A Giant Peach In New York City

Started a gloomy, showery morning with a run to the laundromat. I wish I hadn't. Though I was able to get a washer, they were still busy, and someone had The Maury Show blaring in the background. Blech. How boring can you get? Why couldn't someone switch to the game shows or something? Thank heavens I didn't have a big load anyway. I got out as soon as I could.

I had to rush when I got home. I was up late and got up early. Not a good combination. I would have put off doing my laundry all together, but I really needed clean work clothes. I put away my load, put Butterbear on my dresser to dry (she really needed a bath), changed into my clean work uniform, packed my lunch, and hurried off.

Work was a pain and a half today. The continuing showers didn't help. They were never heavy, and they actually smelled pretty good when I was riding to the Acme, but they fell on and off throughout the day. I was dead tired and not up to dealing with annoying customers or managers who kept telling me to go faster in Express or help the old people better and didn't seem to notice how tired I was. I was so happy when one of the college boys came in for me and I could hurry out of there.

(And I heard about the bombing at the Boston Marathon during my break. I was half-reading the paper, half-listening to an uninteresting episode of The Doctors about testosterone levels when the show was interrupted for a breaking news story. I didn't catch much before I had to return to the registers, but I do know that this was a horrible thing, and I'm sorry for all the runners who lost family members or whose family members were hurt and for the people of Boston.)

Needless to say, I was not in the best of moods when I finally headed out. Instead of going straight home, I rode over to Dad's. I left my birthday card at his house yesterday. He and Jodie were at  home, doing yard work before the next round of showers came down. I joined them inside for mushroom pizza. They initially had Red Dragon on, but switched to Scoop not long before I left.

I continued to cheer myself up with the rest of James and the Giant Peach, which I started earlier in the day. James (Paul Terry) is a sweet young boy at the mercy of his obnoxious aunts (Joanna Lumley and Miriam Margoyles), who would prefer he stayed a servant for them forever. An odd man (Pete Postlethwaite) gives him a bag of crocodile tongues, which he spills on a peach tree. Suddenly, a tree that has never bourne fruit has one peach grow to gargantuan size. The aunts make it the talk of the town, but James has other ideas. He bites into the peach, climbs in...and finds himself among a group of talking bugs who don't like his aunts any more than he does. They finally push the peach into the ocean, sending themselves on a wild trip to New York City to find their destinies...if they can avoid the nasty aunts and the assorted other mechanical and skeletal monsters they encounter on their journey!

A strange but sweet tale of a boy with big dreams and odd friends who discovers that you can make anything happen with a lot of support and a little bit of magic, even standing up to your nasty aunts. The live-action opening with James and the aunts is rather slow, but things pick up once we're in the peach and switch to stop-motion animation. The voices for the bugs include Richard Dreyfuss as a fast-talking Brooklyn centipede, Susan Sarandon as a loner spider whom James rescued from his aunts, and a British grasshopper who plays the violin (Simon Callow). They're all having a lot of fun with the unusual material and the show-stopping songs by Randy Newman. My favorite was the touching "Family" and James' wistful introductory number "My Name Is James."

I enjoyed it, but there are some caveats, especially with that slow opening. It's a mite frightening for younger kids, but for kids James' age and older and adults who love Roald Dahl's books or movies based after them or unusual fantasy, this is actually quite charming and is recommended.