As well as continuing with my-read through all the most significant children’s classics (this month it’s Winnie the Pooh) I also had a very important goal: to watch as many movies as I could that I only want to see once before deleting them from my hard-drive to make more room on it.
As such, this month’s viewing/reading material is very scattershot, with no unifying theme. And if it feels like I didn’t do a whole lot of reading, I’ve actually gotten though two and half books in Katherine Woodfine’s Taylor and Rose quartet (the follow-up to The Sinclair’s Mysteries). I’ll just wait until next month, and the completion of the final book Nightfall in New York, to discuss them all together. After that, I’m looking forward to tackling Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Isaac Theatre Royal)
Well, I got to tell my entire family: “I told you so.” When promotion for this show started late last year, I very quickly decided: “nope, that’s going to be way too dark and creepy for my four-year-old nephew.” But then my sister turned up and told us she had brought tickets for the whole family – and sure enough, when the second act rolled around and poor Augustus Gloop went flying up that pipe, little Finn had a mild freakout. He made it through Violet Beauregard (“she exploded,” says her horror-struck father) and Veruca Salt (who gets dismembered by squirrels onstage), and by the time Mike Teevee grabbed that remote from Willy Wonka, he’d figured out the formula.
There’s a gag in which Charlie and Grandpa Joe are scuba diving through the depths of the factory, and a number of signs float by, one of which says: “child death ahead.” I thought to myself, well at least Finn can’t read – but then of course, Charlie read it aloud. As per the 1971 film, the musical adds a little test for Charlie; not involving an everlasting gobstopper, but Willy simply telling him: “don’t touch anything,” as he goes to sign a contract with Joe. Naturally Charlie goes to read Willy’s book and add his own ideas, and poor Finn got so frightened something bad was going to happen to him, as it did to all the other disobedient children.
(Though he did better than the little boy directly in front of us, who was openly crying with his hands over his eyes and had to be carried out by his mother).
As Willy and Charlie ascended in the great glass elevator, Finn had tears on his cheeks, so I’ve no idea what he thought was happening. Perhaps that Charlie had died and was being taken to heaven? In any case, we gave him an ice cream afterwards and he was fine. But I did get to say: “I told you so.”
This story has become so deeply engrained in pop-culture that desensitized adults forget it involves the implied deaths of four children – and no matter how obnoxious they are, that’s still pretty confronting for first-time viewers (and yes, I know they survived in the book, but for a little kid, that reassurance doesn’t do much. It’s all very well to say “it’s not real,” or point out that the bad kids come back for the curtain calls, but the thing children are scared of is seeing something scary. I remember that feeling well; it’s a form of self-defence so you’re not up all night thinking about something terrible).
It’s odd, as Roald Dahl no doubt thought his readers would love seeing naughty children get punished, but it’s just as threatening and creepy if you’re very young. All that aside, the show itself was great – very bright and colourful and filled with all the dark comedy you’d expect. There were some good upgrades, such as Violet being an Instagrammer and Mike Teevee being into video games instead of television, but they worked well.
Every performer was bright and energetic, and the costumes were spectacular. The one thing that was a tad disappointing was the big curtain reveal for “Pure Imagination.” This is when the children and their parents are first brought into the factory’s tasting room, where everything is made of chocolate and candy. Both films know it’s a big set-piece moment and so go all-out on making it look incredible – but here it was just a few lollipop trees and big stuffed giraffe. I was expecting something a bit more spectacular!
Songs from the 1971 film were present and accounted for, such as “Pure Imagination,” “I’ve Got a Golden Ticket” and “The Candyman” – and of course, the Oompa Loompa Song. When they came out chanting their famous refrain, the crowd practically erupted. It was like a bunch of rock stars had just appeared! The show itself seemed to understand they were going to be a big drawcard, as no pictures of them appeared in the programme, and they managed them quite ingeniously by having the performers sit on little wheeled stools with large costumes that went down to the floor. They would scoot around the stage, and it was a pretty effective illusion.
Even though Roald Dahl gave Willy Wonka clear characterization in the book, the fact that Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp gave two such profoundly different interpretations – both from each other and the original text – means that how an actor chooses to portray the great chocolate maker is rather up for grabs. Ours was very sardonic and droll, and it was unclear at any given point just how serious he was being. I suppose it’s not a huge issue, as all he really has to be is eccentric, and the most important character is always Charlie Bucket, who was suitably wide-eyed and sincere.
Aside from having to sweat it out with poor Finn, it was a great show. But if you’re planning to see it with a little one, please prep them first.
Get Well Soon, Mallory! by Anne M. Martin
As you probably deduced from the title, this is the book containing the payoff to Mallory’s long-seeded feelings of illness and fatigue – she’s diagnosed with mononucleosis. Even worse, she has to put up with siblings and classmates deciding that it’s cooties, brought on by kissing Ben Hobart. When can this poor girl escape to boarding school?
Because she’s so conditioned to think she’s worthless if she isn’t being of service to everyone, Mallory is stressed about missing classes, not being able to do her chores, and having to temporarily drop out of the BSC. In an extremely annoying development, she decides to act like a jerk so the girls will fire and replace her – thankfully this scheme only lasts a couple of chapters, but it’s still excruciatingly stupid.
Perhaps the cruellest thing of all is that the Pikes were offered front row seats at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York, and not only does Mallory have to miss out, but her parents cancel the whole trip so nobody goes. Yeah, let’s give her a guilt complex to go with her feelings of inadequacy!
In the B-plot, the club decides to put together a Thanksgiving treat for the residents of Stoneybrook Manor, which is nice since it feels like we haven’t had a community project in ages! The BSC and the neighbourhood kids raise money to buy gift baskets and arrange a small carnival for the old folks who live there (which includes bean bag throwing, go fish, and a cakewalk, which I had to Google). There are mentions of the deceased Ronald Hennessey from Stacey and the Mystery of Stoneybrook, Uncle Joe from Mallory and the Ghost Cat, and Esther Barnard, who was in a Little Sister book.
