The latest adaptation of A Christmas Carol will come in the form of a miniseries set to air on FX in December. The series will star Guy Pearce (Iron Man 3) as Ebenezer Scrooge as he is visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve in order to change his heart. Executive produced by Ridley Scott and Tom Hardy (who also stars in an undisclosed role), we now have our first look at what the adaptation will look like.
In an interview with the magazine, Serkis admitted that he did not initially want to take on the role, but eventually changed his mind when he was shown what the producers were planning:
Do we really need another one? But this is the most amazing piece. It felt very contemporary and fresh.
Image Via Entertainment Weekly
One of these fresh takes was Pearce portraying a younger version of Scrooge that embodies the same personality as the classic character, without the unappealing older look that he is known for. Writer Steven Knight hoped that this new version would make him more appealing to the audience:
What I wanted to do was to make Ebenezer Scrooge someone who, if it weren’t for what he is and how he behaves, would be an attractive man. I didn’t want to make him look like his soul, because his soul is pretty wretched. But on the outside, he’s okay. I wanted the audience to say to themselves, ‘Why is this person like this?’
According to Sesame Street Magazine, October 15th is National Grouch Day—a day for all Grouches to celebrate their way of life.
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Since Sesame Street Magazine taught me everything I know, we’re going to celebrate National Grouch Day the only way we here at Bookstr know how—by making lists.
6-Ebenezer Scrooge
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The quintessential grouch, Ebenezer Scrooge is a cheap old miser who brings misery wherever he goes.
The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice
That’s a nice way of saying he’s a grouch. A miserable, old, grouch. Literally A Christmas Carol is about him “warming his cold heart”, a poetic way of saying him becoming less a dick.
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A less talented writer would make A Christmas Carol an anatomy lesson about Scrooge getting that stick out of his butt, but (pun intended) luckily Charles Dickens is a talented writer. He gives us a wonderful story, retold countless times, about this cold-hearted grouch warming up into a bright happy person during one of the coldest nights in winter.
5-The Grinch
What is it with stories about grouches becoming better people being set on Christmas? Is it because Christmas is so cold and authors can’t resist the irony of a grouch shedding their cold heart on one of the coldest days in the year?
Either way, the Grinch is a Grouch. In fact, he looks like Oscar the Grouch!
Image Via Elise Skidmore
And don’t blame his grouchiness on the face he has a medical condition—his heart is literally “too sizes too small”—and don’t give me that nonsense that the Whos were mean to him. That’s only in the Jim Carrey movie, and we’re talking about Dr. Seuss’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas here, so you can…
His hatred of a holiday stems from one fact and one fact only: he hates seeing other people happy. Talk about a grouch!
4-Argus Filch
Image Via The Harry Potter Lexicon
For all you Harry Potter fans and all you Hermione fans and all you David Bradley fans.
Image Via PopSugar
When we first meet Filch, he’s quite an unpleasant person. He hates children, students in particular, and it’s quite a strange hatred seeing as he works in a school. I don’t know, maybe the pay is good.
Still, he barks “What are you doing?!” so much you’d think he’d have ground that gravelly voice of his into dust. Be wary, from the students who sneak out at night to the ones who forgot to wipe their feet! Actually, revise that, even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you should still avoid him.
Miserable all the time, he’s rather sadistic, taking this unnerving delight in dishing out punishment to the students of Hogwarts. Look, and re-read, how much he enjoyed punishing young Harry in the first book when Harry was only eleven!
The only thing he seems to love is his cat, Mrs. Norris, but everyone loves cats.
Image Via Odor Klenz
Granted, as we learn more about him, his grouchiness becomes more understandable. He’s harassed by Peeves, the Poltergeist, and he’s a squib, meaning he can’t perform magic. He also evacuated all the students in the Battle of Hogwarts and, despite being unable to perform magic, fought against the Death Eaters. So you know what? Maybe he’s not too bad…
Image Via Reddit
He’s actually pretty cool, but still a major grouch.
