Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish - reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!
Last week, I attempted to understand the latest Brexit news. Tina reviewed The Clockmaker's Daughter by Kate Morton. Gaele reviewed the audio version of The Wizards of Once by by Cressida Cowell, read by David Tennant.
Was anyone else confused by having two movies in two years with "Christopher Robin" in the title? I thought this was the other one. So, first I had to get over my expectation for a cute, talking, CGI Winnie-the-Pooh. Once I did, I liked this one.
Goodbye Christopher Robin, from 2017, is a bio-pic of A.A. Milne, author of the Winnie-the-Pooh books. He was a playwright who came home from World War I determined to write about the horrors of war and the need for peace. Milne moved his family from London to the country in the hope of getting his writing to flow, but instead of the anti-war treatise he intended to write, he ended up writing about his son and the stuffed animals playing in the woods.
His books for children shot the Milne family into success and fame in ways that had some very negative consequences for the real boy, Christopher Robin.
I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but we thought the framing worked well, even though it would have been too much in some stories.
I'm also looking forward to the 2018 movie Christopher Robin. It looks more fun and less dark, but I wonder if I'll find it too frothy after the realistic portrayal of success-gone-wrong in Goodbye Christopher Robin. Have you seen either or both of these films?
About Joy Weese Moll
a librarian writing about books
