Thursday Theater

I was thinking of spending some time comparing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to the films based on it or The Hobbit to the new movie, but conversations I’ve had about the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory starring Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka have always gone something like this:

Someone Else: I just love that movie!

Me: It’s okay, but I wish it would have followed the book better.

Someone Else: I never read the book.

Me: [Barely suppressed sigh/groan]

Chances are, either you already know all of the places where the movie deviates from the book in these stories, or you really don’t care. My comparisons would probably seem needlessly grumpy or totally boring. Let me just say, however, that for me, the book is always the real story. Whether it’s the geese that lay golden eggs in Willy Wonka or Radagast’s bunny sleigh in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, anything that shows up in the movie that wasn’t in the book is a lie.

If you love books, however, it’s another thing altogether for there to always be that something that you can’t quite put your finger on that doesn’t allow a film to measure up to a book. That something probably has to do with another person’s imagination (ie the film director’s) not matching very well with your own. I have less of a problem with this, myself, since the images from my own imagination tend to mix and meld with those in the film and I forget what was my own picture and what I saw in the movie. If your mind’s eye has clearer vision than mine does, however, you’ll likely have a harder time shifting gears to someone else’s idea of what the story looks like. In that case, I think these few paragraphs from A Year at the Movies by Kevin Murphy contain some great thoughts and good advice for enjoying both media without sacrificing your own intellectual dignity. Murphy was writing about the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, but I think it applies equally to other well-loved stories…such as The Hobbit and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:

 

If you’re like a lot of people, you were captivated by how the story played in the theater inside your own skull. It opened up your imagination. Like all good stories, it inspired you to illuminate the story in your own mind’s eye. … If J. K. Rowling has done nothing else truly remarkable in her pages, she used modern language to absolutely illuminate a fantasy world, and she’s done this in a way that leaves the illumination in the hands of the reader.

            Sure, these images were born of J. K. Rowling’s book, but they were nurtured and decorated and set upon the stage by you. This is your movie, your screenplay, adapted for your own imagination by you. And since you’re working with good material, you probably have a terrific cast, splendid art direction, and a fabulous soundtrack. It’s a slam dunk. Like shooting ducks in a barrel.
             But now you’re going to shelve all that and let Chris Columbus and about three hundred people under contract to Warner Brothers coin all those images and characters for you. Will you be disappointed? I hope so. Entertained, yes, but disappointed, because your imagination has been co-opted, redesigned, copyrighted, licensed and sold back to you. And you’re paying for the privilege…
            Here’s all I’m suggesting: Before you go out and pay good money for the rights to your own imagination, mull the story over in your mind. Not so you’ll know it by rote, but so you’ll reflect on why you like it so much. Hold your own adaptation of Harry, hold it close, and maybe you’ll enjoy the Chris Columbus version, even though it pales next to your own.

  

Perhaps there is a way to love both movies and books. Perhaps we can all just get along.

 

 

 

A Year of Books I’ve Read Before

 

A Year at the Movies by Kevin Murphy

One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey

Kevin Murphy, of whom I became a big fan while watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, didn’t just focus on movies in the year 2001. He experienced the full-blooded phenomenon of viewing publicly-presented films every single day in that year. That’s the story of A Year at the Movies.

While Murphy knows plenty about film itself and does comment on particular films, this memoir is almost entirely about the venues of viewing. He experienced the multiplex in all its magnificent glassy-eyed dullness and concluded, “It’s a shame that the country’s best screens are being used for the country’s stupidest films.” He viewed films all over the world in some of the largest theaters and in the very smallest. He watched art films with snobs and dumb movies with everyone else. He experienced some of the most interesting movie houses and met some of the most interesting movie people. I wanted to know more about the films he watched, whether this film or that film was good, whether he liked the same films I did, but I got caught up in his real theme, filmgoing, and enjoyed the ride all the way. 