Mallory can’t attend any of it, but hearing about some of the bedridden oldies keeps her own illness in perspective. As it happens, I never owned this book, but borrowed it from a friend for a while, and was absolutely obsessed with the preparation chapters. I can’t tell you why, but I read and reread the chapter when they all go to the bulk mart to get stuff for the gift baskets.
Eventually Mallory reconciles herself to just getting better in her own time, asking not to feature on new fliers as an honorary member. (Which is weird since this is the first book in which Shannon is identified on the back cover as the Alternative Officer and Mal as an Honorary Member. Wait, was Shannon even in this book? I can’t recall, but she definitely wasn’t part of the Thanksgiving celebrations. Also, the girls are putting their full names on the fliers? That can’t be safe). It’s hinted that the girls will be on the lookout for a new member to cover for Mallory’s absence, but this never really comes to fruition – glancing over the forthcoming books, Abby is still years away.
Finally, the series has now celebrated its FOURTH Halloween, following on from Claudia and the Phantom Phone Caller, Mary Anne’s Bad Luck Mystery and Kristy’s Secret Admirer. The first one did account from the older girls turning from twelve to thirteen, but now three years have passed and they’re nowhere near sixteen. It’s also the first Halloween-adjacent story not to have a scary theme, as Mallory sleeps through the trick-or-treating, the story is clearly more interested in Thanksgiving, and the whole thing is over by chapter two. What a waste of the spooky season!
Stacey and the Cheerleaders by Anne M. Martin
I can’t say Stacey-centric books are my favourite: she had a few good mysteries, but they’re usually about boys, health issues, squabbling parents, or the popular crowd. In this book Stacey begins to make friends with the cool kids at school (that is, the basketball team and the cheerleaders) after a guy called RJ “accidentally” hits her with a snowball and asks her out. The two of them don’t really connect, but during their date they meet up with RJ’s wider circle of friends and she meets Robert Brewster, who is much more her type.
They start dating (girl doesn’t waste time!) and Stacey is soon invited to try out for the cheerleading squad after one of the other members drops out. She starts practising with Jessi and soon has a great routine under her belt.
The back of the book makes it sound like Stacey is going to be torn between old friends and new, or having to decide whether she wants to remain with the somewhat immature BSC or join the sophisticated crowd (and we all know how the club feels about having friends outside their inner circle) but that’s not really the issue here. Instead, Robert tells her he feels uncomfortable with the way the athletes and their girlfriends are treated by the faculty and other students – like gods, who get grades they don’t deserve, no punishments for skipping classes, and general favouritism.
When Stacey doesn’t make the team despite overhearing the cheerleaders say she was the best candidate, Robert quits the basketball team in protest – and that’s it. There’s a small mention of a staff inquiry designed to reevaluate the sports programme and any internal biases, but the whole story has an air of “to be continued” about it. I know Robert sticks around for a while after this book, so we’ll see how it pans out (I am fast approaching the end of the books I’ve actually read in this series – soon I’ll be going in blind).
The B-plot shines a light on Shannon’s family, which is nice considering she’s now a fulltime member of the club. That said, I wasn’t aware she had two younger sisters: Tiffany has shown up before, but this is the first time I recall hearing about Marie Kilbourne. Turns out that middle child Tiffany is tired of her overachieving sisters and is encouraged by the babysitters to try out a bunch of hobbies until she finds something she likes doing, not just something she’s immediately good at. This intersects with Stacey’s story when she realizes she was making the same mistake as Tiffany: pursuing a hobby for the wrong reasons.
It’s a pretty forgettable book (I’ve no idea why or how I actually own it) but other notable observations include: it’s explicitly set in December, which tracks with the previous book covering Thanksgiving, Stacey excitedly describes a new blouse which honestly sounds like something an old lady would wear (“a brand-new white cotton cardigan with gorgeous floral embroidery and a scalloped, crocheted neckline”), and the whole thing is pretty prescient when it comes to the obsession American schools have with their sports. There’s never been a lot of focus on Stacey/Jessi’s friendship, so it was nice to have a spotlight on it for a little while, as well as Jessi hanging out with the older girls even without Mallory there. It’s cute.
The Emerald City of Oz by L.F. Baum
Can you believe that this is the first Oz book that gives Dorothy her last name, published ten years after the first? And of course, it’s Gale after the tornado. As it, a torrential gale. I’m embarrassed to admit I never twigged to that before!
It’s very obvious by this point that L.F. Baum is ready to stop writing Oz books, but pressure from his fans (and presumably his publishers) keep taking him back to the well, even though he’s clearly run out of things to say. This at least is a step up from The Road to Oz in that it actually has a story and some degree of suspense, but it’s still very formulaic.
After five books of adventures in Oz, Dorothy finally realizes that she and her family could be living in that wonderous technicolour fairy land instead of a rundown Kansas farm that’s about to be seized by the bank. After convincing her aunt and uncle of the veracity of her stories, Dorothy has Ozma whisk them all away to the Emerald City, where she is installed as a princess, and Henry and Em as honoured guests.
From there, the story splits into two main plots. Dorothy and her friends (the Wizard, the Shaggy Man and Billina the talking chicken, along with Henry and Em) are sent on a tour throughout the Land of Oz, where they visit settlements containing people such as the Cuttenclips (people made of paper), the Fuddles (people who need to be put together like jigsaw puzzles), and the Flutterbudgets (people who worry about everything) and places such as Utensia (full of sentient utensils) and Bunbury (sentient baked goods) and Bunnybury (talking rabbits).
Meanwhile, in a nice bit of continuity, the Nome King from Ozma of Oz is plotting his revenge. He has his army start digging a tunnel that will take them safely under the Deadly Desert and the walls of the Emerald City, and sends out his general to recruit the likes of the Whimsies, the Growleywogs and the Phanfasms, each species more terrible and frightening than the last.
As such, there is a modicum of suspense when it comes to Dorothy’s leisurely exploration of Oz’s more obscure communities, knowing that all the while the Nome King is amassing his forces with the intent of destroying the Emerald City and enslaving its people. But then of course, the army emerges into the courtyard of the palace that contains a never before mentioned fountain that holds waters of forgetfulness. Having just marched through the dust-filled tunnels, the entire army gulps down the water and immediately forgets who they are and why they’re here. It’s a pretty straightforward Deus Ex Machina.
