Hogfather (2006 Movie)

240px-H_DVDWell, I did manage to squeeze in a movie before the end of the year. So here goes.

 

Part one of this movie deal with Teatime, successfully I might add, getting hold of the Tooth Fairy’s castle and all the teeth involved. He manages to destroy all belief in the Hogfather and the Hogfather’s Castle of Bone disintegrates into nothingness. Death has done all he can to keep the Belief alive by pretending to BE the Hogsfather but against voodoo, it isn’t enough. He knows it won’t be enough and so forbades his granddaughter Susan from interfering in any way.  She is human enough that he knows she won’t be able to stop from interfering. Susan learns that if the Hogfather ceases to exist, then the Sun won’t come up.

Part 2 reveals that Teatime has much bigger plans that just getting rid of the Hogfather. It appears that he has his eye (the one that’s not glass anyway) on World Domination. If Teatime can control the tooth-fairy, he can control the belief and hence existence, of anything. The storyline proceeds by the book, as it were, hahahahaaa.   Teatime comes back from defeat at the hands of Susan, forces a confrontation with Death and loses. Banjo, one of Teatime’s former associates ends up as the new Toothfairy.

The movie does a really good job of following the book’s story. In some ways I thought it did a better job actually. It smoothed out some of those leaps of intuition that Pratchett required of his readers.  Certain issues were plainly spelled out. I also thought the chronology was presented better too.

And Teatime? Oh my goodness, what a complete FREAKAZOID! He scared me.  His voice was spot on and his casual dismissal of everything except himself was exactly as I imagined it when reading the book.

With those improvements, did I like the movie even more?

HA, NOT EVEN CLOSE!

The couple of Discworld movies I have seen all suffer from the exact same problem. Pratchett’s humor does not translate from the written word onto the screen very well at all.

While I wasn’t laughing out loud the whole time reading the book, I didn’t even crack a grin while watching the movie.  It felt too long and all I could think of was “when is this going to be over”? That is the death blow thought for any movie for me.  Also, why is Albert front and center of the dvd cover? He’s Death’s lackey,  a minor side character.  And he looks like some dirty monkey on the cover. He’d be better served as a villain in some Dickens book.  I wouldn’t buy that dvd if you paid me!

A complete, utter and abysmal failure of a movie. I would not even recommend this to a hardcore fan because the humor just doesn’t translate. And Pratchett without humor is like vegan icecream.

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And I’m doubly disappointed because the book was so good. Well, there’s always next year to find a decent movie.

 

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Hogfather (Discworld) ★★★★★

hogfather (Custom)This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress, Blogspot & Librarything by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission
Title: Hogfather
Series: Discworld
Author: Terry Pratchett
Rating: 5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 304
Format: Digital Edition

 

Synopsis:

It is Hogwatch Night and the Hogfather is flying across the world in his red suit and white beard and 4 jolly boars delivering gifts to all the children. However, this Hogwatch Night the Hogfather is looking a little different. He’s a bit bony in the face, he has to stuff a pillow up the suit to give him that jolly fat look and his ho ho ho’s are more like HO, HO, HO! Yes, Death has taken over being the Hogfather for the night.

Now, where did this all start? The Auditors. Of Reality. They hired the Assassin’s Guild to kill the Hogfather. The head of the Guild, thinking it an impossible job, assigns it to Mr Teatime, an assassin who has been causing problems lately with how much he’s been killing. He’s got no style, you know? So the HAG (Head of the Assassins Guild) gives the job to Teatime. Either he’ll succeed and the Guild will get a cavern of gold or Teatime will fail and they can let him go and be done with him. Teatime has thought about just this kind of situation and he has answers.

And that is why Death is pretending to be the Hogfather. He can’t interfere with the Auditors directly but he sets his granddaughter Susan on the case. She tracks down Teatime, who has used the power of the Tooth Fairy make children NOT believe in the Hogfather. She and the newly created god of Hangovers, with the help from a tooth fairy helper, take down the insane assassin.

It is revealed that if the Hogfather doesn’t exist, the sun won’t rise. This will destroy all life on Discworld and THAT is the final goal of the Auditors. Life is messy and doesn’t really fit into neat check boxes, so they want to get rid of it. All of it.

Can Death, Susan and sundry others Save the Most Magical Night of the Year? Of course! Not even Pratchett was so full of bilious hatred and vitriol against Christmas that he’d write otherwise. But he gets his revenge on the readers by getting all metaphysical for at least 3 solid pages. What a rotter.

 

My Thoughts:

My goodness, it has been a bloody decade since I last read this! Still 5stars, still a favorite and still just as good as last time.

This time around I concentrated on the character of Teatime. And you know what? He takes up a VERY small portion of the book even while being a main villain and the killer of the Hogfather. It is like he casts a huge shadow over the whole book while only being a skinny little twig. He has such presence though that I “remembered” him having a much larger role. I think it does say something for Pratchett’s skill that he can make a such a small used character be so big. Of course, him facing down Death himself right at the end does show he had some pretty big cojones.

Death gets a great bit of action and I just laughed and laughed. When Corporal Nobbs, the most venal member of the Watch, gets a super duper assault crossbow from the big red sack and he goes nutso with excitement, I just about died. It also made me remember H.P’s review of the lamest Robin Hood movie ever, complete with “assault crossbows”. Maybe it would have been a good movie if Knobby Nobbs had showed up, hahahahaa. Anyway, I did a lot of laughing.

