Great upcoming local literature & film events

It's really spring!  The birds are chirping, tulips are blooming, and cool local children's literature and film events are coming up for central Illinois.

Whenever Candace Fleming comes to town it's a treat and she'll be here this Saturday, April 16, from 2 to 3 pm at the Normal Public Library.  Perhaps my favorite book of hers is The Lincolns: A scrapbook look at Abraham and Mary. Others in our house have enjoyed her chapter book The Fabled Fourth Graders of Aesop Elementary School and there's a new book about Fifth Graders. One of her most recent is the picture book Muncha! Muncha! Muncha!. We are reading her new book Amelia Lost about Amelia Earhart. After her talk, there will be refreshments and books available for purchase and autographing.

We'll be running over to the TheatresCool in downtown Bloomington shortly after that on Saturday to see the Broadway Workshop Performance: Comedy Tonight! directed by Cristen Susong.

Celebrate El Dia de los Ninos/El Dia de los Libros (Day of the Child/Day of the Book) on Saturday, April 30, at the Bloomington Public Library.  The fourth annual event, from 11 am to 1 pm, will feature a local soccer star, Dora the Explorer, an authentic Mexican band, Mexican crafts, and Mexican food.  Reading is important in all languages.

Finally, one of the highlights of the year is always going to EbertFest, the film festival at the University of Illinois-Champaign-Urbana, that celebrates Roger Ebert, films he enjoys, and the people who create them.  Even though Ebert's health is not as good as when the festival started, he continues to be an enthusiastic champion for great filmmaking.  This year the festival is April 27 - May 1.  It'sAt EbertFest a few years ago. held, once again, at the beautiful Virginia Theater, 203 W. Park Ave., in downtown Champaign. 

The experience of watching a film in the Virginia Theater with about 700 film enthusiasts on a beautiful spring afternoon when we all could be outside is always such a treat.  The people who go to EbertFest just love films.  They applaud, they clap, they laugh, they weep -- their participation as an audience makes the interesting films Ebert chooses even more wonderful to watch.  Then afterward, a key person from the film (usually the director or an actor) talks about the film.  Yep, right in central Illinois it's Hollywood for a few days.

Also, although festival passes sell out months in advance, we have always had success getting a ticket for specific films.  You just wait in line for about 20 to 30 minutes beforehand and you'll get a seat.  Maybe not the best seat on the main floor.  But we've always had a good seat.  Don't miss the opportunity.

Carroll's possible thoughts as Alice in Wonderland film wins Academy Award

Tim Burton's dark Alice in Wonderland continues its success by winning last night's first Academy Award.  Robert Stromberg and Karen O'Hara accepted the Oscar for Art Direction for their work in Alice in Wonderland.  Later, the winner of the 2011 Academy Award for Best Costume was Collen Atwood for Alice in Wonderland.  She had certainly been heavily promoted as a possibility even before the film came out.

Great article in the Chicago Tribune on former Chicagoan Karen O'Hara on what was involved in Art Direction for Alice in Wonderland.  While art directors and producers used to get their actual objects on the set, in this CGI-enhanced Alice, O'Hara worked with the computer graphics people to take the images she had found and put them into CGI.

She explains:"There's a huge department on films nowadays that creates the environments in 3-D on a computer, based on paintings and other research that the production designer has put together," she said. "What I do is, I bring in all the items that are going to decorate those areas, just as they would be in a complete live-action movie. I photograph those items and then those get built in 3-D in the computer. Then I sit with the computer artists and place those objects in the environment. Everything that's in that rabbit hole that Alice falls through — and there were hundreds of items: a piano, pictures, pieces of jewelry, a large sofa, a bed — all those pieces need to be figured out."

In this backstage interview after winning the Academy Award, Robert Stromberg also explains that during his acceptance speech he put a little Mad Hatter hat on the Oscar.  Cute!

I am sure that Lewis Carroll would have been both appalled and intrigued by the Academy Award Show last night.  As a man who loved theatre, just being with all those actors would have thrilled him.  But he was more conservative than many assume and he might have found some aspects a little tawdry or risque.

Review Cech's great book on Weston Woods' history now on Project Muse

John Cech's new book Imagination and Innovation: The Story of Weston Woods is a particularly interesting history of this ground-breaking film company known for its amazing adapatations of children's literature.  My review of his book is now available in the Children's Literature Association Quarterly section on Project Muse.  If you want a print copy, it's in Volume 36, Number 1, Spring 2011, pp. 115-117.  I think this book is well worth reading for children's literature scholars, librarians, film scholars, and all of us who remember watching these films in school and on television.

How beastly! Two films re-imagine fairy tales for teens

Wolves! Ugly beasts! Beautiful girls in hoods! Dark woods! Magic! 

