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Priscilla Alvarez
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One of London Zoos best-known movie moments is from Harry Potters first movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone. London Zoo does not have any talking pythons -- or even CGI ones, as they have in the movies -- but this scene was shot at the reptile house at London Zoo in 2001. The James Bond movie Skyfall is a firm Christmas favourite of mine, because it features London Zoos then-Komodo dragon, Raja, as the lead.
The future for a zoo that has four tigers is uncertain -- it went into liquidation last year after a bank cut off its overdraft -- so the tear-jerking Hollywood film comes in just in time. When three-year-old Ella Mees father visited the set in April of last year, he asked Matt Damon to pose for pictures wearing A Zoo With Four Tigers shirts, as a way of showing the bank that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Three-year-old Ella Mees dad never imagined that his story would be the subject of a harrowing Hollywood movie, starring Matt Damon as Benjamin and Scarlett Johansson as Big Cats guardian.
After two years of the twists and turns that followed, Ella Mees father wrote We Buy a Zoo, a book that recounts a time in his life that changed him forever. Just five months after their dad bought the zoo, which included four tigers, their mother, Kathryn, died at just 40 from a brain tumor. When Ella Mees, now three, and her brother, Milo, now ten, have children of their own, just imagine the bedtime stories they will tell of growing up as part of a family who brought Dartmoor Zoo back to life with four tigers.
After Benjamin Mees father died early in 2005, Mee persuaded his mother, who is in her seventies, to sell the Surrey house where he and his three brothers and sisters had grown up, and to buy his own new family home. The single man was thus not just the sole father to his two youngest children, Milo and Ella, but responsible for an entire familys animals, as well as staff, in the failing, run-down petting zoo.
One man was continually worried the zoo would not simply survive long enough to make a movie about the project. They had been happily settled down for two years, with one of them writing a book while also renovating two of their sheds -- now he had a crazy new idea for buying a zoo. This is one mans real story about buying an unsuccessful, dilapidated zoo, aiming to save and reopen it to the public.
Mees reaction to his death scare was to embark on the biggest adventure of them all, buying a century-old country home with his remaining family inheritance, and buying the zoo. The operation is moved from Devon to sunny California, with Mee buying the zoo after his wife died, although the reality is that the family moved in together before their wives death. The projected movie was moved to California, USA, and the character of his wife is absent.
Instead, the film is moving, honest, and thought-provoking, following May and her family who are racing to prepare a petting zoo for critical inspection, and, if it succeeds, to open it for its summer season. If readers are expecting a anecdotal book on animals, with insight into various species and the behavior of animals gained on the way, all of the background info, as well as details of the familys lives in France, as well as the ways in which Benjamin Mees family raised money to eventually purchase a failed, dilapidated zoo, seems to get somewhat out of focus. The rotting zoo, the animals, and the dedicated employees are the focus, first on Benjamin and Rosa, then, at length, on Dylan , so they are both drawn into the larger fight rather than on their personal struggles.
No, Cameron Crowes not spending big money on new cars or whatever, but he is casting Patrick Fugit, who plays a character based very closely on Crowes own younger self from "Almost Famous," in Crowes new film, "We Buy the Zoo". This is the first time filmmaker Cameron Crowe has published in The Times, and The Times does not know how old he is. It seemed like one of a persons first tasks as zoo director was going to have been deciding what animals were going to get shot.
LONDON -- Details have emerged about plot lines in James Bonds highly anticipated new movie, Skyfall, and the studios chief executive is exclusively speaking about how James Bond did, in fact, buy the zoo. Sean Connery and Mark Sutton parachuted to a stadium in the 007s brief feature film, which features Daniel Craig and The Queen, at the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.