Jennifer Garner’s husband Ben Affleck seems to have been getting all of the attention of late, having been the first director ever to win both the Golden Globe and the Directors Guild awards for Best Director although sadly he failed to earn an Oscar nomination for the same work, for Argo.
But as well as raising their three children, daughters Violet Anne (born December 1, 2005), Seraphina Rose Elizabeth (born January 6, 2009) and son Samuel Garner (born February 27), Jennifer has been busy making a new movie – The Odd Life of Timothy Green. It was released in America last August, but it is making its debut screening in the UK from 5th April 2013.
The Odd Life of Timothy Green is told from the perspective of Cindy (Jennifer Garner) and Jim Green (Joel Edgerton), as they explain their experience with Timothy (CJ Adams) in an effort to persuade an adoption agency to allow the couple to adopt a child.
Cindy, who works in the town’s local museum, and Jim, who is employed at the town’s historic pencil factory, resides in the drought-stricken town of Stanleyville, North Carolina. The Greens are informed by doctors that they are unable to conceive. Distraught by the news, Jim convinces Cindy to dream up their ideal child and write the child’s characteristics and life events on slips of notepad paper.
The couple place the notes inside a box and bury it in the backyard garden. After a thunderstorm, which seemingly affects only their property, a ten-year-old arrives at their home claiming the Greens as his parents. After finding the box they buried smashed to pieces around a large hole in the ground where they originally buried it, and finding the boy inside their house, covered in mud, they realize that the boy, named Timothy, is actually a culmination of all their wishes of what their child would be.
Embarking on parenthood, Cindy and Jim soon discover their son is an extraordinary boy with strange powers who will transform the lives of everyone he comes into contact with. It is a touching drama about families and wishes coming true and is both moving and magical.
The Chicago Tribune said “…The emotional anguish of infertility; the challenges of adoption; raising and being a nonconformist or “different” child; small-town recessionary woes; improving your relationship with your father while there’s still time; saving the local pencil factory. That’s a big range.
Hedges’ film follows how the Greens adapt to this addition to their lives, and how Timothy, the boy from the ground, fulfils or subverts their laundry list of ideals. The writer-director’s previous film, also for Disney, was “Dan in Real Life,” and throughout Hedges’ career the Iowa native has adapted his brand of whimsy across novels, plays and screenplays. Extraordinary children and ordinary, sometimes idiotic parents inhabit a theme he explores frequently, and “The Odd Life of Timothy Green” continues that exploration.
It’s an elegant, honeyed production, photographed (in Georgia) by cinematographer John Toll and it’s full of interesting actors. Tense and chatty, Jennifer Garner and Joel Edgerton bring fervent sincerity and a welcome touch of comic eccentricity to the Greens, helicopter parents just waiting for take-off. CJ Adams as Timothy is charming and effective, in a Haley Joel Osment-but-less-fraught way. His character is what it is — a symbol of parental projection and fond, supernaturally fashioned hopes for a better, more verdant and just society…”
In complete contrast to this Disney movie, Jenifer Garner’s next film is The Dallas Buyers Club; she is playing alongside Matthew McConaughey who has gained much attention for the film due to the extreme amount of weight he needed to lose to play the part.
The film is set to be released in 2013 – In 1986 in Dallas, a man diagnosed with HIV (McConaughey), began smuggling alternative medicine with Rayon, a HIV positive transsexual woman. Loosely based on the true-life tale of Ron Woodroof, a drug taking, women loving, homophobic man who, in 1986 was diagnosed with full blown HIV/AIDS and given thirty days to live.
He started taking the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved AZT, the only legal drug available in the U.S, which brought him to the brink of death. To survive, he smuggled non-toxic, anti-viral medications from all over the world, but yet still illegal in the U.S. Other AIDS patients sought out his medications forgoing hospitals, doctors and AZT. With the help of his Doctor, Eve Saks (Garner) and a fellow patient, Rayon, Ron unintentionally created the Dallas Buyers Club, the first of dozens which would form around the country, providing its paying members with these alternative treatments.
The clubs, growing in numbers and clientele, were brought to the attention of the FDA and pharmaceutical companies which waged an all-out war on Ron. The Dallas Buyers Club film charts Ron Wood roof’s personal fight to survive which lasted 2191 days when he died on September 12, 1992, six years after he was diagnosed with the HIV virus.
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