These days, kids are liable to watch anything and then go out and try it. Monkey see, monkey do. Movie’s message to kids: teeth don’t matter.

2. Gone with the Wind (1939) – They burn down a fracking city in this movie. That’s a lot of carbon injected or ejected into the atmosphere. The filmmakers’ excuse? They’re ending slavery. Movie’s message to kids: you can increase your carbon footprint willy-nilly if you just think up a good excuse for it in advance.

1. Nosfertatu (1922) – Forget all those trillions of shark teeth. The teeth you need to worry about are the ones stuck in your neck at night. Confusing movie message to kids: drinking blood is a sex thing.

Honorable mention: Teeth (2007), which puts teeth in their rightful place.

Top 5 Cheese Movies

First, the rules: No mice. No Swiss cheese. Or is it swiss cheese? I never liked it. And with the holes? Been done to death.

No Limburger. I don’t want to show my age.

Who Moved My Cheese? has not been made into a movie yet, as far as I know.

1. I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With (2006) – L.A. and New York are full of folks, mostly young adults, making a living, or trying to, by being funny. This movie includes a number of them, Jeff Garlin and Sarah Silverman at this point having worked their way higher upon the hog, referencing ham and cheese, than most of the others.

2. Little Caesar (1931) – The best Big Cheese? Until “Mother of Mercy! Is this the end of Rico?” de-cheeses him.

3. The Stratton Story (1949) – Maybe Stewart doesn’t have the best big-league cheese. We’ll give Dutch that, in The Winning Team (1952). But Stewart’s got the moxie.

4. Millions (2004) – As the movies prove, again and again, if you come across a lot of cheese that isn’t yours, trouble usually follows.

5. This space is reserved for any unpleasant movie, in honor of cheesy movies in general, and butt-crack cheese, smegma, mother’s-milk cheese, cheesecake, cheesecloth – whoa. There’s nothing wrong with a big bolt of cheesecloth! In fact, I’ll go with Freddy Got Fingered (2001). I liked it, but many found it objectionable for some reason.

Honorable mention: Wallace and Gromit and their love of cheese, from the moon and otherwise.

Top 5 Flea Movies

I’m ruling out movies about cats and dogs. Listing movies about cats and dogs and their fleas would be like making a Top-5 list of movies about, say, breathing. And yes, I’m two days late applying the Advantage this month. I swear I’ll do it tonight.

I’m also ruling out The Seventh Seal and all other plague movies.

And poverty movies. I hate depressing old Top 5 lists about the poor and the flea-bitten.

And please, no cartoon fleas.

1. The D. I. (1957) – In 1957, I was living in Beaufort, S.C., next to Parris Island, where The D.I. (Drill Instructor) transpires. It was #1 in town for weeks, of course. Jack Webb at his best. The central scene: maneuvers on a beach; don’t slap the sand fleas even as they bite. A recruit does slap, the men are made to hold a funeral for the flea and spend the night out on the sand, with the surviving fleas.

2. The Autobiography of a Flea – If no one ever made a movie of this classic of erotica, they ought to have. A friend brought back a copy from Europe in 1960. This was before the word “porn” had been invented, because there wasn’t any, as far as most of us knew. “Hardcore,” if it was used, did not relate to the arts. The book chronicles the non-clerical activities of a collection of monks and nuns. Flea’s-eye view. I wonder if my friend was worried at Customs, as I’m sure that they loved to confiscate this sort of item. I should google him now after 50 years and ask him.

3. The movies wherein a group is hiding from the Nazis and one of them gets bit, but to react would be to expose the group. Nazis and fleas, of course, just naturally go together.

4. No more military or sex movies. This space is reserved for the movies where, at a crucial moment, a flea bites somebody in the ass and they jump forward and knock over the, the, the sacred idol, or cry out before the bride can say I do, or like that.

5. MEMORIAL – This space honors all the drive-ins that have turned into flea markets.

Honorable mention: Movies that combine fleas and ghosts or fleas and vampires, but not fleas and werewolves.

Top 5 Vegetable Movies

I don’t have five, or even one, vegetable movie in mind as I write this. I’m hoping that inspiration will strike as I go.

But first, the rules:

– No movies about vegtables in the shape of phalli.

– No movies named in a spirit of unkinditude or bad taste, such as Talk to Her (2002).

