Marshmallow World

I've been so crazy busy recently that I feel like I need reminders to remember that Christmas is imminent. I do love this season, but it's kind of difficult to remember that when I feel frantically swamped with work. My own particular Christmas is a kind of secular, materialistic, pop-culture Christmas - the kind of Christmas that gets railed against in A Charlie Brown Christmas, even as Vince Guaraldi's dreamy score fits right under that pop culture-loving column. I thought I'd take some time to offer examples of some of my favorite holiday media.

My Favorite Holiday Movie: A Muppet Family Christmas

This is NOT repeat NOT The Muppets Christmas Carol, which takes the already creepy weirdness of A Christmas Carol and puts Muppets in on top of that. A Muppet Family Christmas is a TV movie from the late 80s, and it is glorious. Why, you ask? Well, the movie is chock-full of Muppets. Practically every Muppet ever created. Muppet Show Muppets, Sesame Street Muppets AND the Fraggles. Who could ask for anything more? Also, Jim Henson and co. avoided a key error by using pre-existing Christmas songs and not trying to make up any of their own. I don't know if I can convey the awesomeness of this movie in words. I mean, the Swedish Chef tries to cook Big Bird for Christmas dinner. Amazing.

This movie is so excellent, I decided that there should be two clips. In the first, Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem rock out to Jingle Bell Rock, and it is excellent. There is also one of my favorite lines of dialogue: "She loves canine humor!" Every time I watch this movie, I want to quote it in everyday life. I'm pretty sure that no one would have any idea what I was talking about, though.



In the second, the Sesame Street Muppets arrive, and some more of my favorite lines of the movie occur. "Where we come from, this is small talk." And, my personal favorite, which pops into my head practically every time it precipitates, "Barometers are falling sharply...Oh no!"



A Close Second, and Not Necessarily Less Awesome: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

So not that long ago I was having a conversation with one of my friends who's Jewish about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and I referenced this special, forgetting as I always do that this holiday experience is not universal, and she was like, "Rudolph? Which one?" And I was like, "Which One?!?! THE one." This stop-motion special is so essential to the way that I experience Christmas now that I imagined it crossing cultural and religious lines and bringing joy to all regardless of color or creed because Rudolph is straight-up awesome, to the degree that sometimes when the songs come up on my iTunes shuffle in, like, June, I still listen to them. "A Holly Jolly Christmas"? "Silver and Gold"? Classic. It's almost like one of those things from the 60s like The Graduate where I watch and wonder what it must have felt like to watch it anew, when the songs were fresh and unheard and hadn't become part of the larger culture. I mean, in the 60s people probably kind of wrote it off as a TV special for kids, but it just feels significant to me.



That song's not even really seasonal, just really pretty and will make you feel better about yourself. How did Clarice end up being such a nice, decent reindeer when everybody else is so assy to Rudolph?

My Favorite Christmas Album: A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector

I was reading something earlier today about how people apparently like their Christmas songs classic and 40s style, and that they're bothered by stuff like Bruce Springsteen's "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." This is entirely the opposite of how I feel. The pop-y Christmas songs of the 50s and 60s are so bouncy and fun and fresh, and are epitomized by A Christmas Gift for You. Spector brought his Wall of Sound to the holiday season, and created a bunch of girl-group classics. It's so good that it got on the Rolling Stone 500 Best Albums list that was compiled a few years ago, and it's a Christmas album. Since I got the album a few years ago, "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" with Darlene Love has slowly crept up to become my favorite. Her voice is a knockout on practically everything she sings on the album. However, for a long time, before I even knew that a whole album of this stuff existed, one of my favorites was the Ronettes' version of "Sleigh Ride."



I mean, it's just so fun. Who can argue with that?

My Least Favorite Christmas Song, by a Vast Margin: "Christmas Eve in Washington"

Only people from the DC area know about this song, which gets insane amounts of airplay once radio stations switch over to the all-Christmas, all-the-time format in December. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I couldn't find a video or anything with the song. I don't know if I have adjectives sufficient to describe the epic awfulness of this song. The tune always reminds me of another overwrought song, "God Bless the U.S.A." The lyrics are extremely cheesy and basically list DC area landmarks like they were picked out of a travelogue. I'm pretty sure that with a different set of landmarks, you could construct a practically identical song about a completely different city. Suffice it to say that the chorus begins, "It's Christmas Eve in Washington, America's hometown/For it's here that freedom lives and peace can stand her ground." There must be some people who like it, because it gets played over and over again until it seems like it's invading my dreams. But I can't remember a time, even as a small child, when I ever enjoyed hearing it. I think that sales of the song go to charity, so I feel bad trashing it. Maybe if it wasn't played so frequently. I love going home for the holidays, but I am dreading hearing that song again.

