Chains

I'm just a little bit annoyed with Laurie Halse Anderson. She's one of the most popular authors I teach in my children's/YA lit class; I teach Speak every year and every single time, someone tells me how important it is to her (usually it's a her). I've had students pass it along to their roommates, to younger kids they're mentoring, to groups they're involved with on campus. Students come to my office, close the door, and tell me how grateful they are for the book and our discussion of it.

So why am I annoyed with her? Annoyed might be too strong. Her new book, Chains, is a terrific read--a really engrossing tale of a young slave girl, Isabel, who gets caught up in the Revolutionary War in New York City. Promised her freedom by her mistress, she finds herself instead taken from her home in Rhode Island to a Loyalist stronghold in New York by her mistress's nephew, who won't honor his aunt's wishes. Isabel is a beautifully drawn character--at first relatively ignorant of the political situation, she is disgusted by the hypocrisy of both sides, who are willing to manipulate and even endanger her for their own purposes.

So, again, why am I annoyed? Because the book is the first of a two-volume series, and I didn't know it would leave me hanging. Sometimes a book leaves you hanging and you forget about it, thinking maybe you'll pick up the second one if and when you think of it--but I spent the weekend talking about this one, recommending it and then adding a brief warning. It's how I felt when I finished The Golden Compass--I turned the page and nearly cried out loud at the irresolution of it all.

But, really, I shouldn't be annoyed. I loved the book, and it really does stop in a logical place. And I think it's a terrific book for middle schoolers, especially ones who are interested in historical fiction. I'm passing it on to Nick next--he loved reading about the Revolution two years ago in his social studies class and is eager for more. But I also recommended it to adults I was talking to over the weekend--we had just seen a documentary, Traces of the Trade, about a New England family coming to grips with its own history of slave-trading, and this novel takes us through some of the same scenery, confronting some of the same issues, as the film. The film takes up the modern legacy of slavery; the novel gives us the contemporary reality of it. I recommend both, highly. And I retract my annoyance, though if the next one doesn't come out soon, I may start feeling it again.

Just. Stop.

I have to confess, I haven't even seen the live action Cat in the Hat.* Nor the Grinch. Why would I? I have the books and my children, thank goodness, are old enough not to beg to see these. The reviews of Horton haven't been quite so bad, but the anti-abortionists hijacking the tag line have annoyed me, so I'll probably stay away from that, too.

So, you know, I loved this. But it's not really G-rated, just so you know.

Stop Making Movies About My Books

*imdb search terms include "Critically Bashed" and "Box Office Flop"

More on Enchanted

Tricia pointed me to Mitali Perkins' great post on Enchanted (read the comments, too). I began to write a long comment but instead of highjacking the thread I thought I'd just post it here.

(Caution: Many, many spoilers ahead...)

It's absolutely true, as I think I noted, that Enchanted has its cake and eats it, too. It deconstructs the love-at-first-sight motif only to reconstruct it in the end, for example. It also deploys the damsel-in-distress motif but then reverses it, putting the hero (briefly and not very seriously) at risk while the heroine struggles to save him. From a feminist viewpoint, I thought, well, meh. Giselle does end up with a job (while her rival, Nancy, who's apparently been a successful businesswoman, gives hers up). The Marie Curie story is shown to be just as much of a fairy tale as Little Red Riding Hood. Giselle even speaks up for stepmothers--a good thing, since by the end she will become one. But apparently shopping is the most significant form of female bonding, and a credit card is better than a fairy godmother (or, apparently, than remarkable skill with drapes, scissors, and thread). Disney will never, ever deconstruct its consumerist fantasies.

