Saturday, August 11, 2007

The Movie That Almost Never Was .....

Sometimes, when I visit the video store, I look for something in particular ..... and sometimes, I'm just browsing, going through the new releases, row after row, to see what's arrived ..... on Thursday, I was doing the latter, and that's how I stumbled across "Neverwas" .....

And I DO mean 'stumbled,' because I had never heard word-one about this movie. True, it had never played in the Tall City, but that can be said for some major film releases, and for a majority of those small, independent flicks ..... but, even in perusing my usual sources for movie news, I had never heard of "Neverwas" .....

But the film looked like it might be a good rent ..... the description on the back of the box ('young man searching father's past finds there may have been some fact to the old man's fantastic tales') reminded me a little bit of "
Big Fish," which I had enjoyed ..... and the cast - which included Ian McKellen, William Hurt, Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange and Michael Moriarty - was, well, 'stellar' .....

My Favorite Landman and I watched it tonight, and liked it ..... A LOT. It's not a great movie, but it's a good one, and well worth the cost of a rental. It's hard to say whether it met with critical acclaim, or critical disdain ..... because there's very little critical comment out there, period .....
Rotten Tomatoes assembled a whole five reviews for their Neverwas page .....

It goes on ..... there are no American box office numbers to report, because the film never made it to the big screen - the closest it ever got was the Toronto Film Festival, in 2005. It was then released at some theaters, than on DVD and television, in Europe and Latin America, before coming to the U.S. on DVD ..... weird.

The same is true in the virtual world .....
IMDb has some data on their page for this movie, but not a lot ..... a casual search of the web finds almost nothing about the movie - no official site, no fansites, almost nothing ..... weird.

More than one critic suggested the inability of filmmakers and distributors to 'categorize' the film may have been behind its initial disappearance ..... "Sadly, one of the realities of movie making – or actually, of movie marketing, which tends to rule movie making – is that a movie needs to fit in a cubby-hole in order to convince the powers-that-be that it’s got a hope of achieving box office success," Brian Webster wrote in his review for Apollo Guide. "How Neverwas got made in the absence of a cubby-hole to slot it into is something of a mystery to me, although I must say that there are worse crimes than failing to conform to Hollywood’s rules. Of course, inability to get the movie released cancels out any warm and fuzzies over making a movie that’s a little bit different. And this is different. Part mental health drama, part fantasy, part coming to terms with childhood pain, Neverwas is a movie that never quite finds its way. There are moments when it begins to hit all the right emotional buttons, but then it wanders off in a different direction, and there are times when it verges on entering a world of fantasy, but those are always cut short. So this movie doesn’t just fall outside of categories; it also never quite hits its stride."

But, nonetheless, it's here now, and it's on the shelves in the Tall City ..... and I recommend it to you all.

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