How did I miss this?
Jan. 21st, 2011 12:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kukla_tkoFinally saw "Neverwas" tonight. I had it on DVD and it was one of those "I'll get around to it" movies. I vaguely remember when it came out, and that it got terrible reviews.
And now I see why. It is not a very American Hollywood-style picture.
It is NOT a story about a boy who discovers a fantasy world. It is NOT a story about wizards, magic, or faeries.
No, it's really sort of a movie that is about the guy who wrote about a fantasy land with wizards, magic and faeries.
Or, rather, his son. The boy has grown up to be a very nice man who struggles to understand his father's illness and death.
The cast is exceptional, the script is handled very well, the acting is superb, and the story is amazing. I could hardly breathe for the tears at the end.
But I suspect that most of America HATED it. Most of America would not get the point of the story. Most of America would watch this, be confused by the promos for it, and get angry about the fact that it is not high fantasy of any kind.
Kind of like Bridge to Terrebithia (sp?), it is not the kind of story that is satisfying to a standard American moviegoing audience.
I strongly encourage my fannish friends to see this film. I would dearly like to discuss it with my fellow dreamers, and so I'll cheerfully loan it to whomever wishes to borrow it.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
allura629, I don't think it is your kind of movie, but you might like it after all. bradhicks, I cannot predict whether you would enjoy it, but I'm interested in your take on it.
If you have seen it, or have no intention of seeing it (and therefore don't mind spoilers) give a peek behind the cut and see what I think.
There is a trope that is used in fiction, particularly what they're calling Young Adult fiction these days, that goes far back into written history and oral tradition.
Alice in Wonderland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and even Peter Pan are some more modern examples, but Russian folklore and other European tales often center around a young person (usually a young girl, but not always) who finds her way into a magical world through some interesting or mundane portal.
Some experts will tell you that the young-girl-discovers-a-magical-kingdom story is a metaphor for puberty, of a girl becoming a woman.
Except that usually the "Girl" in question is not 10 or 12 or 13. She's usually five, or six, or maybe seven years old.
I digress.
I think that the reason that we have so many stories of six (or so) year old girls finding mysterious, magical lands is that at that age, your imagination runs wild, your intellect is starting to assert itself, and any girl who has heard any fairy tales is going to be interested in finding the magic that seems to elude her around every corner. Our inner six-year-old is delighted with the idea of a child finding the way to the magic.
As a child, all the way back to being a toddler, I had imaginary friends and I created my own magical lands. Something with elements from Star Wars, Oz, the mysterious Fairy Tale Kingdoms, and of course, magic. I remember my Imaginary Friend, but it was my father who recently reminded me that there were originally three friends, all named from the nonsense chorus of my favorite song.
I remembered Doo-Dah. I'd forgotten Zippity, and Eh.
I want to be clear: I did not mistake my imagination for reality. I knew that while I enjoyed my escapes and adventures, they weren't real. I didn't really have a lightsaber, my bed didn't travel through space and time, and when I shared ideas with Doo Dah, she was really just a figment of my imagination, not a real person. I knew that when I was called down for supper that I had to put all that aside and be a little girl eating dinner with her parents.
As a child I tirelessly looked for the Magic. I wanted there to be magic in the world. I believed in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and the like. I wanted there to be fairies in the woods, leprechauns in the trees, and wishes coming true. I wanted those things to be real because my actual life kind of sucked. At three, I had a new baby brother, so my world changed dramatically when my playmate and friend had someone else to look after and be Mommy for. At four, I started school and discovered that despite my love of learning, School was a personal nightmare for me, with the teachers humiliating me and the children harassing me every day. By the time I was six, I had discovered my love of theater, but also learned that auditions were scary and intimidating, so I had no outlet but school plays. By the time I was eight, I learned the "Secret" of Santa Claus, gained a new baby brother (again) began counseling for my severe neurosis (it's now called "School Anxiety") but my third grade teacher was a spectacular failure as a teacher and caused me more harm than good.
I wanted magic, I needed something to believe in. I had religion (after all I went to a Catholic school up to this point) but my attempts to understand my religion were sometimes misunderstood or discouraged.
Not every child has it this rough. Not every child has it this good. I'm a random sample, but I wanted very badly to be that girl who finds her way to a magical land.
