Alabama Moon

Alabama Moon is a 2009 American coming-of-age film starring Jimmy Bennettand John Goodman,^[3] based on the book Alabama Moon by Watt Key. The story takes place in the forests of Alabama.^[4]

The World Premiere of Alabama Moon, directed by Tim McCanlies (Secondhand Lions), starring Jimmy Bennett (2009's Star Trek, Evan Almighty, Firewall, Poseidon), John Goodman (The Big Lebowski, Raising Arizona, O Brother Where Art Thou, The Babe), Clint Howard (Frost/Nixon,Halloween, Cinderella Man), and Uriah Shelton (currently filming Lifted in Birmingham). Beyond the title, Alabama Moon has many connections to the state of Alabama as the film is based on the award winning book, Alabama Moon, by Alabama native and resident, Watt Key, and was produced by Lee Faulkner, a native of Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Alabama Moon is a family friendly film, set in the early 80's. Eleven-year-old Moon Blake (Jimmy Bennett) has spent most of his life hiding out in the forests of Alabama with his father, an anti-government radical who clings to conspiracy theories and trusts no one. Moon's life suddenly changes when the land they live on is sold to a lawyer just as his father becomes ill and suddenly dies. He has never known any truth but his Pap's and so he tries to follow his last instructions: make your way to Alaska where "people could still make a living off trapping." 

Moon quickly finds himself in the path of civilization, when the lawyer, Mr. Wellington (John Goodman), discovers him on his land. Thinking he is doing what is best for the boy, he calls the local authorities. Moon bolts, fearing the very thing he has been hiding from his entire life. Unfortunately, he is captured by the mean-spirited Constable Sanders (Clint Howard), who takes him to a boy's reform school to become property of the State. Here, Moon meets other boys his age and learns what friendship is all about. However, Moon is determined on getting to Alaska and escapes from the school bringing two of his friends Kit (Uriah Shelton) and Hal (Gabriel Basso) back to the forest to live with him. Moon uses his wilderness survival skills to outwit Constable Sanders and provide food and shelter for him and his friends. Moon writes smoke letters to his Pap, letting him know he is ok. However, Moon begins to question his father's beliefs when Hal leaves and Kit gets gravely ill and is in need of medical attention. As Moon encounters other lifestyles, true friends and true enemies, he adapts and learns to survive in the outside world, and even, perhaps, make his home there.NOVEL

Alabama Moon by Watt Key is a unique, action-packed coming-of-age story in the vein of classics such as Louis Sachar’s Holes, Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Since its release in September of 2006 it has quickly won the hearts of readers young and old.

The novel has received attention from publications such as The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and is the winner of several awards including the EB White Read Aloud Award for Older Readers 2007 and the Parent's Choice - Gold Medal in 2006.  

The novel has been translated into five languages.  It was recently nominated for the German Youth Literature Award 2009. This award has been issued by the German section of the International Board on Books for Young People since 1955, and Watt Key received a nomination in the children's middle grade novels category. The presentation will take place at Frankfurt Book Fair on October 16 2009. Dressler (Germany), Kinneret (Israel), Kaisei-sha (Japan), and INK Pub (Taiwan) have published it.

ALABAMA MOON has become required summer reading in several middle schools across the country including, among others, those in the State of New York, Ohio, Alabama, and North Carolina. It is also being taught school-wide at Daphne Middle School in Daphne, Alabama. 

Published in hardcover by Farrar Straus Giroux (2006; now in its eighth printing) and paperback by Square Fish (2008; now in its fifth printing), it has achieved combined sales of over 100,000 in the US.

Film roles

Year	Title	Role	Notes
2003	The Jungle Book 2	Hathi Jr. (voice)
2003	Daddy Day Care	The Flash/Tony
2004	Springtime with Roo	Roo (voice)
2004	The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things	Young Jeremiah
2004	Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy	Tommy
2004	The Polar Express	Billy the Lonely Boy (voice)
2005	Hostage	Tommy Smith
2005	The Amityville Horror	Michael Lutz
2005	Pooh's Heffalump Halloween Movie	Roo (voice)	replaced Nikita Hopkins
2006	Firewall	Andy Stanfield
2006	Poseidon	Conor James
2006	Shark Bait	Junior (voice)
2007	Evan Almighty	Ryan Baxter
2007	South of Pico	Mark Weston
2008	Diminished Capacity	Dillon
2008	Snow Buddies	Buddha (voice)
2008	Trucker	Peter
2009	Star Trek	Young James T. Kirk
2009	Orphan	Daniel "Danny" Coleman
2009	Shorts	Toby "Toe" Thompson
2009	Alabama Moon	Moon Blake
2009	Stolen	John Wakefield
2010	Bones	Bones White
2011	Ghild	Ralph Gullivan	Short film
2013	Movie 43	Nathan	Segment: "Middleschool Date"
2014	Camouflage	Kevin
2015	Bad Asses on the Bayou	Ronald
2015	A Girl Like Her	Brian Slater

Tim McCanlies

filmography

Position	Film	Year
Screenplay	North Shore	1987
Director/Screenplay	Dancer, Texas Pop. 81	1998
Screenplay	Dennis the Menace Strikes Again!	1998
Screenplay	The Iron Giant	1999
Director/Screenplay	Secondhand Lions	2003
Director	Alabama Moon	2011
Director	When Angels Sing	2013

The Truth about Guardian Angels (part 3)

This special bond between generations is better understood in other cultures than our own, especially among the Chinese. There the veneration of ancestors and the expectation that they can be called upon to help those living is taken for granted. Here, in the West, we have lost this feeling. If we are not outright atheists, we tend to believe that if the souls of the dead exist at all, they are distantly removed from us in a heavenly zone with which we have no connection. I no longer believe this to be the case. Our ancestors, especially those who are not that distantly related in time, take an active interest in our affairs and seek to help us where they can and when permitted. In this they are our primary spirit guides, no so much angels as companions on the way. For them our lives provide an opportunity to progress through service while for us we need all the help we can get. It is a win-win situation that is barely hinted at by the term ‘guardian angel’ but I do vbelieve this is the reality. Now I have told you about my ‘Persian’ guide who appeared to me in Denver and you may be thinking that guardian angels are all exotic beings from former times and ages. Well in my experience nothing could be further from the truth. So here is the story of how I identified a guide who I think has been with me since birth: my own grandfather.