3-Walder Frey
For all you Game of Thrones fans and all you David Bradley fans, Walder Frey.
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Ignoring his part in the Red Wedding, Walder Frey is still a prick.
After farting his way after Ser Edmure Tully’s call to arms because he wants to arrive when the battle is done, Walder Frey is immediately a prick and it only gets worse from there. When Catelyn Stark meets with him, we find that he’s not a nice old man at all. Toothless and wrinkled, he sits in his chair and brags about how he is still sexually active. With 28 kids roaming around, you’d think he’d care about at least one of them.
Image Via A Song of Ice and Fire Wiki
Not a chance. Even at the age of 91, Walder Frey is as self-serving as ever. Being the leader of his house, no one trusts him or his family. Thus, instead of making amends, Walder sees fit to complain about this and continue to deserve the contempt of noble houses throughout Westeros.
He’s a miserable person to be around. A real grouch.
And you know what? I’m not going to ignore the Red Wedding.
Image Via Imgflip
This man orchestrated it because some dude snubbed his ugly daughter and he wanted to get ahead in life. Screw you, you miserable old fart.
2-Smaug
Image Via Smithsonian Magazine
Smaug is small. He’s a tiny dragon, but that’s no excuse for being such a grouchy ball of flames.
HE’S ALSO LAZY / Image Via The One Ring.Net
After destroying a kingdom just for the money, he then spends the next 150 years in a mountain. Mass murder for money he doesn’t plan to do anything with? Talk about a miser!
Image Via Pipedia
I think we can all agree that Bilbo is the happiest man in the world, at least in The Hobbit!
Someone drew this! / Image Via PInterest
When Bilbo visits Smaugh, what does Smaug do? Well, he’s amused by him, but ultimately he just wants to be left alone. What a grouch.
And then he burns a town down because he wants to be alone. What a grouch. A mass-murdering grouch.
1-Captain Ahab
Image Via The Guardian
A megalomaniac fanatic, Captain Ahab is obsessed with capturing a whale because on a previous voyage the whale bit off his leg.
That’s it. Moby Dick, a book big enough to break someone’s jaw, is about how instead of calling it quits, instead of moving on, Captain Ahab wears a prosthetic leg made out of whalebone and intends to turn the whale who bit him into bones.
Get over it dude.
Image Via Shmoop
And it wouldn’t be so bad if Ahab was the least bit likable. But he isn’t. His only drive in his life to find and kill the Whale. He forces his crew to support his insane mission just so he can kill a whale.
Three hundred pages just looking for a whale while his crew suffers, and he doesn’t stop and think “Maybe I should be considerate to the crew who is risking their lives for my stupid obsession”. That thought doesn’t even pass through his head.
GET OVER IT DUDE / Image Via Consortiumnews
Even when his ship is destroyed and he and what’s left on his crew is on the boat, he’s still chasing after a whale. GET OVER IT DUDE!
You weren’t even nice, Ahab, you were just a real grouch. You’re going to jump for joy when this grouch is dragged to the bottom of the sea by the very thing he’s been trying to kill.
The infamous lost portrait of Charles Dickens, painted over the span of six sittings in 1843 when Dickens was starting his most infamous story of all time, A Christmas Carol, is set to go on display in his curated home in April. This event is part of an endeavor by the Charles Dickens museum to raise enough funds to purchase the painting.
The Guardian writes that “[a]fter its publication, the portrait was exhibited at the 1844 Royal Academy summer exhibition”, but in 1886, sixteen years after Dickens’ death in 1870, quotes Gilles as saying she had “lost sight of the portrait itself”.
“Have you seen this portrait?” was the question asked for a hundred-and-seventy-four years.
Image Via CNN
Well, someone did.
Lifestylereports that “the portrait was sold for £27 (about $36) in an auction of household goods in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, as part of a tray of trinkets. The finder originally bought it to sell the frame.”
