Harp contestant Coline-Marie Orliac, courtesy PBS
HARP DREAMS
Friendly Rating: Patient adults, though musical young ones could enjoy it.
Safety Rating: Very safe.
Quality Rating: Squirmies aside, hard to turn off.
Film premieres tonight on PBS, check your local listings for times.
Watching Harp Dreams is a lot like eating your vegetables and realizing that maybe asparagus isn’t quite so icky after all.
The film is a look at the U.S. International Harp Competition – basically a contest drawing over 30 of the world’s best young harp players from around the world to Bloomington, Indiana, to see who plays the harp the best. The cool thing is that you get to see a harp being made and find out why this behemoth of an instrument is also one of the toughest around to play.
The biggest problem? Well, it’s not the fastest moving flick on the planet and harps are…. Well, not your average, everyday kind of thing. But it’s also the kind of aspirational thing that might just fire some middle-schooler’s imagination. After all, if you’re going to do something different and all your friends play piano or guitar, harp might just be the thing.
And if it gets an otherwise bored kid interested in something besides video games, who knows?
See, that’s kind of the problem with movies like this – getting the kid to watch them. It’s like the whole eating vegetables thing. There are many veggies that taste good, but getting a kid to even try them, let alone appreciate them is a major struggle. Here’s a reasonably interesting film – I did get squirmy, but couldn’t turn it off, either, because so many of the profiles of the different contestants were so interesting – but tell my kid that she’s going to watch a movie about a harp competition? I can see her eyes rolling like the reels on a slot machine. Funny thing is, if she saw it, she’d probably like it.
So, here’s the strategy. You take over the family TV for the night. You watch the movie and wait for the kids to wander in and get captivated on their own. Of course, that means there are no TVs in their rooms. Or internet connections. I can’t promise this will work. There are, alas, way too many other options for entertainment besides watching TV. But it might.
What’s your favorite way to encourage your kids to watch something they might like, if you could only get them to try it? Share with us in the comments section.