– Herbs don’t count, ruling out that Argentinian movie about the guy who has a heart attack, retires, grows lavender, and, spoiler, has another heart attack.

– Movies about fruits are ok.

– I’m ruling out movies about gourds. It has to be a vegetable or fruit that you can eat.

– No Van Gogh movies on the basis of sunflowers and the fact that you can eat their seeds. This also rules out major-league baseball movies, where ballplayers eat lots of  sunflower seeds these days, instead of chewing tobacco.

– No animated vegetables. This disqualifies It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966).

– No talking vegetables, including Dustin Hoffman as a tomato, regardless of his motivation. Hoffman, back before he moved into his 70s and has to take what Mick LaSalle calls twinkly parts.

– Sadly, cheese isn’t a vegetable.

– I haven’t seen Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978), but I’ll bet that if I had, it wouldn’t make my list. I have seen Children of the Corn (1984) (just the first of the many). It doesn’t make it either. And I haven’t seen King Corn (2007).

– No movies where a green alien is a vegetable, like in the original The Thing (1951). You’ve got to eat it; it can’t eat you. This rules out The Little Shop of Horrors (1960).

– No movies that just have vegetables or fruits in the title, like Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) and The Cocoanuts (1929).

– No movies about a big meal, of which there are too many to bother getting specific.

– Soup isn’t a vegetable.

– The vegtable can be cooked or raw.

– Please, no famines.

So, my list:

1. Mr. Majestyk (1974) – It’s about melons. Charles Bronson grows them and he has to break a few of the other kind in the course of the movie. Elmore Leonard wrote it; I hope that you’re enjoying Justifed. The great Al Lettieri is the bad guy in Majestyk; you may recall him from The Getaway (1972), doing his thang thang with Sally Struthers.  Al Lettieri, dead at 47 from a heart attack… There was a time when Bronson was making some fine movies.  The Mechanic (1972), though, not so much, because of the bummer ending and the fact that it made me hate Jan-Michael Vincent after seeing it.

2. The Secret of the Grain (2007)  (Le graine et le mulet) – Old Algerian in Sète, France, wants to open a restaurant selling cous cous and mullet. Cous cous, being pasta, isn’t strictly a vegetable, but I’m giving it a pass. Great movie till it runs out of steam at the end.

3. The movie about the young German woman from Norway who immigrates to… Minnesota? Wisconsin? after the war and meets a guy. The two of them harvest a zillion acres of corn, barehanded, in a couple of days. Or maybe I misremember.

4. Lorenzo’s Oil (1992) – Tell me that the oil was made out of some vegetable or other. I wasn’t that crazy about the movie, but now I only need one more to be done.

5.  Damn. I thought of one and now I’ve forgotten it… Hmm… Oh, yes. The one by a woman, long-time filmmaker, a documentary, about folks who go out after a harvest and scavenge from the fields. French. The somebodyorothers.

Top 5 Worst Jobs

5. Kenny (2006) – If a woman reports to you that she’s dropped her wedding ring in the porta potty, you’ve got to act fast. The ring will lie on the surface briefly, but then begin to settle, at which time you will be unable to retrieve it. Hustle over there. Don’t wear gloves. You cannot wear gloves, because when wearing gloves, you can’t feel the ring with sufficient acuity. Use the bare hand.

4. The Dark Knight (2008) – Your job is supposed to be fun. Satifying. You’re supposed to enjoy it. This guy? With the gruff voice? He’s happy? I don’t think so.

3. Psycho (1960) – It’s hard enough to run a motel, but if you’ve got a bossy mother butting in all the time, it’s  impossible.

2. Alien (the whole franchise) – Once, sure. It could happen to anyone. But to go back, again and again and again. What is wrong with this woman?

1.  Tie: The Ten Commandments (1956) and The Passion of the Christ (2004) – Moses, this guy. 40 years in the wilderness, was it? His beard gets those streaks of white in it. So does he get to the promised land finally? What do you think? And he missed all the parties with the golden calf, so forth. And with whom did he get to lie, or lay? I can’t remember. As for Jesus, no explanation necessary.

Top five nose-picking movies.

Who do you have to screw around here to get someone to read a post?

