When young marble-phenom Ryan beats a friend at a game of marbles and gleefully takes the boy’s marbles as the prize, Ryan’s grandfather takes him aside, and explains to him that winning isn’t necessarily everything. His grandfather tells him a story about when he was a boy, there was a marble-player in his neighborhood who was so good, everyone called him “EL Caniquero” (“THE Marbler”).
But one day, after repeatedly brushing off his tag-along younger sister, he accidentally knocks out one of her teeth with a marble during a game. He feels so bad about what he did and the way he treated her that he puts away his marbles and refuses to play anymore. But one day, a group of big teenage boys from another neighborhood come by; they proceed to unfairly beat other neighborhood children in several games and take their marbles. After a few times of this, the kids go to their former marble champion and ask him to beat the bullies for them. He finally agrees, and goes on to soundly beat the older kids in a winner-take-all game of marbles. However, when the game is over, he returns his opponent’s bag of marbles, thus showing –as the Grandfather in turn explains to Ryan—“it is better have more friends than more marbles.” Having learned a new lesson, Ryan goes outside and gives his young friend back his bag of marbles so that they can play together again.
Content
The story is told in the style of a Western, kind of in the vein of El Mariachi or Desperado (but with far less bloodshed!). The plot is very predictable: the “hero who unintentionally hurts someone and vows never to do [insert hero’s specialty here] ever again, but finally reluctantly agrees when injustice arises, and then goes on to defeat said injustice, thus helping the hero come to terms with what happened and find his/her purpose again” plot. However, it works well for this film. This plot style is effective in communicating a lesson, especially in films that are geared toward children/families. Let’s face it, most films in that genre have a predictable storyline; but that’s because it works.
The writing in the film wasn’t bad. However, the acting was trickier. Directing is hard enough; trying to direct a cast of children is even harder. Most kids have a tendency to forget their lines, freeze up, look at the camera, fidget, and/or try to steal the scene by “hamming it up”. (It’s no wonder that big-budget films have a “kid wrangler” on staff!) It was very apparent in the film that several of the kids didn’t quite know their lines; others seemed awkward, as though they weren’t quite sure what they were supposed to do.
In the first film I worked on, we had an adult actor who had a very difficult time with these same sort of issues. He was okay at remembering his lines, but when the camera was on, he froze up. One day, after trying repeatedly to film one scene, I suggested to the director that we turn off the camera and rehearse the scene once or twice; then, we would turn the camera back on (without telling the actor) and go through the scene one or two more times. We tried it, and it worked like a charm; the actor did his scene with no trouble. I would suggest trying this if you’re going to do a film with child actors. Most people get very self-conscious when there’s a camera around. However, if you’re able to have a rehearsal day, bring the camera along and tell the actors you’re practicing your camera moves. Run through the scenes with your camera off, but act as if you were filming it. That will get the actors used to being around the camera; after awhile, they should get used to it and stop paying attention to it. On the day of filming, go through a few (camera off) rehearsals. Don’t tell the actors when you start filming, and hopefully, you’ll get a good, natural performance.
Important note: be sure to treat the rehearsals as if they’re actual takes (i.e. no crew members talking in the background, no actors screwing around, etc.). The goal is for the rehearsals to be as similar as possible to the actual take, so the actors don’t know the difference.
