11 July 2007

A Hairy Situation with Spiderwick

Fuse #8 alerted me to the new Spiderwick Chronicles movie trailer on Yahoo!, so I checked it out. "Wow, they're really playing up the darkness of the books," I thought, before realizing that for some cyberreason my browser wasn't showing me a picture.

So I sought out the same trailer on YouTube. This peek at the movie emphasizes the story of troubled twin Jared over nerdy twin Simon, to the extent that you'd have to read the books to know that Freddie Highmore is playing two parts. Perhaps special-effects shots of the two boys interacting are still being worked on.

As shown in the cover above, Tony DiTerlizzi drew Jared with a messy part in his hair, Simon with a neat one. In the movie, Jared has no part at all, just unflattering prepubescent bangs. Back in college my theatrical roommates called that sort of sacrifice "follicle realism." Judging by Highmore's own hairstyle at a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory premiere in Europe, however, he already understands hair as an artistic expression.

3 comments:

Jay said...

Wow. Fantasy movie coming out with a main character who has my first name... will have to see if the character is worthy of being a Jared...

J. L. Bell said...

Try the first book. It'll probably take only a couple of hours to read. And it will certainly give you a sense of what the authors are trying with Jared.

Anonymous said...

AAAAHHHHGGGG they removed it from youtube before I saw it!!!