2 Poignant Period Pics About Parents and Kids

This past weekend, on two different nights, at two different movie houses in two different cities, I went to two movies. Did I see the new Venom flick? Well, it's a sequel to a movie I didn't care to see, so what do you think? No. Did I see Smile 2? Well, it's a sequel to a movie I didn't care to see, so what do you think? No. I also could have seen Heretic, or Here, or I kid you not, Hitpig. Of these three, would you believe the one I was most interested in seeing was Hitpig? But I didn't see that, either. Instead, I saw The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and Lost on a Mountain in Maine. And I went away more than satisfied.

In the first instance, it was a touching, family-friendly laugh-fest based on a book that my fourth grade teacher read to the class. I mentioned this to the guy who sold me the ticket, and he said he read the book every year of his teaching career to his sixth grade class. Assuming our cases aren't just a freak coincidence, that might be a sign that there are a lot of people who have fond memories of this story from sometime in the last 40 years or so. And now, I hope, a lot of people will enjoy memories of this movie, with its touching message that the story of Jesus' birth is for everyone, including a certain family of rambunctious redheads from the wrong side of the tracks.

It's a rare Christmas movie that acknowledges that the birth of Jesus is what Christmas is about. It shows the life-changing power of the message of Jesus. It features a character explaining what the word "Emmanuel" means. It features the lowest and least coming, uninvited, to the party and making it the best party ever, because you see what the story of Luke 2 means in their tear-streaked faces. It featured characters admitting they were wrong and growing as people. It features a character looking straight into the camera and saying, "Unto you a child is born!" And it made me laugh. And it made me cry, a little.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is directed by Dallas Jenkins, the force behind The Chosen. The book on which it is based was by Barbara Robinson and is as old as I am, 1972. The cast is headlined by Judy Greer and comedian Pete Holmes, with Lauren Graham of The Gilmore Girls as the narrator and (at the end of the movie) grown-up version of the hero girl, and a bunch of kids who do very well in their roles despite being completely unknown until now. Maybe this movie will change that, for some of them.

Three Scenes That Made It For Me: (1) Beth (the hero girl) takes the horrible Herdman kids to the school library, where they discover discovery – not to mention everything they wanted to know (almost) about the Christmas story. (2) Beth discovers that she wants Imogene Herdman to play the Virgin Mary after all, and bicycles across town to tell her so. (3) Yes, of course, the climactic moment when everybody realizes that the one with the Herdmans really is The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.

In the second instance, I took a chance on a movie that I had never heard of until I started looking at what was playing at the two-towns-over cineplex. I looked at a trailer for it and that was all I knew going in. Truly, I spent the drive there debating in my mind between this movie and Hitpig, which at least has a good title. I still think "Lost on a Mountain in Maine" is still rather on-the-nose. But belly to the box office bar, I bought a ticket to it and when I say both movies made me cry, please understand that I squeezed out a tear for the Christmas pageant but this one made me sob.

Produced by (among others) Sylvester Stallone, the movie is about a fighter – a 12-year-old fighter named Donn who becomes separated from his family during a hike up Maine's Mount Katahdin. It's a true story; it actually happened in 1939. But you might not know how it turned out, because it was that long ago, so whether the kid's going to be found alive as he remains lost for day after agonizing day remains in suspense until the very end. It's a brutal ordeal for everyone involved, and the cast – again, featuring some little-known actors – gets credit in my book for seeing their characters through hell, especially the hero boy, his parents and his twin brother. If their work gets noticed, maybe names like Caitlin FitzGerald, Paul Sparks and Luke David Blumm will be better known by this time next year or so.

Three Things That Made It For Me: (1) There are a couple of fourth-wall breaking moments where Donn and one of his parents both gaze into the lens and somehow seem to make eye contact despite being separated by miles. One one occasion, the dad becomes so convinced he hears his son calling to him that he runs out into the woods and gets injured. On another occasion, it's what the son hallucinates hearing his father tell him that finally decides his fate. (2) The scene in which Donn, resting on the forest floor, comforts himself in the embrace of the terrifying, Native American god his trail guide told him about at the campfire the night before he got lost. The secrets he confesses to the winged, antlered monster are deeply touching. (3) The mom's confession that when her husband called her with the news that he lost their boy – without saying which of their three sons was lost – she hoped it was Donn, because he had a will to survive. Or as one of his friends reminisced in some archival footage cut into the film, Donn was a livewire.

In some ways, he's the ideal type of character to endure a survival ordeal like this. But it's still terrible to see him go through it and, bringing the tension to a hum, even the latter-day archival footage doesn't reveal the ending before its time. Do you think you can endure it? You'd better, in honor of this movie's young hero.