Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 6 September

Bridge to Terabithia (Csupó, 2007) is streaming on Prime Video

Was Bridge to Terabithia the first “big” Hollywood film to come to Aotearoa and take advantage of the LOTR halo effect (as well as all that sweet production and VFX infrastructure )?

I stand to be corrected in the comments or Notes because memory is fallible.

The second screen adaptation of Katherine Paterson’s 1977 children’s book –with a screenplay by Paterson’s son David – it features soon-to-be much bigger stars Josh Hutcherson (The Hunger Games) and Anna-Sophia Robb (Soul Surfer and The Carrie Diaries) alongside established figures like Terminator 2’s Robert Patrick.

When I gave it a very brief review in 2007 I described it as “… a note-perfect kids film with the good taste to cast the luminous Zooey Deschanel and then have her sing Steve Earle’s Someday to her music class.”

I recall also being annoyed at the time when I heard that Deschanel had been in Wellington to record ADR for the film at Park Road Post but nobody had told me!

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That June 2007 review for Capital Times also included Ocean’s 13 (“fun but forgettable”), Scenes of a Sexual Nature (early Tom Hardy), Monica Belluci in How Much Do You Love Me? (“spectacular” – a bit too much male-gazey stuff creeping into my reviews at the time, I fear), Timothy Spall as Britain’s last executioner in Pierrepoint, micro-budget Aussie indie Puppy and a somewhat dismissive statistical analysis of Shrek the Third (“out-loud laughs = 6 (50% of those for Puss-in-Boots)”).

Speaking of Capital Times, reader PA of Wellington sent me a reminder of the cultural caché I once had, a Jitterati cartoon by Grant Buist:

Based on the Olympic reference, I’m dating it at 2008.