I sent $50 to some guy for five sure-fire methods of garnering readers. I tried all five and none of them worked, but when I asked the guy for my money back, he told me that he thought “garner” meant to piss somebody off ha ha, and that his ad had garnered me and my $$. But then he gave me one more idea, for free: to do a top-five list of movies on an unlikely subject. I asked him what kind of subject and he said, well, what are you doing right now?

What I really want to do is make a list of my top five movies where a guy pays some money to somebody and gets rooked by him and then goes over and BEATS THE KAHOOEY OUT OF HIM! if i knew where he lived. He claims he’s the son of the president of Nigeria but that doesn’t make any sense. If he were the son of the president of Nigeria, he could just order a bunch of flunkies to visit my site and pretend to read it and get me off his back.

I could use the IMDB keywords for nose-picking, choose from the 24 titles listed, and be done with it – just wait for the curious readers to descend on me. Or I could choose a subject less outré, like note-biting, cotton-picking, or top five movies about the sons of African presidents who are a-holes and if you’re reading this, don’t answer his fracking ad!!!

Top five movies about annoying royal Africans causing problems in the U.S.:

Coming to America (1988) – The guy who screwed me even sounds like Eddie Murphy in his YouTube ad. What African accent sounds like the Bronx?

E.T. (1982) – He’s not from Africa, but I find the little twerp annoying as hell.

The Naked Jungle (1954) – Army ants vs Charlton Heston in South America. The army ants eat everything, Charlton Heston does that thing with his face that he used to do. The movie is sort of like this guy taking my money, you know what I mean?

Marley & Me (2008) – Oh, Marley. You are such a cute little puppy. I love you. How could they let you grow old and pass away in the movie?!? The sobbing in the theater was heart-wrenching. And yet I know you were just acting and that right now you’re back home. Hopefully your owner will read this to you.

Gone With the Wind (1939) – I only liked the first half.

Don’t make me watch it!

A couple of years ago, my son asked me what my IMDB number was. According to him, I could figure this out by looking at the IMDB Top 250 list and, starting with movie #1, counting the movies on the list that I hadn’t seen yet. When I reached ten unseen movies, I was to check how far I had got in the list. So, beginning with Shawshank and The Godfather, I ran my eyes down the list. Found a movie I hadn’t seen: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), currently #9. Then The Usual Suspects (1995), currently #25 (I had started TUS multiple times, but never finished it. Perhaps if I had realized that Gabriel Byrne was going to become my therapist, I would have done better.)  Sunset Blvd (1950), #30. In no time, I had ten movies that I hadn’t seen, and I was only up to #65 on the list, out of 250. So, my IMDB number: 65. Embarrassing.

If I watched one of the ten I had found, I could then continue down the list to the next unseen movie, which happened to be #73. So I watched The Usual Suspects. Took a little patience, because for whatever reason, the movie did not engage me, but when it was finished, my IMDB number magically jumped from 65 to 73. I looked over the complete list of 250, to see how many movies I would have to watch to ascend to an IMDB number of 250 (that is, nine or less movies unseen on the list, or ten, if the tenth happened to be #250). Ugh. At least 135 unseen movies, all of which I had declined to watch in the past for whatever reasons.

So I began watching those movies and I quickly discovered that I  had never wanted to see most of them for good reason. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). Major downer with Bogart acting like a real skunk. All the Billy Wilder movies. I am not on the Wilder wavelength. Metropolis (1927) and Sunrise (1927). Thank God I watched Metropolis before they found its missing reel in Brazil; that extra viewing time might well have driven me over the edge into madness. Sunrise: contrary to the message of this movie, don’t have an affair and then try to murder your wife, her knowing it while you’re doing it, and then expect her to enjoy a night out on the town with you THE SAME DAY.

What I ended up doing was, taking three movies at a time and watching five or ten minutes of each of them every night, before switching over to something fun. Even five minutes of Sunset Blvd. or Double Indemnity (1944) seemed interminable. Fred MacMurray emoting about how perfect their plan would be, and then they run out with some half-assed scheme and get screwed? Noir, or lazy writing?

