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www.rollingstone.com - : The young screenwriter David Mickey Evans gives the semi-autobiographical story a startling urgency. Two boys -- eleven-year-old Mike (Elijah Wood) and his eight-year-old brother, Bobby (Joseph Mazzello) -- move from New Jersey to California in 1969 to start a new life with their divorced mother, Mary, compassionately played by Lorraine Bracco. Mary soon marries a man (Adam Baldwin) who calls himself the King. Things go well until the stepfather starts drinking and beating Bobby. Mike helps his brother hide the bruises because neither boy wants to ruin things for Mary, a waitress who's mostly out working double shifts. more...
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www.filmtracks.com - : Radio Flyer: (Hans Zimmer) If you want to study about a film that definitely should never have been made, then Radio Flyer is your case in point. It's hard to think how director Richard Donner couldn't see the writing on the wall, but the screenplay for Radio Flyer by David Mickey Evans was passed around Hollywood with extremely high interest, and Donner took it upon himself to bring this terrible fantasy tale of child abuse to the big screen. Donner's first film being The Omen was perhaps some indication at the time that the director could take any film about a troubled child and make it into a classic. Unfortunately, Radio Flyer falls into the trap of an impossible reality: a mother of two children remarries an abusive alcoholic, but she doesn't know that he is beating the younger son. Having seen another child attempt to fly on his Radio Flyer wagon (and being crippled by it), the two brothers decide that the only way to escape the abuse is to build their own flying wagon and attempt to have the beaten brother fly away to safety. The whole film exists in this fantasy world, balancing the horrors of his beatings with the imagination of flight that is the boys' goal. The older brother tells the story some years later, and despite the film's glossy, misleading ending (which indicates that the escape was not only possible, but the flight actually happens), the brother dies in the attempt. It's a hideous, malformed story that had millions pumped into its making, and Hollywood remembers it as one of the most fiscally disastrous projects of all time (as of 1992). Composer Hans Zimmer was building his fame in giant leaps and bounds in 1992, and took on the project with a sense of challenge since children's scores were a new avenue for him. The problem with the film and score, however, is how the music would be approached. Would the score mirror the horrors of the abuse? Or would it exist solely in the fantasy world of the boys? more...
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