Murphy is cynical and funny, intelligent and open-minded. His year-long journey/experiment, took some good planning, a fair bit of optimism, and plenty of guts. Yes, he pulled a few stunts while experiencing the movies, like dressing in full nun drag for a sing-along The Sound of Music, sneaking an entire turkey dinner with all the trimmings into a theater on Thanksgiving, and dating several women in one week (he’s married) just to re-discover the concept of the date movie. He also found wonderful venues, like the Midnight Sun Film Festival in Finland and a tiny, well-run theater in Australia, and found along with them a renewed hope in culture of the cinema.

I’m not someone who likes to brave the movie theater very often. The big screen and huge sound system aren’t often worth the extra cash to me, even with the bonus feature of sharing a dark room with big strangers over whom I have to step to get to a good seat. I have had some great experiences in movie theaters, however, and it was the feelings invoked by these experiences that allowed me to share some of the hope for the cinema along with Kevin Murphy. Going to the movies should be fun, and the best showings, sometimes independent of the quality of the film itself, are those during which every audience member is having a good time.

I like Murphy’s attitude and the care he has for quality entertainment. I also admire the energy with which he tackled this project, especially through setbacks and obstacles ranging from jet lag to a kidney stone to Corky Romano.  A Year at the Movies makes me wish I loved the movies as much as he does. (Maybe in my own little way, my love of stories well-told, I do.) His passion is inspirational and contagious. I can’t help but get excited by such enthusiasm: “The cinema is a miracle. Great drama, humor, sound, and spectacle, image and motion, all malleable, all portable, seen in a crowd, the world shown to the world, our modern circus, our timeless stage. It can be crudely assembled or finely polished, but it all has the potential to thrill me.”

This is a highly entertaining memoir of a monumental adventure and it makes me excited about movies again, like I was as a kid and they were a big event. Murphy suggests that we demand better from film-providers, and perhaps if we did, the movies could be big events for all of us each time we go out to a theater.

A Year of Books I've Read Before

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

There really is nothing I could say about The Hobbit that hasn’t already been said. That being the case, however, just reading (or hearing or saying or thinking) the perfect opening line, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” makes my toes curl with excitement. That line is like the word “SPECIAL” spinning on the television screen indicating that something different than the usual network programming is coming up. (Remember that?) The anticipation of a fantastic ride, “there and back again” as it were, is delicious.

I’ve read The Hobbit more than once, but I’m not one of those persons who has read it so many times that I have every detail memorized (I think you know there are folks like that out there). I can’t even remember if I’ve read The Hobbit since I was in college and I re-read it as part of a Modern Masters class on the works of Tolkien. (That’s right. I got to read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for a class!) That was a long time ago. So long ago that there were significant parts of the book about which I had completely forgotten.

Since I have seen the recent release of the film version of the first portion of The Hobbit, I couldn’t help comparing the book to the movie as I went along. Usually this kind of practice makes me disappointed and frustrated. I must be learning to lighten up, however, because I found it fun this time around. Sure, there are plenty of passages that required some punching-up to make them more theatrical, but my heart no longer yearns for perfect film adaptations. I can enjoy the two media separately, but books are almost always better experiences for me.

I wish I had one of those personal stories to tell about how discovering The Hobbit as a child launched a life-long love of reading and an intense (and nerdy) appreciation for fantasy literature. I don’t. Sure, I’ve enjoyed this book every time I’ve read it, but, to tell the truth, I think I was more excited about it this time around than any other. It’s simply a great adventure story, one of the best and one of the first of its kind. There’s an inviting narrator who tells his story almost like a bedtime story for children, but that narrator’s wisdom and craft along with some of the more intense themes make his tale enjoyable to those of us who have grown up a little bit, too.

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” A simple beginning to a wonderful story. It takes a certain amount of discipline to move on to another book instead of just picking it up and reading it again….and again.