Creating an imaginary world is one of the ways humans escape from their problems and their lives, when things get awful. Children do it easily and slip back and forth between imagination and reality very well. When adults do it, it's often seen as delusion. Mental illness.
The movie is, at least partly, about mental illness. What it is, how it is handled, how institutions sometimes fail their patients. I know a thing or two about it; I mentioned my own issues above. My family has a history of mental illness, as well. I have a few friends who are Two Crazy To Work (hi there!) and a few others who have spent some quality time in the hospital and/or are on medication for mental illnesses.
There's an honesty to this film that I appreciated. The young, successful psychiatrist who goes back to the institution that failed his father to set the place right; he rings very true. Many people go into this field in order to better understand their own demons, and this guy has some doozies.
After all, he's the son of a famous author, one who put his own son in his book as a main character. Our Hero is trying so hard to escape the fame and attention that he's changed his last name so as not to be associated with either the book or his late father.
While at the institution, he finds a man who was a friend of his father's. A man who seems obsessed with him and gives him a very sort-of "Tarrant the Mad Hatter" speech. He doesn't quite say, "You were much muchier. You've lost your muchness!" but he alludes to the same thing. This patient is completely obsessed with the mythology of his father's book, Neverwas, and Our Hero misses it on the first bounce because he hasn't read it, or rather has blocked all memory of the book from his mind.
And he runs into an old childhood friend, or rather the younger sister of a childhood friend. She's a huge fan of the book, like I am of the Oz books or the works of Peter Beagle. She shows him the two prizes of her collection: A signed copy of the book and a licensed lunch box that she carries as a purse. She pushes the book onto him and he reads it, now understanding the nonsense being spouted by his patient.
And, if this were a classic Hollywood story, we would either discover that Nevermore is real, a magical kingdom just outside this one, and Our Hero would be led there by the girl who loves the story so much that she figures out a way to find it. Or perhaps the mental patient would lead them there. And they'd have some special adventure in Nevermore that teaches Our Hero the things he needs to know about his father, to get closure and move on, either becoming a king of Nevermore, or becoming the world's greatest psychiatrist.
Or, perhaps, we would discover that Nevermore only exists in the mind of the mental patient, and Our Hero would indulge the old man and keep him happy that way, becoming the World's Greatest Psychiatrist because he feeds the delusions of his patients and plays in their worlds, as he's now learned to do.
Instead...
Well, we kind of get both. And neither. You see, as it turns out, the old man is not just some nut obsessed with the book Nevermore; he's the idea machine behind it. The man who wrote the world's most beloved modern fairy tale didn't make up Neverwas. He learned about it from his friend, who lived there as the king. Is his friend delusional? Oh, yes. He's very Quixotic, he sees the world his own way. But... he's also not non-functional. He's not dangerous (although there are some moments where he appears to be so.) It turns out that he took a patch of land, and created a kingdom where he could be happy. He built a castle out of found materials, created a king's wardrobe for himself (also out of found materials, it seems) and lived happily and peacefully in the world of his own creation. He befriended a talented writer who suffered from mental instability, and the two shared the world for a little while. The author loved the world that his friend created so much that he not only wrote it all down to share with all humankind, he placed his only child in that beautiful world as its savior.
And weirdly, the story he wrote actually unfolds metaphorically right in front of us. The old man (the King of Neverwas) reads the book, and after an initial meltdown understands that it is an oracle.
And he's not wrong.
You see, why was a perfectly happy and functional (if mildly delusional and eccentric) old man stuck in a mental institution?
Because he had dismantled the bulldozers that had come to destroy his world. Turns out that he didn't own the land that was his kingdom.
And the boy (as a grown man) as in the story, rescued the king from captivity, won the kingdom back from its oppressors, and returned it to its rightful King.
How? Well, they don't say, specifically. They don't spoon-feed you the ending at all. The trail of breadcrumbs I followed included a throw-away reference to the fact that the author's son never touched any of the royalties from the books, and that he made some kind of "arrangement" with his lawyer that prevented the police from evicting the weird old man from his weird old castle.
I know what he did. He took the money made from the story, and used it to purchase the land from the developers and give it to the person whose intellectual property earned the money in the first place.
