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War Horse (with Joey and....Jeremy Irvine as Albert)

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Aloysius J. Gleek:




--- Quote from: delalluvia on December 25, 2011, 01:42:18 pm ---I hope to go see this movie later today.

As my sister pointed out, she hopes it has a happy ending as movies with horses seldom do.  :-\

--- End quote ---



But movies with Spielberg nearly always  do--I think you're safe!   :laugh:

Aloysius J. Gleek:

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/25/war_horse_spielbergs_almost_great_world_war_i_epic/singleton/


“War Horse”
Spielberg’s almost-great World War I epic
John Ford meets Kubrick -- with a side of "Black Beauty"
-- in the gorgeous, overwrought "War Horse"

By Andrew O'Hehir
Saturday, Dec 24, 2011 8:00 PM 09:53:32 EST


Jeremy Irvine in "War Horse"


It’s difficult to say who Steven Spielberg’s “War Horse” was made for — I suppose the most plausible and most honorable answer is that he made it for himself. This two-and-a-half-hour Great War saga with an equine hero is partly John Ford-style British Isles claptrap and partly a grueling tale of man’s inhumanity to man (and also horse). It’s likely to seem too dark for family audiences — I certainly would not suggest bringing children younger than 10 or 11 — and too treacly for many grown-ups. “War Horse” is certainly a movie for Spielberg’s fans, for those who are enraptured by the blend of childhood yearning and adult grief that characterizes his mature work, and also by his film-school-on-steroids effort to re-create the look, mood and feeling of bygone cinematic eras.

Of course, one could also offer a more cynical interpretation, and read this boy-meets-horse allegory as middle-of-the-road Oscar bait of the highest order, a picturesque period weeper designed to reduce 70-something, Beverly Hills-dwelling Academy voters to tears. Listen, I have gravely mixed feelings about Spielberg, but I’m not going there. I’m sure he still welcomes awards and good reviews and all that, but at this point in his career Spielberg is pursuing personal goals, and everything that’s terrific and overly flat and tooth-rottingly sweet about “War Horse” reflects that. It’s almost a great war movie in one direction, and almost a piece of irredeemable cheese in the other, and there you have it. Steven Spielberg, ladies and gentlemen — the director of “Jaws” and “The Color Purple” and “Saving Private Ryan” and “Munich” and “The Adventures of Tintin” (which is competing with “War Horse” right now for the Christmas weekend box office) and a forthcoming biopic starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln. We aren’t gonna change the guy now.

“War Horse” officially begins in the early 20th century in Devon, a rural county in southwestern England, where a drunken and obstinate tenant farmer named Ted Narracott (the terrific Scottish actor Peter Mullan) buys a beautiful thoroughbred at auction, largely to spite his flinty landlord (David Thewlis). But any resemblance to the real Britain circa 1910 is accidental; this part of “War Horse” is really set in the imaginary version of places like Devon as mythologized by Hollywood, notably in John Ford classics like “How Green Was My Valley” and “The Quiet Man.” (I am aware that those movies are set in Wales and Ireland, respectively; those distinctions are lost on most American viewers, and in the cinematic context they don’t much matter.)

Janusz Kaminski’s photography of the storybook settings — “War Horse” was shot entirely in England, both on location and in two different studios — is predictably gorgeous, and depending on your taste the archetypal characters will either charm you to pieces or make your fillings pop out. In addition to Mullan’s boozy dad, a Boer War veteran who refuses to talk about his past, and Thewlis’ mustachioed, frock-coated Mr. Moneybags, we have Emily Watson as the nagging, loving Mum, perennially on her knees scrubbing things, and young Jeremy Irvine as Albert, their ambitious only son, who sees the handsome horse as a symbol of the family’s brighter future. (Officially, the screenplay by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis is based on Michael Morpurgo’s original 1982 novel, although it clearly borrows its narrative approach from Nick Stafford’s Broadway show.)

