9 worst pieces of roald dahl media (part 1)
i've read, to my knowledge, every piece of writing roald dahl ever published, and watched/experienced the vast, vast majority of widely-available adaptations of his work. when i was a kid i went to an abusive private school where they regularly abused severely developmentally disabled children (one of the teachers got convicted for brutally assaulting an autistic 10 year old a few years after i left, and a lot more of the staff *should* have been convicted for similar crimes) and dahl, as one might guess, really, really spoke to me. there's something so uncanny about being seven and reading matilda and hearing a scream and looking up from the book to see irl trunchbull assaulting one of your classmates. there's a bond between a reader and their first favorite writer that never really breaks, i think.
the dahl estate has always done well for themselves but they have been attempting to rapidly expand in the last ten years into a massive dahl empire, pumping out shit adaptation after shit adaptation, so cynically that it makes walt disney's complicated relationship with p.l. travers look positively saintlike in comparison. there's something particularly gross about it to me, owing to dahl's general disdain for adaptation in general and the way almost all of them systematically strips away even the barest implications of edge or darkness or cruelty to be replaced by a gesture to a nebulous and empty sense of "wonder".
here's the absolute bottom of the barrel, both from his own writing and the corporate losers failing to emulate it.
willy's chocolate experience. even the most well-adjusted adult (i.e. not me) has a moment in their life when they see a child experience something special that they themselves did not as a kid, something that can only truly be appreciated by someone already in the throes of childhood, and feel an intense, unfathomable pang of envy.
i will never get to be a small, sad, disappointed english child in a dilapidated glasgow mall, holding my two jellybeans and my quarter-cup of lemonade, watching willy mcduff do battle against the unknown with his luigi's mansion vacuum, and i'll be honest with you. it breaks my heart.
some people have all the luck. they should do a series like 7-up where they check in with the kids who went to that thing every few years and see what they turn out like, i'd be interested to see
wonka. i hate this movie more than the vast majority of dahl adaptations, even stuff lower on this list, but it at least succeeds at sometimes actually being really edgy and dare i say occasionally funny!
the biggest problem ultimately is that chalamet is a fantastic actor who was completely miscast for this because the direction they went in with his character just does not work.
even if you want a young wonka with zero trace of the cynicism and tiredness of his older self (doesn't matter if book/wilder/depp, same for all) the choice to have him be a totally naive optimistic dreamer a la spongebob couldn't connect with me. it's great that they make the world as mean as it is to compensate: he gets fined by the police for daydreaming and enslaved into a secret underground laundry poorhouse by the end of his second day in town, his rivals try to murder him multiple times and poison his customers, half the characters are dickensian villains. but it doesn't balance well with attempts at emotional moments which were too saccharine and came too often (worst of all giving wonka a dead mother to spend the movie mourning over, blargh, give me burton wonka's dentist daddy shit over that for me any day. i'll tell you right now that burton's charlie and the chocolate factory is NOT on this list, it kicks ass.)
despite most of the songs were not good except for the montage of him selling candy and the one where slugworth and co. sung as a barbershop trio as they bribed keegan-michael key with chocolate to murder wonka.
in the third or fourth line of the movie wonka mentions his "tattered dirty jacket" as one of his only possessions; it's in perfect condition and looks like it's being well attended by a lint roller the whole movie. that sums up the aura of it all for me, it gestures at true dahlian cruelty but can't commit. i wish instead the director had made another paddington movie about paddington opening a chocolate store or that slugworth pushed wonka's mother off a cliff a la cruella.
spielberg's the bfg. the bfg was my favorite dahl book when i was a kid, if i'm remembering right, and seeing it morphed into this was a hellish experience.
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this is the worst fart scene in the history of fart scenes. i don't need to see the queen's corgis scoot-farting across the floor, no thanks, i'm good, appreciate you. (the key to a great farting scene is subtlety; you want to to linger on the farts for as little time as possible; compare/contrast the queen's whizzpopping to say, the funniest fart of all time, as seen in the sobe thriller lizard dance superbowl 42.
(note the tasteful understatement, the juxtaposition of this tiny little *poomf* burst out of a single lizard's asshole against the sensory experience of a entire gang of geico geckos trying to dance their way into fucking a supermodel.)
thankfully for spielberg he also directed always and ready player one so this isn't his worst movie but god, no, i don't want to think about this one, it's profoundly empty and soulless.
i hate designs of all the giants in this, they look repugnant, and not repugnant in the way they're supposed to. there's a pretty decent old 2d animation in a bakshi-esque style i'm pretty fond of, give that a try instead.
charlie and the chocolate factory, pc (2005). okay so i said the burton movie wasn't going to end up here but the games are up for grabs. the burton movie came out in peak "let's release a video game based on a children's movie on six different consoles and have them all have different versions", and the pc one is by far the worst.
i originally played this game at the computer lab at the child abuse school i mentioned earlier and honestly it's almost as bad as what they got shut down for. the whole thing consists of some of the worst controlling minigames i've ever seen in a full-price game, i didn't pay any money for this and i still felt like i had gotten actively scammed just by turned it on. there's this slide minigame where charlie only goes either achingly slow or way too fast to dodge a single obstacle, i never got past this as a kid.
interestingly, they went through the effort to get all the original VAs for this (aside from depp, but the impersonator does a pretty great job).
