Obscure Movie Review of the Day: Get a Clue!

Not be confused with the Disney channel film with Lindsey Lohan, this film, which aired on Showtime before coming to DVD, and made by the same folks who created such "classics" as P.U.N.K.S. and My Brother the Pig, is based on the Newberry Award winning book The Westing Game.

The book is a puzzle book, a mystery, and a fun one at that. The kind of thing you sit down and read with a pen and paper as you figure it out. Then, about halfway through the book, when you realize the whole thing was more complicated than you thought, you either start over, or you just read through and realize how much more time you could have spent on it if you wanted to. The plots are many and convoluted and confusing, and the characters are numerous and quirky.

Naturally, the filmmakers were faced with a problem. How do you convert a fully interactive book, one that is meant to be read slowly and carefully, full of intricacies and deliberate convolutions into a movie, deliberately our least interactive and most streamlined medium known to modern man?

The answer is, you completely gut everything that made the book work as a book, and only leave in the stuff that works as a movie. And I guess, as far as it goes, the filmmakers did that pretty well.

But, without giving you undue hints towards solving the mystery, some of the key clues in the real mystery are left out of the movie--understandably so, since they're better understood written down than showed onscreen, but dang it, that's so much of what made the book memorable. Films are all about character and plot, and let me tell you, nobody who reads The Westing Game comes away talking about how much they really enjoyed any of the people. The group of suspects in the mystery are deliberately an eclectic bunch, interesting for film, but not the kind of people who would manage to tug on your heart strings. The book is about the puzzle, and they leave out so many of the key peices in the name of keeping up the flow.

I would be curious to know where it got dropped. Was it in the original script? Was it in the editing room? Did they even try to make it work, or is what we saw on film what they shot?

So as far as kids movies go, it's a good one. A far sight better than lots of the made-for-cable mindlessness that's being cranked out nowadays. But considering how good the source material is, that's kind of like how even a really bad picture of Cameron Diaz will still look hotter than average.

If you've read The Westing Game, and dug it, then check out Ellen Raskin's first book, The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel).