Despite an ad campaign suggesting wall-to-wall special effects, Bridge to Terabithia is grounded in reality far more than in fantasy. Adapting Katherine Paterson's award-winning novel, the screenwriters David Paterson (Ms. Paterson's son) and Jeff Stockwell have produced a thoughtful and extremely affecting story of a transformative friendship between two unusually gifted children. The result is a movie whose emotional depth could appeal more to adults than to their offspring.
Jess Aarons (Josh Hutcherson) is a sixth grader with four sisters, financially strained parents (Robert Patrick and Kate Butler) and a talent for drawing. An introverted kid who is regularly picked on by the school jerks, Jess forms a bond with a new student named Leslie (AnnaSophia Robb), a free spirit whose parents, both writers, are fondly neglectful. An attraction between outsiders, their friendship feeds on her words and his pictures; together they create an imaginary kingdom in the woods behind their homes, a world they can control and where their minds can roam free.
Beautifully capturing a time when a bully in school can loom as large as a troll in a nightmare and the encouragement of a teacher can alter the course of a life, Bridge to Terabithia keeps the fantasy in the background to find magic in the everyday. Gabor Csupo, one of the creators of Rugrats, directs this, his first feature, like someone intimate with the pain of being different, allowing each personality more than a single characteristic and reveling in tiny, perfect details: the mending tape hugging a worn pair of sneakers, the way a child detects the tension in a parent's hushed conversation, the inchoate isolation of a lone boy in a house filled with the sounds of women.
PHOTOS COURTEY OF CMC
With strong performances from all the leads, including Zooey Deschanel as a spirited music teacher and little Bailey Madison as Jesse's youngest sister, May Belle, Bridge to Terabithia is able to handle adult topics with nuance and sensitivity. As the emotional landscape darkens, those who haven't read the book may be surprised at the sorrow the filmmakers evoke without ever resorting to shock or sentimentality. In other words, your children may sniffle, but they won't be traumatized.
Consistently smart and delicate as a spider web, Bridge to Terabithia is the kind of children's movie rarely seen nowadays. And at a time when many public schools are being forced to cut music and art from the curriculum, the story's insistence on the healing power of a nurtured imagination is both welcome and essential.
Common sense is not that common: a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes the concept is “somewhat illusory.” Researchers collected statements from various sources that had been described as “common sense” and put them to test subjects. The mixed bag of results suggested there was “little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people.” It’s no surprise that there are few universally shared notions of what stands to reason. People took a horse worming drug to cure COVID! They think low-traffic neighborhoods are a communist plot and call
It is barely 10am and the queue outside Onigiri Bongo already stretches around the block. Some of the 30 or so early-bird diners sit on stools, sipping green tea and poring over laminated menus. Further back it is standing-room only. “It’s always like this,” says Yumiko Ukon, who has run this modest rice ball shop and restaurant in the Otsuka neighbourhood of Tokyo for almost half a century. “But we never run out of rice,” she adds, seated in her office near a wall clock in the shape of a rice ball with a bite taken out. Bongo, opened in 1960 by
Over the years, whole libraries of pro-People’s Republic of China (PRC) texts have been issued by commentators on “the Taiwan problem,” or the PRC’s desire to annex Taiwan. These documents have a number of features in common. They isolate Taiwan from other areas and issues of PRC expansion. They blame Taiwan’s rhetoric or behavior for PRC actions, particularly pro-Taiwan leadership and behavior. They present the brutal authoritarian state across the Taiwan Strait as conciliatory and rational. Even their historical frames are PRC propaganda. All of this, and more, colors the latest “analysis” and recommendations from the International Crisis Group, “The Widening
From a nadir following the 2020 national elections, two successive chairs of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) and Eric Chu (朱立倫), tried to reform and reinvigorate the old-fashioned Leninist-structured party to revive their fortunes electorally. As examined in “Donovan’s Deep Dives: How Eric Chu revived the KMT,” Chu in particular made some savvy moves that made the party viable electorally again, if not to their full powerhouse status prior to the 2014 Sunflower movement. However, while Chu has made some progress, there remain two truly enormous problems facing the KMT: the party is in financial ruin and
RSS