Brink Lindsey has an extremely interesting blog entry up about the really deep conceptual learning that seeing E.T. invoked in one of his kids.

Pretending was something he understood, and so the whole idea of a "real" movie with "real" people that still wasn't really "real" (i.e., the events in the movie didn't really happen) started to make some sense to him. But he was totally blown by the skill with which the child actors pretended. "How did they learn to pretend to cry and be happy and sad?" he asked me. I didn't have any good answer