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Mischa Barton Articles, Reviews
and Picture
Links
Memorable Performances Power Offbeat 'Lawn
Dogs'
Los Angeles Times Lawn Dogs Review Full Version
By KEVIN THOMAS TIMES STAFF WRITER
Excerpt from this review, please click above for full version.
"Even though vital, risk-taking performances are a Duigan trademark--think of the nasty Nicole Kidman in "Flirting"--Barton is in a class by herself in making Devon come alive in all her passion, iron will and naivete. Rockwell emerges as a compelling actor and McDonald and Quinlan have the dreadful Stockards nailed from frame one. The supporting cast is also strong."
Review for Video Release of Lawn Dogs By James Wong
The two central performances are superb. Mischa Barton owns Devon and the film. Her work is quite amazing, such a young actress and is able to light up the screen like a veteran actor. I can say for sure she boasts at least 50 facial expressions all used to good effect. Sam Rockwell as ‘the country bumpkin’ gardener is solid in his role. They make a good on-screen duo.
“Time to go home, princess.” – Trent.
“I’m not a princess.” – Devon.
“Yeah well, I’m still piss poor.” – Trent.
ROGER EBERT Review of PUPS Full Version
Excerpt from Ebert Review of
'Pups'
"Pups"
looks ragged and slammed-together, but that's part of its appeal; the film
has a wildness that more care would have killed. It's about a bank robbery
and hostage crisis involving a 13-year-old and his girlfriend. Why this bank?
"It was on the way to school."
The kids, named Stevie and Rocky, are played by Cameron Van Hoy and Mischa Barton in two of the most natural and freed performances I have seen by actors of any age.....
Barton, has a lot of professional experience, but must never have found a role like this before. You can sense her exhilaration as she behaves the way a 13-year-old girl would behave--not dampened down by a conventional screenplay. Often Van Hoy and Barton waltz through long takes, working without the net of editing....... So much depends on the performances. If instead of Van Hoy and Barton the movie had starred safer or more circumspect actors, the energy would have flagged and the flaws of the quick production would have been more of a problem. As it is, "Pups" is a kind of headlong rush toward doom.
The
"Pups" review by Michael Freidson, (TimeOut New York Feb
10-17 2000) refers to Barton's performance as
"Stellar".
Full
New York Times Review of
PUPS
FILM REVIEW By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER
`Pups': They've Got Hostages, and They Want Their MTV
February 14, 2000
"Stevie and Rocky are a Bonnie and Clyde for the MTV generation"....
"Rocky, in a layered performance, combines loyal girlfriend and voice of reason with deep cynicism toward the world she was born into and now is shaping".
CHILD'S PLAY by Ariel Gandsman
Full Review from
the Big
Combo
"Barton is a veteran in comparison to Van Hoy, having been featured in LAWN DOGS and THE SIXTH SENSE. Her performance here is the best by a pre-teen actress since Natalie Portman walked away with THE PROFESSIONAL. The supporting cast of bickering hostages is also quite good."
Combo Capsule
Review by Matt Reichl
"PUPS is that sort of dangerous venture — a serious film that's absolutely reliant on performances by children. Anything short of brilliance on the part of Van Hoy and Barton could've led to a laughable film — an After School Special with more violence than usual. But the kids do more than just deliver — Van Hoy and Barton give two of the most remarkable performances the cinema has ever seen by children. Forget Haley Joel Osment, these two demonstrate they're the most gifted and exciting actors of their generation. Van Hoy offers an amazing mixture off naivete, anger, pathos, and cultural shaping (it's quite clear the television has babysat him on far too many occasions). And Barton's even better. She gives ones of the most emotionally authentic depictions of a teenager that movie screens have ever seen (it's right up there with Jean-Pierre Leaud in THE 400 BLOWS and Crispin Glover in THE ORKLY KID)."
Excerpt of "Pups" Review at Amazon by Gordon Kearns
............"Pups" follows the pattern by casting in the roles of Stevie and Rocky two young actors of consummate skill. Cameron Van Hoy is remarkable in his first major role, and Mischa Barton adds another great performance to her already impressive acting history (check out her stunning reading of the role of the complex Devon in "Lawn Dogs").
This is as powerful a movie as you'll ever see, possibly too powerful for some. But if for no other reason, I recommend you see "Pups" for the excitement of watching a pair of outstanding young actors in action.
Japanese Poster for
"Pups" August 2000 Tokyo
More Review
Links
Tart Preview Pics coming
soon!