New Name

The signature on my posts has changed, as I switched the account for the blog. It's not indicative of a psychotic break or anything.

Also, I changed my Google to iGoogle, and I am in love with the wee little fox in the theme.

The Goodwill Index

I'm concerned that my nearly decade-long love of Seth Rogen might be blinding me to the extent of the sexism in Knocked Up, and I don't really know what to do about it. I kept meaning over the summer to write about how freaking excited the popularity of Knocked Up and Superbad made me as someone who has loved the works of Apatow dating back to Freaks and Geeks. I remember trying in vain to find someone else who watched the show when it originally aired when I was in middle school, and I remember the joyous day that I bought my treasured DVD set. No longer having to explain who Seth Rogen is when I talk about him to my friends is a thing of wonder after some eight-odd years. Katherine Heigl's recent remarks on the sexism in Knocked Up, and the resulting reactions to those remarks, have had me thinking as I peruse blog comments. I don't disagree that the male POV is dominant in the movie, which is entirely what I expected as a longtime Apatow/Rogen fan. I just don't see all of the problems that some people find with it. I completely disagree with the idea that the happy ending for Ben and Allison is based upon them ending up together. The wedding is such a noteworthy scene in The Forty-Year-Old Virgin that I firmly believe that if Apatow wanted the audience to think that they got married, he would have shown us that. All the ending really shows us is that they work together as parents, which to me is independent of the outcome of their "romantic" relationship. I just don't know. I mean, I am a feminist. If people who generally hold a similar set of beliefs about the ways that women should be depicted on screen feel so strongly that Knocked Up does a disservice to its female characters, am I missing something?

Anyway, this whole personal crisis had me thinking about what I like to call my "Goodwill Index" - the amount of goodwill for a specific actor or actress that is built up in my mind due to past TV shows or movies. For example, the Wilson brothers have basically an infinite Goodwill Index due to my love of Wes Anderson movies. Where this relates to the above discussion of Knocked Up is when the Goodwill Index comes into conflict with a present-day project that may be completely abhorrent, or at the very least problematic. My sense of Goodwill Indices have given essential free passes to David Anders and Kristen Bell in the past season of Heroes due to their massive stockpiles of Alias and Veronica Mars-related love. Over the past few months, I have been examining and re-examining my feelings about Jason Lee as his predominantly Almost Famous (with some Kevin Smith in there) related Goodwill Index comes in violent conflict with the pure bile that rises within me every time I come in contact with the trailers for Underdog and Alvin and the Chipmunks. I mean, really? Really, Jason Lee? That is a lot of goodwill that's being thrown down the drain. (Alvin and the Chipmunks is a really rough one, because there's also Justin Long (GI from Ed) and Matthew Gray Gubler (GI from being Intern No. 1 in The Life Aquatic) It's like fingernails on a chalkboard, except the chalkboard is MY BRAIN.) I would maybe give Cameron Crowe a call, because I heard that Elizabethtown was not so good, and you both could probably do with an awesomeness-recovering change of pace.

Writing for the Sake of Writing

I've got writer's block for everything important that needs to get written RIGHT NOW. This may get a bit random, and maybe even abnormally prolific, over the next week or so, as somewhat of a dumping ground for rambling/chisel for the aforementioned block.

I watched Cold Case earlier tonight. I have an odd sort of relationship with Cold Case - I rarely make time to watch it, it's the sort of thing that just sort of occurs to me to do sometimes after The Amazing Race, particularly in times like right now, when football pushes the CBS shows back so they're not airing on the hour and it's not worth it to change to Desperate Housewives in the middle of the show, or it's a rerun like tonight. The thing about Cold Case is, I've cried at the end of practically every episode of that show that I've ever seen. I cried tonight, and not five minutes before I did, I was thinking that I wasn't that emotionally invested in this week's episode - I mean, I guess there's a scale. Most get some kind of sniffle or tearing up. Then there are some that are so touching ("Boy in the Box" or "Forever Blue") that I bust into sobs at the end. They've got their show-ending montage down to a science, and the moment when the episode's departed returns to gaze upon their loved ones now that their murder has been solved and their soul is at peace is the showstopper. It's not always the most subtle show, but it's not like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, where you practically expect Ty Pennington to break the fourth wall, gaze into the camera, and wail "CRY!!!"

