Dickensblog

'A Christmas Carol' earns three Tony nominations

This was the Jefferson Mays one-man Christmas Carol that ran on Broadway from November 2022 to January 2023. Congratulations to Dane Laffrey and Lucy Mackinnon, nominated for Best Scenic Design of a Play; Joshua D. Reid, nominated for Best Sound Design of a Play; and Ben Stanton, nominated for Best Lighting Design of a Play! The full list of nominations is here.

Thoughts on Hulu's 'Great Expectations,' episodes 1 and 2

Watching Steven Knight's Great Expectations, after having watched his A Christmas Carol a few years ago, has driven me relentlessly to one conclusion: Knight just doesn't like Dickens. At all. If Knight had been born hating Dickens and hated him more every day of his life, he couldn't have done him more dirty than he has.

Once again we have the characters twisted and distorted out of all recognition. Once again we have a woman put in a degrading sexual position by an older man (a relative, in this case). Once again we have Dickens's quicksilver words discarded for clunky, leaden attempts at dialogue, and his odd, fascinating quirks smoothed over, to be replaced with various vices and kinks. Even the music, by Keefus Ciancia, is grim and joyless. 

Hulu's 'Great Expectations': Reviews and articles

The first episode of the new BBC/FX Great Expectations is now available on Hulu. The Independent opines that, paradoxically, "the desire to sex up Victoriana" is "all very predictable." The Hollywood Reporter states, "What could have been a daring spin on a classic is transformed instead into a dreary slog," and CNN says, "The story ... grinds along sluggishly." According to The Evening Standard, "It’s not so much a dramatisation of Great Expectation[s], as a hollowing out of it in order to accommodate a very different story and almost unrecognisable characters." (Relatedly, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has an interesting piece at LitHub, with the marvelous title "The Wizardry of Boz," taking a look at how the various adaptations of Dickens have shaped our view of his work.)

But the piece that most got my attention was writer/producer Steven Knight's interview with TV Insider, in which Knight said, "[Dickens] can never go all the way into those dark places. So that’s what I tried to do." You can read my Twitter rant on that quote here. The gist of it is that I'm sick and tired of people claiming to have added qualities to Dickens that are already there, and that Dickens could out-dark Knight with one hand tied behind his back. Just because he wasn't explicit or gruesome doesn't mean he was too timid to explore or create haunting pictures of the grim side of life.

Anyway, I'll probably be watching Episode 1 (there will be six total) tonight or tomorrow, and will share my thoughts here. I have to admit, after some of what I've been reading (and after the same team's Christmas Carol adaptation), my expectations are not great.

Thoughts on 'Spirited'

Is the end of February too late to share thoughts on Spirited? :-) I actually started writing this review in December. But what with one thing and another, I got way, way behind. I guess I could always wait till next December, but I'd really like to just get this done and off my plate, so with your kind indulgence, let's have a little Christmas in February!

I've seen Spirited called A Christmas Carol from the ghosts' perspective. That's only partially true. It's not actually an adaptation or a remake of A Christmas Carol; rather, it's a peek into a world where A Christmas Carol has played out over and over again through the years, every year targeting a new Scrooge. But yes, it does give us the ghosts' point of view on the process -- one ghost's in particular. 

Will Ferrell stars as the Ghost of Christmas Present, who's eager to reel in a really big fish this year. He advocates for Clint Briggs (Ryan Reynolds), a social media consultant who has no qualms about using every dirty trick he can come up with on his clients' behalf. Though Clint is considered "unredeemable," Present prevails, and Clint becomes this year's Scrooge. But things go awry when Clint seduces the Ghost of Christmas Past (Sunita Mani); Present falls for Clint's assistant, Kimberly (Octavia Spencer); and Clint starts deducing Present's weaknesses and pushing back. 

'Shadow Chasers' to feature Dickens and his characters

In the adventure film Shadow Chasers, to be shot in Australia this fall, a young Charles Dickens will join forces with Oliver Twist, Scrooge, and Marley "to save Old London from imminent destruction." George Mahaffey (Chief of Station) wrote the script, and Luke Sparke (Occupation) will direct. Deadline Hollywood has the details!