Two films being released in March -- Beastly and Red Riding Hood -- are re-imagining  traditional fairy tales for modern teen audiences. Historically, fairy tales have been revised to suit the sensibility of that era's  audiences.  Some critics chafe at Walt Disney and his studio's interpretations because the animated versions do not keep to the 'traditional' script. But Disney knew, as fairy tale scholars know, that fairy tales are appealing, in part, because at their core they weave interesting stories with issues that the audience wants to work out and contemplate.  The re-interpretations enable each generation to embrace and analyze the core stories and related issues through their own lens.

Fairy tales started as oral tales, and as we all know, when you tell stories aloud you change them to adapt to the audience.  These new films are doing the same thing -- seeing if they can mine the contemporary adolescent interest in the gothic,  darkness, issues of beauty, while trying to understand and unravel universal problems.

The creators of the new films, or at least the trailers, seem to have a bead on contemporary teen and young adult audiences.  For Red Riding Hood, the director is Catherine Hardwicke, who directed the enormously successful first Twilight film and the troubling Thirteen (2003).  Red Riding Hood is played by Amanda Seyfried who is the cute, slightly over dramatic girl in Mamma Mia! (2008), Dear John (2010), and Letters to Juliet (2010). She brings to the role experience in the TV series Big Love (2006-11) and Atom Egoyan's Chloe (2009). Also starring are Lukas Haas (great as a child in Witness (1985) and recently in Inception) and Gary Oldman (who I just talked about while teaching films based on Dracula since he starred in Coppola's vision). The trailer makes the film look like a Twilight fairy tale -- probably a clever calculation that will make the film have good box office.  Here's the link to the trailer of Red Riding Hood.

Beastly is set in contemporary times and is based on "Beauty and the Beast." The trailer shows the lead, played by Alex Pettyfer, as a pretty boy Beastlywho is good looking, probably a rich football player, and popular.  (Pettyfer was interesting in Alex Rider (2006). Through a magic curse, he becomes disfigured, in an interesting way.  It takes the love of a girl, played by High School Musical's Vanessa Hudgens, to see beneath the surface of his unusual appearance.

"Beautiful people get it better" is the opening line of Beastly's trailer. The line is curious here because the beautiful person is a boy, not a girl.  For years, feminists have criticized beautiful images of girls, so it's interesting just in the twist of that role being played by a boy. Will feminists consider the problems of handsome boys and men as well?

Clearly inspired by the success of the Twilight series and probably by Harry Potter and Disney, the previews show films with the moody gothic sensibility so popular with teens as they retell familiar stories in either a contemporary setting Vanessa Hudgens and Mary Kate Olsen star in Beastly(Beastly) or a dark forboding, northwoods type setting (Red Riding Hood).  I assume that the tremendous success of Tim Burton's dark Alice in Wonderland film is bouying the studio's hopes.  There are similar merchandising efforts, though not as overwhelming as for Burton's Alice. Also just reading a review in the Miami Herald for I Am Number Four, which also stars Pettyfer and is similarly aimed at the YA audience, has a similar story arc to Twilight.  Hollywood loves to get on the bandwagon.

By the way, I've also been told by our local tween that beastly means great, cool, fantastic.

Alice in Pop Culture-land

Disney is churning the promotional wheels to land Tim Burton's Alice in WonderlandCostume sketch for Alice's red dres in Oscarland. Is it worthy for an Academy Award Best Film nomination, or other Academy Awards?  Does a billion in gross sales make it a natural to get one of the Top 10 nods? Is Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter incarnation that much better than many other actors' jobs this year, or even some of Depp's previous, Oscar-nominated roles? I'm not quite sure, but the film's saga is becoming curiouser and curiouser.

Clearly, Colleen Atwood's costumes are one of categories that Disney is hoping for an Oscar nomination. Disney has her designs are on exhibit in LA. The costumes are some of the more creative aspects of the film and the film does focus on the Mad Hatter as a high fashion designer, sort of.

Alice in Wonderland costumes and the characters are certainly inspiring numerous Halloween costumes this year. In Buffalo, New York,  and Boulder, Colorado, Alice in Wonderland characters are popular along with Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and the BP oil spill. The Mad Hatter is particularly popular for men, who do need an occasional opportunity to dress up a little wilder than normal perhaps.

"Everyone wants Alice, from kids to adults," said Andrea Simon, assistant manager of Halloween Adventure in South Hills Village (in Pittsburgh).

Haunted houses at Halloween have even been inspired by Alice in Wonderland this year, which is some kind of popular culture landmark.

Then there's the Broadway-bound Alice inspired musical as well, scheduled for next spring in New York. 

And finally Steven Perry, of Aerosmith, is doing the voice of the Mad Hatter in a segment of the children's TV show Wonder Pets that was inspired by Alice in Wonderland. I don't exactly remember the Hatter telling Alice which way to walk; the Mad Hatter seemed rather confused at the time.

A girl's red queen costume with cute flamingoJohnny Depp's Mad Hatter is inspiring Halloween costumes, but can it inspire an Oscar nomination?

The Miss Alice costume is already out of stock at some stores

Steven Perry as the Mad Hatter in Aersomith's 2001 video for "Sunshine," inspired by AlicePlay The Wonder Pets' online Alice in Wonderland game