It’s Albert who temporarily saves the Narracott family from eviction by harnessing Joey — that’s the noble thoroughbred’s name — and training him to be a plow horse during a drenching rainstorm, and if that seems like an utterly ridiculous notion to anybody who knows anything about farming and horses, well, it’s just that kind of story. It’s not like the other stuff that happens in this section of “War Horse” is less comic and picturesque and improbable, not to mention (to my taste) vastly irritating. But war is coming in faraway Europe, and while everyone keeps insisting that the Hun will soon be driven out of Belgium and it’ll all be over in no time, we know better. Despite Albert’s heartfelt pleas, Joey is sold to Capt. Nicholls (Tom Hiddleston, who played Scott Fitzgerald in “Midnight in Paris” and Loki in “Thor”), a handsome cavalry officer who assures Albert, “man to man,” that he’ll take good care of Joey and bring him home if he possibly can.

This is the moment when “War Horse” makes an abrupt shift from one kind of old-fashioned movie to another, leaving behind “How Green Was My Quiet Darby O’Gill” and turning into “All Quiet on the Western Front” or even “Paths of Glory.” It’s also the moment when I should warn you that talking about the rest of the movie involves giving away certain plot developments — and it’s the moment when unprepared families who haven’t read reviews like this one will find out that “War Horse” definitely isn’t suitable for most young children. Nicholls is an admirable and likable character, an old-school English officer who believes in honor and duty and has no idea that the world order he represents is about to come crashing down. He won’t be able to keep his promise to Albert because he isn’t coming home himself, with or without Joey. When Nicholls and his cavalrymen realize that they’re riding toward a line of German machine-gunners, it’s one of the most terrifying sequences in all of Spielberg’s oeuvre, and even more so because the director avoids any explicit bloodshed.

I suppose the sudden shift in mode and mood is precisely the point of “War Horse.” Rural characters like Albert and Joey, seemingly locked into their lives in an unchanging Britain, are suddenly uprooted and thrown into a broiling chaos where survival is largely a matter of good luck. Joey goes from Nicholls to a pair of young German soldiers who try to desert, and then to a French farm where an ailing grandpa (Niels Arestrup) is trying to keep his treasured granddaughter (Celine Buckens) safe at a place and time when lovely teenage girls were at terrible risk. He is confiscated once again and thrust into service hauling artillery, a task few horses could stand for more than a month or two.

In a vivid, nightmarish sequence that unfortunately isn’t a dream, Joey careens among the trenches, exploding shells and corpses (human and equine alike) of the German front lines, at one point coming face to face with a primitive tank, the animal power of old Europe facing a mechanized monster of the new one. In the film’s moral and visual centerpiece, Joey gets entangled in barbed wire smack in the middle of No Man’s Land, between the German and British front lines, and a couple of soldiers — distracted from their task of murdering each other by the plight of an injured animal — emerge from the trenches to see if they can rescue him. It’s magnificently staged and powerfully affecting, and in true Spielberg fashion, it’s all rather too much. Too much allegorical and symbolic weight, too much emotion projected onto a handsome animal who cannot in fact express it, and too much prefiguring of the miraculous reunion we all know is coming, but which (for better and for worse) cannot undo everything that has happened.
 
“War Horse” opens Dec. 25 nationwide

Aloysius J. Gleek:



http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/12/jeremy-irvine-on-great-expectations-and-changing-his-last-name-from-smith.html


Jeremy Irvine on War Horse,
Great Expectations,  and
Changing His Last Name From ‘Smith’
By Jennifer Vineyard
Today at 9:00 AM


Like Drew Barrymore and Christian Bale before him, Jeremy Irvine is a beneficiary of Steven Spielberg's keen eye for actors, however little known. While studying at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Irvine tried out six times before he won the lead role of Albert Narracott in Spielberg's War Horse.  Albert enlists in the army during WWI in part to find his horse, Joey, who's been auctioned off to the cavalry. This being a Spielberg film, you know that Albert's devotion will ultimately win out. Irvine chatted with Vulture  about loving horses, playing innocent, and changing his last name from "Smith."
 

What's been the best part of this experience so far? Or the part you least expected?
You know, I made the mistake while I was filming War Horse  of eating all the food. You see the craft-service food the production sets out and you make full use of it. The food was so good, and there was so much of it! You stock up for a week. So I went from being thinner to putting on a stone [fourteen pounds] in three months! I was telling my friends that I was doing the movie, and when the press came out with the first images of me as Albert, I got about fifteen to twenty texts from my friends saying, "Jeremy, did you eat the horse?" [Laughs.]
 

