My Favorite Adaptations: Little Women

So, a few years ago when Batman Begins came out, I felt myself getting filled with giddy excitement about it, like, all the time.  One day I just had to ask myself, "Self, why do you love Christian Bale so much?" A moment of contemplation revealed the answer: Little Women.  When I was younger, I loved this movie so much, especially Bale's Laurie.  I still haven't ever seen Empire of the Sun or American Psycho, but Little Women has earned him an enduring place in my heart.  Beyond elementary-school-era crushes, the truly great thing about Little Women is that as I've grown older and plowed through Louisa May Alcott's classic read a few times the film has only grown in my esteem.

What this film version, adapted by Robin Swicord, does that others don't is place the Marches in their historical milieu and flesh them out into real people.  Watching the March sisters pass an injured soldier in the street brings the Civil-War-era setting of the story home in a way that the knowledge of their absent father, away at war, simply doesn't.  The performances breathe life into characters that have been re-imagined and re-embodied enough times to seem rote.  Claire Danes in particular gives a three-dimensionality to Beth, a character who basically exists to be tragic, that makes predecessors seem especially shallow and treacly.  Additionally, like the later Pulitzer Prize-winning novel March by Geraldine Brooks, Little Women conflates the Alcotts with the Marches, bringing in some of their Transcendentalist philosophy and making Marmee a tough proto-feminist.  In this version of Little Women, the Marches and their companions don't just come off of the page, they live.  Nearly fifteen years after its release, I will still drop everything to sit and watch this movie.

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.