Oh, and that fangirl friend from his past? She's a writer, too. She helps him find the real-world landmarks of the Kingdom of Neverwas. How much do you want to bet that she can get permission to write additional stories in the world of Neverwas, by talking to its King?
But the part that got me, right through the chest, is this:
Our Hero learned something that I learned a long time ago.
You don't have to find a magical kingdom with fairies and wizards, if you figure out how to find the magic in the real world. The end of the film shows him bringing magic and beauty and wonder to his patients at the clinic. There is magic in the world, but it isn't a Hollywood special effect. It isn't in a wand, or a crystal, or a spellbook, true. I have experienced magic, and I have shared magic with other people.
I saw the old man's castle, near the end of the movie, and I just wept. "Oh, God, it's beautiful," I gasped. I'm misting up right now, just typing about it. My S.O. said, "Huh. Kind of like the stuff we see at Lothlorien." Yep, a little. And that's a place that is just running over with magic. Junk does not mean magic, but you can make magic with anything, including junk. I'm easily overwhelmed when I see someone create something beautiful and amazing with found objects or discarded trash. (Why do you think I love the City Museum so much?) But I could see the castle for what it was in reality, as well as what it was to the King of Neverwas.
It's a complex film, as well as a beautiful one. Sir Ian McKellen plays the old man, the King of Nevermore. Aaron Eckheart plays Our Hero Zack. Brittany Murphy plays the writer who grew up with him. William Hurt plays the man in charge of the Clinic. Nick Nolte (in flashbacks) plays Zack's father, the tortured author. (And you know it doesn't go well for you if Nick Nolte is your dad. Grin.) Everyone is AMAZING in this piece, and if you like any of those actors, see it.
Just be aware that the magic is the real magic in the real world, not a High Fantasy Epic.
And now I see why. It is not a very American Hollywood-style picture.
It is NOT a story about a boy who discovers a fantasy world. It is NOT a story about wizards, magic, or faeries.
No, it's really sort of a movie that is about the guy who wrote about a fantasy land with wizards, magic and faeries.
Or, rather, his son. The boy has grown up to be a very nice man who struggles to understand his father's illness and death.
The cast is exceptional, the script is handled very well, the acting is superb, and the story is amazing. I could hardly breathe for the tears at the end.
But I suspect that most of America HATED it. Most of America would not get the point of the story. Most of America would watch this, be confused by the promos for it, and get angry about the fact that it is not high fantasy of any kind.
Kind of like Bridge to Terrebithia (sp?), it is not the kind of story that is satisfying to a standard American moviegoing audience.
I strongly encourage my fannish friends to see this film. I would dearly like to discuss it with my fellow dreamers, and so I'll cheerfully loan it to whomever wishes to borrow it.
allura629, I don't think it is your kind of movie, but you might like it after all. bradhicks, I cannot predict whether you would enjoy it, but I'm interested in your take on it.If you have seen it, or have no intention of seeing it (and therefore don't mind spoilers) give a peek behind the cut and see what I think.
There is a trope that is used in fiction, particularly what they're calling Young Adult fiction these days, that goes far back into written history and oral tradition.
Alice in Wonderland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and even Peter Pan are some more modern examples, but Russian folklore and other European tales often center around a young person (usually a young girl, but not always) who finds her way into a magical world through some interesting or mundane portal.
Some experts will tell you that the young-girl-discovers-a-magical-kingdom story is a metaphor for puberty, of a girl becoming a woman.
Except that usually the "Girl" in question is not 10 or 12 or 13. She's usually five, or six, or maybe seven years old.
I digress.
I think that the reason that we have so many stories of six (or so) year old girls finding mysterious, magical lands is that at that age, your imagination runs wild, your intellect is starting to assert itself, and any girl who has heard any fairy tales is going to be interested in finding the magic that seems to elude her around every corner. Our inner six-year-old is delighted with the idea of a child finding the way to the magic.
As a child, all the way back to being a toddler, I had imaginary friends and I created my own magical lands. Something with elements from Star Wars, Oz, the mysterious Fairy Tale Kingdoms, and of course, magic. I remember my Imaginary Friend, but it was my father who recently reminded me that there were originally three friends, all named from the nonsense chorus of my favorite song.
I remembered Doo-Dah. I'd forgotten Zippity, and Eh.
