“The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep,” a fantasy set in WWII about a boy who befriends the Loch Ness monster, is one of the best family movies of the year. I spoke with director Jay Russell and stars Ben Chaplin and Alex Etel.
How do you act with a creature who isn’t there but will be filled in later with CGI?
AE: It was really hard to act to a tennis ball on a stick. It was a challenge for me. When it first hatched and was in the teenage stages it was a puppet, so that was easier. But we didn’t film in sequence at all, so we began with my looking at a tennis ball and pretending it was Crusoe (the monster).
JR: Some of the very first things we did the creature was already an adult. Later on when we got to the stage work, the WETA Workshop built these amazingly lifelike puppets and the puppeteer was so great. He would give the creature those quirky moves. When it was an adult, that’s when they had to play make-believe. We did pre-visualization. I would take the storyboards that I did before we started, WETA would bring them to life with animation and we would have living storyboards on the set and that would help them, especially when there’s nothing there.
Why has the legend persisted?
JR: Because there are really two legends. The first goes with any body of water or in the mountains with, Bigfoot, and that kind of thing. The original legend goes back over 1000 years, kelpie or water horse, about a traveler who would come by the loch and this creature would appear to be very friendly and would want to take them across the loch and then get them into the middle and drag them to their death. Then there was the more modern notion from the 1930’s with the famous surgeon’s photo. My feeling about why the legend persists is that we want to believe that there’s something out there that we can’t understand. We have a need for magic and imagination. When I went to Loch Ness for the first time, we pulled up and saw all these tour buses looking out. Then I stood there a while looking for it myself.
BC: It’s a deus ex machina.
JR: We want it, we need it. There always will be a legend of a loch, even as recently as last May, a guy shot a video on his phone of the water and a wave with a big black thing underneath it, and it’s all over the internet.
BC: Because it’s in a loch it’s not as scary as in an ocean.
AE: It’s like it’s in a zoo.

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In the grand tradition of “he followed me home — can I keep him?” movies, we have seen movies about children who are brought to adventure and understanding through dogs, horses, cats, a whale, a dolphin, dragons, geese, and an extra-terrestrial. But this imaginative family fantasy-adventure is the first movie in my memory about a boy and his very own Loch Ness monster.
Angus (Alex Etel) is a young boy in World War II Scotland, the son of the housekeeper of a large estate. He finds what he thinks is a rock but it turns out to be an egg. He calls the creature who hatches “Crusoe.”

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Marjane Satrapi brings her award-winning graphic memoir to the screen in a powerful story of growing up in Iran as the Shah was ousted and hopes for democracy were crushed by the rise of the fundamentalists. Named for the legendary ruin Alexander the Great is believed to have burned, the frank portrayal of Satrapi’s coming of age personally and politically is a stunning achievement. Like the books, it is told almost entirely in black and white, with simple, supple, strong lines that beautifully complement and underscore the starkness of the story.

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The three talented young stars of “The Great Debaters” talked with me about making the film and the teachers who inspired them.

Nate Parker on what makes a great debater:

Denzel Whitaker on why you should see the movie:

Childhood tragedy and attendant guilt feelings. A big career-defining concert followed by a flashback of everything that went before. Adults amazed by early evidence of extraordinary talent and feel for music. Tragedy and loss to overcome. A first wife who complains that he does not spend enough time with the family. The big chance. The amazed audience. The amazed recording studio engineer. The amazed recording industry executives. Success montage. Falling in love with the second wife montage. Encounters with musical legends and a mass murderer. Montage about what VH1 “Behind the Music” calls “the long descent into drugs and alcoholism” and the Oscar-ploy detox scene. Then there are those other humiliating descents: the 70’s variety show, the 80’s roller disco, the pet monkey and giraffe. This faux biopic was made by people who lovingly watched every single film from “Coal Miner’s Daughter” to “Ray” and “Walk the Line” and then, just as lovingly, skewered them.
As the movie begins, adoring fans are waiting. The theater is ready. But his long-time band member Sam (Tim Meadows) says, “Dewey Cox needs to think about his entire life” before he goes on stage. It will conveniently take just the running time of a feature film to tell the story.
Dewey (John C. Reilly) thinks back to his childhood, bathed in golden light. “Ain’t nothing horrible going to happen today!” he and his classical pianist brother shout merrily as they run off to play in a series of increasingly hazardous situations. When tragedy finally strikes, Dewey’s brother tells him he will have to be “double great” and Dewey’s father tells him that he will never be a quarter of what his brother was. Dewey is so traumatized he loses his sense of smell. We next see him at age 14 in the high school talent show. His music provokes the kids to get up and dance – and make out. A few quick scenes later, Cox has been thrown out of his home, stunned the audience in a club, married his first wife, and made his first hit record.
It is all done with such conviction and attention to detail that it is possible to forget for moments at a time that this is not the real thing. Slacker scribbled-on-a-cocktail-napkin mishmashes like “Scary Movie” think that referring to something is just as good as making an observation about it, but “Walk Hard” is a spoof with wit as well as heft. Sometimes it hits home just by having someone on screen just say explicitly what is going on: “This is a dark time period.” “People come here to dance erotically!” Sometimes it just repeats the time-honored tropes (“You don’t want no part of this,” Sam says when Dewey sees him using drugs, “We never get to see you!” says his first wife, “I’m so cold!” says Dewey in detox) and sometimes it exaggerates them (the “suits” from the record business are Hassids named Mazeltov and L’Chai’m, the first wife keeps turning out babies like cars on an assembly line). Dewey encounters Buddy Holly, Elvis, and Charles Manson, and there are cameos by real-life stars, including the Temptations, Ghostface Killah, Lyle Lovett, and Eddie Vedder. A high point is Dewey’s psychedelic transcendental mediation lesson with the Beatles, featuring Paul Rudd as John Lennon, Jack Black as Paul McCartney, Justin Long as George Harrison, and Jason Schwartzman as Ringo Starr. It also has the funniest dirty song (or possibly the dirtiest funny song) ever recorded on film.

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