f13.net

Really? No thread on this? Going to see it tonight. Will report for better or worse.

Wasn't done by Disney this time around and most reviews didn't like the movie.  I'm not sure how many of the reviewers actually read the books or not (one in particular mentioning how they should have made Eustace less of a pain in the ass :awesome_for_real:) but it was enough to make the wife and I decide to wait until it's in the cheap theater or on DVD.

Underperforming here, but the overseas markets love this Narnia shit.

I liked it. It was a bit disjointed as they went from one island to the next to the next and then went home. But it was a fun adventure. And Eustace was fucking perfect.

It was bad. In fact I am willing to submit that it was worse than #2.

The first movie, which I liked, was an teen/adult movie with a kid's theme. ala the latest versions of Harry Potter.
The latest Narnia movie was a kid's movie period. ala the very first Harry Potter movie. But with flat acting and a scatter brained plot and or bad editing of the flow of the story.

Lastly, the Christianity themes were a bit more pronounced in this movie than they were in the first. Aslan actually says to Lucy something along the lines of "I am in your world, but known by another name. I brought you to this world to get to know me, so you would know me better in your world." 

You really ought to read the book if you are complaining about that. Its like complaining that the Golden Compass movie was anti-religion.

And that line was straight from the Voyage of the Dawn Treader the book.

Yeah, what Sir T said.  The allegory gets much more heavy-handed as the series moves on.  Lewis saw the series as a way of indoctrinating kids who weren't interested in the stuffy church of old.  So the first book was deliberately vague about it to get kids interested and drawn-in.  I can't remember most of The Magician's Nephew but I'm fairly certain that one was even more literal in a lot of places as it involved the creation of Narnia.   

Yes, it got worse and worse.  The Last Battle was utterly clownshoes fuck stupid in every way.

God pretty much ruins everything.

Never even heard of it.

I remember reading an interview with Lewis where he got irritated at it being called an "allegory".  Aslan isn't meant as an allegory for Jesus, he's meant to actually BE Jesus.

The Last Battle seemed pretty awesome to me purely because it was so ridiculously heavy handed and in any context but hardcore Christianity the ending was absolutely fucktarded.

And no matter what the movie is like, could we please get the proper title on this thread?

People have argued that Susan got the shaft because she was too close to having secondary sex characteristics. Which, as much as I love the books, makes me wonder a bit about C.S. Lewis' ability to relate to grown women.

Lewis himself said it was never allegory. Aslan is straight up the embodiment of Christ in Narnia.

Oh man. I"ve gone off on that topic before. Lewis mentions Nylons and Lipstick and some people blew their tops interpreting it as Susan getting dissed for being a slut.

Susan's trip was that she was wound up over earthly concerns. It would have been the same deal if she's been interested in NASCAR or needlepoint or stabbing herself in the eyeballs.

Really, she was entertaining suitors when she was a queen. (Horse and his Boy)

That sorta proves the point: woman entering that stage of sexuality means a loss of innocence, hence she's left off the Jesus bus at the end.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Pevensie

emphasis mine.

So, in essence, girls wanting to become women (ie a LARGE percentage of teen girls) are vain, silly and conceited. That sound like someone who understands women at all?

Sounds like someone raising a teenager, actually.  :why_so_serious:

This is where your argument falls down. Wanting to be a woman isn't silly, vain or conceited. Susan was a queen in Narnia, and had many suitors. Neither her maturity or her sexuality were an issue.
Being a woman isn't accomplished by wearing nylons and lipstick and getting invitations to parties. Those were the things that Susan was concerned with.

Susan wasn't excluded from Narnia. She renounced her belief in it. "Oh, we used to have such fanciful imaginations as children!" (paraphrasing) And none of it necessarily excludes her from Aslan's Country. (Heaven) Lewis himself said

"The books don't tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there's plenty of time for her to mend and perhaps she will get to Aslan's country in the end... in her own way."

So what your saying is: She won.  :awesome_for_real:

Maybe if Lewis had actually shown us Susan behaving badly in some kind of Reverse Eustace maneuver it would have been easier to accept her as a bad guy unworthy of paradise. As it is, I still think she got a raw deal.

Hah, what a silly thing to be concerned about. By the time the books had gotten to be that heavy-handedly Christian I was only reading them to finish the series.

I'm pretty sure she got there eventually. I mean, she wasn't bad, so she didn't go to hell, but I like to think she hung out in purgatory going to endlessly boring parties for like 200 years until she saw a mouse or something that made her think of Reepicheep then went "OMG what am I doing here!!!" then said her prayers and went to bed and woke up at the teddy bear's picnic, the end.

Anybody curious about how Lewis pictured Hell can read The Great Divorce. It's short and simple and pretty conventional in new-age christian circles.

Man, I hope that new Conan movie coming up in 2011 is R-rated as fuck and at least watchable. We need way the hell fewer magical English schoolchildren in fantasy movies, and less Jesus, but more tits, more decapitations, and more dudes turning into fucking snakes and shit for no good reason.

This Narnia shit looks like Lord of the Rings except made for that one kid whose mom wouldn't let him watch He-Man because it promoted witchcraft. I just want a fantasy movie with some naked bitches goddamn it.

