Nell Minow: December 2007 Archives

When Harry Met Sally... is a sweet, funny love story of two people who took a very long time to realize they were meant for each other. A series of New Year's Eves punctuate their developing relationship.

Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn star in Holiday, about an idealistic young man whose engagement to a wealthy girl is supposed to be announced at a New Year's Eve party. Hepburn plays the girl's sister, whose support for the engagement gets complicated when she begins to fall for him herself.

The Apartment, the bittersweet comedy about an ambitious man who lets the executives at his company use his apartment for their assignations won the Oscar for Best Picture. Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine star in this Billy Wilder classic.

The pilot episode of Futurama takes place on New Year's Eve in the year 3000, and yes, Dick Clark (well, his head) makes a cameo appearance.

My favorite movies this year, all pretty much tied for first place:

The Namesake
Charlie Wilson's War
Atonement
Gone Baby Gone
Into the Wild
No Country for Old Men
Juno
Once
No End in Sight
Lars and the Real Girl

And runners-up:

Sicko
King of Kong
Persepolis
American Gangster
The Savages
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
There Will be Blood
Michael Clayton
Waitress
The Lookout

This was a very good year for family movies. Here are the best:

Bridge to Terabithia
Golden Compass
Surf’s Up
Enchanted
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Hairspray
Transformers
Stardust
The Water-Horse
Ratatouille

Runners-up:

Bratz
The Last Mimzy
Game Plan
Meet the Robinsons
Shrek 3
The Astronaut Farmer

"The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep," a fantasy set in WWII about a boy who befriends the Loch Ness monster, is one of the best family movies of the year. I spoke with director Jay Russell and stars Ben Chaplin and Alex Etel.

How do you act with a creature who isn't there but will be filled in later with CGI?

AE: It was really hard to act to a tennis ball on a stick. It was a challenge for me. When it first hatched and was in the teenage stages it was a puppet, so that was easier. But we didn't film in sequence at all, so we began with my looking at a tennis ball and pretending it was Crusoe (the monster).

JR: Some of the very first things we did the creature was already an adult. Later on when we got to the stage work, the WETA Workshop built these amazingly lifelike puppets and the puppeteer was so great. He would give the creature those quirky moves. When it was an adult, that's when they had to play make-believe. We did pre-visualization. I would take the storyboards that I did before we started, WETA would bring them to life with animation and we would have living storyboards on the set and that would help them, especially when there's nothing there.

Why has the legend persisted?

JR: Because there are really two legends. The first goes with any body of water or in the mountains with, Bigfoot, and that kind of thing. The original legend goes back over 1000 years, kelpie or water horse, about a traveler who would come by the loch and this creature would appear to be very friendly and would want to take them across the loch and then get them into the middle and drag them to their death. Then there was the more modern notion from the 1930's with the famous surgeon's photo. My feeling about why the legend persists is that we want to believe that there's something out there that we can't understand. We have a need for magic and imagination. When I went to Loch Ness for the first time, we pulled up and saw all these tour buses looking out. Then I stood there a while looking for it myself.

BC: It’s a deus ex machina.

JR: We want it, we need it. There always will be a legend of a loch, even as recently as last May, a guy shot a video on his phone of the water and a wave with a big black thing underneath it, and it’s all over the internet.

BC: Because it's in a loch it’s not as scary as in an ocean.

AE: It’s like it’s in a zoo.

In the grand tradition of "he followed me home -- can I keep him?" movies, we have seen movies about children who are brought to adventure and understanding through dogs, horses, cats, a whale, a dolphin, dragons, geese, and an extra-terrestrial. But this imaginative family fantasy-adventure is the first movie in my memory about a boy and his very own Loch Ness monster.

Angus (Alex Etel) is a young boy in World War II Scotland, the son of the housekeeper of a large estate. He finds what he thinks is a rock but it turns out to be an egg. He calls the creature who hatches "Crusoe."