Word: hollywoodizations
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...this character work pays off. The movie never feels like watching someone else play a video game. Instead, “How to Train Your Dragon” takes a classic and clichéd Hollywood storyline and makes it memorable. This is most evident in the wondrous scenes in which Toothless, Hiccup, and Astrid soar through the sunset to the beautiful Celtic-inspired score of John Powell. Viewers may recall a very similar CGI experience in “Avatar,” in which flying beasts streak the sky in symbiotic unity with their mounted protagonists. The difference...
...became a darling of the avant-garde dance world. She shocked traditionalists with Deuce Coupe, her 1973 dance piece that wedded classical-ballet moves to Beach Boys songs. She worked with Mikhail Baryshnikov and David Byrne (and had romantic flings with both), shuttled between the American Ballet Theatre and Hollywood and then, in 2002, rocked Broadway with Movin' Out, her dance musical set to Billy Joel's greatest hits. Ballet choreographers like Jerome Robbins had done musicals before, but Tharp broke new ground, building a hit show almost entirely out of dance--and redefining what a Broadway musical could...
Tharp hasn't shied away from stretching her own conception of what art is. She has worked on Hollywood films (Hair and Ragtime, among others) and directed the 1985 Broadway revival of Singin' in the Rain, which got a critical drubbing that humiliated her. ("A catastrophe," she called it later.) Even after the success of Movin' Out, she had another misfire with The Times They Are A-Changin', in which she used a circus motif to illustrate the music of Bob Dylan--a conceit that no one much liked...
...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...
...fact is that the revenue discrepancy between the mainstream Hollywood product and indie or foreign films has never been so chasmic. In domestic box-office terms, How to Train Your Dragon is the Statue of Liberty, while the new Swedish release The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is one of those Willard Wigan microsculptures that fit inside the eye of a needle...