Tuesday evening is usually the time when I present another "Our Life in Books" entry, about my experiences raising young readers. But you know what, folks? This evening featured some legendary patience-testing moments of motherhood. I'm not going to go into details, only to say that the main event will hitherto be referred to as "The Great Poop Incident of '07."
Yes. Now, to shake that all out of your heads, I'm going to take refuge in presenting some delightful lil' clips from YouTube.
The clip here is a trailder for the Tom Davenport production of Bearskin. Not familiar with Davenport? In the '70s and '80s, he made a series of films for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting depicting Grimm Brothers folktales in various American settings. These films left none of the original gore or violence from the tales, so they were kind of controversial when they were first released, but audiences liked them. They remain pretty provacative and psycholocigally charged today as they were decades ago (albeit still pretty low-budget-looking, but I think that's part of the charm).
If you think "Bearskin" is spiffy (and I do), be sure to check out the trailers for Hansel and Gretel, Soldier Jack, and Ashpet (those last two are set during the WWII era -- cuteness!). Take note of the presence of legendary African-American storyteller Louise Anderson as the fairy godmother in Ashpet. Dude, she rocks.
Davenport Films has recently released all twenty-odd folktale films on DVD, but at $40 a pop, it looks like the sort of thing that only libraries could afford to buy. (Hint, hint, if you are a collections development librarian -- buy these and you won't be sorry!)
2 comments:
Aw, I like the looks of Ashpet (Bearskin freaked me out a little).
"And, Husband, we've got som'thin' to talk about tonight." What a wonderful, wonderful step mother!
Ashpet is awesome, although hard to actually get a copy of (I have a friend who has it, but had to work to find it). It's slightly odd, but a really good telling of the story.
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