In his prior book, Baum’s introduction flat out admitted that he incorporates the ideas of his child readership into the books, and here he writes: “my readers have told me what to do with Dorothy, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, and I have obeyed their mandates.” Oof. Pleasing fans has never made for good storytelling – not then, not now. The final chapter also makes it very clear that he intended this book to be the last one in the series via a message from Dorothy herself: “you will never hear anything more about Oz, because we are now cut off forever from all the rest of the world. But Toto and I will always love you and all the other children who love us.”)
Ironically, financial troubles eventually led Baum to write eight more Oz books – and I say ironic because of the very overt socialist leanings that are apparent in this volume. As is explained directly to the reader:
There were no poor people in the Land of Oz, because there was no such thing as money, and all property of every sort belonged to the Ruler. The people were her children, and she cared for them. Each person was given freely by his neighbours whatever he desired for his use, which is as much as any one may reasonably desire. Some tilled the lands and raised great crops of grain, which was divided equally among the entire population, so that all had enough. There were many tailors and dressmakers and shoemakers and the like, who made things that any who desired them might wear.
Likewise there were jewellers who made ornaments for the person, which pleased and beautified the people, and these ornaments were also free to those who asked for them. Each man and woman, no matter what he or she produced for the good of the community, was supplied by the neighbours with food and clothing and a house and furniture and ornaments and games. If by chance the supply ever ran short, more was taken from the great storehouses of the Ruler, which were afterward filled up again when there was more of any article than the people needed.
Every one worked half the time and played half the time, and the people enjoyed the work as much as they did the play, because it is good to be occupied and to have something to do. There were no cruel overseers to watch them, and no one to rebuke them or to find fault with them. So each one was very proud to do all he could for his friends and neighbours, and was glad when they would accept the things he produced.
I mean, it’s a lovely fantasy, but even this left-hearted writer has to admit there is no way to transpose such a way of living to reality. It’s also no surprise that the later Oz books are never adapted into film or television – there’s simply no conflict here with which to craft a compelling story.
Winnie the Pooh stories by A.A. Milne
In these days of sequels, prequels, reboots and franchises, it’s a little shocking to read the introduction to The House at Pooh Corner (or the “contradiction” as the book calls it) and realize the second volume is already going to be the last. Milne wrote only two books on the subject of Pooh Bear, and now there are more stories not penned by him concerning these characters than there are (including a prequel, picture books, short story anthologies, and all those Disney shows).
I never really experienced Winnie the Pooh as a child, though I certainly watched the Disney cartoon and I know my sister had a copy of the two books as one hardcover volume. But I have never before sat down and read these stories in their entirety. And because our library has brand-new editions with colour illustrations, glossy pages, and a little medallion that says “celebrating 100 years” on the covers, I had to bump them up the queue, along with Milne’s two poetry anthologies.
I managed to read them in entirely the wrong order: it should start with When We Were Very Young, then Winnie the Pooh, then Now We Are Six, and finally The House at Pooh Corner (at least I tackled that one last) but there were plenty of surprises along the way. For example, I was astonished that Tigger doesn’t appear until The House at Pooh Corner, when he’s always felt like such a staple part of these stories.
The books are also rather like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in that everyone remembers the tea party and the croquet game and the rabbit hole, but hardly anyone recalls the pigeon or the giant puppy or the pepper-crazed cook. With Winnie the Pooh, everyone knows the character’s greatest hits: getting stuck in the front door to Rabbit’s house, using a balloon to go in search of honey, navigating the floodwaters on an upturned umbrella, playing Poohsticks – but how many people recall the search for Small, or Rabbit getting lost in the woods, or Owl’s house collapsing along with the tree in which he lives?
It’s easy to see why the books were so beloved: Milne has created a peaceful and bucolic world in which a little boy plays with his toys in the safety and freedom of the One Hundred Acre Woods, but with just enough wry humour that adults as well as children can enjoy the stories. He loves wordplay and hyperbole (“once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday”), the random capitalization of letters, nonsense words, literalness, whimsy, and most importantly – not explaining any of the jokes to his reader.
When Pooh and Piglet spend an afternoon walking circles around the Six Pine Trees, growing increasingly alarmed by the number of footprints they keep overtaking, there is no explanation given courtesy of Christopher Robin to inform a child reader what exactly is going on. Either they’re going to figure it out, or they’ve just spent a chapter feeling as confused and distressed as Pooh.
And this is really just the tip of the iceberg; there are plenty of conversations with Rabbit (who is too constrained by the mores of politeness to just come out and say what he really means) or Eeyore (who is so passive-aggressive that Pooh simply cannot glean what he’s talking about) that go undeciphered and uncommented on by the narrator.
That is perhaps Milne’s real genius: how accurately he can depict a child’s view of the world. Much like Tinker Bell, Christopher Robin’s toys encapsulate the nature of childhood: Pooh is a child’s grasp of logic, Piglet their timidity, Tigger their inescapable energy, Eeyore their mood swings and self-pity, Owl their intellectual egotism, and so on.
Much of Winnie the Pooh is written as a story being told to Christopher Robin in second-person narrative; that is, there are sentences like “you went to a party,” and “you were somewhere else” and so on. You get the sense that these tales really were based on conversations and experiences Milne had with his only son – but much like Lewis Carroll and the Liddell sisters, or J.M. Barrie and the Llewellyn family, it’s not always a good idea to plunder a young person’s childhood for material.
As the real Christopher Robin said later in life: “it seemed to me almost that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with the empty fame of being his son.” Did Milne exploit his son’s childhood? Was it fair to expose him to fame at such a young age? Is the joy that Winnie the Pooh has brought to other children worth the misery it brought to Milne’s own? I don’t have the answers, though I was shocked to discover that the real Christopher Milne died in 1996. We think of these stories taking place generations ago, and yet he died in my lifetime.
