Filthsome..that is what it is....Filthsome!

In the words of the BFG, this movie is just "fillthsome"!  I have not seen too many books that have been made into a movie that I just despise...but this happens to be the second one that has ruined a book for me.  Growing up I had several favorite books, one of which was the BFG.  This year while teaching 3rd grade I had a student ask me to read this book to the class.  I agreed thinking that this was one of my favorite books and we could get it done by the end of the school year.  We finished it the second to last week before school ended and all of us were excited to hear that The BFG was coming out in the theater in July!  I really thought they might do a good job with the book, just hoped it wouldn't be too gruesome and bloody for my kids.  Thank goodness they left that stuff out; however, I can't say that I enjoyed it.

There are three parts that I liked and felt like the movie brought the book to life...the BFG's dream cave was absolutely beautiful (although not what I envisioned in my head), the dream country was better than the book and the ending for the giants was much kinder than Roald Dahl's version. However, the movie started off completely different and placed Sofie as an insomniac with control issues.  This is not how it was spelled out in the book and from that point I was pretty edgy.  Then when the scene of the giants fighting came I was insulted by the way Steven Spielberg portrayed that part of the story. It seemed like most of the movie was out of order and the parts where garbled together haphazardly.  I understand the producers are trying to tell the whole story in one hour and 30 minutes...I am sure that is hard....but there are just some books that should be left to the imagination and for me this was one of those books.  Even the BFG's movements were too robotic for me.

So, I did take my own children to the movie...for my 5 year old it was too slow.  For my 8 year old who hadn't heard the book she knows no difference.  It will be interesting to see what she thinks of the book now that she has already seen the movie.  Finally, I look forward to hearing from some of my students about what they thought of the movie.  I wonder if they will feel as strongly about this movie vs. book as I do!

Either way, it was nice to get out for a little while, but now it is back to the grindstone!  I guess the moral of this post is that sometimes technology should leave things alone and just leave them to the imagination!