As I have written in an earlier post, I was able to go all the way from Denver to Chicago with just one lift. It was remarkable and even at the time I was aware that my guides had a hand in setting this up. The two young guys who took me there had deliberately turned off the freeway to check if anyone was hitching on the desolate spot where I was standing. They left me in the centre of Chicago. There I tried to get directions to Racine, Wisconsin. It was the evening rush hour and I asked a news vendor the way. Whether he was hard of hearing or it was too noisy, although I repeated my request several times, he simply could not understand what I was saying. I could understand him perfectly but it seems that my English accent, which is not even a regional dialect, had him completely thrown!

Giving up on him, I started walking in a dirction I reckoned to be north till I found a place to put out a thumb. Almost immediately a concerned motorist stopped. “Really, you don’t want to be hitching here”, he said, “you’ll get yourself mugged or worse. Jump in and I’ll take you out to the suburbs where you’ll be a lot safer.” I thanked him and soon found myself somewhere on the northern fringes of the Windy City. He dropped me by a burger bar and it was here that I found a dollar bill at my feet and no one around to claim it. Grateful to the cosmic for sending this gift, I dined hungrily on a burger and chips.

By this time it was getting dark and I needed somewhere to sleep. Nearby was a church and I could hear people singing. I went inside and once the service was over, asked the pastor if he wouldn’t mind me pitching my tent on the small patch of grass in front of the church. He was OK with this and so was I. The next day I hitched a ride to Racine, intending to stay for a few days before heading back down to Chicago and then on to NY.

I stayed a few weeks and then my plans changed radically with the weather. Winter set in abruptly and the temperature plummeted, soon going down to -24ºC. It became a case of hunkering down until the winter turned into summer and the ice melted. Until then, Lake Michigan was frozen as far as the eye could see and any un-gloved hand was instant turned to ice too. There was no Spring worth mentioning, not like we have here in England. Summer came with an abruptness that I found quite startling. In the meantime Racine had an excellent library to study in. I also made many new friends, some of whom I am still in contact with.

It was during this time of short days and frozen cityscapes that my next guide appeared to me in a dream. He, however, was no stranger from another time and world but none other than my father’s father, my grandfather. Now I had never met him in person as he had passed over the year before I was born but I recognised him immediately from a picture we had at home. A smartly dressed city gent, he had been at his prime during the Edwardian era at the beginning of the 20th century. A self-made man who by today’s standards would have been classed as a multi-millionaire, he had made his money as an importer of sugar, copra (dried coconut used for the extraction of cocoanut oil) and, I think, tobacco. His fortune, alas, was lost (like so many others) during the Second World War. It closed off access to his suppliers and all but bankrupted his company. Nevertheless, as a boy living in the 1950s, I saw something of the after-glow of his enterprise: I grew up in a large house, which had been his, in a relatively wealthy London suburb.

In my dream my grandfather was not at all happy with me and most especially with my lack of organisation in my finances. He said he would help me sort this out but that I must start to behave more responsibly and stop drifting. It was time to stop running away from responsibility, he said. I needed to get a grip on my life.

My grandfather’s message was not really news to me. At some deeper level of my being I knew that my time of travels had to come to an end. For though I had toyed with the idea of trying to settle in the US—something which even then was quite hard for a foreigner like myself to do—I knew I needed to go home and sort things out there. What was strange was meeting someone in a dream who previously I had only known from one or two pictures. It was a bit like the movie ‘Night at the Museum’ where the exhibits come to life at night-time. I was talking to a man who looked just like the image in  his picture (above). That he should take an interest in me was not all that surprising for I am, after all, his only grandson and, as I have no sons myself, the last male of his lineage. Nevertheless I believe there is something more to our connection. I believe he has a special relationship with me that was probably agreed between us even before I was born. In this sense he is my human guardian and guide in a way he is not for my sisters.

This special bond between generations is better understood in other cultures than our own, especially among the Chinese. There the veneration of ancestors and the expectation that they can be called upon to help those living is taken for granted. Here, in the West, we have lost this feeling. If we are not outright atheists, we tend to believe that if the souls of the dead exist at all, they are distantly removed from us in a heavenly zone with which we have no connection. I no longer believe this to be the case. Our ancestors, especially those who are not that distantly related in time, take an active interest in our affairs and seek to help us where they can and when permitted. In this they are our primary spirit guides, no so much angels as companions on the way. For them our lives provide an opportunity to progress through service while for us we need all the help we can get. It is a win-win situation that is barely hinted at by the term ‘guardian angel’ but I do believe this is the reality.

So if you want to know who is your guide, look back along your family tree, at those who were dead before you were born, and see if you can recognise someone with whom you have a special affinity. It could just be that this long lost uncle, grandmother or even ancient ancestor is working with you today. They might even be your primary guardian angel.

(In the next article we will discuss networks of guides and how you can make the best use of their help to realise you dreams and destiny).https://invcol.com/