As for E.H. Shepard’s illustrations (or as the cover puts it, “decorations”) they are as inseparable from these stories as Quentin Blake is to Roald Dahl, Arthur Tenniel to Lewis Carroll, or Pauline Baynes to C.S. Lewis. Christopher Robin dragging Pooh down the stairs by his arm, the backwards bathmat, the map of the Hundred Acre Woods – you simply cannot remove them from the text. In fact, sometimes they supplement it, usually by clearly depicting something that the text leaves unclear (the toys/animals sign their names to a letter, and the BLOT and SMUDGE are shown to be Tigger and Roo’s contributions, while the dreaded “heffalumps” are portrayed as elephants in Pooh’s fearful daydreams).
Then there are the books of poetry. I’ve heard recently that rhyming verse is only as good as its worst rhyme, and I was never a huge fan of it as a child, as it limited the width and depth of the storytelling if certain words had to rhyme with each other. For my money, the best of the best (at least in the realm of children’s literature) are Roald Dahl and Lynley Dodd, and even A.A. Milne admits in his introduction that some of poems included aren’t as good as others: “bits of it seem rather babyish to us, almost as if they had slipped out of some other book by mistake.”
There are two types of poems, those concerning childhood (often involving Christopher Robin, Pooh, and occasionally a little girl called Anne, to whom the book is dedicated) and some involving rather silly adults, which come across as traditional nursery rhymes: King John, Sir Thomas Tom, the Emperor of Peru, Bad Sir Brian Botany and so on. Even Little Boy Blue and Little Bo Peep get a poem to themselves.
The former kind are easily the best, as once again Milne demonstrates how good he is at capturing the world of a child. They contain imaginary friends, catching insects, playing pretend, getting told to “run along,” watching raindrops race down the windowpane, walking in pavement squares (so as not to be eaten by bears), and being asked if you’ve been bad (“should I be likely to say if I had?”)
These are the poems that contain his most famous lines, the ones that everyone knows, even if they’ve never read the book: “wherever I am, there’s always Pooh, there’s always Pooh and me,” and “halfway down the stairs, is a stair, where I sit,” and the one that dogged poor Chrisopher Milne into his adulthood: “whisper who dares, Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.”
There are also plenty that capture the beauty of the countryside in which the Milne family lived, such as “Spring Morning,” in which Christopher Robin enjoys the unsupervised freedom of nature, or “The Island” in which he feels: “there’s nobody else in the world, and the world was made for me” (how many kids these days ever get a chance to feel that?) or the seaside in “Sand-Between-the-Toes” (“I went down to the shouting sea.”) I love that, “the shouting sea.”
Shepard illustrates these volumes as well, quite delicately and bucolically without tipping into full-on sentimentality (though it’s a thin line!) Again, his work adds to the context of the poems: Christopher Robin and Pooh appear in illustrations for poems such as “Binker” and “The Charcoal Burner,” even though they’re not explicitly mentioned in the text itself. Likewise, some of his illustrations tell their own stories, such as the fact Bo Peep’s lambs transform from toys to real animals.
One more thing. In the entirety of the Winnie the Pooh stories, there is but one female character, and that’s Kanga. Her inclusion is interesting not just because she’s the Smurfette, but because she is the only animal or toy that is an adult. Specifically, a mother. Apparently, she’s based on the real Christopher Robin’s nurse, but she really does stand out for being a calm and reasonable voice of maturity among the rest of the characters – and as a result, not that interesting as a character. You can tell (or at least feel) that she doesn’t quite fit.
Reading these books through from start to finish was quite an education. I enjoyed the glimpse into a very specific childhood and the seemingly idyllic life that the young Christopher Robin had, and was intrigued by the fact that each chapter is a different story – obviously some are more charming and memorable than the others, so some have lingered in the collective consciousness more vividly than others (though my favourite was one of the “forgotten” stories: Rabbit wants to teach Tigger a lesson by leading him into the woods and then abandoning him there, only for Tigger to get home safely and Rabbit to remain lost. Tigger diligently goes to find him: “the small and sorry Rabbit rushed through the mist at the noise, and it suddenly turned into a Tigger; a Friendly Tigger, a Grand Tigger, a Large and Helpful tigger, a Tigger who bounced, if he bounced at all, in just the beautiful way a Tigger ought to bounce.”)
It was pleasant to revisit the stories I did recollect from long ago, such as Eeyore losing his tail (wait, is this how we got Pin the Tail on the Donkey?) or Pooh and Piglet building Eeyore’s house from the materials already used to build Eeyore’s first house, and matching up each story with the landmarks on the map featured on the inside cover of the book.
These stories have well and truly soaked into our culture – one might tell a person: “you’re such an Eeyore,” and they’d immediately know you were calling them gloomy and melancholy, which is why it’s such a surprise that there are only two books and some poetry about Winnie the Pooh, as penned by his original author. It’s easy to assume that there might be hundreds of stories about the Silly Old Bear.
Secrets on the Shore by Katherine Woodfine
This slender volume has Taylor and Rose on the cover, but is better described as a bridge between the four original Sinclair’s Mysteries and its sequel series, Taylor and Rose: Secret Agents (which is based more in espionage than crime). Originally released as an ebook, finding a hard copy at the library inspired my reread of the series in full.
Set in 1911, “Secrets on the Shore” takes place in Rye, the small town featured in Malcolm Saville’s Lone Pine books, favourites of Woodfine (as she explains in her foreword). She certainly nails the atmosphere, describing it so well I was tempted to book tickets and visit it myself: “a place of secret passages, hidden rooms and smugglers’ tales… the steep, crooked streets of the little town and the wild marshes and shoreline feel like classic children’s adventure story territory.”
It tells of Sophie and Lil’s first mission working for the Secret Service Bureau, in which the girls go undercover as birdwatchers to investigate the possibility of German spies operating on the Sussex coast. Joe, Billy and Mei get cameos, but this story is strictly about Lil and Sophie, as well as Alfie Riggs, the son of the local innkeeper who gets caught up in the action.
It’s a slight story, more interested in atmosphere than plot (in fact, I gave it too much credit – I thought two tertiary characters would end up being the German spies instead of the obvious suspects, but nope). That said, there are shingle beaches, desolate salt marshes, ruined castles, boats lost in the fog – it’s a fun little exertion that allows the girls to work together effectively, which is appreciated since they’re separated for most of the Taylor and Rose books.
