Glenden BrownWhen bad movies happen to good books
As a child, one of my favorite books was Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising. When I saw it was being turned into a film, I was pretty psyched. Christopher Eccleston starred as the Dark Rider and he is one of my favorite actors, so I figured that was a good sign.
I rented The Seeker - the Dark is Rising recently. I knew there’d be some changes. Making the main character a few years older was obvious. But many of the other changes were deeply unsatisfying. Gone is the loving, honest Stanton family, replaced by a dysfunctional, argumentative family. The family background was utterly changed. A number of key plot points were changed to the detriment of the story. If I hadn’t read the book, I would probably have liked the movie. Much of Cooper’s mythical world was altered and changed, her symbolism watered down, in the quest to create an action-adventure movie, rather than a suspenseful mystery movie.Â
While I’m thinking about such things:
I recently watched DVDs of the 1990s TV series Millenium. Season one made for some grim, fascinating viewing. The pilot episode has some scenes that are still haunting and disturbing all these years later. A later episode involving a sexual psychopath who kills horses remains disturbing. The imagery and filming style managed to create a sense of claustrophobia, of the world closing in but also anchored by optimism and hope.
Season two was a a complete mess. The producers were obviously trying to create some sort of mythology, but it ended up being silly rather than scary. They also added a supernatural element to the show that frankly just never worked for me. Rather than feeling scary, or cool, or mysterious, it came across as glum and arbitrary. The season ended with a laughably bad two parter in which the Millenium group released a deadly virus into the world.Â
In season three, the show’s creator took charge and tried to get the show back onto solid ground creatively. He had to create a lot of retroactive continuity - essentially undoing the damage of the previous season. A new character was introduced as Frank Black’s partner at the FBI and she provided a strong presence (played by a wonderful actress). Creatively, the show found its footing again, getting past (for the most part) the supernatural silliness and moving into a more serious realm that actually showed the supernatural as mysterious and unknowable rather than a series of visions.
April 8th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Ever wonder upon disney movies? Where many of the animated characters are orphans, or a parent dies? Now we see revised books in which the happy home is dysfunctional.
Do you see any larger purpose is such changes? Destroy the family unit, rule the chaos. If it is delivered that dysfunction is normal, and the value of cohesion is shrifted, it becomes so much easier to brainwash the population to its own detriment.
Been going on since widespread movies have been around.
Ever notice that most males in television these days are found lacking, aberrant, or simply afflicted by their own buffoonery? Watch some commeicials and get back to me. Once I noticed the pattern, I threw out my TV. It is a loathsome intrusion on human relational reality.
April 8th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
neat.
April 9th, 2008 at 8:37 am
Well said. Christopher Eccleton is my favourite actor, I decided to watch the film only for him, but first, as I usually do in case of adapted scripts, I read the books first. I enjoyed them very much, the world of Susan Cooper is unique and suprising. And then I saw the film. OMG. Probably the names are the ones that remained intact. I still have no proper word for what they did to the original books but I am sure it was a criminal act but leastways an offence against literature. So sad.
April 9th, 2008 at 11:51 am
Anonymous,
I hear you about not just Disney but all kids’ movies. Although it must be said that there has lately been a swing back toward intact families with sage, competent parents. I rather like Troy’s coach/ Dad in “High School Musical,” who is very old school “Sounds like you have thinking to do, sport” model. Gabriella’s mom appears single but accomplished and competent.
I’m very fond of the wizened but kindly Dad in “Jump In!” It doesn’t break any new thematic ground. Dad has never been the same since Mom died, has thrown all of his grieving energy into the tough guy sport. Son wants to do the gender-bending sport. In the best Disney tradition it all works out so that nobody has to choose and everybody gets everything. OK, not a deep movie, but lots of good ” I push because I love” Dad/ kid dialogue.
Another great Dad (albeit with Dead Mom) is Billie Ray Cyrus on “Hannah Montana.” He is fun but strict when necessary, and not only voices but sings his emotions.
Hmmm, I am not doing a very good job of showing intact families. Let me think…
I rather like the family in “That’s So Raven,” which does a good job of showing the stress of parenting, and the need for the kids to pitch in, without making the parents total basket cases. Kudos also to Raven-Simone, who is unabashedly curvy and fabulous. Likewise the Raven-Simone vehicle “Cheetah Girls.” Perfectly reasonable pals-y but parental moms in both of those.
Mrs. Weasley in “Harry Potter” is pretty righteous. She putters, she worries, she knits. But never forget that she is not just the housekeeper to the resistance. She is it conscience and its kick-*ss warrior.
You’re 100% right about commercials, though. There’s not a man in any of them who can get out of his own way — whether he’s buying “Thanks for putting up with me” jewelry once a year or sneaking away from yardwork or turning a deaf ear to his kids. I have only one word for you there — “Tivo.”