No real point to that, I guess, just saying that if you've got nothing better to do, you could do a lot worse than Cold Case.

Below is one of said montages, from the episode "Forever Blue." It doesn't really make much sense out of context, and I don't know if I can do the emotionally-wrenching-ness of the episode justice with a short synopsis - it's about the murder of a police officer in the late 1960s, who ends up having been in love with another police officer and it is all very, very sad. The first time I saw this episode, I was watching with a suitemate, and we were both sobbing hyper-emotionally at the end.

Musicalfest 2007: Cabaret and Company

I was having a conversation recently with some friends of mine who insisted that they did not like musicals at all. Now, to me this seems like a simplistic opinion. The world of musicals is so varied that it seems impossible to blanket-statement dislike musicals. The difference between what you get with Rodgers and Hammerstein and, say, Kander and Ebb or Sondheim stylistically and thematically is pretty vast, considering that both fall under the "musical" heading. Jukebox musicals are coming from a completely different place than musicals that start out being developed for the stage, film or TV. There's so much that goes into what a musical is - story, song, dance - that define each show stylistically on what seems to me to be a pretty vast spectrum. The two musicals that this post is about seem to me to be emblematic of the kinds of musicals that don't necessarily come to mind when people condemn them wholesale.

I initially became introduced to the music from Cabaret and Company through the online radio website AccuRadio. I've started to reach a point where my music collection is driving me a little stir-crazy just by existing with the selection of music that it currently contains, so I occasionally have to frantically find some other music resource to tap into. A few days with the 60s and 70s Broadway station convinced me that Cabaret and Company (along with A Chorus Line, the movie of which I hope to watch and write about at some later date) were different from other musicals in a completely fascinating way. I mean, talking about A Chorus Line, a song like "Dance Ten, Looks Three" is worlds apart from "My Favorite Things." Cabaret carries the dark, seductive tones of the work of Kander and Ebb, while the super-adult nature of Company is unexpectedly absorbing.

Due to my new love, Netflix, I was able to watch the movies that grew out of the stage show. For Company, that film is the Pennebaker documentary of the recording of the original cast album. It's really too bad that the film didn't grow into the intended series, because it seems like a fascinating process, the confluence of vocals and instruments necessary to capture forever a song usually performed on stage in an extended series of one-shot deals. The tongue-twister nature of "Getting Married Today" and emotionally draining performance in "Being Alive" are highlighted by the multiple attempts to capture words and emotions and preserve them for posterity.

Cabaret is a totally different animal. Apparently dramatically different from the stage show, the movie, as directed by noted choreographer Bob Fosse, is nonetheless both astounding and chilling. It seems easy to forget, in the American Idol-era of unjustified, over-the-top praising of talent, what it truly means to be a triple threat. One of the things that I love about movie musicals is when they feature someone who really can do it all. Liza (with a Z!) Minnelli is one of those people. Her presence almost becomes shocking as she goes from song to song. Lingering beneath the talent displayed by Minnelli and Joel Grey as the MC is the constant knowledge that the audience has of the potential fate for all of the characters we see. Not to take every comparison back to Rodgers and Hammerstein and The Sound of Music, but I think that it's worth noting that there is even a dramatic difference in tone and style between two musicals that both concern the rise of Nazism in Europe. Even when it's clear that the characters are deceiving themselves into ignoring the way that the world around them (in early 1930s Berlin) is changing, the film never lets the audience forget that they know how the bigger story really ends. The only other film that I can recall seeing in recent years that left me feeling similarly shaken was Capote, where a similar feeling of foreboding about an inevitably bleak future for the people concerned in the film swept over me as the credits rolled.

I keep thinking about writing posts instead of actually writing them, and then they just float around in my mind driving me crazy, so I want to write down other entries that I have in mind so I don't forget them:

-West Side Story, Hairspray and Cats: When dance defines a musical
-Guys and Dolls and My Fair Lady: The non-singing actor as musical star
-High School Musical and High School Musical 2: The modern musical phenomenon

Edited to add: Since watching Cabaret, I've become kind of totally obsessed with this song from the film:



I mean, "Everybody loves a winner, so nobody loved me"? Killer.