At once point we’re told: “sticking together was what Sophie and Lil did best,” and it’s so nice to have a loving female friendship as the focus of a story. (Murder Most Unladylike has one too, but Daisy and Hazel are much pricklier with each other. Sophie and Lil are just devoted).
The second story is called “The Mystery of the Purloined Pearls” and is set even earlier, between The Clockwork Sparrow and The Jewelled Moth, when Lil was still working as a chorus in the theatre. Told in first-person by Lil, it’s nowhere as long as its predecessor, but we do get to revisit some familiar names and faces from Lil’s theatre days.
Finally, I thought there was a third story, but it was only the first three chapters of The Clockwork Sparrow. That feels like cheating to bulk up the page-count. Each story comes with a short introduction from Woodfine and concludes with “case notes” detailing the real-life historical context. It’s a fun little book, but clearly a taster for the main course that kicks off with Peril in Paris.
Rebecca (1940)
I’ve written about this film before, but it ended up being the voted-for pick at my last movie night at work. And this surprised me since it was up against Highlander, which was the early favourite. There’s not much to say about it that I haven’t already mentioned here, though I will say that the casting is impeccable. Joan Fontaine was cast only two weeks before shooting started, and she does an amazing job capturing the timidity and awkwardness of our nameless heroine – and having seen her recently as the more confident and self-possessed Rowena in Ivanhoe, the comparison is pronounced.
The film is also very good at getting all the major narrative beats of the story, with only a little truncation to keep the plot rolling (the shipwreck occurs on the same night of the fancy dress party) with one infamous change: Maxim deliberately shooting Rebecca is changed to Rebecca simply falling over and cracks her head open. This was because the Hays Code forbade any character from getting away with a crime, but it messes with the entire point of the story. If you squint, you can pretend that Maxim is lying about what really happened that night, but the rather tacked-on happy ending between the couple outside the burning of Manderley is another false note in what’s meant to be a very dark and subversive Romance-with-a-Capital-R.
It could have been worse: as I’ve mentioned in a few recent posts, Hitchcock wanted to make our protagonist a more assertive, confident heroine, only to be talked down by Brian Selznick, the producer. It was the right call, as that kind of female character simply would not have made any sense at all – either in the plot or the setting. It’s an interesting early example of a writer trying to make a female character more “modern” at the cost of the story’s logistics (see also: Zendaya’s Chani and Game of Thrones’s Talisia). And it’s not like we could call Hitchcock a feminist! Netflix’s terrible 2020 adaptation does exactly the same thing by making Lily James more cunning and proactive, thus proving that authors know what they’re doing when they write their stories. Adaptations can polish and sometimes improve, but for the most part – trust the masters.
Moonstruck (1987)
I’ve said it before, but I’m not a romantic person. I have no idea how this movie ended up on my TBW list, and I’m not entirely sure what I was meant to get out of it, even though it landed Cher an Oscar for Best Actress. I’m not trying to be a killjoy, I just don’t get romantic comedies.
The story follows Loretta Castorini and her Italian-American family. Cher is Loretta, a thirty-seven-year-old widow who has just accepted a marriage proposal from Johnny Cammareri. It wasn’t particularly romantic: she had to instruct him to get down on one knee and he didn’t bother to purchase a ring, but they get on well enough. As he flies off to Greece to be with his dying mother, he asks her to visit his brother Ronnie to mend their estrangement and invite him to the wedding.
Loretta meets Ronnie at the bakery in which he works. He acts like a crazy person, and a few minutes later, they’re having sex. This is all very normal and realistic behaviour, and thankfully Loretta’s infidelity is excused when Johnny comes back from Greece to announce that his mother is still alive, and that he therefore cannot marry Loretta for some reason.
There are other couples strewn throughout the story: Loretta’s parents Rose and Cosmo, the latter of whom is having an affair. Loretta’s aunt and uncle who are still in love despite their advanced years. Rose has an impromptu dinner with a college professor who can’t stop dating his students. Even a couple running a bodega appear in a brief scene in which an argument turns into a humorous declaration of love.
Look, I can recognize the warmth and bittersweetness and humanity of it all, and I’m a big fan of Olympia Dukakis calmly telling her cheating husband: “I just want you to know that no matter what you do, you’re still gonna die, just like everyone else.” It’s an oddly comforting sentiment.
But guys – I’m just not a romantic.
My Cousin Vinny (1992)
When I watched Moonstruck, I had no idea that Cher won an Oscar for her performance. When I watched My Cousin Vinny, I did know that Marisa Tomei won Best Supporting Actress, and that it was one of the biggest upsets in the Academy’s history. Having now seen the film in its entirety, I’d say she deserved the win, though I’m a little annoyed with myself for having watched her Signature Scene on YouTube well before this. It works by itself, but the film does a lot of careful leadup to the moment, and its impact is a little lost without the full context.
Two Brooklyn boys (it was a month for Italian-American families) are traveling through Alabama when they stop at a convenience store for snacks and accidentally shoplift a can of tuna. Realizing what they’ve done, they don’t put up too much of a fight when they’re stopped by the police, even if they’re a little confused by the intensity of their arrest. It’s not until later that they realize they’ve been detained because the shop clerk was shot dead just minutes after they left, and that at least three witnesses have identified them as the killers.
They call in Vinny, a cousin who took six attempts to pass the bar and has no courtroom experience whatsoever. In tow is his girlfriend Mona Lisa, because in this magical fictional land a guy like Joe Pesci can be in a relationship with a woman like Marisa Tomei. The two don’t come across as particularly aware of what they’re doing, but as the film stretches on, their hidden talents come to the fore.
The film feels quite long, but in hindsight, even the comedic parts (such as the couple eating grits for the first time, or trying and failing to get a hotel in which they can sleep without interruption from trains, cows, or other loud noises) serve as vehicles for important exposition.
But… you knew there was a but coming. There are two thing that really bugged me.
The first is that Mona Lisa’s testimony on the witness stand is treated as an astounding, jaw-dropping, gobsmacking shock. The clear implication of everyone’s reaction to her deductive reasoning on the make and model of the car that left tire marks on the road outside the convenience store is that a woman couldn’t possibly know anything about cars to the extent that she does. A woman? As an expert witness on the subject of cars? Wha-wha-WHAT?
