How ya doin'?
I realize from some of your posts that you already visit the Libertas site, but if you haven't yet seen this review of the Prince Caspian movie, it's looking pretty good.
A few fair-use quotes from the review:
All 140 minutes of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian are vastly superior to its predecessor. The crucial difference is that unlike The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), Caspian is not a C.S. Lewis picture, it’s a director’s picture — it‘s an Andrew Adamson picture.That could be good or bad, of course; I've seen plenty movies where the director's ego messed up a perfectly good novel. But it's also true that Print and Film are two different art forms with different strengths and weaknesses, and successful adaptations take these differences into effect. This reviewer thinks Adamson did a good job.
A more fitting title for this wonderful sequel might have been, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lie Of Kumbaya. Caspian’s themes of honor, faith, nobility, and self-sacrifice all come to a single point: confronting and destroying an evil that will not be appeased or negotiated with. This is often a dark adventure, and one that doesn’t ask us to turn the other cheek when it comes to confronting evil — even through war.Good. The concepts of honor, faith, nobility, and self-sacrifice--not to mention confronting and destroying evil--seem to have been out of fashion among our philosophical elites for some time; it's good that someone still takes them seriously.
This is not some new-age Christian allegory where if you fall to your knees in some sun-dappled field and raise your hands to Jesus all your problems will go away. As in life, God is not a deus ex machina. There’s a bigger picture at work — a master plan — and it’s up to us to find our place within that plan, not the other way around. What Would Aslan Do? No. What Would Aslan Want Us To Do.I'm thankful for this; Christianity, as practiced by Jesus, by the apostles, and by many, many Christians throughout the millennia involved some serious sacrifice; it's way too easy, in this time of relative religious freedom and unprecedented prosperity, to forget this fact.
I like how the writings of C.S. Lewis always bring us back to a sense of seriousness: that daily life conspires to distract us from the important questions and the deeper truths, but the questions and truths nonetheless remain and still drive our destiny--whether we choose to see them or not. The book Prince Caspian plays this theme over and over.
Anyway, the movie opens this weekend. Alas, as a daddy of really young kids, I'm not likely to get to see it until it comes out on DVD.
So Chris, after you've seen the movie, could you let me know if it would be appropriate to take a somewhat sensitive 5-year-old girl to see it on the big screen? ;-)
3 comments:
Sounds cool. Being a bit of a bookworm, myself, I rarely like the movies made from the books. Books allow you to create so much of the world in your own mind. I have a hard time letting the film be its own work.
But we'll likely see this movie as well. :)
The previews alone look a little too much for the Pillowfight Fairy. Has she seen the first one?
She has, numerous times, and she enjoys it. But then, she already knows what's going to happen.
I've read her the book, so she's at least a little familiar with the story; but as the review said, the movie does not attempt to be a perfectly faithful adaptation of the book.
But then, my whole family saw Star Wars in the theaters when I was six--and Andy was four at the time....
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