Finally, with 35 movies left unseen on the list, I couldn’t take it anymore. I walked away. For maybe a year. But then, I came back, as when I came back to earn those last few merit badges to make Eagle scout. Went back into five-minutes-of-boring-hell mode and reached the point where I only seven left on the list, and each of them partially watched: Scarface (1983), The Lion King (1994), the one about the two kids in firebombed Tokyo, Grave of the Fireflies (1988), and I forget the others. Pooped out again. Also never made Eagle scout. In addition to the merit badges, there were time requirements and probably something I needed to do to prove to BSA that I wasn’t a homosexual communist or a Democrat. In Albany, Georgia, our Boy Scout troop swam nude at the YMCA every week. I should have earned some sort of merit badge for that. Just surviving the dives off the low board was worth something.

By the way, I’m not promoting the IMDB list as anything other than some sort of weird hybrid crowd-pleasing vs Classic Comic Books mutant that no one could ever take seriously, but it’s a list and it’s the list that I was challenged to conjure with.

I am also not calling out the movies that I hated watching as bad movies. Perhaps they’re all great movies. I’m not saying otherwise. Just don’t make me watch them again.

Also, I suffered but I’m glad that I did it. I’m glad that I’ve seen All About Eve (1950). I don’t like Bette Davis. How come it’s not Betty or Bettie? I never liked her. But somebody mentions All About Eve every time I turn around and hah, I’ve seen it.  Ditto Into the Wild (2007). I sat there and watched the guy starve to death and I did it for the sake of art. But I won’t have to watch that other guy cut off his arm, not unless at some point I get the notion of updating myself on the IMDB list and find the arm-cutting-off-movie there.

A fellow cinema-lover, Rissalada, has been participating in an event (The Director’s Cup) that examines and evaluates movie directors – or something. He mentioned to me in passing, in a message, that in the course of his participation, he had had to suffer through quite a few films that he didn’t like, as part of the project. I then asked myself, when do I watch movies that I don’t like, and why? I asked him too,  and he replied with the following:

“Regarding watching movies on a list vs. picking movies you think you would like based on other more reliable factors, that’s an interesting thing to explore. There were times in the directors cup where I was getting pretty sick of watching films I just hated and was thinking about all the movies I was more interested in seeing, this especially occurred near the end when I had become much more familiar with the directors still in it, especially the ones I had not enjoyed. In fact, the winner of the whole cup, Nikos Nikolaidis, is now one of my least favorite directors! But, I love lists and having a format like this that can be used for discussion, so that is what made me commit.”

Another movie-watcher, Michael Troutman, has been working his way through a 1001-movie list. I asked him what kept him going with movies he didn’t like in a comment thread to one of his reviews. For one thing, he doesn’t give up on a film till he gets to The End, because you never know:

“I want to finish it because some films don’t pull together until the end and others don’t suck until the end. The Usual Suspects, for example, is rather unremarkable until you get to the ending. If anyone said they didn’t like the movie I would immediately ask about the ending. If they hadn’t watched the whole thing then I would tell them they don’t know what they are talking about. It’s like trying to comment on a painting having only seen the bottom half.”

Some other thoughts on the subject, from the Filmspotting Forum:

“I usually stay for 2 reasons: one, out of the perverse belief it may get better, two, so I compound the damage the earlier part of the film caused. Heck I even stayed to the end of Enter the Void and I was begging for the film to finish with at least 20 minutes to go. Admittedly I was with other filmspotters at the time, so I did have a reason to stay. Still most films I do find some pleasure in, so it is not often that the stopping watch comes up.”

A number of folks I asked said that they were picky in the first place, and usually found something to like in any movie, so that the issue of suffering through a movie rarely came up.

“Walk away
Fast Forward button
Life’s too short”

“I so rarely walk out that I can count the times on one finger (Hi Shopgirl!)… I usually just catch up on sleep.”

“I used to work in a movie theater and I watched every film that played there.  Sometimes a movie would be terrible, then in the last 15 minutes there would be a small, wonderful moment.  Just a tiny bit of interest.  And while it couldn’t save the film, it made the experience worth while.  It gave me a movie memory to take with me.  For example, Loaded Weapon 1 is, was and always will be a terrible film.  However in the final third there’s a delightful cameo from Bruce Willis that really worked.

