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Uncle Orson Reviews Everything
February 20, 2005
First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.
Winn-Dixie, One Man Star Wars, Harvest Moon, Shakespeare
Because of Winn-Dixie is a movie based on a children's book by Kate
DiCamillo, and it's a good one.
Annasophia Robb plays Opal, the young motherless girl whose loneliness
as a stranger in a small town is relieved by a mutt that she adopts and names
for the grocery store chain.
There's not a lot of suspense in the story. There might have been more,
but when Winn-Dixie seems to have run away, the situation is resolved within
a few hours instead of lingering, as it could have, for days. False tension is set
up a couple of times by the local law enforcement, but it comes to nothing.
It's just one sweet thing after another.
But what are we asking for? A kids' thriller?
Basically, this story is Pollyanna with an easy ending. Opal and her dog
go about touching the hearts of lonely people, making them happier and
uniting them in friendship.
It is not Old Yeller, where the dog has to be put down at the end. (That
would be Million Dollar Baby.) It all ends happily.
Nothing wrong with that. I'm a sucker for movies like this; I get teary-eyed right on cue.
If you're looking for something thrilling and new, this isn't it.
But if you're looking for something cheerful and sweet, then take your
kids to Because of Winn-Dixie.
*
I recently had a chance to see a remarkable stage performance: Charles
Ross in One-Man Star Wars.
Ross, alone on stage with a microphone, reenacts the whole Star Wars
trilogy, taking about fifteen minutes per movie.
The better you know the movies, the funnier Ross's parody is. But even
if you barely know the films, it's still amazing to watch a performance of such
wit and incredible energy.
Not only is Ross all over the stage, athletically reenacting all the
characters and the starships, but vocally he is reciting the lines and the sound
effects and the film score.
Naturally, he omits a great deal of material, but the main storyline is
there, with satiric touches that leave the audience in stitches.
He's in such incredibly good physical shape that he never runs out of
breath.
He also does a One-Man Lord of the Rings, which he'll be performing at
the official Tolkien centenary this summer. In Britain, alas, so I won't be going.
I hear that Ross charges about $2,000 to put on a show. When you
compare that with the cost and entertainment value of, say, a speech by Bill
Clinton, Ross is an incredible bargain.
Ross's agent can be contacted at the website
http://www.OneManStarWars.com.
*
Almost twenty years ago, I did a consulting gig with LucasFilm Games.
One of the things I urged was that they develop computer games for girls.
In those days, there was nothing aimed at kids who wanted no-conflict
games. "Girls want games where nobody dies," I said. Games where you can
build something or accomplish something, but in a cooperative way.
My older daughter was then quite young, but she was repelled by most of
the solve-the-puzzle-or-die games that were available on the PC. I suggested
that they license the Sweet Valley Twins for adaptation as a computer game, or
create a game about baby-sitting.
"That's just task-management," I was told -- and by the dismissive tone,
I gathered that task-management games were considered sub-par.
But then, it was a guy telling me that.
I was informed by them and everybody else at the time that games
always had to appeal to that core gaming audience -- boys -- and there was no
point in trying to reach other audiences. "How would we even tell them such a
game existed? Where would we advertise it?"
Now, many years later, other companies have long since figured out how
to do it, and there are lots of games aimed squarely at girls.
Some are free online games, like Neopets -- which is so popular that it
now makes money from licensing.
But the favorite at our house is Harvest Moon. The versions for the
Nintendo Game Cube and the Nintendo Game Boy Advance are different from
each other, but the verdict is that both are great fun.
In the game, you start out by inheriting your grandfather's farm, which
has been neglected for some time. You clear the land and plant things, acquire
animals ... and even try to get a woman to fall in love with you and marry.
Yes, girls play this game -- I daresay more than boys do -- but then,
girls have always been willing to read books with boy heroes, while boys will
almost never read books with girl heroes. Girls are just more open-minded
that way. So it makes commercial sense for the farmer to be a male.
It's a task-management game, however. It involves work. Repetitive
chores dominate a farmer's life, and this game doesn't pretend otherwise.
But the game becomes so engrossing that it begins to feel like a real life.
Our ten-year-old announces to us with real excitement: "My cow had a calf!" or
"I finally got married!"
And kids who would never dream of going to a real barn dance or harvest
festival are perfectly happy to take part in one on the computer screen -- or
help with a bridge building project or go fishing.
Who knew that a farmer's life could be turned into a great videogame?
But it has been, and I know of adults who are as delighted with the game as
kids are. Best of all, it's a game that can involve you for hours but doesn't
leave a pile of corpses behind.
*
I grew up on Charles & Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, a prose
retelling of the stories of Shakespeare's plays. While their work has its critics
(and some complain because Charles gets first credit while Mary apparently did
all the writing), it was good enough for me as a kid.
When I later came to the plays in their original form, my memory of that
childhood reading guided me through Shakespeare's difficult language and
encouraged me that the story would be worth the effort.
One story that doesn't work with prose alone is Midsummer Night's
Dream. It's hard to tell the four lovers apart, and with four seemingly unrelated
plots going on, the story doesn't make much sense.
So children's writer Bruce Coville and illustrator Dennis Nolan worked
together to create a picture book, William Shakespeare's Midsummer
Night's Dream.
Nolan is an extraordinary artist, and his envisioning of Puck and the
fairies is not so much cute as intriguingly strange.
Meanwhile, Coville has deftly compressed the story so it actually fits in
the space available.
I wish he had not left out the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, but as Coville
explains, the real value of the play-within-a-play is in the hilarity of the way it
is performed -- which was simply out of reach in a book.
Coville has adapted several other Shakespearean plays into illustrated
picture books, collaborating with different artists, including Macbeth, Romeo &
Juliet, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night. I haven't seen them yet, but I intend to have
them all.
*
I don't usually review my own work here, but I can't help but rave about
Stefan Rudnicki's performance of the unabridged audio version of my novel
Lost Boys.
His performance was recently named a finalist for the Audie Award -- the
Oscar or Grammy of the audiobook world. But I had already been listening to
tapes in my car.
There was an earlier production of an abridged version of Lost Boys, read
by Robby Benson. Benson's reading was sensitive and sweet, but my work
doesn't abridge well -- I don't include things that can easily be cut out without
damaging the storyline.
Rudnicki's voice could not be more different from Benson's -- a rumbling
bass as opposed to a sharp tenor -- but Rudnicki is a wonderful actor and he
brings these characters to life as well as I can imagine it being done by a single
voice.
The story of Lost Boys is set in the fictional North Carolina city of
Steuben -- a town very much like Greensboro -- and is based in part on my
experience as a westerner moving here in 1983. It's the most autobiographical
of my fiction -- so much so that I vowed afterward never to do anything so
personal or painful again.
But listening to someone else's voice read the story made it possible for
me to reread it, and I'm happy indeed with how Rudnicki brings it to new life.
*
If you ever find yourself in Boston, looking for somewhere to eat, of
course you'll buy the Zagat guide and if you're lucky, you'll land a reservation
at L'Espalier in the Back Bay area. The food is innovative and exquisite. The
service was perfect. However, if somebody else hadn't been paying, I would
have had to mortgage one of my kids to cover the tab.
More in line with real people's budgets -- and just as brilliant in its own,
more modest way -- is the Cambridge restaurant Henrietta's Table at the
Charles Hotel (1 Bennett St.; 617-661-5005).
Henrietta's Table is devoted to traditional American cuisine and simple
garden-grown food. But the chef has a deft touch and gives new meaning to
the word "homestyle."
Let's put it this way: Nobody actually grew up in a home that cooked all
this great American food this perfectly.
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