"Now I'm going to tell you something I wish someone had told me when I was your age: take this exploding candy, and be careful not to sit on it." - Willy Wonka (real quote from this game, a joke which they ripped straight from the jimmy neutron movie).
this game is at least in the spirit of dahl in that grandpa joe looks like an antisemitic caricature.
(yes the actor's nose is actually really big but not THAT big)
esio trot (2015). a painfully faithful tv movie based on probably roald dahl's worst children's book, from his famous "books released after matilda right before he died that nobody ever read" trilogy along with the vicar of nibbleswicke and the minpins. it's about an old creep who tricks a widow he's crushing on that he can magically make her tortoise bigger. dahl was a giant perv (no judgement here) and i think this entire plot may have been some type of elaborate metaphor for weird sex shit, but i don't have a fucking clue. i do not care if your movie is faithful to the original thing if the original thing is awful.
dustin hoffman should stick to voicing master shifu in kung fu panda and shooting people with his arrow boner in megalopolis where he belongs
tom and jerry: willy wonka and the chocolate factory. this is a direct to dvd 2d near scene-for-scene recreation of the original willy wonka movie, except tom and jerry are there too, doing tom and jerry.
conceptually this is may be the most slop piece of media ever created, but you can pause at literally any frame in the movie and laugh. the horrible tweening and mid-blink frames in this movie are practically unmatched.
my favorite thing about this movie is like, tom and jerry are in the room for almost every scene in the movie with charlie and the gang but nobody almost ever acknowledges them until like 2/3rds into the movie, when they suddenly become REALLY involved in the plot. which i guess, you know, makes sense, i wouldn't want to talk to them either unless i had to.
charlie can canonically speak to (intern) oompa loompa tuffy though. i think it's because he's poor
Genesis and Catastrophe: A True Story. holy fuck. a sad lady in her house cries for her baby not to die for the whole story, she's like damn, i sure hope my kid doesn't die, the doctor is like damn, me too. and then it's born and it doesn't die, and the lady goes, hmmmm, what should i name him, this beautiful baby boy?
i know... i'll name him adolf... little adolf hitler...
dahl was like, "damn, hehehe. this is going to get them. they are going to have SYMPATHY FOR A DYING BABY but then that baby? that baby you felt so bad about, you piece of shit? HE WAS HITLER. YOU WERE CHEERING FOR HITLER TO BE BORN, YOU MONSTER"
to be 100% clear this specific story is not antisemitic at all, in my opinion, it's just hack shit.
i remember reading this story for the first time years ago and instantly going that there HAD to be a dogshit twilight zone expy show episode based on this, because this is exactly the type of short story they used to crank out, and sure enough, there's a shitty tales of the unexpected adaptation.
(he's writing the name of the baby on the birth certificiate. that baby's name? heh... you'll never guess...)
some time never: a fable for superman. one of only two full-length adult novels dahl ever wrote in his life, and it was also the first, published in 1948, when he was only 32. he published a pretty okay children's book before this called gremlins (that was very nearly adapted into a disney movie!) and this is an adult version of that, a sad, reflective tome from a guy who had just experienced the worst war in human history from the top view. as vonnegut saw the bombs fall in dresden dahl was dropping them in greece; evidently, as it happens, being closer to the ground results in much, much better writing.
i genuinely think i am possibly the only living person on earth who has read this more than once; i'd assume that most of the other 100 people who have read it once are drooling in nursing homes somewhere. this is one of the worst books i have ever finished in my life, and it's only because it is so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so boring. nothing happens in this book. there are gremlins, they want to destroy humanity, they start ww3 (and ww4, who cares) and then they do it. this should be an exciting plot and it's written so, so tediously.
there's a world where this book was mildly better and didn't flop and dahl spends his entire career as a mediocre vonnegut predecessor/imitator, glad we dodged that.
(the only thing i like is that very last scene of this book, where the gremlins finally kill all the humans and then just disappear for no reason, and then the book ends. very influential scene, all books should end like this imo. there's the tiniest spark of the writer that dahl would become here, but it's extraordinarily dim.)
his other adult novel, which is awful too but narrowly managed not to get on this list thanks to those wacky scammers, is called my uncle oswald. it's a sex comedy novel about a scheme to steal semen from famous titans on industry, there isn't a single funny joke in it but if you mention it in polite conversation people will go "oh, huh, uh, cool"
i'll tell you what number 1 is tomorrow, it deserves its own full review. can you guess what it is???