Perkins notes that the film deploys some noxious stereotypes (both racist and ageist) as well--in a way, again, fairly typical of Disney films. I think, though, that those stereotypes are somewhat mitigated by the fact that they are deployed by someone evil: that is, both the Narcissa (evil stepmother) character and Nathaniel (her henchman) are so tied up in their version of a fairy tale world that they can't think beyond deploying those stereotypes. Narcissa transforms herself into a crone because she thinks crones are evil; Nathaniel (badly) impersonates various immigrant types because that's who he imagines would do Narcissa's dirty work. They both fail. So while Perkins is right that there are images of bad first-generation immigrants in the film, the really bad characters are only impersonating immigrants. The "real" working class and/or immigrants depicted in the film are for the most part "good" people (the bus driver, the steel drum band, etc.). Now, true, they are only in minor, supporting roles, so there's still that problem, but they're not evil--far from it. And Giselle, for what it's worth, engages with everyone on equal terms: homeless people, shopkeepers, and high-powered lawyers.

I have to confess, I didn't like Nancy--not because she wasn't awesome (I didn't see enough of her to decide) but because she hung around for five years with a pig! She was obviously McDreamy's rebound girlfriend (his wife left him and his daughter when she was one year old or younger, right, if she was six in the movie and he'd been dating Nancy for five years?), she'd been the only adult female in Morgan's life all that time and still didn't know her well enough to know the whole "girlfriend" routine wasn't gong to work, and she was still mooning around for him after finding him with a towel-clad babe in his apartment? If I'd believed for one second in their relationship I might have felt bad for her--but the whole thing was a setup from the start. The one I was curious about was Morgan's mother--but then, I'm always curious about the mom (maybe those are my bifocals?), especially when she's not on screen at all. Frankly, I was surprised and a bit heartened to discover that she wasn't dead--that would have been the usual Disney move.

I've probably spent way more time on this than it deserves--the movie is entertaining, the production numbers are a hoot, and it doesn't take itself nearly as seriously as I just have. On the scale of Disney movies, it seems better to me (wearing my feminist, mom-ist lenses) than most. But is it either great art or ideologically pure? Well, in a word, no.

I have to confess that It's a Wonderful Life actually made me feel more uncomfortable, on many of these grounds, than Enchanted: the comic African-American maid! The Italian immigrants referred to as "garlic-eaters," and depicted with uncountable children--and a goat! Of course it was made in less "enlightened" times...and it still made me cry to watch it...but at the same time this other little voice was reminding me of its failings. And so it goes.

Placeholder

In case you've forgotten I blog here, I thought it was time for a quick post. And all I have to say is, I found Enchanted enchanting. I didn't really want to, and I'm sure there are things to say about how it both undermines the Disney magic and completely buys into it, but I still loved it. No tears, just pure pleasure at formula done right.

Nick enjoyed it just as much as Mariah, if not more.

(Oh, and by the way? Susan Sarandon should play a wicked stepmother more often. She looked like she was having so much fun!)

Yes.

From the Horn Book, on The Golden Compass:

Indeed, the primary failing of this adaptation is its reductivity. Where the book was a series of questions, building upward, layer upon layer, the movie is all about the answers — starting with an opening-credits voiceover that explains many of the central truths of the trilogy, truths Pullman teased forth over the course of the whole story. Without those mysteries to draw viewers forward, the story seems merely to skate the surface (and while a shorter run time is usually indicative of responsible editing, here the film could really have borne expansion). In some ways the early explanations make the rest of the story more confusing, raising topics not explored until later volumes and eliminating, in the process, some brilliantly propulsive reveals.

The Golden Compass Movie: A Brief Review

CAUTION: SPOILERS AHEAD





So, I finally saw it. Really, it was only the second day the movie was out, but it felt like "finally" as so many folks seem to have seen it in previews, and the reviews and the "controversy about religion" stories have been out for a while.

And, meh.

Well, not quite "meh." It's visually quite stunning. I spent the first few minutes saying to Nick and Mariah, "do you remember that place? Look, there's the Bodleian Library! There's Christ Church Meadow! Look, look!" As Mark said, it made Oxford lovelier than it seemed when we were there, all the while also making it quite familiar.

And the unfamiliar was striking as well. The CGI didn't bother me--I believed in Stelmaria and Pan, and most especially in Iorek. I loved seeing witches fly, and bears fight, and zeppelins and airships and daemons and dust. I didn't find the music intrusive (which for me is about as good as it gets) and I thought the casting--especially Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra, Nicole Kidman as Mrs. Coulter, and Sam Elliott as Lee Scoresby--was inspired. (Oh, yes, I liked Tom Courtenay, too.)

