Author Topic: War Horse (with Joey and....Jeremy Irvine as Albert)  (Read 24549 times)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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War Horse (with Joey and....Jeremy Irvine as Albert)
« on: December 24, 2011, 04:22:30 am »


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6Ru9Y9Xwjg[/youtube]


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[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow4Rv4-bj4M[/youtube]
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: War Horse (with Joey and....Jeremy Irvine as Albert)
« Reply #1 on: December 24, 2011, 04:43:57 am »


















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"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
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Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: War Horse (with Joey and....Jeremy Irvine as Albert)
« Reply #2 on: December 24, 2011, 05:29:36 am »


http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/movies/war-horse-directed-by-steven-spielberg-review.html?partner=rss&emc=rss



Movie Review
NYT Critics' Pick
War Horse (2011)
Innocence Is Trampled, but a Bond Endures

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: December 22, 2011



Jeremy Irvine in "War Horse," directed by Steven Spielberg.


There is no combat in the early scenes of “War Horse,” Steven Spielberg’s sweeping adaptation of the popular stage spectacle, but the film opens with a cinematic assault as audacious and unsparing as the Normandy landing in “Saving Private Ryan.” With widescreen, pastoral vistas dappled in golden sunlight and washed in music (by John Williams) that is somehow both grand and folksy, Mr. Spielberg lays siege to your cynicism, bombarding you with strong and simple appeals to feeling.

You may find yourself resisting this sentimental pageant of early-20th-century rural English life, replete with verdant fields, muddy tweeds and damp turnips, but my strong advice is to surrender. Allow your sped-up, modern, movie-going metabolism, accelerated by a diet of frantic digital confections — including Mr. Spielberg’s just-released “Adventures of Tintin” — to calm down a bit. Suppress your instinctive impatience, quiet the snarky voice in your head and allow yourself to recall, or perhaps to discover, the deep pleasures of sincerity.

If you can fake that, the old Hollywood adage goes, you’ve got it made. But while “War Horse” is, like so many of Mr. Spielberg’s films, a work of supreme artifice, it is also a self-conscious attempt to revive and pay tribute to a glorious tradition of honest, emotionally direct storytelling. Shot the old-fashioned way, on actual film stock (the cinematographer is Mr. Spielberg’s frequent collaborator Janusz Kaminski), the picture has a dark, velvety luster capable of imparting a measure of movie-palace magic to the impersonal cavern of your local multiplex.

The story, in its early chapters, also takes you back to an older — you may well say cornier — style of entertainment. Joey, the fleet-footed, headstrong half-Thoroughbred of the title, is purchased at auction by Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan), a proud and grouchy Devon farmer with a tendency to drink too much. His household includes a loving, scolding wife, Rosie (Emily Watson); a cantankerous goose; and a strapping lad named Albert (Jeremy Irvine), who forms an immediate and unbreakable bond with Joey. The teenage boy trains the horse to pull a plow and together they ride through the stunning scenery.

But this pastoral is darkened by memories of war — Ted fought the Boers in South Africa, an experience so terrible he cannot speak of it to his son — and by social divisions. The Narracotts are tenant farmers at the mercy of their landlord (David Thewlis), and if “War Horse” pays tribute to solid British virtues of decency and discipline it also, like a Thomas Hardy novel, exposes the snobbery and economic oppression that are, if anything, even more deeply rooted in that nation’s history.

So it is not entirely a simpler, more innocent world that is swept away by the war but rather a way of life whose contradictions are as emphatically presented as its charms. And what follows, as Joey is taken across the English Channel to the battlefields and trenches of Flanders and France, is a nightmare of cruelty that is not without its own sinister magic. Like most movies with an antiwar message, “War Horse” cannot help but be enthralled by the epic scale and transformative power of military conflict. “The war has taken everything from everyone” — the truth of this reckoning, uttered more than once by characters on screen, is self-evident, but it is complicated by the visceral charge and cathartic relief that an effective war movie gives to its audience.

The extreme violence of the slaughter in World War I is implied rather than graphically depicted. Mr. Spielberg steps back from the bloody, chaotic naturalism of “Saving Private Ryan” — this is an animal fable for children, after all, with echoes of “E. T.” and Carroll Ballard’s “Black Stallion” — but his ability to infuse action sequences with emotional gravity has hardly diminished.

An early battle scene dramatizes the modernization of warfare with remarkable and haunting efficiency. A British cavalry unit attacks a German encampment, charging through the enemy ranks with swords in what appears to be a clean and devastating rout. But then, at the edge of the field, the German machine guns begin to fire, and the British horses crash into the forest, suddenly riderless and instantly obsolete. Joey, who of course never sought out heroism in the first place, is relegated to a life of brutal labor that seems fated to end in an ignoble death.