Gaiman wrote a short story that explains what happens to Susan.  Kinda.

There's also naked witches and titties in it.

Lewis totally had a problem with women and sexuality. 

Funny that.

What was that short story? Do you remember?

Also, the specific references to parties, stockings and lipstick have to be taken in the context of the day; these accouterments were not 'vain', but just simply one of the staples of how women stepped from girlhood to womanhood. The pseudo-feminist angle that such things are part of the objectification of women and hence Susan was just tarting herself up seems to me to be a generational perspective that's not relevant to Lewis' time.

That Susan should be condemned for moving on from the imagination of youth to the real, on the ground, realities of where she was in her non-Narnian life smacks of infantilised Platonism. The 'real world' is beset with temptation and sin and we would be wise to take shelter in the comforting and inflexible ideology of our childhoods. Part of growing up is indeed leaving behind the safety and comfort of our childhood world view, and CS Lewis wants us thinking about knights, adventure and the peril of the Christian soul in the face of a complex world.  Look at his bigoted interpretation of the Islamic world in his books and then look where all that's gotten us today. 

Actually, one of the most facinating things in Lewis' Narnia books (at least for me) was his treatment of being Faithful to your Beliefs, regardless of how vicious or evil that belief may appear to other people.   Specificly the example of how his "evil Islamics" were worshipping their "evil god" but that evil god was actually just another face of Aslan, and that if those evil people kept faith with their evil god through all the harshness it put them through, they would still go to heaven, but if they broke faith, they were destined for hell as an oathbraker or whatever.   Really makes you wonder.

Well reading his bio it makes me wonder how much his own life was reflected in the books?

For example maybe Susan got the raw end of the stick in his series because as a young man he fancied some chicky who in turn fell for some charming military lad from the US, and it broke Lewis' heart? So he took it out on Susan his character, and would also explain why he didnt marry until after 50?  He married some fan who sent him a fan letter, thats the modern day equivalent of a star dating their stalker.

Also finding out that the series only gets more heavy handed with the Jesus stuff, means I wont be reading the rest of it or watching any further movies.

"The Problem of Susan."

There was a bit about that in the Screwtape Letters:

Quite frankly I think this is all Lewis meant with Susan. Anyone that reads any more into it is loading all their own prejudices into it.

And anyone that's just offended by concept of Jesus appearing as a literary character really really needs to see this movie and get a life.

(http://img.amazon.ca/images/I/51ckUtHs8CL.jpg)

It's maybe my favorite of the Lewis books, but I figured it would be done badly  even if the filmmakers had been more talented simply because what makes it charming as a book makes it tricky as a film. The charm of the original story is that it's Lewis' version of a picaresque, a story with very little central plotline, just a series of incidents strung together with a few character arcs (Eustace's moral growth, Caspian's deepening into his role as king, Lucy's acceptance of herself).  This was the movie to do a different visual style for, and to get director with a very distinctive vision, if you were going to bother: rather like what Cuaron did for the Harry Potter series.

Of course they didn't do any of that, and the result is bland, boring hackery that is not so bad that you actually hate it, but is never good enough to really enjoy it much. Basically to give the movie more of a plotline, they graft a completely generic World of Warcraft questline into the story and then to make sure that the Christian demographic is happy, they pretty much have the characters stop and look at the screen every ten minutes and say, "Hey kids! Remember to listen to Lion-Jesus and resist Lost-Smoke-Monster-Satan! Go to church!" It takes some work to make C.S. Lewis look subtle about religion, but the folks who made this film pulled it off.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/21/Muttley-picture.gif)

I think you misunderstand. I have never seen an ad for this movie. This thread was the first I have heard of it.

This moves needs to be renamed: Voyage of the Brand Shredder.

There won't be another Narnia movie for a long while.

I think you're right, and that makes me sad. I was looking forward to Horse and his Boy, if only to see the Pevensie kids all growed up and noble and whatnot.

Yep. I had that feeling from Prince Caspian where they gutted all the charm of the original material and replaced it with Generic Action Sequences.

I recentley rewatched the animated Narnia movie from 1979, which is the first Narnia thing I saw, and later got into the books and BBC live series.
It's got it's issues, the screaming queen, the cartoony aspects, setting it in America  :uhrr:, but it also wasn't wound up about making a ripoff of LOTR, and the music was really great.

The BBC live series was actually very good. I liked the way they did Dawn Treader especially, but it has to be said the episodic format suited the book very well.

I've seen bits and pieces of the BBC Narnia series. Mostly I remember The Silver Chair. (Yes, I know Tom Baker played Puddleglum.  :grin:)  I need to get them on DVD.

It's ok. There's some miscasting here and there and of course the effects are sub-old-Dr. Who in quality. I think The Silver Chair was their best, which is good since it's likely to be the only version of it.

Yeah, The silver chair was good. I guess I was hampered as i had to try and listen to it through a croud of screaming kids at the time and constant distractions, so Its not stuck in my mind.

