Douglas Adams, Narnia, and Trailers

A few interesting movie tidbits: Joel Greengrass writes "Final post-production has been completed on the long awaited documentary, 'Life, the Universe, and Douglas Adams.' Narrated by Neil Gaiman, the film is a tribute documentary about the life, loves, and passions, of the greatest sci fi comedy writer ever, Douglas Adams. The film will be available for sale on August 4 at douglasadams.com." Reader The_Shadows writes "Sci-fi Storm and Scfi.com's Scifi-wire are reporting that Walden Media exercised options for feature-length, big screen versions of the Chronicles of Narnia, by C. S. Lewis. They have also found an Emmy award winning writer (Ann Peacock) to adapt the most famous book, 'The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.'" And finally, there's an interesting piece about the process of turning a two-hour movie into a two-minute trailer.

Comments

Re:Squeezing

[Noofus]

The problem comes when you notice that the story line of the movie being promoted is so thin, that you got the entire story in the 150 seconds. I can think of many movies who's trailer started off convincing me to see the movie, but by the end have told me that I got the whole deal for free, while waiting for the feature.

The few times I ended up seeing a movie after determining its entire useful content was dumped into the trailer, I either walked out due to lameness, or just bitched about it to my movie-going companion the whole way home :)

Narnia

[Com2Kid]

Great series of books, I read The Magicians Nephew and The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe in second grade, excellent series. C.S. Lewis's science fiction books are also rather nice, though he has a rather nasty habit of starting a series well and then having each successive book get worse and worse (lucky if you can read through the third one. . . .) but it was years ago that I last read C. S. Lewis so my opinions may change should I read those books again.

Narnia has been banned from my local school district do to 'religious' content. Pisses me off, had it not been for Narnia there is a good chance that I would never have developed my love of reading. Liberals /can/ go to far at times. :

And what the hell is wrong with /books/ with religious content? Hell it is OK to read every body elses religiously derived fiction but just not Christian religiously derived fiction? It seems to me that if church and state are to be separate, then the state should not work their asses of concentrating on just isolating out any one particular religion! As it is the removal of Narnia was an obvious attempt at "see we are't being biased, look here, we are removing Christian inspired literature! Yeeesh. That IS called bias folks!!!

(By banned I mean it was banned from being read in the classroom as part of school work or assignments, students can still check them out from the Library of course, I mean they /are/ damn nearly classics and all. :-D )

I do think that some of C. S. Lewis's works should be mandatory reading though if just to show students that things do NOT have to be the way that they are. My word, people cannot even IMAGINE that schools used to not have as much fighting or sex in them! .... Ugh! People must be reminded that it IS possible to get through schooling without punching and fucking your way from one class to the next. :(

Adams

[Skyshadow]

When I read (on /.) that Adams had died, I pulled my leather-bound copy of Hitchhiker down off the shelf, flipped to a random page and started reading.

I happened to open to the bit where they go to see God's final message to his creation. I'm not normally a very emotional person, but when I was reading that I cried like a little kid. For a geek like me, Adams was my John Lennon -- hearing that there just wasn't going to be anymore stories made the world seem gray.

I wonder if the book made up from his notes is worthwhile, or if it'll just seem.. I dunno... wrong.