 

 

 

A Year of Books I've Read Before

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

I began this year with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because I started reading with this book. Sure I’d been able to read for four or five years by the time I picked it up. I’d been dabbling in E.B. White and Laura Ingalls Wilder, Beverly Clearly and Judy Blume, probably a bit of L. Frank Baum, too. I don’t remember reading those books, though. That is, the actual experience of reading them for the first time. I remember, or so I think, what it was like to break into Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, much like breaking into a basketball-sized Cadbury Crème Egg.

I still love Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. What’s not to love, really? It’s whimsical and funny, creative and exciting. It’s loaded with improbabilities, just rewards, and comeuppances. It’s loaded with adventures designed perfectly for imaginative child readers and for those of us who refuse to grow up. And it’s loaded with candy.

I still like the same things I loved about this book as a kid: the genuinely good, loveable and decent Charlie Bucket; the genius but still child-like Willy Wonka; the funny Oompa-Loompa songs; the very way the tale unfolds. Of course my overly-educated adult mind finds a large number of impossibilities in the story and its details now, but I’m also better aware than I was as a youngster of just why I liked this book so much. Not only is it silly and fantastical (and loaded with candy), but it’s pace and structure are just right. A dual tension builds in the first third of the book amid the Golden Ticket excitement and the Bucket family’s extreme poverty. We race through Wonka’s factory but stop often enough and long enough to behold wonders (and bad puns), and to subject each of the visiting children to an extreme test of character. And of course there’s a happy ending. As a child I was (and am still) a sucker for a happy ending.

I’ve started giving copies of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my nieces who can read. I’m hoping they’ll enjoy it even half as much as I do. Really, I want everyone to read this book. This story is wonderfully adventurous and deliciously detailed (and loaded with candy), a perfectly fertile field on which to exercise the mind’s eye. It will be impossible, no matter how many times I read it, to stop loving this book.

 

 

A Year of Books I’ve Read Before

Best-Laid Plans for January

Yes, I’m fully aware that January is half over. That doesn’t mean a girl can’t have dreams!

My hope for the month of January is to re-read the following books:

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, the book I’ve read the most of all the books in the world;

The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien, because I didn’t get it around to reading it before the new movie came out;

A Year at the Movies by Kevin Murphy, for inspiration in my own year-long project;

The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, because it has been too long since I read/studied it and I’m overdue for a reconsideration;

The Moonstoone by Wilkie Collins, because I want to see if it’s a good as I remember.

I’m fully aware that “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft agley,” but I’ve already finished re-reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and I’m halfway through both The Hobbit and A Year at the Movies, so color me optimistic!

Coming soon: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

A Year of Books I’ve Read Before

Preface to a Year of Books I've Read Before

I’m going to take a year to focus on books I’ve read before. It’s as simple as that. Most are books I own in some form: battered paperbacks, practically new hardcovers, multi-novel collections in one binding, e-books, etc. in all their cluttered glory.

For years (and years) I’ve passed over my favorite books and books I didn’t quite remember very well because I wanted to read more books I hadn’t read before. I did a Year (Plus) of Books I Should Have Read by Now (October 2011-December 2012) largely to try and clear the decks to focus on favorites. It was an enjoyable year (plus) of somewhat limited success, but enough of that for a while. I’m going to take this year (2013) to re-read as much as I can.

 

While I am an enthusiast, I’m also a realist. I am fully aware that I’m a very Distractible Reader. Other books, books that overwhelm my curiosity despite my best efforts to focus, will demand to be read during this year. I can just tell. Plenty of other things will probably get in the way as well. And so this is likely to be a Year of Books I’ve Read Before, with Distractions. So be it. Let’s see how this goes.

 

Just so you know, I’m strictly an amateur reader. By that I mean that I have no formal education or training in literature or the business of books or book reviews, at least no more than that afforded by a decent secondary and post-secondary education. I read because I love to. I write this blog because I don’t have enough people to talk to about what I’ve read (and I won’t shut up). I invite comments, complaints, questions and discussions (although, please read these guidelines first). I also invite suggestions, although if they are for books I have not read before, I might put them off for another year. Although, as I said, I am quite distractible…



A Year of Books I've Read Before