“As for a film not being to my liking, I find myself watching and rewatching films from acclaimed directors I don’t enjoy because there must be a reason why they’re cherished.  I’m not going to rail against Terrence Malick, only to have someone point out that I haven’t seen Days of Heaven “which is his best film”.  If I’m going to not like these masters, I’ll have a good reason and strong evidence to support this.  Plus, things can turn around (and I hope they do).  My appreciation of John Wayne has extended to finally enjoying John Ford after 20+ films.  Roger Ebert disliked most every David Lynch film until Mulholland Dr., after which he commented “all is forgiven”.  It’s one of his favorite films of all time, and I think it’s given him a terrific window in which to appreciate Lynch’s unique artistry.”

“If it’s because I’m going through a checklist, then yes… for the sake of being able to say I’ve done that list.  But also because I want to be able to criticize the movie without someone countering with “well you didn’t watch the whole thing so what do you know?”.

“Plus: writing scathing reviews is more fun than writing praising reviews.

“Besides, watching movies you don’t like is a valuable experience.  It helps hone, solidify and articulate exactly what you like and don’t like in movies.

“One of my projects this year is going to be revisiting highly-acclaimed movies that I didn’t like much the first time (The Apartment, The Searchers, The Lady Eve, several others… maybe Gone With the Wind) and see if the years of experience (and maybe less of a chip on my shoulder) have made a difference.”

And now that I’ve thought about it, some part of me wants to go farther than just watching and enjoying; there is a desire in there somewhere to understand movies, be knowledgeable, have a history, a relationship with movies that goes beyond the first date.

It gives me a warm feeling to have seen all those movies, even if it was in snippets. Makes me feel superior to the me that hadn’t done it yet. The pain was worth it. In fact, now, sometimes, I find myself believing that I enjoyed all those movies. They were great! You should see them.

Mon Oncle Antoine (1971)

Filmspotting has a Movie Dictator Club. My Canadian friend Matt the Movie Watcher assigned me Mon Oncle Antoine (1971) a while back . The Criterion version that I watched is immaculate. Set in the 1940s, this naturalistic (till the director starts riffing) film of country life in Quebec is fresh enough to have been made yesterday. The Canadian National Film Board helped with its production; correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that this might have been the first major example of Quebecois film. The NFB has funded quite a few works that feature drama in lesser-known areas of Canada and without it, film in Quebec might never have got off the ground. I grew up in a small rural town in the late 40s and early 50s and instantly related to the setting and characters in this movie. It was filmed in Black Lake City and at the Thetford asbestos mines in Québec.

I can recommend the movie without reservation to anyone interested in a quiet, closely-observed visit to a small town in the country in the 40s, featuring a variety of interesting characters making a hard life seem a little easier that it probably is – especially since the town is dominated by an open-pit asbestos mine that coats everything, including the lungs of the residents, with carcinogenic dust.

Having said that, it strikes me that the director, Claude Jutra, who here adapted a short story for the screen and directed the movie, turned his back on the possibility of making a classic film, ending up with a very good movie instead. I’ve just posted a review elsewhere of “Mother of Mine,” and I had the same thought about the director of that film, Klaus Härö. In both cases, the director seems not to trust the tremendous power of the basic story that he is dealing with and instead tacks on an unnecessary melodramatic narrative that entertains us in the moment but can’t stand up to scrutiny later, relegating both films to the category of rural picaresque. Jutra might well have worked from a checklist here that includes a teenager breathing his last, a journey over unpaved roads with a hard-to-manage coffin (when “As I Lay Dying” was published, this trope should have been moved to the Pantheon and left alone there), a teen’s first look at the adult female rack and I’m not talking about Bambi’s mother here, so forth. A documentary about Jutra is included and it’s as interesting as the film itself. A life of struggle to make movies by a gifted man with money woes. Puts me in mind of Orson Welles.

I also seem to be developing an aversion to characters who stare straight ahead without speaking, leaving us to divine their thoughts and relieving the author of the responsibility of writing intelligent and original dialog for them. Jacques Gagnon, who plays a young man whose final sudden coming of age is compressed into the confines of a day or so, underacts in a way that perhaps mimics the frozen silent wastes of those great northern forests up there, which will probably be filling up with refugee polar bears any day now.

And Bravo! to Olivette Thibault, who gets her ashes hauled here at the age of 57 by a youngish Jutra himself.

Mon Oncle Antoine is filled with interesting characters and interesting moments, entertains in its every frame, and is a gem indeed. Thanks to Matt for choosing it!