Keeping Christmas all the year

'Tis the season, as you know, when the world is rereading and rewatching A Christmas Carol. But the other day, inspired by a Twitter conversation about how Great Expectations is also a Christmas book (or at least part of it is), I went looking for Christmas references in other Dickens books as well. Interestingly, I found at least one reference in every single one of the novels! The majority of them were just passing references, but a few of them were significant. Besides Scrooge's Christmas ordeal, and the other Christmas books, we have ...

• The Christmas chapters in The Pickwick Papers, which include a goblin story that gives us a foretaste of the Carol
• David and Agnes getting engaged at Christmastime in David Copperfield
• Pip bringing Magwitch food, and later seeing him get arrested, on Christmas Day, in Great Expectations
• Edwin vanishing (and most likely murdered) on Christmas Eve in The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Occasionally, even a book that doesn't have a Christmas scene in it have film adaptations where Christmas scenes have been added! One well-known example is the 1935 A Tale of Two Cities, which places an important interaction between Sydney and Lucie on Christmas Eve. No doubt this was a nod to the Christmasy atmosphere that Dickens was known for. 

As Boze Herrington recently wrote of Dickens at All the (Dickensian) Year Round, "Christmas awoke something nameless and secret in him," something that makes it show up again and again in his stories as a pivotal time in people's lives. Watching for such incidences as we read him is one enjoyable way to "keep [Christmas] all the year," as Scrooge promises to do. And so, a merry Christmas to you all, not just today but always!

Maureen Dowd on Dickens and Christmas

From today's New York Times: 

Christmas morally radicalized Dickens. The disparity between the circumstances and fates of different people offended Dickens in the Christmas season. For him, it was a time to think about what we owe one another, how we live with one another; a time to have a proper sense of outrage about inequality and injustice, and to think about the past, present and future and how much they have to do with each other; a time to consider the good values we’ve thrown away and the bad values — selfishness, egotism, social snobbery, condescension and the worship of money — that infiltrate the heart.

Go here to read the whole piece.

Thoughts on 'Scrooge: A Christmas Carol' (2022)

I hate to go all bah humbug about any version of A Christmas Carol, but I'm afraid I didn't find much to enjoy about the new animated film on Netflix. It gave me the impression that someone had forced several cases of Red Bull down the throats of a bunch of animators, locked them in a room, and told them to go to town. The film is frenetic in the extreme. Fireballs streak through the air, surfaces ice over and play videos like a Christmasy Victorian MTV, people and objects float through the air, and honestly, the whole thing is exhausting.

Also, Scrooge has a dog. No, I don't get it either. She's a sweet dog, and a good foil for him, but why Scrooge would have a dog -- or why Marley, from whom he inherited her, would have had a dog -- is a question that's never addressed adequately, and so it just ends up adding to the general air of "What the heck?"

Award-winning composer Leslie Bricusse made significant contributions to the film before he passed away in October of last year. In addition to repurposing songs from his own earlier version, Scrooge (1970), he wrote new songs, in addition to writing the screenplay. His involvement makes me even sadder about my lack of enthusiasm. But most of the re-arranged songs, in this hectic atmosphere, fail to bring with them their old charm, and the new ones don't stand out at all. And there's nothing in the script -- no especially interesting new twists or backstory or flourishes -- to justify this adaptation. As far as the basic story goes, it doesn't really stray all that far from the original (aside from a few inexplicable departures, like the dog), but the sheer busyness of the film makes it look as if it didn't trust its own source material and was relying on distractions.

If there's a plus to this film at all, it's the fine vocal work of the cast, particularly Luke Evans, Olivia Colman, and the other leads. But they're so overly talkative, especially Colman as the Ghost of Christmas Past, that even that gets wearying. This was one version of the Carol that I probably won't be watching again.

Dickens on British TV

Acclaimed actress Miriam Margolyes is not a fan of Christmas, but she is famously a fan of Dickens. So she "has agreed to see if she can warm to the season through her love of Charles Dickens," in a Channel 4 special called "Miriam's Dickensian Christmas." The special airs Tuesday night, and Margolyes talks about it here. Lucinda Dickens Hawksley also worked on the special, and she discusses it here.

In other British television news, Mark Gatiss's filmed stage production of A Christmas Carol, which was recently in cinemas, will air on BBC Four (and BBC iPlayer) on Christmas Day.

New 'Christmas Carol' illustrations

New York-based artist John A. Rice is posting on Instagram some beautiful new Christmas Carol illustrations that he's been working on. Go here to see!