It’s hard enough for a young actor to win over a casting agent, producer or even director to score a role.

Child star Nathan Gamble landed his biggest part to date by charming a bottlenose dolphin.

Gamble’s audition for the lead in “Dolphin Tale” meant spending some quality time with Winter, the dolphin famous for her prosthetic tail.

“There so much like humans. They have to like you and be comfortable with you,” Gamble tells Big Hollywood. “You have to be very respectful, and calm, and do the hand signals [the trainers] tell you.”

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Director Charles Martin Smith’s “Dolphin Tale” was one of the few pleasant surprises in what has been an otherwise disappointing year for Hollywood at the box office. Over the fall, the 3D children’s film, based on the true story of a disabled dolphin named Winter, came out of nowhere and chugged along to a surprising $71 million gross — which, quite remarkably, is only a little less than where the high-profile “Muppets” reboot will top off. And you can see why. For young kids, “Dolphin Tale” has much to offer, even if parents are forced to sit through a television movie-level screenplay.

Nathan Gamble plays Sawyer, an introverted adolescent who feels out of place in the world, unless he’s with his older, college-age cousin Kyle. Sawyer’s father’s abandoned him, and now Kyle is leaving to join the Marines. To make matters worse, Kyle is failing every subject, and with school just out for the year, he only  has summer school to look forward to.

The plot turns when Winter (played by the real Winter) washes up on a Florida beach tangled in fishing net. Clay (Harry Connick Jr.), a widowed veterinarian who runs an aquarium/animal hospital on the verge of bankruptcy, and his adolescent daughter Hazel (Cozi Zuehlsdorff) attempt to nurse Winter back to health, but due to the dolphin’s circulation being cut off,  part of his tail has to be amputated. With Sawyer’s dedicated help, Winter rebounds and is even able to swim sans tail, but the unnatural swimming action will lead to serious medical complications down the road. What to do?

Smith does bring a nice visual flourish to a flat script. What’s lacking more than anything, though, is the development of the relationships between the characters. The main players — Clay, Sawyer, his nurse mother (Ashley Judd), and Hazel — all cement who they are to one another early in the second act, which makes too much of the remaining plot feel episodic.  For instance, a few sparks seem to fly when Connick’s widower and Judd’s divorcee first meet, but the relationship never evolves from there.

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The producers of “The Blind Side” are back with another true story family feature. “Dolphin Tale” is inspired by Winter, a dolphin that swims with a prosthetic tail and serves as encouragement for handicapped people of all ages.

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The story follows Sawyer (Nathan Gamble), a quiet kid whose cousin and only real friend (Austin Stowell) has just shipped off to the military. During a visit to the beach, Sawyer finds a dolphin, Winter, tangled in a crab trap and helps the team from Tampa Bay’s Clearwater Marine Aquarium to rescue her. When the injury requires Clearwater director Dr. Clay Haskett (Harry Connick Jr.) to amputate Winter’s tail, Sawyer and Haskett’s chatterbox daughter Hazel (Cozi Zuehlsdorff) are there to help Winter learn to swim again. But Winter’s new swimming style puts pressure on her spinal cord and threatens to paralyze her.

Meanwhile Sawyer’s cousin returns home after being wounded in an explosion during his tour of duty. While visiting him at a veteran’s hospital, Sawyer runs into prosthetics specialist Dr. Cameron McCarthy (Morgan Freeman). In a race against time, Sawyer convinces the doctor to create a prosthetic tail for Winter while financial concerns threaten to close Clearwater permanently.

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Fidel Castro has a favorite new book and he’s quoting favorite passages in his captive media: 

“At Woodstock nearly half a million youth gathered to be drugged and brainwashed on a farm. The victims were isolated, immersed in filth, pumped with psychedelic drugs…all with the full and secret complicity of the FBI and CIA.” 

Alas, when in 1979 Fidel Castro (whose regime murdered more political prisoners than pre-war Hitler’s and jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s) invited Stephen Stills to perform in Cuba, the famous Woodstocker could hardly contain his elation. The fervent champion of human-rights, civil rights and free-speech (indeed CSNY’s last tour was titled “The Free-Speech Tour”) not only took up the offer to perform at this “Havana-Jam,” but also composed a song in Castro’s honor, titled “Cuba al Fin!” 

Jazz-master Paquito‘d Rivera, in Cuba at the time, recalls watching Stills on stage at Havana’s Karl Marx theatre lovingly crooning the song to the families of Castro’s Stalinist nomenklatura as if Havana-Jam were a personal performance for the mass-murderer himself. Within blocks of this cheeky “Havana-Jam,” (which also included Human-Rights activist Kris Kristofferson along with Billy Joel) Cuban youths, black and white, languished in dungeons suffering longer prison sentences than Nelson Mandela’s. The Cubans’ crimes were attempting free speech.  (more…)

The Drew Barrymore-produced romantic comedy He’s Just Not That Into You has made the jump from catch-phrase to self-help book to movie hit. With an all-star cast this classic ‘chick flick” appears to be winning the weekend after posting a spectacular $10.5M in opening day ticket sales. That should mean a 3-day start of $27.4M or so, easily out-pacing holdover Taken (Fox) and three other new wide releases. With this kind of opening, Not That Into You could reach almost $60M by the end of next weekend (a 4-day Presidents/Valentine’s combo), which would forecast a potential $90M in US ticket sales.

The new movie developed by New Line and now released by Warner Bros is based on the book of the same name co-written by former Sex & the City scribes Greg Behrendt and Liz Tucillo. The line itself has come to be a reassuring fallback for women in the dating scene (and I’m guessing single guys have adopted the mentality as well in the rough-and-tumble world of dating).

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