But it was less than I'd hoped, and many of the changes, to my great surprise, seem to me to increase rather than decrease the possibility of religious controversy. The movie seems much, much more clear-cut in its depiction of "villains" and "heroes," and locates almost all guilt quite squarely in The Magisterium from the beginning. One of the things I most liked about the novel, particularly on first reading, was the ambiguity. Was Asriel heroic, or demonic? Were Lyra and Pan right about Dust, or were they wrong? Where did the Master of Jordan's loyalties lie?

By making Fra Pavel, rather than the Master of Jordan, Asriel's intended assassin, and by having Asriel focus on Dust with no mention of intercission or trepanning, the movie makes Asriel far more heroic than he is in the book. (I don't mind leaving off the end of the novel; that makes narrative sense for the film, but it does contribute to this sense of Asriel as potential hero.) And making Asriel heroic makes the Magisterium the only villain. Now, it's never called the Church, as in Pullman, so perhaps the movie seems less overtly anti-Christian, but I still think that the novel complicates things fruitfully by suggesting that the Church is not the only source of corruption in the world. That seems to me lost in the movie.

My other objection is to the frequent discussion of free will and doing what one wants. The conversation between Mrs. Coulter and Lyra at the High Table, for example, suggests that the big problem with the Magisterium is that it tells you what to do. (Never mind that Mrs. C. is actually working for them anyway.) But in fact the question of free will is far more vexed in the novel, as a conversation between Serafina and Lee towards the end of the tale makes clear.

Mariah, I think, said it best: she thought they got the characters right, but not the story.

It has given me a lot to chew on over the last twenty-four hours, and will probably continue to. But I think I realized something this evening when I compared my reaction to this film to my reaction to The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which I absolutely loved despite my strong reservations about the book. Much of what I love about His Dark Materials is the language, the beauty of the prose, the clarity of description, the absolute refusal to talk down to the audience. The film loses all of that, and in so doing magnifies the occasional incoherencies and contradictions that are present in the book, but which I can overlook in favor of the inventiveness of the language and plotting. I don't find much to admire in Lewis's language, and his theology seems incoherent to me. But the film built in some narrative coherence that I quite liked (the emphasis on World War II, which is completely lacking in the book), changed some of the most distasteful parts of the story (the sexism is reduced, if not reversed), and completely omits Lewis's often-annoying narrative voice--leaving behind a ripping good adventure yarn.

I've more often than not been disappointed in film adaptations of much-loved movies, starting with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which (for me) was a sad come-down from a novel I'd loved. As a kid, I was all about faithfulness to the text. As an adult, I'm perfectly happy to see adaptations as interpretations, and to enjoy a film for its daring departures from a book as much as (or more than!) for its fidelity. But there all interpretations are not equal, and alas, this one falls far short.

I need to see this movie now!

Because I am just gorging myself on stories here, there, and everywhere on The Golden Compass, and I'd really rather just be re-reading the novels or seeing the film. And with the way our schedules are this weekend, it looks like we may not get to it until next weekend. Sigh. Still, these are all worth reading. My favorite, from the CS Monitor ("everywhere") is this:

Indeed, Pullman's God is not the God of religion, but the didactic, authoritarian voice of adulthood. It's the Authority that pays lip-service to free thought, but then limits free thought within the narrowly defined parameters of what it judges comfortable and acceptable. It is this Authority – and not the God of the Bible – that Pullman silences.

The Golden Compass

I've mostly kept quiet about The Golden Compass movie that's about to open. I want to see it, I think the bear looks amazing, Nicole Kidman as Marisa Coulter is inspired casting, and beyond that I don't have much to say. Lots of other people in the world do, though, and here's a terrific, thoughtful, balanced response to some of the hysteria I've been reading about. (You may have to sit through an ad; sorry!)