He is kept alive by instinct, human kindness and the companionship of a regal black horse named Topthorn. Joey’s episodic journey takes him from British to German hands and back again, with a sojourn on a French farm owned by an elderly jam-maker (Niels Arestrup) and his young granddaughter (Celine Buckens).

Albert, meanwhile, makes his own way to the war, and his and Joey’s parallel experiences — harrowing escapes, the loss of friends, the terror and deprivation brightened by flickers of tenderness or high spirits — give the story texture and momentum, as well as giving Mr. Spielberg an opportunity to show off, once again, his unmatched skill at cross-cutting. (The large cast, mostly British and almost entirely male, acquits itself admirably, with a few moments of maudlin overacting and many more of heartbreaking understatement.)

Mr. Spielberg and the screenwriters, Lee Hall and Richard Curtis, have wisely avoided attempting to reproduce the atmosphere and effects of the stage production, in which Joey and the other horses are portrayed by huge puppets. He prefers to translate the tale, which originates in a novel by Michael Morpurgo, into a fully cinematic idiom. And “War Horse” turns out to have a central Spielbergian theme — perhaps the dominant idea in this director’s body of work — namely the fraught and fascinating relationship between the human and the nonhuman.

What do they — sharks, horses, aliens, dinosaurs, intelligent machines — mean to us? What are we supposed to do with them? The boundary can be hard to maintain: sometimes, as in “E. T.” and “A. I.,” nonhuman beings are virtually impossible to distinguish from humans; at other times, as in “Amistad” and “Schindler’s List,” self-evidently human beings are denied that status. Sometimes the nonhuman is a threat, at other times a comfort, but it always presents a profound ethical challenge based in a stark existential mystery: Who are we?

Mr. Spielberg’s answers to this question tend to be hopeful, and his taste for happy, or at least redemptive endings is frequently criticized. But his ruthless optimism, while it has helped to make him an enormously successful showman, is also crucial to his identity as an artist, and is more complicated than many of his detractors realize. “War Horse” registers the loss and horror of a gruesomely irrational episode in history, a convulsion that can still seem like an invitation to despair. To refuse that, to choose compassion and consolation, requires a measure of obstinacy, a muscular and brutish willfulness that is also an authentic kind of grace.

“War Horse” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The violence is intense and upsetting, though not especially gory by present-day standards.

WAR HORSE

Opens on Sunday nationwide.

Directed by Steven Spielberg; written by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis, based on the novel by Michael Morpurgo; director of photography, Janusz Kaminski; edited by Michael Kahn; music by John Williams; production design by Rick Carter; costumes by Joanna Johnston; visual-effects supervisor, Ben Morris; produced by Mr. Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy; released by DreamWorks Pictures and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 26 minutes.

WITH: Emily Watson (Rosie Narracott), David Thewlis (Lyons), Peter Mullan (Ted Narracott), Niels Arestrup (Grandfather), Tom Hiddleston (Captain Nicholls), Jeremy Irvine (Albert Narracott), Benedict Cumberbatch (Major Stewart), Toby Kebbell (Geordie Soldier), Celine Buckens (Emilie), Rainer Bock (Brandt) and Patrick Kennedy (Lieutenant Waverly).
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: War Horse (with Joey and....Jeremy Irvine as Albert)
« Reply #3 on: December 25, 2011, 12:17:55 pm »


http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2011/12/war_horse_review_steven_spielberg_s_corny_equine_drama_breached_my_emotional_defenses_.html



All the Weepy Horses
Steven Spielberg’s corny, saccharine War Horse
breached my emotional defenses.

By Dana Stevens
Posted Friday, Dec. 23, 2011, at 7:07 AM ET



Jeremy Irvine in War Horse


Steven Spielberg’s War Horse  (DreamWorks), a deliberate throwback to a long-dormant style of unabashedly sentimental Hollywood filmmaking, is so completely what you would expect it to be that it comes back around and transcends its own clichés. In this 146-minute WWI epic, there are plucky tenant farmers and sneering, oppressive landlords. There are idealistic youths whose character is tested by the crucible of war. There is, my right hand to God, a comic-relief goose. Above all, there are horses, those animals whose kinetic grace seems intimately bound up with the history of cinema, from Eadweard Muybridge’s racehorse photographs to John Ford’s equine-crisscrossed landscapes.

If you don’t thrill to the site of a horse galloping across a green meadow with a beautiful young rider on its back—if you believe (wrongly) that National Velvet  is just a sappy kids’ movie—then you may not be susceptible to the curious power of War Horse.  Granted, this Spielbergian take on the horse epic doesn’t seem destined to become an enduring classic a la National Velvet.  It lacks that film’s earthy humor and the specificity of its characterizations—not to mention that Jeremy Irvine, the perfectly adequate actor who plays the horse-mad teenage hero Albert Narracott  is no young Elizabeth Taylor. But like National Velvet, War Horse —based on a children’s novel and a play of the same name—is a love story about the bond between humans and animals that somehow sneaks past the viewer’s emotional defenses. One minute, you’re rolling your eyes at its corniness; the next, you’re discreetly dabbing at those same eyes with the back of your hand.

