Fart for arts ache – art for farts ache. Flatulence appears to be in the air at the moment.
It seems that Steven Spielberg has had an attack of the vapours adapting Roald Dahl’s THE BFG to the BS.
To be sure, there are whizpopper’s in Dahl’s text brought about by the consumption of snozzcumber. A polite word for foods that make your bottom quack is carminative, but there doesn’t seem to be anything calming about about snozzcumber and Spielberg is quick to exploit it.
The clapping of the buttocks when the inner gale is liberated is the sound of one cheek clapping in this rather uninteresting and uninvigorated version of a Dahl darling.
Farts are quickly delivered and slowly forgotten, whereas this production is quite the opposite, thus proving flatulence will get you nowhere
Roald Dahl’s “The BFG” was first published in 1982, the same year Steven Spielberg’s own story about an unusual and transformative friendship, “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” captured the hearts and imaginations of children and adults everywhere. Screenwriter Melissa Mathison wrote the screenplays for both films.
The story, for those who have read the book, or had it read to them, concerns Sophie, a precocious 10-year-old, sleepless in her own bed at her London orphanage. While all the other girls in the dormitory dream their dreams, Sophie risks breaking one of Mrs. Clonkers’s many rules to climb out of her bed, slip on her glasses, lean out the window and see what the world looks like in the moonlit silence of the witching hour, a horological point that’s as moveable as Easter. Outside, her familiar street looks more like a fairy tale village than the one she knows, and out of the darkness comes something long and tall…very, very, tall. That something is a giant who takes Sophie and whisks her away to his home in a land far, far away. Fortunately for Sophie, he is the Big Friendly Giant and nothing like the other inhabitants of Giant Country. His brothers are twice as big and at least twice as scary, and have been known to eat children, – Cannnybully Chidlers -but the BFG is a vegetarian and makes do with a disgusting vegetable called Snozzcumber. Sophie’s presence in Giant Country attracts the unwanted attention of the other giants, who have become increasingly more bothersome. Sophie and the BFG soon depart for London to see the Queen and warn her of the precarious giant situation, but they must first convince her that giants do indeed exist. Together, they come up with a plan to get rid of the giants once and for all.
High tea at Buckingham Palace resembles the campfire in Blazing Saddles, with wind breaking corgis making a Welsh rabid.
Screen adaptations of Roald Dahl books have had patchy success and THE BFG does not break the mold. It’s not a patch on the musical stage play, Matilda, and so THE BFG is best between the covers, engaging your own imagination, and not filtered by a film maker.