Thursday, June 08, 2006

Literature and film

We recently started reading chapter books to Ben. On his own, he can read simple books fairly well, but as a kindergartner, chapter books are a bit of a stretch for him. The book we're reading now is Roald Dahl's hilarious 96-pager, The Twits. Mr. and Mrs. Twit are gruesome people, made ugly by all the ugly thoughts they think. They're always playing nasty tricks on each other—for example, Mrs. Twit added worms to Mr. Twit's spaghetti, and Mr. Twit made Mrs. Twit think she was shrinking by gradually adding length to her walking stick and her chair legs. Mrs. Twit freaked out, and was thus amenable to Mr. Twit's suggestion that stretching would cure "the shrinks." So he strapped her ankles to the ground and tied dozens of balloons to her, and then snipped the bonds tethering his dear wife to the earth.

Inspired by this (or perhaps having surreptitiously picked up some knowledge about Christianity), Ben said, "You could escape if someone nailed your shoes to the wall, right?" "Uh, right." "You could take off your shoes and escape. If they nailed your feet, that would leave a mark!"

Do you think Mr. Tangerine and I quote Tommy Boy too much?

3 comments:

Charlie said...

"Not here or here so much, but right here."

Charlie said...

What? Did I kill this thread or something? Here. That's what I was talking about. Apparently I'm the only one anywhere who thought that was one of the most clever lines in the movie.

Orange said...

Charlie, I think perhaps everyone else is a philistine who has not encountered the joys of Tommy Boy. (Me, I bought the DVD—the special "Holy Schnikes" edition.)