Archive for the 'entertainment'

Anvilicious, adj: In media, the state of conveying a particular message so unsubtly that they may as well etch it onto an anvil and drop it on your head. Okay, so I’m late in seeing this movie. Ginny and I don’t get out enough. I always liked the Narnia books, even after I knew that Aslan represented Jesus. As someone who wasn’t terribly absorbed in Christian mythology around age 10, the parallel wasn’t immediately obvious to me at the time, but it seemed undeniable once someone pointed it out to me. Still, I continue to feel that Lewis was a much better fiction author than he was an apologist. Prince Caspian was never my favorite of the series; in fact it would be fair to say that it’s roughly tied with The Horse and His Boy as my least favorite. IMHO the best of the series, in order, are books 4 (The Silver Chair), 6 (Narnia’s “genesis” story, which further explores the concept of parallel universes), and 3 (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which had some cool random adventurey stuff). While Caspian wasn’t that great, I don’t remember it being particularly full of religious overtones as compared with many of the other books. I have a theory about this. Some of his own statements notwithstanding, it seems to me that Lewis wrote the first book as a straight-up Christian story. The lion getting killed for another character’s sins and then coming back to life is just way too obvious to overlook. On the other hand, once he had settled into a mythos, Lewis got more comfortable with writing a good story whose characters take on their own life and don’t necessarily have to correspond with Biblical figures. But that’s not the way the director of the latest movie series saw it. The first movie emphasized the religious overtones, and since there’s not enough of that in the second book, by God he added some. The white witch, who represents the devil, makes an all new appearance,...
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That’s the general impression that this reviewer got, although PZ Myers doesn’t precisely agree. It’s a sad thing about M. Night Shyamalan. I really, really enjoyed both 6th Sense and Unbreakable. Then Signs came out, and Jeff Dee — whose tastes I mostly respect a lot — told me he hated it. He was disgusted by the premise that even horrible tragedies have a purpose, even if the purpose is really obscure and convoluted. I defended Night as much as I could manage. “No no,” I insisted, “you’ve missed the point of the movie. He wasn’t ADVOCATING this point of view; he was setting up an obviously horrible scenario to show what’s WRONG with the idea.” I tried to make the case that Signs was really pulling a sly reversal, just like Frailty, a movie that I watched just because Jeff recommended it, and which Jeff is convinced that the real message of the movie is a reductio ad absurdum showing that the Old Testament makes no sense as a moral guide. Anyway, I’m finally convinced that I was completely wrong about Night. He really believes that mystical mumbo-jumbo, and the message of the movie is being played straight.

This looks like it will be really very funny.

According to IMDb today: Without explanation, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has retracted on its website a positive review of The Golden Compass that appeared in Catholic newspapers last week. The review had appeared to counterbalance claims by the Catholic League, the nation’s largest Catholic lay group, that it served as an introduction to atheism expounded in the trilogy of books on which the movie is based. The League had urged a boycott of the film. In an interview with the Baltimore Sun, Jim Lackey general news editor of the Catholic News Service, run by the bishops’ conference, acknowledged that he was told to remove the review from the CNS website. “It’s hard for me to categorize whether or not it was a surprise,” he told the newspaper. Meanwhile, the church’s Raleigh, NC diocese on Tuesday warned pastors in a letter about the possible ramifications of the film. “The concern is that once a child gets ‘hooked’ on the film or the books, then the next film could resort to the true atheistic nature of the books,” the letter said. And we all know how bad it would be for business if children around the country had an epiphany from reading the books that there’s no invisible magic man in the sky and the church is simply a self-perpetuating authoritarian money machine. Plus, if the kids turn atheist and stop coming to mass and catechism and all the other little rituals we have for them, there won’t be so many of them around to molest! Gasp! Martin! You mean mean man! What a cheap shot! Yeah, well, it wouldn’t be so easy if they hadn’t done it. Now I know I didn’t care for the movie much, but it also happens to be true that the grounds on which the Catholic League (has the odious Bill Donohue even seen it?) is condemning it are wholly bogus, and part of me wishes people would go see it just to realize that all the hysteria in the press is much ado about nothing....
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I’ll start here by noting that this review, while it avoids outright spoilers for either book or movie, has some things in it that will mean more if you’ve read the book rather than not. Since not reading the book would make you a silly person, go correct that lapse in your cultural education at your earliest convenience. Now, onward… Chris Weitz’s film of Philip Pullman’s brilliant fantasy adventure The Golden Compass is a respectable adaptation in a lot of ways, but at the same time exhibits a lot of the problems inherent in trying to compress the plot of a complex novel into a two-hour running time. If I give the book a 5 on a 5 scale (and I do), then the movie is hovering around a 2½-3. Truth be told, Weitz did a better job than I was expecting. He’s clearly a huge fan of the book and strives to be as faithful to it as he can within the limitations he has to work under. I respect him for trying to do his best by Pullman and the book’s fans. But what this means cinematically is that we get a movie whose story feels rushed, with Weitz doing everything he can to touch on each major plot point in rapid succession. The script just sails along, at such a pace that very little suspense is actually built. We establish the movie’s universe, its heroine, and her quest — and then we’re off to the races. Lyra, though extremely well played by a great little newcomer named Dakota Blue Richards (why is Dakota the moniker of choice for preteen actresses?), never really feels like she goes through a character arc in the normal sense of the term. She learns to use the aliethiometer, decoding its arcane symbols with almost supernatural speed, just so the script can get the story going. Thinking about it, it isn’t that the movie is too rapidly paced, so much as that it doesn’t really have anything you could call “pacing.” Its script just flings you from one scene to the next — boom,...
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