Word: dahl
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...After reading Roald Dahl, Shell Oil seemed exciting, but now they are very exploitive," Shell said...
What happened in Boulder on Christmas night was, among other things, proof that tragedy honors no boundaries. Of course we knew that, but one continues to hope. I read in a magazine once that Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl decided to leave Manhattan after their son Theo was brain damaged in a car accident; his nanny was pushing him across the street in a carriage when a taxi jumped the light. Deciding Manhattan was not a safe place to raise kids, they moved to a farmhouse 30 miles outside of London. A year later, their daughter Olivia died...
MATILDA (August 2), about a girl's revenge on her cruddy parents and evil schoolmistress, has the potential delectations of a Roald Dahl story and Danny DeVito's knowing comic direction. DeVito also plays Matilda's dad, expectorating lines like, "Why wudja wanna read, when ya got the television set sittin' right in frunnaya?" Or, we might add, when ya got a 'plex-full of icky kids' films...
...page 1 of the book, Dahl kills off James' parents--they are devoured by a rhinoceros--and, soon after, the wicked Sponge and Spiker. The story then lurches picaresquely amid near catastrophes. Selick gives this all a bit more focus by making sure the early events, including the rhinoceros, resonate throughout the film. He also gives James (winningly played by Paul Terry) a mission: to find his dream city, a Deco-delicious Manhattan. Spider (voiced by Susan Sarandon) here has the melancholy hauteur of a Garbo femme fatale; and the Centipede, obnoxious in the book, is now a Leo Gorcey...
...Oscar winner Nick Park (A Close Shave) and Selick, whose previous feature was Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. This is a jauntier piece--more Disneyfied, perhaps, but still apt to leave a haunting impression on the children who see it. And when they finally read the Dahl book, they may be annoyed. Why, they will wonder, couldn't it be more like this movie...