The Bridge to Terebithia trailer blows.

Walden Media: let's take a personal, contained, idiosyncratic, and heartfelt novel and turn it into some kind of drecky fantasy-epic trash. Let's literalize the fugues and fantasies of a couple of messed-up fifth graders, throw scads of millions at WETA to have 'em build digital giants and silvery fairies and shit, and overwhelm the core-story of Jess/Leslie's totally amazing relationship with a fuckload of pixels and a slew of Neat Shots we learned in film school.

Oh, and wait. Let's take the two messed-up fifth-graders and make 'em both near 14, charismatic, good-looking, and well-dressed. We wouldn't want to alienate our audience! We wouldn't want to show real troubled kids, but we can leave in the references to their social difficulties. That'll make sense! We can do some pat moralizing at the end about being happy being yourself, even.

Next, we could throw in some glittery golden titles full of vague sentence fragments 'Somewhere beyond the road... ' and 'Somewhere across the stream...' while leaving the gist of the story -- the bulk of Katherine Paterson's novel -- totally out of the picture. Who cares about love and death, when we've got an expensive walking tree? Why should we advertise any actual story points? Surely the heart of this Newbury Award novel (millions of copies sold!) is the oblique referencing of an imaginary kingdom, not the explicit story of a boy coming to grips with his greatest personal tragedy! And - and - and let's get a director/producer of animated films like The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: The Visitors from Space to helm this flick. That'll show 'em.

Also it's Bridge to Terabithia, I spelled it wrong.

quicktime here

Presumably they both survive at the end and adopt a magic fairy baby.

god this book and the tv movie KILLED me as a kid.

Yeah, I was reading it to my class a few years ago and had to stop -- I got too choked up to continue.

Truly a sad and poignant book. I am ignoring this movie with all my force. At least the girl got her marker set at the end.

zooey deschanel is in it, shouldn't that set off some ilx alerts?

i thought the whole gang would be here by now!

I have been trying to pretend this didn't exist.

This trailer made me want to die when I saw it at the cinema a few weeks ago.
Bridge to Terabithia is the first book that ever made me cry and I just can't stand to see its name on what appears to be a colossal pile of CGI shit.

I haven't read the book in years, and can't remember much about it, but that trailer doesn't remind me of anything I read at all.

I think I'm going to read the book tonight.

i hated the book so so much in elementary/middle school but this is a fucking travesty

(i hated it because i hate tear-jerking endings. i am an extremely sentimental person on the inside and hate to lose control. i completely lost it at Titanic even while realizing it wasn't a very good movie! i wept for hours.)

at least it was like that when i still had a soul, bwahahahaha

Its a good book for kids to read, to finally have some story that says to them "Look, shitty things happen and that's the way life is." - no happy end.

yeah but kids also have santa claus don't they?

er, kids who celebrate x-mas anyway hohoho

but they also have a million boy-living-on-a-farm-during-the-great-depression-whose-beloved-dog-dies-at-the-end books.

what's this about a dog who dies of depression?

slocki, did you see the newest lassie?

this is so sad. esp since it doesn't have to be bad, considering how close thematically it is to something like heavenly creatures, which is just amazing.

or pan's labyrinth!

haven't seen that!

now that i bring up HC, there does seem to be a funny circularity to all this, what with Peter Jackson being kind of responsible for the ubiquity of CGI these days (maybe)

ha i think that predates Jackson's ascendency..hear of a guy named george lucas? cameron? spielberg?

o yah

Jeez, the Kiddo was near destroyed when she first read "Bridge to Terabithia." She talked me into reading it and I ended up reading the final few chapters while parked at Sonic ... and crying like a baby.

It'll take a whooooole lot of convincing to get me anywhere near this movie. Of course, I said the same thing about "The Lord of the Rings," but still.

Reading this Katherine Paterson Q & A -- no mention of the film -- surely beats out thoughts of this movie.

Q. In what ways has your religious conviction informed your writing? And would you comment on the presence (or lack ) of religious content, specifically Christian, in recent children's literature (say the last fifteen years or so)?

A. I think it was Lewis who said something like: "The book cannot be what the writer is not." What you are will shape your book whether you want it to or not. I am Christian, so that conviction will pervade the book even when I make no conscious effort to teach or preach. Grace and hope will inform everything I write.

You're asking me to comment on fifteen years of 5000 or so books a year. Whew! We live in a Post-Christian society. Therefore, not many of those writers will be Christians or adherents of any of the traditional faiths. Self-consciously Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) writing will be sectarian and tend to propaganda and therefore have very little to say to persons outside that particular faith community. The challenge for those of us who care about our faith and about a hurting world is to tell stories which will carry the words of grace and hope in their bones and sinews and not wear them like fancy dress.

Q. I read that your son had an experience like Jess's in Bridge to Terabithia ... losing a close friend in a freak accident. How did your son respond to the book? Was there a therapeutic value in this for him?

A. David still, now with two little boys of his own, finds Bridge a very difficult book to read. It's too close to the bone. Any therapeutic value the book had was for me, facing not only Lisa's death but my own mortality call. I had cancer that year and was hearing the bell toll.

Q. Have you ever thought about another book for Jesse? Does he still live in your mind, growing older, continuing his art, etc.?

A. No. I feel strongly that Jesse has earned his privacy.