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Somewhere Over The Rainbow (2008)
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Projects

Kit Kittredge
Madison as ... Ruthie
Release: July 2 2008
IMDB || Official

Parasomnia
Madison as ... Young Laura
Release: 2008
IMDB || Official

Humboldt County
Madison as ... Charity
Release: 2008
IMDB || Official

The Attic Door
Madison as ... Caroline
Release: September 2008
IMDB || Official

Jack and the Beanstalk
Madison as ... Destiny/Harp
Release: 2008
IMDB || Official

Agent OSO (Voice)
Madison as ... Stacey/Fiona
Release: 2008
IMDB || Official

ER
Madison as ... Claire
Release: Fall 2008
IMDB || Official

The Lost Medallion
Madison as ... Allie
Release: 2009
IMDB || Official

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At The Lollipop Theater Event

Press Democrat

Humboldt County
Humboldt County opens Friday, Sept. 26 at the Rialto Lakeside in Santa Rosa and, wouldn't you know it, the Garberville Theater on the Russian River and the Minor Theater in Arcata. If you think it's just another stoner movie, you'd be half right: Don't expect giggles from this new pot-country drama, but a coming-of-age story that starts slowly and then chills out.

Fans of north coast filmmaking who keep waiting for the breakthrough release that will put the region on the cinematic map at last will have to keep waiting. In the wake of Bottle Shock - perhaps popular in Napa and Sonoma, but a critical disappointment - comes Humboldt County, a film exploring the 'other' main agricultural product of the north country.

The story follows a medical grad student on the verge of his residency, if only he can pass his diagnostic final. He biffs it - his subject, a four-time abortion patient, is thinking about suicide, and Peter Hadley (Jeremy Strong) prescribes an anti-depressant. "Paxil," sniffs his professor. "Really?

It turns out the professor, played by actor-director Peter Bogdanovich, is also Peter's father, and he threatens to fail his own son. This leads Peter (Hadley, not Bogdanovich) to impulsively follow an aggressive young nightclub singer first to her bed, then to her off-the-grid family at the end of the road, Humboldt County.

Predictably, this uptight and closed-off student has some sort of awakening, if not to cosmic consciousness at least to self-awareness and tolerance during the next several weeks. The girl who led him north, Bogart Truman (Fairuza Balk), disappears after serving her purpose in the plot, though for some reason she's relentlessly and pointlessly name-checked throughout.

The biggest problem is the lead, a stage actor whose first film this is. Jeremy Strong is anything but - in fact he is numbingly dull in most of his scenes. The big exceptions come midway in the movie, when he finally gets high for the first time (at last!), and at the end, when he finally learns the lesson of bedside manner and comforts a thoroughly demoralized pot patriarch, played by Brad Dourif.

Dourif himself came to prominence as Billy Bibbit in his first credited film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Next, and was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar. Subsequent roles including the lead in Wise Blood, directed by John Huston and based on a Flannery O'Connor novel, underscored his type-casting as an unstable or eccentric.

Now he's all grown up, and guess what - he's still a bit eccentric, but in the dappled and daft world of Humboldt County, he's the sanest guy around. He uses his striking presence and big blue eyes to great effect, whether comic or sociopathic, providing a much-needed centripetal force in the movie, and to care about the characters is to care about his family.

Humboldt County is by no means a bad movie; at least it avoids the obvious mechanical script that cripples Bottle Shock. But it does start out excruciatingly slow and awkward, and if you're pressed for time getting to the theater to see it, don't rush: coming in 10 or 12 minutes late will spare you the worst of it.

Unfortunately it will also spare you most of Fairuza Balk, the neopagan actress (The Craft, American History X) who plays the nightclub singer Bogart Truman. Though many of her lines are clichéd, she delivers them with energy and surprise.

Frances Conroy of the TV drama "Six Feet Under" plays the chain-smoking mother of this hippie enclave, and has perhaps the single best scene in the movie, an uncomfortable but revealing soliloquy.

Another "Six Feet Under" alum is Chris Messina, who portrays a troubled middle child whose secret garden almost brings the whole golden dream down.

Also watch for a great 11-year old girl performance by Madison Davenport, from whom we'll be seeing more, I guarantee it: she's plays best friend to Abigail Breslin in Kitt Kittredge: An All-American Girl, but she's second-fiddle to no one.

Oh, and by the way: writer-director team of Darren Grodsky and Danny Jacobs, profiled by John Beck in his PD story here, make cameos as fellow trimmers Bob and Steve, so if you're wondering why those two stoners get so much screen time, now you know.

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