Secondly, this film contains what is perhaps the most egregious case of “behind every man is a great woman” I’ve ever seen. Across the course of the film, Mona Lisa takes the photos that lead to an acquittal, earns the money that gets Vinny out on bail, reads a law manual cover-to-cover so she can inform Vinny the prosecutor has to share evidence, gives her Oscar-winning testimony on the stand, and arranges for a third party to vouch for Vinny’s cover story that he’s a successful New York lawyer called Jerry Callo. She does practically everything, and you can bet your ass she doesn’t get any credit for it.
For that reason alone, I’m especially glad Tomei got the Oscar.
Mortal Kombat (1995)
The last time I watched Mortal Kombat I would have been ten years old, believing it was the coolest thing ever. It’s… really not, though you have to respect a film that knows so confidently what it’s about that it opens on its own techno theme music, comprised of a great beat and some guy screaming: “MORTAL KOMBAT!” We can also give it credit for committing to its Asian lead, and including two semi-competent female characters who aren’t only there to be sexualized (damning with faint praise, I know).
It’s based on a video game, which means the whole thing is little more than an Excuse Plot for elaborate fight scenes. That said, I do kind of dig the premise, which is that an evil dimension can conquer Earth if it defeats its greatest warriors in ten consecutive martial arts tournaments, known as Mortal Kombat. They’ve already won nine, and the barrier between worlds is close to collapsing (squint, and it’s not a million miles away from the plot of K-Pop Demon Hunters).
A range of fighters are picked from all over the world by Raiden, the god of thunder, including Liu Kang (ex-monk), Sonya Blade (cop) and Johnny Cage (actor). To the film’s minor credit, it does try to give each one an arc: Liu is guilt-ridden over the death of his brother, Sonya wants vengeance for her murdered partner, and Johnny wants to be taken seriously as a stunt actor despite tabloids calling him a fake (I’m not sure why they’d care, but whatever).
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and his wonderful villain face chomps down on the scenery, and though Raiden probably should have been played by a Japanese actor, Christopher Lambert’s raspy voice and knowing smirk is at least well-suited to playing a godly mentor to the heroic trio. It is very stupid in so many ways, but the effect it had on my ten-year-old self means I’ll always have a soft-spot for it.
The Brady Bunch Movie and A Very Brady Sequel (1995 – 1996)
It was a mild stroke of genius to do a Brady Bunch movie whose central comedic premise was to keep the family in their seventies sitcom bubble while transporting them into the nineties, making the painfully wholesome family completely unaware of how they come across in a real-world setting. Of course, now that we’re all looking back with wistful nostalgia for the pre 9/11 nineties, the film feels idyllic even in its grungy, garage band, torn jeans, giant cellphones criticism of its own contemporary setting.
The whole thing makes for some fun gags, such as Greg and Marcia not understanding they’re being carjacked, or Mr Brady’s architectural designs all being exact replicas of his own house, or one of the neighbours ominously telling the others that he “never saw a toilet” in the Brady residence. Every actor playing one of the Bradys has to do so with complete sincerity – any hint of sarcasm or self-awareness and the whole setup collapses.
The featherlight gist of the plot is the Bradys have forgotten to pay their taxes for the past thirty years, which means real estate developers can seize the land. Your bog-standard evil plot, though it’s spearheaded by the Bradys’ neighbour Eric Dittmeyer, who will take any opportunity to get rid of the family he despises. On hearing about their financial trouble, the Brady kids try to raise $20,000 by the end of the week – though honestly, the whole thing is just an Excuse Plot for an extended parody of a Brady Bunch episode.
There’s also a range of subplots like Jan’s pathological jealousy of Marcia, Greg trying to become a rock star, Marcia being asked to go to the dance by two different boys, Peter struggling with the onset of puberty, Cindy struggling with her lisp, and the youngest boy (can’t remember his name) also being present. And sometimes it manages some genuinely sweet scenes, like when Davy Jones turns up to the prom at Marcia’s invitation. He’s recognized by the excited female teachers and sings “Girl” accompanied by a grunge band – and it’s good enough that the other students eventually get into it.
The sequel definitely isn’t as good, though I have to give the writers credit for understanding the first rule of comedy: never tell the same joke twice. The premise of the Brady Bunch being completely out of touch in the nineties is a running gag the sequel almost totally does away with, limiting it to just a few strange looks from those around them.
Instead, it builds a plot out of the horse carving that stands in a place of prominence in the Brady household – turns out it’s a priceless artefact that Carol’s first husband sent to her before presumably dying at sea. Now his partner Trevor has arrived at the Brady residence (what on earth took him so long?) to claim the horse by pretending to be her long-lost husband. Surely there were easier ways, like simply casing the joint and then stealing the thing, but hey – it’s a standard sitcom situation. Hijinks ensue, and eventually the family ends up in Hawaii for some reason.
It was wise of them to drop the whole “seventies versus nineties” gimmick, though the truth is it made for some of the previous film’s best gags. Here we get stuff like Jan acting like people will be fooled into think a mannikin is her real boyfriend, or a plane being put in reverse (as in, they actually rewind the footage so it’s flying backwards) because Marcia forgot her hairbrush.
The sequel also loses a lot of the supporting cast, who were pretty funny in their own right: Marcia’s closeted lesbian friend, Sam the butcher, the rest of the Bradys’ neighbours, various classmates – the ensemble is jettisoned so as to keep the focus on the nonsense of everyone believing Trevor is who he says he is.
But as you’d expect, there are a lot of fun cameos; the ones you’d expect from the television cast (most notably Florence Henderson and Ann B. Davis, though this time around I found out that the music producer Greg goes to see is Barry Williams, the original Greg), but also the likes of RuPaul, Rosie O’Donnell, James Avery, and Barbara Eden (as Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie, introducing herself as Mike’s first wife). In a fun case of Retroactive Recognition, David Ramsay (John Diggle from Arrow) has a small role as a lifeguard.
