Nim's Island

After a really hard week (migraine - what's new?) the only thing that got me through today was the knowledge that I would be seeing Gerry. Sigh.


"Eleven-year-old Nim (Abigail Breslin) and her marine biologist father, Jack (Gerard Butler), are the only human residents of a remote but idyllic South Pacific island.


While Jack studies nanoplankton, Nim makes the entire island her school, with the animals as her teachers and her friends. Every few months, a supply boat brings another book by her favourite author, Alex Rover, an international man of adventure.




But Alex is really Alexandra (Jodie Foster), a writer so terrified of just about everything that she lives on canned soup, constantly sanitizes her hands, and cannot get far enough outside her front door to retrieve the mail." - Nell Minow, Chicago Sun-Times

"A tomboyish young girl, Nim has playmates Selkie the sea lion, Fred the bearded dragon and Galileo the pelican, while her literary hero is Alex Rover, the lionhearted star of adventure novels. Scottish hunk Gerard Butler plays the dual role of Nim's father and the intrepid Alex Rover, an Indiana Jones with a heartier laugh, who appears to writer Alexandra (Jodie Foster) and haunts Nim's imagination. Butler rolls through both roles by channeling an overdeveloped sense of macho into slightly different versions of the same man." - Kirk Honeycutt, The Hollywood Reporter


"Be the hero of your own life story" is the advice the fictional Alex Rover gives writer Alexandra as she struggles with her agorophobia. As a writer myself - who is basing my own fictional character on Gerard Butler - all of the scenes between Alexandra and her character really struck a weird chord. Trust me. It's one thing to carry on in my own mind - it's quite another to see and hear the very man who plays my vampire character talking to the writer who creates him in the film.

Add to that Jodie Foster - one of my husband's favorite actors - playing an agorophobic person, a huge problem my husband struggles with daily - and the weirdness just kept getting weirder. But I mean that in a good way. Basically, this movie seemed to gather a lot of things that are personal to me, and allow me to watch them on the big screen.


And the two Gerry's made the long, long, painful week disappear in a gorgeous instant. Sigh.