Come early 2018, however, the buyers saw what they had. Even through the mold, they saw the same eyes that struck poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and caused her to say, “the dust and mud of humanity about him, notwithstanding those eagle eyes.”
Just to be sure, they sent the piece to London to be authenticated.
Image Via 4D Projects
Art dealer Philip Mould of Philip Mould & Company authenticated the piece and told CNN that, “It was electrifying when it first came into the gallery, even though it was obscured by mold”.
Portrait found, end of story. Well, it’s not that simple.
Image Via PBS
The Charles Dickens Museum is looking to secure the portrait for its permanent collection, bringing it back to London to be put on permanent public display.
The portrait has a price tag: £180,000 ($238,921.56).
Asking the public for donations (link available here), the museum has so far raised £65,000 ($86,277.23).
With around 36% of funding raised, they’re getting there but it’s far from close. That’s actually why this display is happening. The museum has struck a deal, releasing a statement that says this stunning eagle-eyed miniature portrait “will be displayed from 2-7 April in the Study at 48 Doughty Street, the room in which Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, completed The Pickwick Papers and began Barnaby Rudge.”
This attraction might hopefully give the museum a push, if not a full fledged blast, to the finish line. Either way, the Dicken’s miniature will be right back home above the desk where those magnificent and classic works of literature were constructed with the might pen itself.
Image Via Free Tours by Foot
I might just have to take a flight to Holborn, London.
On December 19th, 1843, a Novella, A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas or more commonly known as A Christmas Carol was published. Written by Charles Dickens and illustrated by John Leech, the famous yuletide tale this year marks its 175th anniversary.
This classic Christmas tale recounts the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a rich and successful but miserly old man. On the Christmas Eve, his clerk, Bob Cratchit, shivers because Scrooge refuses to spend money on coals for a fire. Scrooge’s nephew pays him a visit and invites him to an annual Christmas party he and his family are hosting, and Scrooge bitterly declines. Two gentleman drop in later that day to ask Scrooge for a contribution to their charity. Scrooge angrily refuses their request and denounces any and all Christmas cheer. Later that night as he is sitting by a warm and cozy fire in his house, he is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and three other spirits: The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come. All through the night, these spirits haunt Ebenezer Scrooge, and show him the error of his ways. After that night, Scooge is transformed into a kinder, gentler man.
Image via Independent.uk.co
In the middle of the 19th century, Dickens was witnessed the abject poverty of working class children in England, and was outraged by the amount of children working in appalling conditions in factories, workhouses and as chimney sweeps. The suffering he witnessed was then reinforced when he visited the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several of London’s industrial schools/orphanages where the children were half-starved and uneducated.
In a fundraising speech on October 5th, 1843, Dickens urged workers and employers to join him in fighting against the child labor. He then realized in the days after that an effective way to reach a wide audience and spread his message about poverty and injustice was to write a deep and meaningful Christmas narrative rather than writing pamphlets and essays.
The Novel was a best-seller in both England and the United States, but because there were no international copyright laws in those times yet, Dickens didn’t make any money when he sold the American editions. In 1867, Dickens arrived at New York and on December 9, 1867 he was able to read A Christmas Carol at a public reading – which in fact was sold out.
Image via movieposters2.com
Ever since, this classic Christmas tale has been adapted into different versions of entertainment from films to plays to a children’s movie. The first film adaptation was in 1901. Jim Carey voiced the scrooge in the 2009 animated version of A Christmas Carol and is played on kids channels every year around Christmas time. There were rumors that parents used the ghosts of Christmas past as a way to scare their kids into behaving all year.
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The novella was adapted to the stage almost immediately after publication and had been adapted to other forms of media, including opera, ballet, a Broadway musical, and a BBC mime production. Almost every year, Broadway casts the play in December and it usually sells out pretty quickly along with the Trans Siberian Orchestra.
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