Look, clearly Susan was an imbecile who deserved to burn in the lake of fire.  She got teleported to a magical world, grew to adulthood in it, became a queen, fought some wars, and generally spent more time there (or a roughly equal amount) than she had in the real world.  Then, upon going back into the real world, she decided it was all make-believe.

Wat.

She'd already grown to adulthood once, in Narnia.  Nobody called her on putting on makeup and not having to stuff her bra any more, or on hooking up with guys.  So why would they do so when she grew up for the second time?  Because the second time she grew up retarded, that's why.

Retarded and EEEVUL!!!11!

It's a problem with Lewis' entire theology. He thought that God's existence was roughly as obvious in our world as Aslan's existence was in Narnia. You have to be a screaming idiot in Narnia or maybe be unlucky enough to live in one of the few thousand-year periods where Aslan is busy creating Mini-Golf-Is-Awesome-World to even remotely doubt his existence. So who does? Idiots and completely fucking crazy evil assholes like Shift and dirty brown people who are born as Mooslims and don't have the moral courage to become Aslanites. So same goes for our world: you're utterly stupid or completely evil or a dirty brown person if you're not a Christian. Serious secular doubt for Lewis is always evidence that you're either Shift or Trumpkin: a fiend or a dumbass. He has hope if you're the latter: all it takes is Lewis or someone like him to show you up.

And that's closer to the root of the argument than saying something dumb like "Lewis was a misogynist because he said Susan was a slut who went to hell for wearing lipstick!"

I don't see those arguments as mutually exclusive.

I think it's perfectly plausible to see some underlying misogyny in the phrasing of Lewis' characterization of Susan in The Last Battle. Most of the Inklings had that weird old-don girls-are-icky thing going on in some measure, and Lewis more than most. Whatever his sex life really was, I think it's fair to guess that he had some hang-ups about doing the deed and about people, particularly women, who had a healthy grown-up interest in doing the deed. But in the same measure, there's a lot of clear textual evidence that he was not intending to say, "Susan shows that sluts go to hell, so don't be a slut, my dear young readers", that his conscious intention was to suggest that Susan's real problem was a lack of faith in imagination and stories, and thus, by proxy, in God and redemption.

He was a virgin until about 60, when he married a hot young fan of his. That hot young fan died a few years later of cancer. LOL! :(

Movie about him (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108101/) is actually pretty decent. Kind of a chick flick, except for old dudes.

I was going to say that there was a bit of a dispute between his two biographers about whether he and Janie Moore, the older women he spent 30 years in a relationship with before he met Gresham, were actually lovers.  And he was with her before he converted back to Christianity.  As it's 20+ years since I read AN Wilson's biography of Lewis, I thought I'd just check my facts.  Turns out there's no longer a dispute. From wikipedia:


So, no. He probably wasn't a virgin and Gresham wasn't his first relationship. He didn't marry Moore because she was seperated from her husband but never got divorced so they cohabited until her death.

There's still a few Lewis fans who say it was ambiguous, but yes, there's at least some pretty good reason to think he had a long term sexual relationship with a woman whose basic affect, according to most of Lewis' friends, was "stepmotherly". Makes you think about the White and Emerald Witches and their respective histories with Edmund and Prince Rilian in a different light, perhaps.

There's no real doubt that the relationship with Prince Rillian and the Green Witch would have been sexual. Edmund and the White Witch would be more of allegory of drug addiction and the power the dealer has over you.

I can't remember the Green witch at all. Hrm.. later books, I guess, since I only read those once or twice.   The White Witch I wholly believed was drugs even when younger.  Being from the states I thought Turkish Delight was some sort of exotic adult-only food like that mysterious 'magic brownies' everyone got in such a fluff over.

And yet, didn't the Green Witch turn into a snake ?

She turned into the Green Serpent that had killed Rillian's mother at the end, once her enchantment spell was broken, yeah. I'm sure you will make lots of hay about that in the quest for "IT MUST BE ALL ABOUT SEX REALLY!!"  :oh_i_see:

Of course the enhancement spell was broken by putting out the fire that she was burning the spices she was using to befuddle their minds. So you could argue there was a lot f anti-drug stuff in there as well.

You're right.  The snake's never been a metaphor for male sexuality in any text, right back to before the Bible.

 :oh_i_see:

Well if you want to duel symbolism

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Rod_of_asclepius.png

The rod of Asclepius. A symbol of medicine and healing.

Which does tie into the bible.


Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Yeah but that was one guy changing his mind about Lewis later in life, based on something someone else said, also later in life. Realistically they were two healthy sexual creatures living close together, so it'd be insane to think they didn't do it. But then again, humans don't always behave "realistically".  :grin:

Come to think of it, I'll bet Edmund and the White Witch did it too. It'd be much easier for her to keep him seduced if she popped his man-cherry.

Oh Im sure the intertubes are crawling with fanfiction of just such an occurrence.

Yep found some!

You just wrote that, didn't you.  :why_so_serious:

Race to the bottom!  :drill:

Now if there was a Black Bitch in these books, we would have the makings of an interesting XXX serial.

I put on my robe and wizard hat.

Good god this was a tedious piece of shit.   :ye_gods: