Tag: childhood

March 18, 2010 / / Main Slate Archive

BIG FISH

Big Fish – 2003 – dir. Tim Burton

Tim Burton’s Big Fish is an homage to everything that we were, everything that we are, and everything that we will be.  What really bakes your noodle is the reveal that it’s all happening, every moment, all at once.

Based on the novel by mythology enthusiast Daniel Wallace (watch for a cameo of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces on Ed Bloom’s nightstand), Big Fish is a tale about everything big in our lives: the worlds of our childhood, the worlds of being in love, and the worlds of responsibility, maturity, death, and beyond.

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October 26, 2009 / / Main Slate Archive

MYSTIC RIVER

By Paula Delaney

Mystic River – 2003 – dir. Clint Eastwood

Director Clint Eastwood weaves a tangled web in this movie that provides excellent cinematography, particularly with shots of Boston. The movie contains a number of parallels, beginning with the scene of three young boys in South Boston playing in the street, when one of them gets abducted by two men.  A parallel scene occurs toward the end of the movie, when the abducted boy, Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins) is now a man and again falls prey to another type of abduction.  This time he innocently joins the Savage Brothers (gang type characters) who take him to a bar where his once childhood friend, Jimmy (Sean Penn), accuses him of killing his daughter.  There is a shot of an older but just as fragile Dave looking out the rear window of the car as it speeds away, similar to the earlier shot when he was abducted as a child.

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January 29, 2009 / / Film Notes

MOMMA’S MAN: There’s No Place Like Home

By Rachel Thibault

Momma’s Man – 2008 – dir. Azazel Jacobs

Momma’s Man (Jacobs, 2008) is such an informal, simple title for a film that is anything but. It’s both modest and unassuming in both scope and visual style, but moves beyond the stereotype its title suggests. The film is a moving, complex ode to how we negotiate, define, and attempt to return to that place we call home.

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