Three movies, all nostalgic.

For the past few months, my nephew Jordan has been after me and my father to do a podcast of three generations of critics talking about film. Yesterday, the day after Christmas, we finally made it happen in the basement of Jordan's parents home in south Minneapolis.

It wasn't bad. The doing, that is. I have no idea about the listening, but you can listen to it here.

After several rounds of negotiations (mostly with my father, the holdout), we finally landed on discussing three movies that each of us liked as children. They are:

• “The Four Feathers” (1939) for my father, born in 1932
• “Star Wars” (1977) for me, born in 1963
• “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (2009) for Jordan, born in 2001.

Yes, it's all a bit arbitrary, but it's interesting culling meaning out of it.

Each movie, for example, is nostalgic in nature. “The Four Feathers” was released on August 3, 1939, exactly a month before Britain declared war on Germany and entered World War II, but it relies upon the Kiplingesque trappings of British empire and honor. It's based on a 1902 novel and set mostly during the 1890s. It celebrates what's gone. So does “Star Wars,” released a few years after Watergate and a few years before the Iran hostage crisis, and during a period when Hollywood movies tended to be downers. But from the opening crawl to the triumphant end—not to mention the clear demarcation between good and evil—it's essentially a movie serial of the '30s and '40s sped up, and with A-production values. “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” too, is based upon a book that was published 40 years before the movie was released. We keep looking back to create the now.

Both “Feathers” and “Star Wars” contain extensive scenes in the desert. One big difference between the two: we root for the empire (British) in “Feathers” and against the Empire (Evil) in “Star Wars.”

“Feathers” seems to be the most adult but it's really about reclaiming individual honor and dignity against a backdrop of war; its story is individualistic in nature. The point of both “Star Wars” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is that there's something bigger than the individual, whether the hero finds that something within (the Force) or without (the team of wild animals relying on their natures to defeat the bad guys).

Finally, “Four Feathers” indicates why these subsequent movies tended toward fantasy. If you base your story on history, as “Feathers” did, and include period attitudes toward swaths of people that actually exist (“Fuzzie Wuzzies”), it might feel a bit awkward as the moral arc of the universe bends a little bit more in its journey.