Mmm...New TV

I am unreasonably obsessed with television, and the beginning of the new TV season in September may be my favorite part of every year. Although I don't have a television right now, the advent of online TV means that I can catch more shows that I ever previously dreamed possible. The weeding-out process begins immediately as I begin to cement my watching schedule. Some first impressions and snap judgements:

- I have to face it, I'm just not that into Prison Break. It's a fairly entertaining show, I suppose, but the whole storyline of Michael returning to prison forced me to face the fact that I actually don't care about what happens to him. (Caring is crucial to me. Once I become even slightly invested in a show, I have to follow it through despite terrible writing or acting. My inability to tear my eyes away from utter trainwrecks has lead me to watch every episode of Studio 60, October Road and The Best Years, of none of which I am proud.) I'm not too broken up about leaving Prison Break, as it frees up some of my Monday for...

- NBC. I think NBC may be on some kind of roll with quality shows. Their lineup of new shows for the fall isn't entirely mind-blowing, but it is pretty solid. (NBC's online player has gotten much better, also, which works in their favor. One of the most frustrating things early last year was trying to get into Friday Night Lights with NBC's patchy player.) Chuck seems cute and strikes a pretty good balance of espionage and humor - kind of like what Alias might have been had it been a show about Marshall. I wasn't really planning on watching Journeyman or Life, but procrastination and online availability won out and both outperformed my somewhat low pre-season expectations. I don't think I'll become particularly attached to either, but they seem pleasant enough for the time being - no egregiously bad writing or acting. Bionic Woman was a bit meh - some critics I've read seem to think that Michelle Ryan doesn't have enough fire, and I think that's true. I'll stick with it, at least for a little while, as a Battlestar Galactica fan who loves Katee Sackhoff's sassy way of delivering cheesy lines.

- I'm excited about my Wednesday nights, as I think that I may now have some kind of "trashy rich people being awesome" block going. As an unabashed lover of primetime soaps, (I own DVDs of Dynasty, Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place) I had high hopes that Gossip Girl and Dirty Sexy Money would honor the memory of the late, great Aaron Spelling. I was not disappointed. Gossip Girl makes me truly happy in a way that only a really sharp, well-executed book-to-screen representation can. Dirty Sexy Money seems to have a great cast, and I wanted to watch the pilot again right after it ended. Hopefully, both do well enough ratings-wise to stick around and make my Wednesdays awesome.

- The rest of ABC's new dramas leave something to be desired. Private Practice is one big meh. I don't think that the substitution of Audra McDonald for Merrin Dungey was a good thing, and the sing-song dialogue of Shonda Rhimes is really starting to get on my nerves. No matter how many times I try to wrap my head around it, I just can't understand how we got from the stellar Season 2 ender for Grey's Anatomy to uncalled-for character assassination on that show and this lukewarm spinoff. Their other new drama (besides Pushing Daisies, which premieres next week) is Big Shots, which has a premise that doesn't give viewers much to sympathize with, character wise, and has some really terrible dialogue. I went back and forth with myself about whether my love of Michael Vartan (from Alias) extended far enough to include Big Shots. I don't believe that it does. However, I'm not quite ready to give up on it for a few reasons. One, I'm intrigued by Nia Long's character (actually, I wish that there was a show about a character like that instead of this one. The travails of a black female executive seem like they would be much deeper than the superficial problems that are the focus of the show.) Two, Rob Thomas from Veronica Mars is allegedly coming in to revamp scripts and make the show better, which gives me hope that it might one day suck much, much less.

Ahhh, the new fall season. I already can't wait for November sweeps.

"I saw eternity the other night / like a great ring of pure and endless light"

I had been thinking for a while about writing something about Owen Wilson and the feeling of nearly losing a creative voice that I love when I heard that Madeleine L'Engle had passed away. Her faith, which came through so strongly in her writing, gives me faith that her soul is somewhere that, if not better, is at least different from here. I couldn't help but shed a few tears though, to know that she has gone and taken her characters and worlds with her. The stories of Meg Murry, Polly O'Keefe and Vicky Austin have all been told, there will be no more.

Like most children, my introduction to L'Engle was through A Wrinkle in Time, which I must have read for the first time sometime in elementary school. I recall reading the Wrinkle quintet and enjoying them, but it wasn't until high school that I started to compulsively collect and read more of her adult books. As a reader, I could tell that she cared deeply about her characters and that their lives didn't stop with the books. My two favorite books of hers, A Severed Wasp and A Live Coal in the Sea, each pick up the story of one of her young heroines, decades after their first appearances. She created complex, intelligent women who were wives and mothers as well as Nobel laureates and world-renowned concert pianists. She raised issues of religion and faith without proselytizing. She wove her stories together, taking characters from one novel to the next and always making their appearance natural. I can't say enough about what her books have meant to me.

