Thursday, February 18, 2010

Book to Reel Wednesday (on Thursday)

This weekly event is hosted by Lori at Escape Between the Pages. What Lori does is each week she posts a trailer for a particular movie and the description for the book that inspired it. Readers are encouraged to comment on the book, the movie, or both.

Truthfully I don't think too often about the movie adaptations of books, because more often than not they're hideous reproductions that make me yearn for an ice pick with which to stab myself. But on my walk to work this morning I just started thinking about some of the ones I liked, times where either the the movie was a true representation of the book or it veered enough from the story to keep the spirit but exist as an independent entity.

**Disclaimer: Most of these will be movies based on books from my childhood, at least in the beginning, because those are my favorites.**


This is not a fairy tale. This is about real witches! Grandmamma loves to tell about witches. Real witches are the most dangerous of all living creatures on earth. There's nothing they hate so much as children, and they work all kinds of terrifying spells to get rid of pesky kids. A boy listens closely to his Grandmamma's stories of the evil witches, but nothing can prepare him for the day he comes face to face with The Grand High Witch herself!





I loved Roald Dahl when I was a child and love him now. I think he has some of the most unique and culturally pervasive children's characters ever - and those characters always seem to hang around. I haven't seen the movie in a while at this point but I still remember how scary it was! Angelica Houston was probably the scariest witch ever and that was before she started peeling off her skin and showing how grotesque she was underneath! If you get the chance I definitely recommend picking this up from Blockbusters (are those still around?) or NetFlix and reminding yourself how cool kid's movies were even before Harry Potter.