Two Classic Books Coming to Theaters

Written by Jon Williams

Theatergoers heading to the box office this weekend will be faced with a plethora of choices, as usual, but for many of them it will come down to one big one: will it be Independence Day: Resurgence, opening nearly twenty years after the original, or will it be Finding Dory, the charming animated sequel to Finding Nemo, now in its second week of release? Tough call. And it won’t get any easier next weekend, which sees the opening of two new adaptations of beloved classic books.

One of these is The BFG, which is based upon the 1982 novel by whimsical children’s author Roald Dahl. Brought to the screen by director Steven Spielberg (and with a soundtrack by John Williams), it tells the fantastical tale of an orphan named Sophie, who is kidnapped by what turns out to be a Big Friendly Giant (hence the title), an outcast who needs her help to stop a band of giants with the not-so-friendly tendency to eat other children. This is the first live-action version of The BFG to be produced; a made-for-TV animated version came out in 1989.

Of course, Dahl wrote many classic children’s books, and many well-known adaptations have been made from them. He is perhaps best known for his 1964 tale of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the two movies made from it: the 1971 version Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (for which Dahl wrote the screenplay) starring Gene Wilder, and the 2005 version directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp. Other well-known movies made from Dahl’s works include James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Witches, and Matilda.

The other adaptation coming to theaters next week is The Legend of Tarzan, starring Alexander Skarsgard as the fabled man raised in the jungle by apes after the death of his parents. The character originated in the 1914 novel Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs and continued on through a number of sequels. Burroughs was a prolific writer in the sci-fi and fantasy genres; he also wrote the Barsoom series (beginning with A Princess of Mars) that eventually spawned the film John Carter.

Tarzan, though, is far and away Burroughs’s most famous creation; he is, in fact, one of the most well-known characters in fiction, due in part (or maybe even primarily) to the sheer number of movies and TV shows in which he has featured. The most pervasive of these is a series of films starring gold medal-winning Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller in the title role. One of the most successful TV series starred Ron Ely and ran from 1966-1968. Not surprisingly, Disney made the most popular animated version in 1999, with a star-studded voice cast and a soundtrack by Phil Collins.

So if history is any indication, both of these movies are sure to be quite popular, and patrons will be looking for related material (and, as always, you can search on our website for even more). Let us know which one you’ll be seeing when it’s released, and stay tuned in the coming months for DVD and Blu-ray release date information on these exciting new movies.

John Carter Blu-Ray/DVD Review

Written by Kirk Baird

John Carter is now out on Blu-ray and DVD. The film is best known for being perhaps the year’s biggest flop, an honor more dubious perhaps than merited.

I didn’t care for the film on the big screen. But movies in theaters are bigger than life, which tends to magnify any flaws (like putting a magnifying glass over someone’s face).

On the new Disney Blu-ray release, though, John Carter wasn’t half-bad. Which is a polite way of saying it was only half good.

The trouble with John Carter has a lot to do with redundancy. The film is based on a series of pulp novels from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ written roughly a century ago. The story concerns a Civil War vet named John Carter who finds himself teleported to the dying surface of Mars, where he helps lead the resistance against a war-minded nation.

The book series was popular among the science-fiction crowd, which means a lot of current directors read them growing up and were, in turn, influenced by them. Pixar’s Andrew Stanton, who ultimately directed John Carter, being one of them. These filmmakers also copied from Burroughs’ work – or, at least, borrowed liberally.

 That’s a point of praise for Burroughs. It’s also a serious flaw in the John Carter film. We’ve seen so much of its imaginative settings and sequences before in the Star Wars movies, Stargate, Avatar, to name a few, that John Carter feels stale and old – even though the movie was released only in late March. There’s very little wow factor at play in the two-hour-plus film, which is not what you expect of a movie budgeted at $250 million. 

Perhaps that’s why it grossed less than $75 million of that domestically. If you account for worldwide revenue, John Carter at least did respectably with nearly $210 million – which would push the film past the break-even point, in theory.

The film is also hindered by the rather unimpressive feature-film debut of Taylor Kitsch. Nice kid, good actor in small doses and certainly on the small screen on Friday Night Lights, which is what he’s known for. But as the centerpiece to a big-budget effects and action-driven film, he lacks the requisite charisma. Kitsch is like a pretty vase placed on a football field: he is swallowed up by the surroundings.

Lynn Collins, who plays his love interest Dejah Thoris, the princess of Mars, isn’t much better. Lovely actress, but she cannot carry the role.

And these problems are amplified on the big screen. In the comfort of a living room, though, these flaws seem less significant; it’s easy to dismiss the criticism of John Carter as overblown and another instance of a film snobbery pile-on. And that’s not incorrect. We critics can harp on a film. And when there’s blood in the water (meaning a film is dying at the box office), we become even more vicious.

While I believe the collective dismissal of the film was correct for the theatrical release of John Carter, on Blu-ray/DVD the new format and smaller screen merits a do-over.

John Carter isn’t a great film. But it’s not a bad either. And certainly not worthy of the “box-office bomb to end all bombs” tag it’s been saddled with. It is worth checking out, if only to see what all the criticism and bad press was about. And then decide if it’s true.