But there was one joke that perfectly encapsulates the way modern fandom is able to seize the language of social justice to suit their own viewing demands, which may end up inspiring a whole other post on the subject. It was when Marcia snits: “get with the times, Greg. Haven’t you heard of a new thing called women’s lib? It means women get everything they want!” I had to pause the movie to finish laughing, because I don’t think I’ll ever be able to see online whining about how a self-insert version of a female character wasn’t empowering enough because she didn’t hook up with whatever creepy male villain the viewer was lusting after without thinking of that quote.
Harriet the Spy (1996)
Confession time: I have never read Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. I think I first found out about the book’s existence thanks to The Babysitters Club, and just like Mallory, I was captivated by the idea of being a spy and collecting secrets. I definitely remember seeing the trailer as a kid and thinking: “I want to see that movie,” so there’s a good chance that the last time I saw this, it was 1996.
It’s especially poignant watching it now, what with the recent death of Michelle Trachtenberg. She’s as cute as a button, playing Harriet as a normal kid that makes her fair share of mistakes. That said, I’ve a hot take: Harriet did nothing wrong. The other kids should have never read a book clearly marked “private.” Everyone has ungenerous opinions about other people sometimes, even those they love; what makes you a good person is if you share those opinions or keep them to yourself. Harriet didn’t share them – they were stolen from her.
But of course, that’s neither here nor there. They’re kids, of course they’re going to read a book marked “private,” and of course they’re going to disproportionately punish her for what she’s written about them.
The nineties were a good decade for adaptations of classic children’s books and comics – just off the top of my head I also remember enjoying The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, The Little Rascals, Dennis the Menace, Caspar the Friendly Ghost, Matilda, The Indian in the Cupboard, Babe – this was the landscape of my childhood! Harriet the Spy presents an idealized portrait of New York in the nineties, in which children roam the neighbourhood unsupervised and everything is as colourful as it is quaint. Some scenes are just extended plot-irrelevant sequences of the kids playing in quirky gardens or public parks.
The nineties are going to be the next decade that kicks off a wave of nostalgic reminiscing for the Good Old Days (they work in thirty-year cycles) and so it’s rather ironic that this film updated the book’s setting – which took place in the sixties – only to itself retrospectively depict the decade in which it’s set through rose-tinted glasses.
Elektra (2005)
After seeing Jennifer Garner as Elektra in Deadpool and Wolverine, I found myself eager to see the character/actress’s solo venture in 2005. And though I knew it wouldn’t be very good (it, along with Supergirl and Catwoman, pretty much destroyed any studio interest in female-led superhero films until Wonder Woman) it at least wasn’t hideously unwatchable – though it gets increasingly silly as it goes on.
(I watched the director’s cut, but I’ve no idea what the difference was between this and the theatrical version. Maybe all the repetitive flashbacks to Elektra as a child? They didn’t really add much).
I must have watched Ben Affleck’s Daredevil (which was awful) way back when it first came out and have since seen some of the MCU shows involving Charlie Cox and Elodie Yung, which meant it was interesting to see elements like Stick and the Hand in a different context, and still without all the lore that no doubt exists in the comics.
I vaguely recalled that Elektra died in the Daredevil film, and though that’s somewhat dealt with here (there are a few shots of her being mystically resuscitated) it doesn’t really figure into the plot in any meaningful way. Poor Matt Murdock doesn’t even warrant a mention – no wonder she was so indifferent when Deadpool offers his condolences on his death.
The gist is Elektra is working as an assassin (her first kill is an uncredited Jason Isaacs) when she’s tasked with a hit on a Hot Dad and his teenage daughter. Unfortunately, she’s accidentally gotten to know them while waiting for her instructions, so of course she not only can’t go through with it, but presents herself as their protector when more assassins turn up.
It’s a reasonably solid setup, though once the sideshow of assassins with kooky powers turn up, it gets a little silly. It comes as no surprise that their real target is Abby, a teenage prodigy, and everyone just sort of fights artfully in impractical clothing until the end credits. It’s kind of a bummer, as there was some potential for the Lone Wolf and Cub setup (à la Wolverine and X23) between two women for a change, but the characterization remains paper-thin throughout.
It’s 2005 in a way that’s hard to define: the fringes, the flip-top phones, the grotty CGI, the gratuitous lesbian kiss, the slow motion, the desaturated/overly-contrasted filter (I don’t know the technical term for it), the fight scenes which look like they belong in a music video – it’s all just so 2005.
Terence Stamp appears as Stick, and I laughed to see Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, as I had just watched him the night before in Mortal Kombat and had no idea he was in this too. Goran Visnjic gets the thankless role as Hot Dad/Quasi-Love Interest, but honestly, it’s always fun to see a guy stuck in this position for a change. Jennifer Garner’s take on Elektra isn’t a million miles away from Sidney Bristow, and it’s hard to sense much interiority from the character. Yeah, I know this was well before the MCU kicked off the Golden Age of superhero movies, but like I said – dying and being resurrected means virtually nothing here. They just wanted the character to be in another movie.
Challengers (2024)
As with Moonstruck, I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing here – I care as little about sport as I do about what passes for romance in Hollywoodland, and in this case the sport and the relationship are inextricably entwined.
Patrick and Arthur (Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist) are two tennis players that have been inseparable since they were twelve, and lately besotted with illustrious up-and-comer Tashi Duncan (Zendaya, who I can guarantee is sidelined in all the fanfiction about this movie). The plot is non-linear, weaving back and forth (rather like the ball in a tennis match) from when the trio are unconvincing teenagers, to when they’re approaching retirement age in their early thirties.
Across the intervening years we see the relationship entanglements they get themselves wrapped up in, and the way in which it effects their sporting performances. Since The Crown, Josh O’Connor has been absolutely everywhere, and Zendaya is clearly trying to branch out into more adult roles, though I haven’t seen Mike Faist outside of the West Side Story remake. What else has he been in?
But though I could appreciate the dialogue and the cinematography of the tennis matches and the metaphor for how the game captures the complexities of this particular three-way relationship (and I admit a lot would have gone over my head given my lack of insight into how tennis is played), I just couldn’t get invested. It’s well-made and well-performed, but the three very self-absorbed characters at its core just couldn’t pique my interest.