Rest in peace, Ms. L'Engle

Musicalfest 2007: Newsies and Grease 2

I think that I'd better limit these posts to bullet points or something - I know the blog header says "stream of consciousness," but overly verbose ramblings about musicals just make me seem crazy and overinvested. So here goes - these two films have some interesting similarities that struck me as I thought about what I might say about them.

-Neither is directly derived from a stage show, which certainly puts them in a minority among musical films, at least since the 1950s or so.
-Both are directed by choreographers, something that seems to result in a greater number very large dance numbers featuring dozens of people than one sees in those films directed by straight-up directors. Maybe it's a conscious effort to show off their dance-creation prowess. Maybe it's just because it looks cool.
-Both feature early roles by actors who would become much more famous in the future. Grease 2 is often referred to as Michelle Pfieffer's "first starring role," and she mostly pulls it off, considering that the movie is almost entirely ridiculous. The central newsie of Newsies is played by Christian Bale, who is somewhat less successful. Bale is not quite as accomplished at the song & dance element of the musical as fellow singer-dancer-superhero Hugh Jackman (particularly at the dancing - he's rarely at the front of those aforementioned large dance numbers.) Neither is really a film to look at for glimpses of stardom.
-Both have insanely catchy songs, like still-stuck-in-your-head-after-two-weeks catchy. Interestingly, Newsies features songs written by Alan Menken, who served as half of the songwriting teams that brought Disney back into prominence in the late 1980s-early 1990s with the animated musicals (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, etc.) Menken was probably the most familiar composer to children of my generation in their early formative years, though his name doesn't seem to be brought up very frequently. The songs in Grease 2...defy adjectives. Even if I spelled out the entire synopsis of the movie and its songs here, I could not adequately describe the sheer ridiculosity of the songs in Grease 2. The point is, watch it.
-Both are unintentionally hilarious. My sister used to watch Grease 2 with appalling regularity, as in multiple times a week, when she was early-elementary-school-aged (why? We're still not sure), but it wasn't until we dug the movie back out as teens that we realized how over-the-top, so-bad-it's-good the movie is. The movie abounds with double-entendres completely lacking in subtlety - one example is a song set at the bowling alley entitled "Score Tonight." (I wish that I had made that up. It's truly a movie that has to be seen to be believed.) Newsies scrapes by with a bit more credibility than Grease 2, just because some of the characters it depicts were actually real people, even though watching "tough" newsboys of turn-of-the-century New York burst into exuberant song is ridiculous, even within the surreal parameters of musical film.

So much for writing less. I'm not sure whether I should be concerned that I can write this much about musical films. We'll see how the next few posts turn out.

Musicalfest 2007: Chicago and Moulin Rouge

Some time ago, my sister and I decided that this summer would be the summer for watching as many musicals as we can. We're off to a somewhat slow start, as she's still got schoolwork, but I wanted to write my thoughts on each one - it's in keeping with my idea of what this blog's general theme is, and it fits with the plan that I always have for writing more frequently. The first two musicals are from earlier this decade: Chicago and Moulin Rouge.

I find myself constantly baffled by the claims that film critics always seem to make about the box office potential of musicals. It would seem that today's filmgoers are simply too practical for musicals, that although they know that the films are not real, the requisite suspension of disbelief involved in watching people burst into song and dance is too much for them. While only a generation or two ago, musicals like West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and Grease were hits, apparently a director today has to make the musical structure seem feasible in real life. Maybe I'm missing something. However, it makes these two films an interesting jumping-off point, as both were separately heralded for ushering in a new era for musicals. In Chicago, the strategy is turning the musical numbers into fantasy sequences. My personal feeling is that if the songs are going to be there anyway, why do they need to be "real?" In Moulin Rouge, the issue is diluted by the use of popular songs, written well before the movie, that swirl into Baz Luhrmann's fantasyland. This both works and doesn't - the spirited mash-up of "Lady Marmalade" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" near the beginning of the film makes the scene so unique that it really sells the film, even if you're not sure where it's taking you. However, I still kind of resent Luhrmann for putting Ewan McGregor's voice in my head every time I hear "Your Song."

It's an interesting question: Does the world need a new kind of musical for the twenty-first century? One of the things that I'd like to do with this summer-long marathon is to go back and start in the thirties and forties, watching the musical evolve into what we have today. What are moviegoers looking to see on the screen when they sit down to watch a musical? What are the stories being told through song? Maybe the general populace says the musical is dead, but I'm looking forward to an exciting summer.