Actually, you can eat the horse now, here in the U.S. Even PETA supported lifting the slaughter ban, because it saved the horses from being sent on horrific train journeys to countries where slaughter was legal.
Right. Hmmm. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I like horses! I wouldn't want to see any animal in pain, no matter what. I don't know the ins and outs of that, but I certainly wouldn't want any animal to be inhumanely treated. Who would? 
 

Your character Albert really loves his horse...
In my head, Albert has this innocence that people just don't get anymore: a complete lack of cynicism. Kids nowadays are exposed to so much, so to have someone who is completely innocent is so rare. At the same time, he's so lonely — no brothers or sisters, no real friends. So when the horse comes into Albert's life, it's like his brother. That's what I imagined. I have two younger brothers, so I saw Joey as Albert's younger brother, and I imagined how I would feel if one of my brothers was taken away from me. That's how I went about it.
 

You actually have some sort of family connection to World War I, don't you?
So many people across Britain and Europe do. Two of my great-grandfathers were in the war. The fact that I had relatives in the war is not extraordinary. What is extraordinary is that one of them had a horse! He kept a horse throughout the First World War, and at the end of the war, he bought it back off the army at an auction, and for nearly exactly the same amount that Albert does in the film! I've got the receipt. It's astonishing. What a coincidence!
 

At one point, before you became an actor, you loaned your body out to science, for medical research on an artificial pancreas.
I've been diabetic since I was 6, and the medical research team had done so much for me, it was a no-brainer to give back. I wouldn't say I was partly responsible for kids living longer lives, though. That would be very arrogant of me. There were brilliant people working every day on this, so I'm only a tiny, tiny part of it.
 

Your last name back then was Smith. Why the switch?
All actors have to change their name. [Laughs.] That's the law. That's how Equity works. You can't have two actors with the same name, and there was already someone named Jeremy Smith. My grandfather passed away while I was looking for a stage name, so I took his first name, and that seemed to be a quite nice solution.
 

You just wrapped Great Expectations.  Did the exercise of exploring Albert's innocence help you in subsequently playing Pip?
No. This Pip is plain and simply ambitious. That's where it all comes from, this ambition to get out, to get away from his family life of extreme domestic violence. And he thinks being a gentleman is the best way of getting the girl that he loves. And it's not just little, silly, schoolboy love — he really loves her. So he sacrifices his relationship with Joe, who is basically his father figure, to get what he wants. That's a big deal. And when he discovers that all of it has been for nothing, his life kind of crashes around his feet. Great Expectations  is one of the greatest stories. It's really easy to fall into the trap of doing a Dickens film that's all fun and jokey. This isn't that. This is a heartfelt, violent, dark adaptation. I mean, Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham? I've got great expectations for it.

Aloysius J. Gleek:


http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/12/war-horse-movie-blue-eyes.html


Who Has the Bluest Eyes in War Horse ?
By Kyle Buchanan
Yesterday at 4:45 PM



One possibly apocryphal (yet delicious) story about the making of You've Got Mail  had it that in order to preserve the cinematic power of Meg Ryan's tousled Sally Hershberger hairdo, no other actresses or extras working on the film were allowed to sport blonde locks. Whether true or not, it's a bit of cinematic trickery that Steven Spielberg seems to have taken to heart while making War Horse,  where virtually every actor in the movie is ostentatiously blue-eyed, all the better to emphasize those big brown eyes of Joey, the movie's titular animal. In fact, Spielberg throws so much pupil-reducing key light at his actors' faces in this film that you'd think he were lighting Anjelica Huston in The Addams Family ! With all those big blue peepers on display, Vulture  felt compelled to provide an analysis. Whose eyes were bluer, and what exactly did those wide eyes convey?





Albert (played by Jeremy Irvine)
As the nearest thing to a human protagonist in this ensemble picture, Irvine's also got the most opportunities for a blue-eyed close-up. He does not disappoint, seizing the chance to give Spielberg Face at every moment.

What Do These Blue Eyes Convey?  Dreamy innocence.