I want to be clear: I did not mistake my imagination for reality. I knew that while I enjoyed my escapes and adventures, they weren't real. I didn't really have a lightsaber, my bed didn't travel through space and time, and when I shared ideas with Doo Dah, she was really just a figment of my imagination, not a real person. I knew that when I was called down for supper that I had to put all that aside and be a little girl eating dinner with her parents.
As a child I tirelessly looked for the Magic. I wanted there to be magic in the world. I believed in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and the like. I wanted there to be fairies in the woods, leprechauns in the trees, and wishes coming true. I wanted those things to be real because my actual life kind of sucked. At three, I had a new baby brother, so my world changed dramatically when my playmate and friend had someone else to look after and be Mommy for. At four, I started school and discovered that despite my love of learning, School was a personal nightmare for me, with the teachers humiliating me and the children harassing me every day. By the time I was six, I had discovered my love of theater, but also learned that auditions were scary and intimidating, so I had no outlet but school plays. By the time I was eight, I learned the "Secret" of Santa Claus, gained a new baby brother (again) began counseling for my severe neurosis (it's now called "School Anxiety") but my third grade teacher was a spectacular failure as a teacher and caused me more harm than good.
I wanted magic, I needed something to believe in. I had religion (after all I went to a Catholic school up to this point) but my attempts to understand my religion were sometimes misunderstood or discouraged.
Not every child has it this rough. Not every child has it this good. I'm a random sample, but I wanted very badly to be that girl who finds her way to a magical land.
Creating an imaginary world is one of the ways humans escape from their problems and their lives, when things get awful. Children do it easily and slip back and forth between imagination and reality very well. When adults do it, it's often seen as delusion. Mental illness.
The movie is, at least partly, about mental illness. What it is, how it is handled, how institutions sometimes fail their patients. I know a thing or two about it; I mentioned my own issues above. My family has a history of mental illness, as well. I have a few friends who are Two Crazy To Work (hi there!) and a few others who have spent some quality time in the hospital and/or are on medication for mental illnesses.
There's an honesty to this film that I appreciated. The young, successful psychiatrist who goes back to the institution that failed his father to set the place right; he rings very true. Many people go into this field in order to better understand their own demons, and this guy has some doozies.
After all, he's the son of a famous author, one who put his own son in his book as a main character. Our Hero is trying so hard to escape the fame and attention that he's changed his last name so as not to be associated with either the book or his late father.
While at the institution, he finds a man who was a friend of his father's. A man who seems obsessed with him and gives him a very sort-of "Tarrant the Mad Hatter" speech. He doesn't quite say, "You were much muchier. You've lost your muchness!" but he alludes to the same thing. This patient is completely obsessed with the mythology of his father's book, Neverwas, and Our Hero misses it on the first bounce because he hasn't read it, or rather has blocked all memory of the book from his mind.
And he runs into an old childhood friend, or rather the younger sister of a childhood friend. She's a huge fan of the book, like I am of the Oz books or the works of Peter Beagle. She shows him the two prizes of her collection: A signed copy of the book and a licensed lunch box that she carries as a purse. She pushes the book onto him and he reads it, now understanding the nonsense being spouted by his patient.
And, if this were a classic Hollywood story, we would either discover that Nevermore is real, a magical kingdom just outside this one, and Our Hero would be led there by the girl who loves the story so much that she figures out a way to find it. Or perhaps the mental patient would lead them there. And they'd have some special adventure in Nevermore that teaches Our Hero the things he needs to know about his father, to get closure and move on, either becoming a king of Nevermore, or becoming the world's greatest psychiatrist.
Or, perhaps, we would discover that Nevermore only exists in the mind of the mental patient, and Our Hero would indulge the old man and keep him happy that way, becoming the World's Greatest Psychiatrist because he feeds the delusions of his patients and plays in their worlds, as he's now learned to do.
Instead...
Well, we kind of get both. And neither. You see, as it turns out, the old man is not just some nut obsessed with the book Nevermore; he's the idea machine behind it. The man who wrote the world's most beloved modern fairy tale didn't make up Neverwas. He learned about it from his friend, who lived there as the king. Is his friend delusional? Oh, yes. He's very Quixotic, he sees the world his own way. But... he's also not non-functional. He's not dangerous (although there are some moments where he appears to be so.) It turns out that he took a patch of land, and created a kingdom where he could be happy. He built a castle out of found materials, created a king's wardrobe for himself (also out of found materials, it seems) and lived happily and peacefully in the world of his own creation. He befriended a talented writer who suffered from mental instability, and the two shared the world for a little while. The author loved the world that his friend created so much that he not only wrote it all down to share with all humankind, he placed his only child in that beautiful world as its savior.