V-Day

At the beginning of this month, I was talking to one of my friends about why I'm not particularly fond of February. In my personal history, not-so-great things have happened in February, and various depressing Valentine's Days of the past decade are a large part of that. One V-Day in particular stands out: seventh grade - the year when receiving obligatory valentines from your classmates was no longer. I was madly, unrequitedly in love with this boy, with whom I was friends as well, which was excruciating and terrible. Valentine's Day was on the weekend that year, so the last Friday beforehand was the big day for gift-giving at school. At lunch, one of my best friends received an elaborate gift from my crush - an ostentatiously large glass penguin accompanied by a note detailing how he found the penguin in Venice, "the city of love," and so on and so forth. The emotions that I most clearly recall are devastation, and then blind rage. Not only was this guy who I adored lavishing attention on someone who wasn't me, but she didn't even want it. The very worst part of the whole experience, though, didn't happen until I got home, after spending half of the day fighting valiantly against the torrent of tears pricking at my eyes. Being friends, he apparently thought he could call and pump me for information about her reaction to his gift. While I was twelve years old, and life-consumingly obsessed with this guy, I managed to evade the questions and I'm still proud that I didn't involve myself in some deeper, more messed-up adolescent shitshow.

This is where the story does a complete 180. Because after realizing that I wasn't giving anything away, he invited me to a movie that weekend. Not alone, mind you. In all of my similarly one-sided affairs, my luck has never really swung that way. It was among our group of friends, a bunch of guys who shared sharp wits, cynical senses of humor and eclectic tastes in...well, everything, I suppose. They were all at least a head taller than me, rare for middle school, and when we went to the movies, my mother said that she knew that she didn't have to worry about my well-being because they looked like my bodyguards. So, on the day that actually was Valentine's Day, we went as a group to see Patch Adams. (I know. Looking back, I saw some pretty mediocre movies with them - The World is Not Enough, Vertical Limit. The late-90s were not a great time if you were limited to PG-13.) Regardless, the fact that the movie was kind of terrible is insignificant.

I started detailing this V-Day as the worst Valentine's Day I've ever had, but I realized that it was actually the best. My friend who received the penguin? Ascended to the heights of middle- and high-school popularity and I never really thought twice about the loss. The boys, however, are a completely different story. They made me feel like good company, like a good person to be around on that Valentine's Day, which is more than I've felt on any of the V-Days that have followed. Of all the people who've popped in and out of my life in the past ten years, I think that I miss them the most. As we attended different high schools and took different paths, we lost touch completely, something I still deeply regret, even as an adult. It is shocking and bewildering to me that people we see every day for years can become strangers. Anyway, this V-Day, I'd like to send out a valentine to PB, MF, CG, RK and GP, wherever they are and whomever they're spending the day with. Thanks.

Reading...and Watching

So I've been thinking a lot recently about the books I read when I was young, primarily because I feel incensed every time a commercial for the movie of Bridge to Terabithia. When I was in elementary school, I read constantly. At the library, I took out twenty books at a time. I would keep the books I was reading in a giant pile at the foot of my bed, growing book by book until the stack teetered precariously. Every once in a while, the pile came crashing to the ground in the middle of the night, which my mother hated.

I had special affection for books that won the Newbery Medal. I'm not sure why - certainly they're not the only good books out there, maybe it had to do with the thrill of trying to collect each one. I went through similar periods of obsession with list-y things - the presidents of the US, the fifty states - I was a weird kid. After about 1950 or so, there are some really amazing books among the Newbery winners (before that, they tend a bit more towards the educational and deadly boring) - A Wrinkle in Time, The Westing Game, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Bridge to Terabithia, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Jacob Have I Loved, I could go on, clearly. Which is a somewhat roundabout way of saying that I can't believe the way that this movie is being marketed.

The film version of Bridge to Terabithia places it along with Harry Potter and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe as a fantasy. There's nothing wrong with those other adaptations being presented as such - they are fantasies, and part of the fun of a movie based on a fantasy novel is seeing the worlds and creatures of that novel brought to life. The thing is, Bridge to Terabithia isn't a fantasy. Not even close. The book is firmly rooted in real life, to the extent that everyone who I know of who has read it remains devastated by its reality years later. The fantasy exists solely in the minds of the main characters, which makes the real-life occurrences that much more real to the reader. I guess it worries me that kids will see the movie and then be disappointed by the book, and a world where a child can no longer be swept away by the emotions of a book like Bridge to Terabithia is one of which I want no part.