Captain Nicholls (played by Tom Hiddleston)
In the upcoming Marvel movie The Avengers,  Hiddleston's Loki seeks to enslave Earth with his magical god-powers and extraterrestrial army. However, why bother with those meager weapons when he could simply use DEM EYES? Hiddleston's pair of peepers is perhaps the most lavishly lit thing we've seen in a Spielberg movie since Kate Capshaw in Temple of Doom.

What Do These Blue Eyes Convey?  Clear-eyed British decency.





Rose (played by Emily Watson)
It sure was nice of Spielberg's longtime cinematographer Janusz Kaminiski to light everything in this scene the same hue as Watson's cloudy-blue eyes.

What Do These Blue Eyes Convey?  Noble, long-suffering Emily Watson–osity.





Grandfather (played by Niels Arestrup)Is it nighttime? Are we in a dark cottage that's barely lit by candlelight? Who cares: Get a klieg light on this old man's pretty cerulean orbs!

What Do These Blue Eyes Convey?  Fatigued but unbroken old-man spirit.





Emilie (played by Celine Buckens)
Perhaps there are child labor laws stating that you can't shine set lights straight into a 10-year-old's eyeballs; it would account for how Buckens is the only actor in the movie whose pupils aren't reduced to mere pinpricks to better show off her eye color. As you can tell, she feels really bad about it.

What Do These Blue Eyes Convey?  Lachrymal overload.





Gunther (played by David Kross)
Both cross-eyed onscreen and at cross-purposes with his own German army, Kross provides the movie's interlude behind enemy lines. And you'd better believe that an Aryan guy's got blue eyes to spare.

What Do These Blue Eyes Convey?  Sympathy for good Germans.





Major Jamie Stewart (played by Benedict Cumberbatch)

Okay, you can't really see them in this picture, but trust us: Cumberbatch has blue eyes for days! Still, out of all the stars in the movie, no one can top Hiddleston. Thanks for playing.

What Do These Blue Eyes Convey?  Squinty support designed not to pull focus from one's mustache.

Aloysius J. Gleek:



 ::) ::) ::) ::) ::)
 ;D


http://www.teen.com/jeremy-irvine-war-horse-facts-trivia-bio-pictures/


8 Things To Know About
War Horse  Hottie
Jeremy Irvine!
 by Kristen Kraemer
December 7th, 2011 in The New Star




Uh, so our Christmas plans may have just gotten a little altered. Of course we’re going to open presents and stuff, but we’re also going to beg our friends to go see War Horse with us. Why? Have you seen the hotness that is Jeremy Irvine yet? With his new Steven Spielberg blockbuster set to release on Christmas Day, you’re bound to be just as in love with him as we are. Click on to learn more about Hollywood’s next heartthrob superstar, including what he has in common with Nick Jonas!
 

1. War Horse is not only Jeremy’s first film, but it’s his very first time on the big screen ever. Exciting!






2. Jeremy had never ridden a horse before he auditioned for the movie. Now? He looks like a pro!






3. Jeremy wasn’t just given the role for being smokin’ hot. He had to audition two or three times a week for two months and was chosen from hundreds of boys. Intense.






4. Remember when Dakota Fanning cut off all her hair for a movie role? Turns out it was for a movie called Now Is Good,  in which Jeremy plays her love interest.






5. Jeremy grew up in Cambridgeshire, England, home to the University of Cambridge. Charles Darwin, Sir Isaac Newton, and Sir Frances Bacon [Frances?  sic!!   :laugh: :laugh:  ] all went to school there. If you pay attention in class, you should know who they are.


 



6. Jeremy graduated from The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Shortly after graduating, he played a tree (yes, as in the huge thing that grows from the ground) in London’s Royal Shakespeare Company. Sounds like fun.






7. Jeremy is super interested in military history and collects weapons from the WWI and WWII era. Where was he when we needed him in high school for our history study sesh, huh?!





8. Like Nick Jonas, Jeremy is also struggling with Type 1 Diabetes — but he’s not letting the disease get in the way of stardom.






What are your thoughts on Jeremy Irvine? Are you going to see War Horse? What other newbies are you crushing on? Tell us!



 :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

Sir Isaac Newton??
:D :D :D

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