April 9th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Actually the “broken” family is a long standing convention in kid lit - taken to absurd extremes in the Series of Unfortunate Events. How many classic children’s books have an intact family? Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time starts with the family in a state of disarray. In the Pooh books there are no adults. There’s whole generation of English writers whose books start with kids being evacuated from the Blitz, separated from parents and family. The plucky orphan (a la Harry Potter) is a stock character. John Bellairs’ spooky children’s novels (starting in the early 70s) all showed families in various states of disarray - Lewis Barnavelt is an orphan living with his uncle, Johny Dixon is living withi his grandparents while his father fights in Korea and following his mother’s death, and Anthony Monday’s family is facing financial ruin and his father is largely absent due to illness. Even less classic stories involve families in crisis; E L Konigsburg’s The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place is about a young girl whose parents are facing a divorce and she spends the summer with her maternal great uncles. Speaking of Konigsburg, she wrote From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a book about an intact family in which the protagonist feels so underappreciated that she runs away.
By contrast, the strongest “families” on TV are often families of choice - the friends on Friends, the Scoobies on Buffy, the team on Bones, the CSI’s, the gang on Will and Grace or Seinfeld. These “families’ are bound not by something as boring as genes, but by genuine love and affection, by shared commitment and caring. These families of choice really first cropped up in shows like Mary Tyler Moore.
Nuclear families on TV - consider the Connors on Roseanne, the insufferable Home Improvement family (I don’t remember their names and I hate Tim Allen and his character Tim - he’s not a character he’s a caricature), Everybody Loves Raymond. The Simpsons. The Griffins on Family Guy. Going back a bit further - Cosby (I saw an episode recently and realized that Bill Cosby’s character Cliff was a really offensive person - smarmy, smug, sexist and deserving of a swift kick in the ass). There was a host of “family” shows back in the 80s. With the exception of Roseanne, most of these “family shows” make my teeth hurt.
April 9th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
I must take exception to two examples. Milne is very much present in the Pooh stories, at least in the beginning, where he is indulging his son and making the stories. And Cliff Huxtable wa a righteous dad.
April 9th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
I’ll agree with you on the Pooh books - it’s been a really long time since I read them. But I’m holding out on Cliff Huxtable. The character of Cliff struck me as unlikable. He has this amazing, smart wife and yet their relationship was built around him treating her as if she were kind of stupid. He treated the kids with condescion, patronizing them and treating their problems as if they were somehow immaterial. In one memorable episode, one of the daugthers says something like “People make fun of me because we’re rich” and he responds, “We’re not rich. You are poor. Your mother and I are rich” as if a child’s economic status is separate from their parent. Those dynamics struck me not as funny but as really troubling. So I’m gonna hold out on that front.
April 9th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Beatrice - I did almost the same thing. I really like Eccleston and I really like the world Cooper created but . . . well the movie just didn’t manage to keep it together.
April 9th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
oops
April 9th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
I sadly have no idea what families you are talking about. Two years into no TV, and I am totally out of the loop.
Glendon, don’t forget Married with Children, the perfect comedy drama of the intact family unit.
As for Cliff, that is Cosby, and it is right on, he is simply acting like the black male Al Bundy, and he was a doctor, and it is common for them to be full of themselves…they save lives dammit, childrens’ problems are meaningless in that context!
It’s a comedy show, and Cosby set the trend for Al, which it why the show was redone in white. Mired with Children, I loved it. Al the shoe salesman. White folks get to be funny white trash, black folks get to be funny rich people. Really just the Jeffersons on a “professional” level. Movin’ on up! Make whitey po’ and stupid, and have his wife have big hair.
Friends isn’t about family Glendon, it is about friends.
Needless to say, I think some people have been watching just a little too much TV.
April 10th, 2008 at 11:26 am
Wouldn’t it be great if someone remade “The Jefferson’s” as a period drama? It would be like, I don’t know if anybody watches as much tv as I do, but the Jimmy Smits vehicle “Cane”? Jimmy Smits is the Cuban refugee made good who is constantly faced with just how much solidarity he wants to have with his swarthier and less fortunate brethren. It’s like a Cuban “Dallas,” or “Brother and Sisters,” with, I never watched “Dallas,” but I guess more politics. Cosby is not the Black “Married with Children.” But I’ll allow as how he might be the Black “Brady Bunch.” All those dads of that era were no less blithe and self-satisfied. But I do yearn for the Black epic saga.
April 10th, 2008 at 11:38 am
I’ve just finished reasing Frankweiler with the kids, and I have to say that I don’t think the familyof origin comes off badly in it. Yes, she runs away, but while away she manages to perfectly replicate for self and bro the disciplined life that they grew up with, including budgeting the money, three squares a day, the whole nightly routine of bathing, changing. She even sets them edifying assignments. And she knows that they are looking for her and will welcome her home. Any parent would count himself successful who raised such a self-assured and independent kid.
April 10th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Cosby is the black married with children, the two fathers are rather dumb bores, and the the two wives are fairly smart and completely manipulative. The spouses in both shows are in fact married with children.
The kids are the source of joy and problems in both families, and though they insult each others intelligence constantly everyone still loves each other. Awwww.
Kill your Television before it is too late.
April 10th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
AD - I agree the family of origin in Frankweiler comes off pretty well - they’re not shown as bad people. What I find refreshing about the book is the way in whick Jamie and Claudia start thinking of themselves as family in the course of the book - it’s a process of moving from being related (brother and sister) to actually seeing themselves as a unit. Claudia is very organized and forward thinking, which makes her a very appealing character; FWIW, Jamie is a very interesting character too. I sometimes wonder if Frankweiler is intended as a critique of suburban family life.