The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival relies on your donations! Want to support what we’re doing? Please donate the 90-Second Newbery here! We are a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization.

Thanks everyone who came out to the 2016 Chicago screening of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival last Sunday! We packed the 300-seat Vittum Theater with a super-enthusiastic audience.

A huge thanks to author of The Other Felix and Booklist Online Editor Keir Graff for once again co-hosting the Chicago screening with me. Keir not only co-hosts, he and I also write the opening skit together. Unfortunately we didn’t get a usable video of this year’s Chicago opener, which commemorated the 90-Second Newbery’s fifth anniversary by looking forward to what the film festival will be like five years from now.

Keir and I played dueling time-travelers, and our opener soon erupted into a lightsaber battle that was resolved by the song “Blame Newbery!” (tune stolen from South Park’s “Blame Canada”). In the picture below, time-traveling Keir informs me who wins the 2018 Newbery Medal: Vorblop Homvaloo 9 from Jupiter, who will write the instant children’s book classic Flimglorp Jeep-Joop Foopy Fop:

Thanks to Travis Jonker of the 100 Scope Notes blog for that cover, which you can see in its full glory here. I asked Travis because his blog has a great series called Covering the Newbery in which he designs alternative covers for Newbery-winning books. Check it out!

One of the big hits of the evening was Walt Disney Magnet School’s adaptation of Rebecca Stead’s 2010 Newbery Medal winner When You Reach Me in the style of a Law And Order episode. It cleverly hit most of the book’s story beats while fulfilling the tropes Law and Order, from the “konk-konk” noise to the classic good cop/bad cop interrogation scene. I especially liked the courtroom scene at the end, in which the attorney attempts to unravel the book’s complex time-travel plot with a Glenn Beck-style chalkboard full of crazy scribblings:

I especially liked how, on her way out of the interrogation room, the “bad-cop” detective picks her cup of coffee up off the floor where she flung it, and without missing a beat begins drinking from it again with a backwards scowl at Marcus.

This year we also got a lot of great entries from Francis Xavier Warde School in Chicago. Here’s one of them that was a hit at the screening. It’s of Gary Paulsen’s 1988 Honor Book Hatchet, but with a twist: instead of its main character, Brian, getting stranded in the forest with nothing but a hatchet to help him survive, he merely gets trapped in a 7-11, where survival is, well, kind of easy. But the breakout character here is Brian’s mom, with her odd mannerism of repeatedly whacking a foil pan with a spatula:

We also got a lot of great entries from Edgewood Middle School in Highland Park, Illinois. Among them was this entertaining adaptation of Kwame Alexander’s 2015 Newbery Medal winner The Crossover, a novel-in-verse about two basketball-playing twin brothers, Filthy McNasty and J.B., who have a falling-out when J.B. gets a girlfriend:

I love the portrayal of “Miss Sweet Tea” by a boy in a wig. He really works it!

Thanks again to everyone who helped out at the screening: Laura Kollar, Mary Kate Barley-Jenkins, Tom Arvetis, and Ford Altenbern of Adventure Stage Chicago; Keir Graff, for co-hosting; Kate Babka, who helped in the tech booth with the lights and sound; Eti Berland, for being the indefatigable master of the 90-Second Newbery’s social media; Travis Jonker for the cover; Joseph Lewis for taking the pictures and video; Northwestern Settlement for being our nonprofit sponsor; and of course all of the kids, teachers, and families who made the movies and came out to watch!

Let’s wrap this up with the closing montage for the night, which features almost all the movies featured at the Chicago screening:

Thanks, Chicago! Already looking forward to next year. Next: SAN FRANCISCO and OAKLAND, this Saturday, February 13th!

The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival relies on your donations! Want to support what we’re doing? Please donate the 90-Second Newbery here! We are a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization.

A big thanks to the San Francisco Awesome Foundation for supporting 2016’s 90-Second Newbery screenings on February 13 in San Francisco and Oakland with a generous grant. (Wait . . . you want to make a tax-deductible donation to the 90-Second Newbery too? You can do it here!)

The Chicago screening of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival is coming up this Sunday, January 31, 2016! It’s sold out, and there’s a wait list, but seats are always opening up, so you can get on that wait list here.

What can you expect to see at Sunday’s screening? Today I want to concentrate on three wunderkind auteurs who project a go-it-alone persona. They make videos that seem to be like one-person shows. Two of them we’ve met in previous years, so let’s lead off with the newcomer: 8-year-old Corbin Stanchfield of Lafayette, Indiana! He makes his 90-Second Newbery debut with an adaptation of Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s 1992 Newbery Medal Winner Shiloh. Check it out above.