And weirdly, the story he wrote actually unfolds metaphorically right in front of us. The old man (the King of Neverwas) reads the book, and after an initial meltdown understands that it is an oracle.
And he's not wrong.
You see, why was a perfectly happy and functional (if mildly delusional and eccentric) old man stuck in a mental institution?
Because he had dismantled the bulldozers that had come to destroy his world. Turns out that he didn't own the land that was his kingdom.
And the boy (as a grown man) as in the story, rescued the king from captivity, won the kingdom back from its oppressors, and returned it to its rightful King.
How? Well, they don't say, specifically. They don't spoon-feed you the ending at all. The trail of breadcrumbs I followed included a throw-away reference to the fact that the author's son never touched any of the royalties from the books, and that he made some kind of "arrangement" with his lawyer that prevented the police from evicting the weird old man from his weird old castle.
I know what he did. He took the money made from the story, and used it to purchase the land from the developers and give it to the person whose intellectual property earned the money in the first place.
Oh, and that fangirl friend from his past? She's a writer, too. She helps him find the real-world landmarks of the Kingdom of Neverwas. How much do you want to bet that she can get permission to write additional stories in the world of Neverwas, by talking to its King?
But the part that got me, right through the chest, is this:
Our Hero learned something that I learned a long time ago.
You don't have to find a magical kingdom with fairies and wizards, if you figure out how to find the magic in the real world. The end of the film shows him bringing magic and beauty and wonder to his patients at the clinic. There is magic in the world, but it isn't a Hollywood special effect. It isn't in a wand, or a crystal, or a spellbook, true. I have experienced magic, and I have shared magic with other people.
I saw the old man's castle, near the end of the movie, and I just wept. "Oh, God, it's beautiful," I gasped. I'm misting up right now, just typing about it. My S.O. said, "Huh. Kind of like the stuff we see at Lothlorien." Yep, a little. And that's a place that is just running over with magic. Junk does not mean magic, but you can make magic with anything, including junk. I'm easily overwhelmed when I see someone create something beautiful and amazing with found objects or discarded trash. (Why do you think I love the City Museum so much?) But I could see the castle for what it was in reality, as well as what it was to the King of Neverwas.
It's a complex film, as well as a beautiful one. Sir Ian McKellen plays the old man, the King of Nevermore. Aaron Eckheart plays Our Hero Zack. Brittany Murphy plays the writer who grew up with him. William Hurt plays the man in charge of the Clinic. Nick Nolte (in flashbacks) plays Zack's father, the tortured author. (And you know it doesn't go well for you if Nick Nolte is your dad. Grin.) Everyone is AMAZING in this piece, and if you like any of those actors, see it.
Just be aware that the magic is the real magic in the real world, not a High Fantasy Epic.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-01-21 06:49 pm (UTC)But speaking of Big Fish something has been disturbing me since it first came out... I saw a movie on TV with almost the same plot like a year before it. I can not find any record of this made for TV movie and I know the Big Budget Tim Burtin was authorized from the book... so what did I see... an unauthorized, another book or script had the same plot that influenced Big Fish's author... I know no story is new but still it has bothered me since the previews.
I do not think I am psychic and simply had a dream of the movie before they finished filming it. So does ANYONE know what movie I am talking about?
no subject
Date: 2011-01-21 07:29 pm (UTC)I see our real hero as Sir Ian McKellen as he is the hermit artist who teaches the world a lesson about magic. A man's home is his castle... well what if you make a castle as your home? What if you see the dance of light differently then others and it makes fairies for you? Is that crazy? Or is that just beautiful. In the middle ages he would have been the beloved story teller of the town. Wierd, built a strange home... maybe some parents would be afraid to let their kids go there but kids would sneak to the "king" of "Neverwas" and hear the stories of his land. This is the kind of teacher who created enough imagination that inventions happened so that the middle ages could end and enlightenment could begin again.