Susan plays a huge part but unlike Teatime she was so exasperated all the time that she couldn’t be “normal” that it wore a little thin. We get it, she doesn’t want to be Death’s granddaughter. Honey, get over it. You don’t really get to pick your relatives. She started out funny with beating the crap out of monsters under the bed with a poker but became almost grating by the end.

The Unseen Academy and the Wizards are involved, as is HEX the thinking machine. HEX going insane and taking digital frog pills to cure itself was just about the highlight for me.

The only downside to this book was the few pages of metaphysics that Pratchett throws in. All crap about Justice and Mercy and Hope being nothing but lies. Then he took it do a bad place where you can’t believe those things if you don’t believe other lies, like the Tooth Fairy. What a hopeless and utterly futile way to live. He just couldn’t resist allowing his bitter hatred against God, or even the idea of God to peek on through. Thankfully, it wasn’t enough to spoil the whole book. However, I tend to think I’ll have to wait another decade before I try this again.

★★★★★

 

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Mort (Discworld #4) (Buddy Read)

cover This review is written with a GPL 3.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at Bookstooge.booklikes.blogspot.wordpress.leafmarks.com by express permission of this reviewer

Title: Mort

Series: Discworld #4

Author: Terry Pratchett

Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars

Genre: SFF

Pages: 293

 

Synopsis:

Death takes on an apprentice, a kind and gentle soul who doesn’t quite have all of his marbles grasped as firmly as most would like. Mort is his name and this is his story about messing about with Time, Death, Causality and other such Capital Letter Words.

My Thoughts:

Read this as a Group Buddy Read with several others over in the Buddy Read Discussions Group.

I read this back in 2007 and enjoyed it then. Reading it now I was able to realize that Pratchett at this time was writing Ideas and simply letting them hang on his characters. This is not a character driven book, and to be honest, I don’t think it is a character driven series [at least up until the Vimes era, which is when I stopped really liking the series].

This was about Pratchett writing about Death in a humorous way so that even if we completely disagreed with him about the concept, it was all just a good fantasy romp, no harm,no foul. That being said, I don’t come to these books to Learn. I come to read and be entertained and Pratchett does a top notch job of doing just that.

I bumped this up half a star this time around. Not sure if that is because I wasn’t using half-stars back in ’07 or because I hadn’t yet been plunged into the cesspool of self-published writers and hence actually had higher standards back then. Sadly, I really do suspect the second option.

Unseen Academicals

6993179
Unseen Academicals
Discworld #37
by Terry Pratchett
Ebook, 448 Pages
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Amusing, with a heavy dash of Vetinari.

phrackin’ “FOOTBALL”.

If I owned this ebook, I would go through and change all instances of football to the proper term of soccer.

and the fat girl getting it on with the goblin, or whatever Nutts was. Maybe Pratchett has a secret chubby fetish? I don’t know.

I am crabby. Not a good time to write a review. So ignore this and go on about your business…

I Shall Wear Midnight

7576115
I Shall Wear Midnight
Discworld: Tiffany Aching #4
by Terry Pratchett
Dtb, 359 Pages
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This felt very “tacked on” to the Tiffany Aching series.

and boy, did Pratchett allow his vitriol and hate of religion show through. I know he has always not been shy about making fun of religion or anything, but this wasn’t making fun, but outright scorn.

It just wasn’t the light heartedness that I have always associated with Pratchett.

Making Money

6998943Making Money
Discworld
by Terry Pratchett
Ebook, 400 Pages
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

 

Maybe the “Occupy Wallstreet” people should have read this before camping out and pooping in the parks 😉

Anyway, a very humorous look at the banking system, Anhk-Morpork style. We get good old Moist Von Lipwig[who I am enjoying immensely] and some more Vetinari stuff. He’s the best kind of tyrant 😀

And I actually found the little annoying dog funny too! Which means Pratchett wrote this well, cause I NEVER find annoying little dogs funny…

A HAT FULL OF SKY

A HAT FULL OF SKY
Discworld: Tiffany Aching #2
Terry Pratchett
Epub-299 pages
4 Stars
Fantasy

Tiffany goes off to get some witchy training. Only a monster, a mindless Hiver, takes her over. She gets free, then has to defeat it. Has some help from Granny Weatherwax and learns some lessons about what being a witch really means. Not nearly as much about the Nac Mac Feegles, so this wasn’t as funny. Still a solid book and very enjoyable.

THE WEE FREE MEN

THE WEE FREE MEN
Tiffany Aching #1
Terry Pratchett
epub-289 pages
5 Stars
Fantasy

Taking place in Discworld, but not necessarily in the Discworld series. A young girl by the name of Tiffany Aching has to defend her land against the queen of the faerie world. Mainly because Tiffany’s grandmother is dead and so she can’t do it. Tiffany is a witch in the making. Granny Weatherwax comes in at the end. It is called “Wee Free Men” because Tiffany gets help by the Nac Mac Feegles. Little blue pict’sies. Drunk, rowdy, almost indestructable but fun and lovable none the less. This was classic Pratchett WITH excellent writing, tight plot and everything was funny, not stupid. Best Pratchett ever!