Shiloh is, of course, your standard boy-and-his-dog story, set in West Virginia. The premise of Corbin’s video: what if there are certain budget cuts in the video’s production, such that the video can’t actually be filmed in the rolling hills of West Virginia where the book is set, but rather must make do with the flat fields of Indiana? And furthermore . . . maybe the budget can’t afford, er, a dog either . . . but, well, how about a bagel? A bagel makes an acceptable substitute for a dog, right? Don’t judge too hastily! Watch the movie, this bagel is a very expressive and frisky and emotional bagel! Corbin does great work throughout too, from selling the premise to nailing the visual gags to his rural accent to the impromptu beard! You can check out more of Corbin Stanchfield’s videos at his website Corbin Films.

Another up-and-comer: Ada Grey of Chicago, who every year submits a super-elaborate 90-Second Newbery done entirely with PlayMobil figures. This year, Ada adapted Katherine Applegate’s 2013 Newbery Medal Winner The One and Only Ivan:

I love the super-complicated, meticulously-composed scenes that Ada puts together. And in terms of storytelling, Ada always lays everything out logically and clearly, which is hard to do in 90 seconds! The voiceover is brisk and witty and I love Ada’s performance as Ivan the silverback. I look forward to her submission every year, she always raises the bar every year with another great video!

Finally for today, Ava Levine of Chicago does Lois Lowry’s 1994 Medal winning chestnut The Giver:

Ava came to my attention last year with a 90-Second Newbery in the style of the opening monologue of “Saturday Night Live,” but comes into her own here with this one-woman show. Like the other movies, it was fun to see Ava play multiple roles, and I liked how she resourcefully used her hair as the Giver’s “beard.” I particularly liked the lines “I will touch you and you will be put into a kind of montage thing” and “I must run away and cause a huge problem for the society!” The montage itself was well done, with the spinning around in color. The movie definitely hit the sweet spot for me at the end, where the narrator says “But personally, I like to think he died”—THAT IS EXACTLY MY OPINION ABOUT THE END OF THE BOOK TOO, but nobody seems to agree with me on that! Thanks, Ava, for saying what must be said! Jonas totally dies at the end of that book, there’s no doubt in my mind!

Whether or not you believe Jonas died at the end of The Giver (and he did die, he’s totally dead, don’t even delude yourselves), I’m looking forward to seeing you all on Sunday!

The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival relies on your donations! Want to support what we’re doing? Please donate the 90-Second Newbery here! We are a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization.

I was on the “Write Of Your Life” Podcast a few weeks ago! Stacy Curtis interviews me about the creative process and I reveal was a “vomelette” is.

The Chicago screening of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival is coming to the Vittum Theater (1012 N. Noble) this Sunday, January 31, 2016, from 3-5 pm! It’s technically sold out, but seats always open up, so if you want to come I recommend you get on the wait list here.

Here are some movies we’ve received from the Chicago area this year! Eti Berland is the superstar librarian who handles all the social media for the 90-Second Newbery (she has also, ahem, been on the Newbery committee). This year, she and Ashley Hamernik of the Evanston Public Library worked with the EPL Homeschool Group to make this great adaptation of Ingrid Law’s 2009 Honor Book Savvy in the video above!

I liked the stylish way this movie efficiently introduces the premise of the book, with the voiceover and subtitles over the intriguing images (loved that cute turtle!). And whoever played the owner of the cafe brought real energy into that firing scene. (And that was a nice waitress costume)! The electrical sound-effects paired with the lights turning on and off was a resourceful way to represent the brother’s “savvy” of having control over electricity. Everyone did a great job acting and the green-screen work was very well done! We’ll be showing this at the screening on Sunday, see you there!

And next up is Shannon Hale’s 2006 Honor Book Princess Academy by Muskaan, Suzan, Liza, Valentina, Amani, and Pia of the Niles Public Library:

Fun and ambitious! The extensive green-screen made it feel like a movie with authentic locations. That’s hard to pull off! Good cinematography, good use of music, and great acting from the star and everyone else (with a breakout performance for Tutor Olana!) The cruel girls were wonderfully nasty, the angry mob of miners was appropriately menacing, and the prince was pretty adorable. We’ll be screening this on Sunday too!

And finally we have Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 1938 Honor Book On the Banks of Plum Creek by Nora, Hazel, and Violet:

I like how this focused just on the daughters’ experience in the story—that went a long way to winnowing down the story to a manageable size. And it was a good idea to give each sister her own introduction right at the top, to make all the characters clear. The subtitles help kept the plot understandable. I liked the running joke about how small the house is, with a cool use of that little door in the side of the house! And the three sisters’ freaking-out “Home Alone” hands-on-the-face reaction to the tininess of the house was fantastic. When grasshopper storm comes, I love how hard the girls sold it, with insane panic and crying, and the camerawork felt appropriately frenetic. It’s the enthusiastic acting that put this one over the top! (And great prairie dresses too!) We’ll be showing this one on Sunday too!

By the way, Violet in this movie went to preschool with my daughter Lucy Momo! Here’s a picture from a few years ago, of them outside the school, when we all spelled out their names with dandelions:

Looking forward to the screening this Sunday!