The release isn’t far away now, and I’m worried another great book for a young audience is going to be destroyed. On the one hand, author Louis Sachar also wrote the screenplay. On the other, more frightening hand, Disney is making it, have cast most of the kids as a group of kids they already had preassembled from a show on The Disney Channel, and have cast Jon Voight as Mr. Sir, which may or may not be the strangest casting choice that will be made all year.
Holes was a book that sold itself based on plot. It developed at a beautiful pace, and was one of those “It all comes together” books. I can’t imagine Disney doing a movie that would have enough attention to detail and pace to bring that to the big screen. But, maybe I’m just being a pessimist.
Thank you! My reaction to that was “Uuuuh … what book?”. If “Holes” is so big, why haven’t I heard about it? I heard of Harry Potter. I heard of Goosebumps back in the day. But “Holes”??? Huh?
Holes, turned into a movie…oh hell…
“Holes”, a novel by Louis Sachar, is a book about a middle class boy (Stanley Yelnats) who is accused of stealing a pair of shoes (these are no ordinary shoes, mind, they belonged to the most famous baseball player in the world, at least that world) from a charity auction thingy. He actually did not do this, but is sent to a correctional facility in Texas, which is in actuality more something of a slave labor camp, run by some odd woman wanting to find a person’s money (this person was some kind of entrepreneur in the late 1800’s, and made loads o’ cash). The children there are forced to dig, with shovels, fivefivefive feet holes in the ground to find this “treasure”.
Lalala a few months into his penance Stanley’s friend runs away after hitting one of the counselors with a shovel, and Stanley soons follows him. They find a patch of onions on the banks of the lake (the correctional facility used to be a lake, but is now dry), and survive for a few days on onions. They return to dig up the treasure and run away, but instead find Stanley’s lawyer, who rescues them after a lengthy piece of nonsense.
Overall, it’s not a bad read, if you want to spend an hour and a half reading it (trust me, it prolly won’t take more time). It’s not that bad of an adventure story, although many pieces made very little sense to me.
My wife just happened to have a copy of this book for her class. I kept reading a page here and there until I finally read the whole thing. A brief synopsis:
A kid is charged with a crime (stealing a pair of basketball shoes destined for a charity auction) that he did not commit. He is given the choice of juvenile hall or a prison camp type place. He takes the camp. While there, he and the other “guests” are forced to dig holes. This is supposed to build character. You soon realize the holes are being dug a very specific manner and there’s more to the digging than building character.
Well, from one point of view, the book isn’t ruined. It’s still there in its original form for anybody who cares to read it. This is Peter Jackson’s riposte to Tolkein purists.
But from another point of view, kids (and people in general) are much more likely to watch movies than read books, and if there’s a bad movie version of a book available, many people will never bother to experience the magic of the original for themselves.
I love “Holes” (the book), and I have SERIOUS worries about the movie. The synopses given above state the basic plot, but fail to capture the delightful unfolding of events at the end.
It’s a wonderful book. It won the Newbery Award (for children’s lit) in 1999.
For a while there, my job required me to watch the trailer for Holes nearly 50 times a day for several weeks. From what I could tell, it looks a lot like an updated version of The Apple Dumpling Gang in that all the kids are loveable little imps in wacky adventures. This is Disney’s meat and potatoes and I’m sure they’ve got the formula down pat.
I had never heard of the book before seeing the trailer for the movie. Based on what I’ve been reading here, the book isn’t science fiction-y at all, but the TV commercials made me think it was a kiddie-s/f horror-type movie.
I hate that the characters have clever nicknames - Armpit, Zig-Zag, etc…