Hustle: Season 7 (2011)
It’s the penultimate season of Hustle, and considering one of the episodes involves Ash walking into a sliding door and sustaining a head injury that prevents him from lying, it’s probably the right time to wrap this up. (He’s cured when he walks into a wall at the end of the episode). Still, the cons remain fun to watch, even though something strange happened this time around – I started to feel a bit sorry for the marks.
Yes, they’re depicted as unpleasant people, but… I dunno. One is a mixed-race woman that the grifters bait by ridiculing her class. One is a woman who is genuinely passionate about modelling and fashion. One is a casino owner whose ancestors are exposed as cheats, and you can tell he’s utterly gutted by the revelation. Their comeuppance feels a bit disproportionate to their crimes, which is – well, being grifters themselves. The only difference between them and our heroes are the people they target, but some of them have built themselves up from nothing.
Even the bystanders are judged pretty harshly. Emma considers giving it all up for an old flame, only to discover he’s pocketed an extra two hundred pounds of reimbursement from the loan sharks who were about to evict him from his home (which is naturally a test devised by Mickey). Learning this, she decides to stick with the crew, as according to her: “he’s just like us.” Which is apparently a bad thing? Even though keeping the money is a pretty understandable thing for him to do in the circumstances?
As ever, there are plenty of fun guest stars: Anna Chancellor (Miss Bingley from the nineties’ Pride and Prejudice), Michael Brandon (who is always called in to play an American in BBC dramas – I’ve seen him play the exact same character in Jonathan Creek, Doctor Who and a Poirot mystery as he did here), Clive Swift (Richard Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances), Dimitri Leonidas (Anwar in Sinbad), and Joplin Sibtain (Brasso in Andor).
It’s also something of a Robin Hood reunion, though they all appear in different episodes: Denis Lawson (who played Lord Winchester, though he’ll always be known best as Wedge Antilles), David Harewood (Tuck), and Joe Armstrong (Allan-a-Dale) which is extremely funny as he’s romantically paired with Kelly Adams, who played Eve – Much’s love interest. And get this: Joe’s character is a widower whose deceased wife was called Kate. I nearly spat out my drink.
I’ll hold off the final season for another month. The show may be past its prime, but I’ve enjoyed myself and I want to savour the last sip.
Elementary: Season 6 (2018)
Autumn is the perfect time to enjoy the safe world of a trusted friendship by settling down with a warm blanket and a twenty-one-episode season of Elementary. Cold weather and a Sherlock procedural – that’s a match made in heaven.
Every season of this show has an arc that revolves to one extent or another around an important supporting character: in order, they have been Moriarty, Mycroft, Kitty, Holmes Senior, and Shinwell. That last one wasn’t a huge success, and he was killed off so abruptly (and is mentioned so negligently afterwards) that I get the feeling story plans were changed quite late in the game. Perhaps the point the show was trying to make is that you can’t save everyone, but it was still very unsatisfying.
This time around our guest-star (who actually makes it to the opening credits) is a man called Michael Rowan, a fellow addict who introduces himself to Sherlock at one of their joint AA meetings, stating that he found Sherlock’s words about how his work helps him cope with addiction very inspiring. He’s clearly up to no good, as by the end of his first episode the audience is privy to his side of a television conversation with Sherlock, in which he’s in the middle of burying a body.
It’s a reasonably interesting take on the serial killer genre in that Michael is a drug addict whose “work” keeps him sober, and Desmond Harrington plays the character as very calm and soft-spoken. Unfortunately, the season ends with him assaulting Joan at the Brownstone (all his victims are women, of course) which is pretty lazy of the show.
Then he gets killed off unceremoniously in the final episode so the storyline can pivot into Joan being credibly accused of his murder. Except that it’s not very credible. Apparently her alibi doesn’t check out because her mother has dementia – but she seriously never spoke to anyone else while she was at her parents’ house? The police can’t check the mileage on her car or her cellphone signal to verify her location? She was seriously meant to have beaten a large man to death while sporting cracked ribs? Come on!
I probably enjoyed the standalone stories and mini-arcs more, which include Joan getting to know her half-sister (I wasn’t sure they’d bring her back, but I’m glad they did), and return appearances from many of Sherlock’s Irregulars, Alfredo, Gregson’s daughter, Holmes Senior, and guest-stars such as Douglas Hodge, Ian Hart, Julian Sands and Parminder Nagra. Nice to see them, to see them nice.
On the downside, they also kill Mycroft offscreen (I guess Rhys Ifans declined to return) and Joan decides she wants to adopt a baby (I’d think that was the last thing she’d want in her line of work). Furthermore, the writers are clearly still hedging their bets on whether Natalie Dormer will ever become available again, as though Moriarty is oft-mentioned, she has yet to make another onscreen appearance.
I’ve no idea if Dormer turns up in the seventh and final season, but you can feel the number of subplots and potential story-arcs that are getting trimmed or rewritten to accommodate her absence, and it’s easy to assume the writers’ room is getting rather frustrated by this. But hey, maybe it’s a good thing. How many Sherlock Holmes adaptations eventually get completely eaten by convoluted Moriarty hijinks? Without her around, this can remain a straightforward procedural that retains its focus on the partnership of Holmes and Watson.
But there is definitely the sense the writers are starting to tie off loose ends, with some of the returning characters (usually Sherlock’s Irregulars) popping in for a final visit before getting a nice send-off. They know the end is nigh. In fact, there’s a chance they thought this would be their final season, as it concludes with Holmes and Watson leaving New York for London, living at Baker Street and working with Scotland Yard.
That said, there’s not a lot of closure with Marcus or Gregson, so perhaps a final season will clear that up (though I’ve no idea if the two of them go back to New York or stay in London). I still have one more truncated season of only thirteen episodes to go, and I certainly can’t complain about having one hundred and fifty-four episodes of this show in total, but damn I’m going to miss these two.
In hindsight, I’m immensely grateful that a woman got the role of Watson, regardless of fandom’s tantrum throwing, and I truly hope one day the universe will come full-circle and I’ll get to see Nikki Amuka-Bird as Sherlock. Think about it, she’d be great.
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