Movie Picture
Links
Roger Eberts thoughts on Lost and
Delirious
A good piece by Ebert at Sundance
LOST AND DELIRIOUS
Date: 2001/01/24
(This is a Sundance report by Roger Ebert from the www.suntimes.com site and I thought it was something special, so here)
Your day fits together like this. You attend a speech by one of the most brilliant brain scientists in the world, who explains how the mind processes emotion and feeling, and how the movies exploit that capacity. Then you go to see "Lost and Delirious," a film starring three beautiful young women in a story involving lesbianism at a boarding school. You find Lea Pool's "Lost and Delirious" to be one of the most carefully crafted, most professional films you've seen at this year's Sundance Film Festival. But that isn't why you like it so much. You're absorbed from beginning to end because the characters are enormously interesting and likable. And because they are gorgeous. And because you could hear a pin drop in the 1,400-seat Eccles Center during the sex scenes, which are not explicit, but are erotic.
You have taken as your credo this statement by the critic Robert Warshow: "A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man." I am honest enough. I am that man. I, personally, was stirred, involved and absorbed by "Lost and Delirious." It was a movie, not a statement, an exercise, a stylistic breakthrough or anything else but a superbly told story, with grace and grand romantic gestures.
My mind, I had been assured only hours earlier by Antonio Damasio, head of the brain lab at the University of Iowa and author of the current best seller The Feeling of What Happens, is so good at processing incoming information that when it sees a smile, it takes only milliseconds to ready my facial muscles to smile back. Damasio, a neurobiologist, was the first in the "big thinkers" series launched by festival founder Robert Redford to bring non-film speakers to Sundance.
My mind is constantly in the process of telling me a story based on everything that happens to me, he said, and this story becomes my autobiography. A movie invites me to give over my mind to its story, and it can also add to my life story. But of course my reaction will be influenced by all that has happened to me before I see the movie. I am the man. I bring myself to the movie.
I enjoyed "Lost and Delirious" not simply because it was about beautiful
women (Piper Perabo, Jessica Pare, Mischa Barton). Piper Perabo was in "Coyote
Ugly," and I did not enjoy that so much. But here the three women play characters
who engaged my sympathy. They are roommates in an all-female boarding school,
an expensive one and a very good one. Perabo is Paula, a free spirit, a heedless
romantic. Pare is Tori, the woman she is
having
an affair with, and Barton is Mary, their uncertain new roommate.
These characters are not depicted as neurotic, twisted, stupid or cliched. They are alive and free to be themselves. The crisis in the story comes when Tori makes a conscious decision to break off the love affair, and Paula responds with hurt, anger and rebellion (she actually challenges Tori's new boyfriend to a duel). Mary is the witness and narrator.
Piper Perabo, Mischa Barton & Jessica Pare
The engine driving the film is romanticism; the characters believe the great speeches by Shakespeare and try to act in the same heroic way. Paula is such a romantic, she even denies that she and Tori are lesbians: They are individuals who share a great love, she passionately explains to Mary, and their love transcends sexual roles and is not defined by them. They are like Antony and Cleopatra.
OK. So the rest of my review can await the movie's opening. This article is about the mind and the emotions, about how we personally see a movie and it interacts with our autobiography. I found myself sympathetic to the attitudes in "Lost and Delirious," I liked the way the characters thought and interacted, and how they shaped and tested their values. I felt great attention for Paula; Perabo makes her into a lost soul, but a great one, willing to live by her principles. Her bold acting-out (in class, in the dining hall and at a dance on parents' day) makes her an enormously attractive rebel. She is the Jack Nicholson of 17-year-old boarding school girls.
Coming out of the theater, I ran into a crowd of young men a few years older than the characters in the movie. They did not like it. As they explained their reaction to me, I sensed irony in every word they used. They held themselves apart from the movie. They were wise to what it was trying to do. They were proof against its appeal. They were shielded from its sincerity and romanticism. The characters were over the top. They had logical problems with the plot.
Well, that's how it works. The mind is wired to the emotions and to the inner autobiography, and life has armed them with irony. But my God, I thought, if they are in their early 20s and already so guarded against grand romantic gestures, what can they do in life except make money? Where will their dreams sneak in? When two girls stand desperately in the moonlit woods and share an oath based on the vows of Lady Macbeth, where are their minds? Can't they conceive that idealistic young women might cast their own crisis in the terms of a tragic heroine? And apart from anything else, didn't they respond as healthy young men to the sight of those beautiful young women? Couldn't they even like the movie for its erotic content? Sexual appreciation is a valid response in themovies--one of the oldest and most sincere. A man goes to the movies. I am that man. I would rather be lost and delirious than found and secure.
No
Oscar, but look at the
Grosses!
Sixth Sense, now the
10th
highest Grossing Movie of all time!
Link to picture below for
videocaps from Sixth Sense
DVD
Hundreds
of videocaps from Lawn Dogs DVD
Magazine and Netpage Picture Links
Mischa Barton Rising Young Star
Black & White Pictures from 'Roadshow' Magazine