Writing about Spielberg’s other big holiday release, The Adventures of Tintin,  I asked whether the director’s fascination with 3-D motion-capture gadgetry might be getting in the way of his usual knack for storytelling. With War Horse,  Spielberg is back in his comfort zone. Unlike the manic Tintin,  this film unfolds at a rustic, contemplative pace that complements the boy-meets-horse storyline.

The film begins with Joey, a rambunctious, untrained half-thoroughbred, passing into the care of Albert’s father Ted (Pete Mullan), a homesteading farmer in rural England in 1914. Ted is a good man but something of a failure—he’s been an alcoholic since returning from the Boer War, where he won a medal for participating in what’s suggested was an atrocity. When he comes home with an expensive racehorse rather than the plow-pulling draft horse he was supposed to buy, Ted’s practical wife Rosie (Emily Watson) insists that the animal be returned. But their son Albert (Irvine) begs to keep the horse and, with hard work, manages to tame and train it. In what’s surely the most suspenseful plowing sequence ever filmed, Albert teaches Joey to pull the plow just in time for the Narracotts’ farm to escape seizure by their landlord (David Thewlis), a miserly wretch whose son (Robert Emms) is Albert’s chief rival.

Then, to quote a line that’s used several times in the film, the war takes everything from everyone. As hostilities with the Kaiser break out, Joey is sold to a cavalry captain, played with old-school panache by Tom Hiddleston. (Albert’s goodbye to his pet may be the first occasion you’ll need that Kleenex.) Later, Joey will pass into the care of Emilie (Cecile Buckens)—a little French girl whose saccharine cuteness stands as the movie’s low point—and eventually into the cruel hands of the German army, whose treatment of animals alone would be justification for waging war on them.

Meanwhile Albert enlists as a soldier and is soon fighting alongside his former village rival in the trenches of Flanders Field. Spielberg invests considerable screen time in showing trench warfare in all its grisly absurdity: dozens of young men huddled in a warren of ditches, waiting to be sent out into a barbed-wire maze where they would almost certainly be shot to death. Like Stanley Kubrick’s great WWI film Paths of Glory, War Horse  shows how, in the senseless butchery of real-life battle, terms like courage and cowardice lose their meaning. Though War Horse  contains several spectacular battle scenes, there’s nothing remotely martial about its spirit. Just beneath the movie’s folksy sweetness lies a powerful and painful critique of war. The battle scenes show little explicit gore, but they’re plenty intense enough to make this PG-13-rated fare too frightening for young children.
 
I won’t further elaborate on the obstacles that keep horse and boy apart for the majority of War Horse.  If you plan to see the movie, you don’t want to know, and if you couldn’t be dragged kicking and screaming into a Christmas-released Spielberg weepie, you don’t care. But if the subject matter leaves you cold, I’ll make one last argument for the film on aesthetic grounds. War Horse  looks incredible; it was shot on film stock (a technology that, sadly, is fast becoming an antiquarian novelty) by Spielberg’s longtime cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, and the images have what I can only describe as a wonderful texture. They also have intense color: deep gemlike greens and reds, with black shadows out of an old master painting.

One shot near the end, a view of the road leading up to the Narracotts’ farm at sunset, is almost surreally extreme in its oversaturated beauty, like an old Technicolor movie remembered in a fever dream. (John Williams’ score, which ladles on the strings Max Steiner-style, only contributes to the impression of mid-20th-century cinematic grandeur.) This unabashedly sincere evocation of an old-Hollywood ending could be seen as a manipulative gesture on Spielberg’s part, or a loving one. How you see it may serve as a litmus test for your tolerance of War Horse,  a movie that’s manipulative and loving at the same time.
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Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline delalluvia

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Re: War Horse (with Joey and....Jeremy Irvine as Albert)
« Reply #4 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.  :-\

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: War Horse (with Joey and....Jeremy Irvine as Albert)
« Reply #5 on: December 25, 2011, 04:54:04 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.  :-\



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


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
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Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: War Horse (with Joey and....Jeremy Irvine as Albert)
« Reply #6 on: December 26, 2011, 11:30:41 am »

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
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
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Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: War Horse (with Joey and....Jeremy Irvine as Albert)
« Reply #7 on: December 29, 2011, 10:50:19 am »



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.
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: War Horse (with Joey and....Jeremy Irvine as Albert)
« Reply #8 on: December 29, 2011, 11:23:07 am »


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.
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: War Horse (with Joey and....Jeremy Irvine as Albert)
« Reply #9 on: January 03, 2012, 01:15:58 am »



 ::) ::) ::) ::) ::)
 ;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


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"