【推荐1】American Jason Stark’s two young sons talked excitedly for months about seeing the The Super Mario Bros. Movie. When the film opened this month, Star k decided to make a special event of taking his boys to the show.

Star k took a day off from work and drove his boys, ages 9 and 6, about a half-hour from their Connecticut home. They went to watch the movie at an AMC theater with a large special screen called an IMAX.

“We got lunch, we went to the movies and had a fun day together,” said Stark. “They loved it. They were amazed by how big (the screen) was.”

Filmmakers and theater business leaders say movie watchers are seeking such new, interesting experiences. American and Canadian ticket sales of traditional movies this year are 16 percent below 2019. However, people have attended movies in large numbers for films and showings that use special effects, including Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water.

Theaters are employing technology to create improved experiences. Changes include larger screens, special sound systems, seats that move in connect ion with action in a film and other environmental effects.

Market researcher Comscore visualizes these special shows will make up 16.7 percent of U. S. movie ticket sales. The company says that number was 9.2 percent in 2019.

Theater companies continue to build large, special viewing screens known as premium format (高级格式). The total number of premium format screens in North America reached 1,940 in 2022, says Omdia, another research company. It says the new number represents an increase of 4.4 percent over the year before.

The average ticket price to see a movie in the U. S. is around $11. Premium screenings usually cost five to seven dollars more.

B&B Theatres operates 531 screens in 14 states and offers large format screens as well as heated chairs that can be raised and lowered, immersive (亲临其境) audio and seats timed to move with a movie’s action.

【推荐2】Four movies to be shown in 2020

Sonic the Hedgehog follows the adventures of Sonic and his best friend Tom Wachowski. Sonic and Tom try to stop Dr. Robotnik from stealing Sonic’s great powers to control the world. The movie stars Tika Sumpter and Ben Schwartz as the voice of Sonic.

Following 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and 1991’s Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, the new movie will center on Bill and Ted who are now middle-aged men. Bill and Ted set out on a new adventure, when a visitor from the future warns them that only their song can save life and bring peace to the world.

The Emperor of China issues an order that one man from each family must serve in the Imperial Army to protect the country from Northern invaders (侵略者). Hua Mulan is the eldest daughter of an honored fighter. She pretends to be a man and takes the place of her sick father. It is a journey that will change her into an honored fighter and earn her the nation’s respect.

Fletcher Carson joins the war in Vietnam. Lost and lonely, he plans to die in the war. But after he found a dog named Lab by mistake, Fletcher unexpectedly begins to regain his will to live. When the war ends, Fletcher is forced to give up his dog. But how do you leave your best friend behind? So together they start an adventure against all unfair things to fight for survival.

【推荐3】We live in a town with three beaches. There are two parts less than 10 minutes’ walk from home where neighborhood children gather to play. However, what my children want to do after school is pick up a screen — any screen — and stare at it for hours. They are not alone. Today’s children spend an average of four and a half hours a day looking at screens, split between watching television and using the Internet.

In the past few years, an increasing number of people and organisations have begun coming up with plans to counter this trend. A couple of years ago film-maker David Bond realised that his children, then aged five and three, were attached to screens to the point where he was able to say “chocolate” into his three-year-old son’s ear without getting a response. He realised that something needed to change, and, being a London media type, appointed himself “marketing director from Nature”. He documented his journey as he set about treating nature as a brand to be marketed to young people. The result was Project Wild Thing, a film which charts the birth of the World Network, a group of organisations with the common goal of getting children out into nature.

“Just five more minutes outdoors can make a difference,” David Bond says. “There is a lot of really interesting evidence which seems to be suggesting that if children are inspired up to the age of seven, then being outdoors will be on habit for life.” His own children have got into the habit of playing outside now: “We just send them out into the garden and tell them not to come back in for a while.”

Summer is upon us. There is an amazing world out there, and it needs our children as much as they need it. Let us get them out and let them play.

【推荐1】On September 26th, 2022, American ski mountaineer Hilaree Nelson and her partner Jim Morrison reached the summit (顶峰) of 26,781-foot Manaslu. Soon after Nelson began going down on skis, she encountered a small snowslide and was swept away. Two days later, Morrison found her body.

Nelson, a National Geographic Explorer, had a distinctive sense of wanderlust (旅游癖) that pushed her through more than 40 expeditions (探险) to 16 countries. In 2012, she became the first woman to summit two 8,000-meter peaks, Mount Everest and Lhotse, in a single 24-hour push. Six years later, Nelson returned to Lhotse to become the first to ski from its summit. In 2017, Nelson and Morrison started another first, of sorts—their first mountain expedition together, as a couple. They succeeded in climbing and skiing a 21,165-foot peak in India known as Papsura.

It was another expedition, to Hkakabo Razi, an isolated peak in Myanmar, that helped push Nelson to reevaluate her potential. “We would only walk 7 to 10 miles a day, instead of 15 miles, so we could camp in each village and visit with people, doing knowledge-sharing sessions,” Taylor Rees recalls, a filmmaker who cooperated with Nelson. “Hilaree stuck with her vision, in that she wanted to do this expedition in a different way and see the entire country from bottom to top.” The National Geographic Society pushed Nelson and her team to the limits of endurance, but they ultimately failed to reach the summit.

Although the media wrote it as a failure, Nelson seemed to come away from the experience more driven than ever to succeed as a Himalayan climber and expedition leader.

“Hilaree paved the way for women in the adventure sports space with her refusal to choose between motherhood and her athletic career. She showed us that we could be everything—follow our passions as well as raise a family,” says Emily Harrington, a climber who joined her on the Hkakabo Razi expedition.

【推荐2】All the Beauty in the World, Patrick Bringley’s memoir (回忆录) about his 10 years working as a guard at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), brings new meaning to the term “art appreciation”. During 8-12 hour shifts spent among the galleries, he takes advantage of the gift of time to study the masterpieces he’s been hired to protect and to think about the role of art throughout history.

Bringley is not the only Met staffer to write about the institution. But Bringley’s “guard’s-eye view” is unique, and he presents his personal story with sincerity. After his brother Tom’s death from cancer in 2008, Bringley gave up his job as a journalist for a job in which “I was happy to be going nowhere”. He explains, “I had lost someone. I did not wish to move on from that. In a sense, I didn’t wish to move at all.” Bringley doesn’t say when he decided to channel his experience of finding peace into art, but this story about jumping off the career ladder in order to find the space for quiet reflection is surprisingly suited to our times.

All the Beauty in the World offers well-chosen facts about the museum to support Bringley’s personal tale. As interesting as these facts are, it’s Bringley’s reflections on dozens of individual paintings, photographs, sculptures and ancient artifacts that turn this book into a tribute (致敬) to the power of art. Discussing Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs of his wife, he writes, “I think that sometimes we need permission to stop and adore things, and a work of art gives us that.” In a Vermeer port rait of a dozing maidservant, he is moved to see that the artist caught “that feeling we sometimes have that a private setting possesses a holiness (神圣) of its own. It was my constant feeling in Tom’s hospital room”.

As rich in moving insights as the Met is in treasures, All the Beauty in the World reminds us of the importance of learning not about art, but from it. This is art appreciation at a high level.