Here's a taste:
I want my children to understand that human beings and institutions are fallible. That sometimes those who claim moral authority can traffic in corruption and abuse. I want them to be angry at every wrong perpetuated in the name of God. To question authority. To be feisty troublemakers for positive change.

Me, too. So we're going to the movie this weekend, if we can coordinate all the schedules (two concerts, two parties, an art opening...and a strong desire to sit in front of the fire and knit). I'll let you know what I think.

Recent reading

It's hard to believe that the same person wrote I Capture the Castle and 101 Dalmations. Yes, both were made into successful movies, but I'm pretty sure the resemblance ends there. Smith was a successful playwright before moving into novels with I Capture the Castle in 1948. It's a terrific story of a blocked writer and his family--including two daughters who have a Jane Austen-like marriage plot. The opening line: "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink" is enough to hook the reader in, and the narrator (and second daughter) is a consistently engaging voice. A writer herself, she and her younger brother conspire to break her father out of his writer's block while she and her older sister and stepmother work on the courtship story as well. The allusions to Austen are pervasive, but the novel also meditates on modern fiction, poetry, and the place of both ritual and writing in modern life. My copy came off the table at Barnes & Noble where they put things they're trying to move for summer (3 for the price of 2), with a blurb from J. K. Rowling on the cover, but other than the romance of the crumbling castle there's little to connect it to Rowling. (I just noted that Amazon recommends Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm and Elizabeth Goudge's The Little White Horse for fans of Castle, and that seems just right...)

101 Dalmations (1956), on the other hand, Smith's first novel specifically for children, is--how can I put this kindly?--not as engaging. The limited omniscient narrator gives us--mostly--the point of view of the Dalmation parents, Pongo and Missis, and they are a pretty twee pair, honestly. Pongo is, we are repeatedly told, one of the brightest dogs in Britain (not only does he understand human language and concepts like right and left, he can read English as well), while Missis is more Barbie-esque: cute but dumb. Pongo's feelings for the surrogate parent-dog, Perdita, apparently caused Smith some concern--when Missis can't nurse all fifteen puppies, the Dearlys (their owners) fortuitously find another Dalmation mother who has lost her puppies to nurse half the litter, and Pongo, we are told, thinks of her as their second mother--though not as his second wife but rather a beloved younger sister. Yeah, because I was worried about that. Well, obviously she assumes kids would be, but it's a bizarre detail to go into, isn't it?

Throughout, the dog characters are far more interesting than the human characters, but it's really the secondary characters--the spaniel whose owner is too elderly to go out, the sheepdog whose charge is a two-year-old boy--who are the most intriguing, while Pongo and Missis seem like pure stereotypes: self-sacrificing parents, the strong handsome male and the loving beautiful female. There's an implicit pro-animal-rights message, of course (the bad guys are all about fur), but there are some big problems as well. For example, the evil Cruella deVil is consistently depicted in stark black-and-white, as if to suggest that the polarity itself is evil. But the novel engages in the same kind of polarity--Dalmations good, Cruella bad--reinscribing the black-and-white worldview that it might have seemed to reject. And don't even get me started on class, both with the treatment of servants among the humans, and mixed breeds among the dogs (we are told they're just as lovable as the purebreds, but we don't meet a single one).

Monica Edinger had a great post on animal fantasies a week or so ago in which she asked commenters to consider what makes a good or great one. I'd say this one uses the animals mostly as humans stand-ins (they marry, eat human food, read, and communicate in sophisticated ways--although that latter caveat may simply reveal my species-centrism) and the kind of humans they stand in for are rather simplistic and stereotyped. So, not great.

It's a quick read, and I remember enjoying the animated movie as a kid, but it's not in Castle's class. There's a sequel--The Starlight Barking--but I think I'll skip it.

things to read

Roger Sutton on didacticism in literature. (But read through the comments, too, for the proliferation of anonymi, for the difference between theme and didacticism, and for Tobin Anderson's interesting take on the issue.)

And then more on the same topic from Monica Edinger, over at Educating Alice. As Monica says, "Since I'm a teacher, I'm didactic." Amen! (But she has lots more to say, and more for you to read, really.)

