"It's a book Club!" Goes to the Movies

So on Saturday I took OlderKid to his second real movie, Curious George. (The first: the delightful The Cat Returns, which also would be especially good for cat lovers who happen to be high (read the imdb.com plot description if you don't believe me.)). I am not a huge fan of the Curious George book series. To me, they are an allegory of slavery played for laughs, and when I say that I always get a lot of verbal (and literal) eye-rolling from people but it's my story and I'm sticking to it. The movie can't really do anything about this, though they do make George's departure from "Africa" to be of his own free will rather than tied up in a sack. But even given that, I thought the movie was quite enjoyable; calm, soothing, with enjoyable visual fantasy sequences and semi-enjoyable singing by Jack Johnson. The plot is now much more Man-in-the-Yellow-Hat-centric, I guess because it's hard to build a 90-minute feature film around a cooing baby monkey, but that's okay too because Will Ferrell does an excellent job as the (voice of) the hat-wearing man, here much more baffled and incompetent than he is in the books.

Plus, the movie encouraged me to read a book that I've had waiting for a while, The Journey that Saved Curious George: The True Wartime Escape of H.A. and Margaret Rey which details the Jewish husband and wife's flight from Nazi-occupied Paris to Rio to New York, all the while carrying the illustrated manuscript that eventually became Curious George. Pretty amazing stuff.