Word: filming
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...hero of the film is the unfortunately named Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel), who is the son of the stoic village chieftain, but inheritor of none of his physical prowess or impressive musculature. A thoughtful, contemplative sort, Hiccup does not quite fit in at dragon-slaying boot camp, where the motto is “Why read words when you can just kill the stuff the words tell you about?” This attitude is problematic for Hiccup, who has secretly befriended a dragon he has christened Toothless—a creature whose creepy cuteness is strikingly similar...
...ballet and tap as well as several musical instruments--but the family movie palace is where Tharp got her first real feel for an audience. She'd work at the snack bar and sit in a junked car way up front to watch the movies--westerns, musicals, horror-film fright fests on Friday the 13th. Whenever a plot started to drag, Tharp would have to hurry back to the concession stand. "I learned about pacing," she says. "Suddenly the movie gets a little boring--you knew there was gonna be a rush on the popcorn...
Then Dakota Fanning gets ahold of the film, steals it from Stewart and seduces us utterly. Fanning plays Cherie Currie, recruited at age 15 by Svengali Kim Fowley (a witty Michael Shannon) to sing and provide what he calls "jailbait sex appeal." The movie was based on Currie's memoir, Neon Angel, so we get a much fuller picture of her home life than that of anyone else in the band, even Jett. Currie has an alcoholic father (Brett Cullen), a foolish mother (Tatum O'Neal) and a sister, Marie (Riley Keough), who in real life is an identical twin...
Fanning, 15 when the film was shot, turns in a performance of startling maturity. It's not just that she's sexy, although that is unexpected and slightly hard to process. (Only four years have passed since she was Fern in Charlotte's Web.) It's that she suggests an inner life for Currie that is both enigmatic and completely sympathetic. She underplays with mastery, revealing Currie as vapid, malleable, ordinary and lost, but at the same time riveting on- and offstage...
...younger brother of Gunsmoke star James Arness, Graves arrived in Hollywood by 1950 and got his first important role, as the all-American soldier who turns out to be a German spy in Billy Wilder's 1953 war comedy Stalag 17. The film provided an early view of Graves' ability to play both a hero type and its own internal contradiction. Throughout the '50s he alternated supporting parts in big films (The Night of the Hunter, The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell) with leads in It Conquered the World and other sci-fi anticlassics ripe for later mockery on Mystery...