If you haven't been reading Tricia's posts from China you could start now. The pictures alone would be worth the link. Later this summer I'm going to Japan, and I can tell you right now you won't get nearly the great posts from me that you're getting from her. It's hard for me to have an experience and document it at the same time. But she's doing a great job of it.

And then if you want to see some images from the graphic novel version of Coraline, you can. (I'm really excited about the movie, with "PC" from the fabulous Mac vs. PC ads, as the dad.)

Yes, I do need to read something other than blogs or magazines so I can talk about it here. I did read I Capture the Castle, noted over in the sidebar, and decided that it's probably not really a children's novel. Maybe YA. I found it on a table at B&N with Virginia Woolf, Khaled Hosseini, Alexander McCall, and plenty of other grown-up authors. It's got a front-cover blurb from J.K. Rowling, though. And the author, Dodie Smith, is perhaps best known for writing 101 Dalmations, next on my list...

Umm, what??

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We've noticed that customers who have expressed interest in Wuthering Heights have also ordered Thunderbolt P-47s Over Europe Deluxe Edition on DVD. For this reason, you might like to know that Thunderbolt P-47s Over Europe Deluxe Edition is now available on DVD.


(OK, this makes a little bit of sense out of it. But only a little:
Filmed in Technicolor, Thunderbolt was the last of Major William Wyler's wartime directorial efforts on behalf of the US Army Air Corps. As in his previous WW2 documentaries, Wyler himself participated in the mission that he depicts herein on film... Adding poignancy to the film is the knowledge that several of the extremely young American participants, here shown smiling and waving at the camera, did not survive the battle. --Hal Erickson, New York Times)

because that's what I do

We are watching the end of Ella Enchanted, Mariah and I. Nick has given up when it looks as if Ella might actually have to kill the prince. (When does an awareness of narrative conventons kick in? We know she won't have to kill the prince...) It is the final scene.

Mariah: Oh, Edgar (villain) isn't dead. He's just gone crazy.

Me: (disgusted) Right, because it's a G movie. No one can die. Except, of course, the mom. Not the evil uncle.

Mariah: Go write an article, Mommy.

Three movies

Astonishingly, I've seen three movies over the last few days. Two in a theatre, even. And, even more surprisingly, all were good--in very different ways.

I probably shouldn't have watched Etre et Avoir while knitting. After all, I don't speak French, and you need to be watching the screen pretty consistently for subtitles to be truly useful. Nonetheless I enjoyed the movie: a slow-moving documentary about a one-room schoolhouse in rural France. The film begins in the winter and ends in early summer, so we take the kids (some 12-15 of them) through about half the school year with their teacher, Monsieur Gomez, who is a year from retirement. I had thought maybe there'd be some drama about his upcoming retirement, or about the multi-cultural makeup of the classroom (one child is Chinese or Korean, another may be of Arab descent--or may not), but really, it's just about going to school and the kind of relationship a teacher can have with a small group of students. I was sad to learn there's some controversy about the film, but it's still worth seeing: a quiet gem.

Then, Happy Feet: the antithesis, maybe, of Etre et Avoir, but still a lot of fun. Too much plot right at the end--suddenly it's all about not only the environment, but immigration, fundamentalism, and freedom--but it all works out eventually. And the soundtrack, especially for viewers from my generation, is hilarious, including the best rendition of "Somebody to Love" ever.

Finally, Stranger than Fiction, which Mark and I went to see last night. (Two adults! Who have children! At the movies! By themselves!) I didn't think I liked Will Ferrell, but this is one funny, and smart, movie. I'm not sure I really have anything smart to say about it, but I think it says some interesting things about literature and free will. Are we bound by the conventions of the genres we (think we) inhabit? Can plots go wherever they want? Can I have Queen Latifah as my assistant?

Oh, and can I have Dustin Hoffman's version of the English professor's job, where you teach five classes a term but are free to meet with random folks off the street any time, and have plenty of time left over to write books and serve as the "faculty life guard"? That's one great job.