In which I am also slightly drunk and very definitely procrastinating writing an undergraduate paper because/in spite of the fact that I am old and have fancy degrees and have done this shit before. It seems an impossible task.
(I am however amused to see the omega on the WordPress toolbar. Apparently it represents ‘Special Characters’!)
My favorite childhood book was recently made into a big Hollywood movie. The House with a Clock in its Walls. I was excited slash horrified to see that this was going to happen. I should say that this book is not really my favorite childhood book: honestly, my favorite John Bellairs book was probably The Curse of the Blue Figurine, and I give all the love to Little Women, Snuggle Piggy and the Magic Blanket, The Picture of Dorian Gray, People, I Had Trouble In Getting to Solla Sollew. Etc.
There have been several excellent film adaptations of Little Women. I would argue that the 1933 Cukor film is one of the best pictures ever made! Just the theme song is enough to make me cry. Katharine Hepburn is so young and so weird and Paul Lukas tells her “You cannot be Shakespeare but you can be Jo March and I assure you that is plenty” in such a tender fatherly yet somehow hott way. And Laurie, as handsome as he is, was and never will be right for her. And we get that.
Little Women is unarguably a classic of American literature. I don’t need to defend or recommend it.
I would argue that The House With a Clock in its Walls is also. I wouldn’t argue that confidently, but I would argue it. I read it many times as a child. I read it many times as an adult. I have made other adults read it: both those I was sleeping with and those I was not. I have never heard anyone say anything less than: “damn, what a great book that was!” I know the prose can stand alone but I have always read and forced it in the old edition with all the Gorey pictures. Spare gothic perfection. It’s scary and it isn’t.
[Here I delete a passage in which I describe how, as a 33-year-old lady, I wouldn’t at all mind having sex with Jonathan Barnavelt. The book version, not the movie version. THE LESS SAID ABOUT THIS THE BETTER]
I also have a very sentimental feeling toward this book, as I do with all Bellairs books, because he and I are both U Chicago PhD dropouts. He dropped out of English, I dropped out of Sanskrit. Both of us at an advanced stage. Maybe I will write my own young adult novel one day. (One day, one day, but today is not that day!*) I certainly didn’t know about this when I was a child but when I re-read his books as an adult it made me cry to know that someone else that I loved so much had experienced anything like the same pain I did.
I know he was a very kind man. I remember reading about that when I had to look him up in the Big Book of Children’s Authors when I had to write a report about my favorite author in fourth grade. I remember that the book told me how he used to write back to everyone who wrote to him and he kept a museum of all the drawings children sent to him and I got very excited and then it told me that oh also he was dead. So I could not write to him and there would be no more books.
I don’t know his particular circumstances, but I can imagine why the University of Chicago might have been too much for such a gentle soul. And/or I think he just got sick of writing about Elizabethan plays. Happens to the best of us.
In any case. Probably no one on earth loves The House With a Clock in its Walls more than I do? And now people will think of the worse than mediocre movie before they think of the perfect book. And I’m angry about that. I don’t expect that movies will or should be “faithful” to the book: otherwise how would we have Blade Runner? But if you’re not going to replace the book aesthetic with an aesthetic that is equally beautiful or content-ful, then why can’t you stick to the original? Why replace Gothic and spare with hideous CGI excess? Why do you need to invent bland predictable Hollywood backstories for characters who don’t need backstories? Why do you relentlessly need to make something worse? Why toilet humor? Why…any of it? What is this in aid of, as Edward Gorey used to say? I expected the worst but it was even worse than I expected.
Though I did love that they kept the line about how Mrs. Zimmermann got her magic degree at the University of Göttingen. I was waiting for that. And…the cemetery design was great. THE TRUMPET SHALL SOUND AND THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED.
I guess people who read comic books as kids have to be angry about movie adaptations all the time but this is a new experience for me.
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* This is an inside joke with myself. I will probably explain this eventually.
dora random 