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Chronicles of Narnia Trailer
Ant writes "After United States' broadcast debut of the "Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe" trailer on Saturday, May 7th during ABC's network premiere of "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets", Ain't It Cool News posted AOL's link to the QuickTime movie (direct link to download the 56 MB high quality trailer file)." Fix yourself some turkish delight and enjoy.
Traditionally (AFAIK), Turkish Delight comes with both red and green shapes (frequently just squares). I kinda like it, but it's an older candy froma a time when not everything had corn syrup in it.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Yeah, I read "Disney" and groaned. But I watched the trailer and didn't catch Eddie Murphy or Gilbert Gottfried anywhere and Narnia certainly isn't musical fodder, so... it looks more like they're trying to cash in on the current LotR frenzy. Box office has proven people want Big Epic Fantasy, and despite the overt religious themes, Narnia is exactly that. It's Big, it's Epic, and it's Fantasy. In a lot of cases (at least in my home skool district), it was the first fantasy novel(s) read by many, many children. I was reading Voyage of the Dawn Treader while I was still building Construx forts for my Star Wars action figures. Hopefully Narnia makes a decent transition to the big screen, but from the trailer it looks like they're focusing on everything they think made LotR a huge success (eg battle, battle, battle - gods that shit bores the hell out of me. Has since The Phantom Menace).
I never got around to reading LotR - I was completely turned off by all the singing and poetry in The Hobbit and figured there'd be more of it in the trilogy... and I found Sci-Fi to be a hell of a lot more interesting (at least until the rack at Barnes and Nobel started to look more like a bad collection of Heavy Metal cover art)...
If they don't screw it up, they can easily cash in on film adaptations of the rest of the series - there's quite a lot of material to work with.
As an atheist, I can't stand talk from people about hating all religions. It shows lack of discernment. Some religions are far worse than others. Christianity, though it has its bad points, is one of the better religions. It is, after all, inseperable from Western life and culture.
Dorothy L Sayers shouldn't be mentioned in the same paragraph. When she was advised that a character in one of her books could be taken as anti-Semitic, she promptly started to write in positive but not over-signalled Jewish characters.
I mention this because one thing that does stand out about the writings of CSL is that, like Sayers, he was a Christian but not a fundamentalist bigot - he was too well educated, well connected and well read for that. In his adult science fiction he started to play with the idea that Christianity was a partial revelation, and that the battle between good and evil was going on in other civilisations elsewhere in the universe. It's a pity he got over mystical and started to bring in the Arthurian legends, because there is stuff in That Hideous Strength which to my mind spoils the book. But I guess no-one will make a film of it anyway, because it is anti-corporatist, anti-Statist and proposes that a small group of activists can and should employ rather violent means to defeat a technocratic dictatorship. In fact, if the Department of Homeland Security is reading this, you might want to investigate who has been reading That Hideous Strength. They might be potential terrorists.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Harry Potter == Evil, Satanic, BURNABLE.
Chronicals of Narnia == Good Christian Literature, PRAISE THE JESUS!
You know, there's a reason you read Chronicals of Narnia in first grade... because it's first grade material. It doesn't hold up when you grow up... or learn to tie your own shoes.
I read it when I was little and then I tried rereading it.
Bad idea there.
The prose is horribly dry. It's written for children - not young adults - children. The spirit of the books is laid out plain as day and easy to see, because the audience is children. To get the same feeling into a movie, all they'd have to do is not change it very much.
Of course, it won't actually be the same as the spirit of the words in your memory or in mine. It'll be what was actually there, which, unfortunately, is much less grand.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
What creeps me isn't that it's Christian propaganda. What creeps me is that it's inaccurate Christian propaganda.
Lewis is quite clear that Aslan the Lion is Christ in another form - at one point Aslan tells the children that they have been allowed to know him in Narnia so that they will know him in their own world.
But Aslan isn't the Christ of Lewis's church (the Church of England); it's his own creation, meting out punishment on whoever Lewis doesn't like. Look at the way the books pour out contempt on Eustace because he's a pacifist, contrasting him with Reepicheep the swashbuckling mouse, who takes insult at every little thing and, well, "lives by the sword." Somewhat the opposite of what Jesus taught, as I recall. Aslan hasn't come to offer everyone in Narnia hope if they'll accept it. He's come to reward the people Lewis likes and punish the people he doesn't.
I don't want to get into the NT's views of women, but Lewis is worse - Aslan is killed by a woman; one girl is literally damned - excluded from heaven - because her teenaged interest in "nylons and boys" has somehow caused her to forget her time in Narnia; a classroom of "dumpy, prim little girls with fat legs" is unworthy of Aslan's company.
From a theological standpoint, perhaps the most egregious scene is the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where Aslan gives the boys swords (and has the girl cut a switch) to beat up their schoolmates. John Goldthwaite wrote of this sequence "I cannot imagine a betrayal of one's faith more complete than this last picture of Christ at the playground, putting weapons into the hands of children."
(For a more complete treatment of this subject, I recommend Goldthwaite's The Natural History of Make-Believe.)
Disney had no problem distributing The Incredibles, which does not play as a Saturday morning cartoon.
Lewis wrote space sci-fi as well, try reading Out of the Silent Planet and the rest of that trilogy.
Doesn't that make him a nerdy author ?
Yes, there is a quite lot of theology and Christian symbolism in the Narnia books. Aslan=Christ, etc. I don't have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is the attitude toward women in these books. Read them carefully and you will see that the female characters divide into 3 types: physically immature girls who are generally regarded as good, adult women who are all evil witches, and adult women who are either dead or bed-ridden with illness, i.e, powerless. You will not find a single healthy adult women in charge of her own destiny regarded as good. When Susan matured and stop being a girl and became interested, in the words of the book, "stockings and parties", i.e., sex, she stopped believing in Narnia. Therefore, in the mythology of the books, she is denied the kingdom of heaven. That's a pretty big penalty just for getting interested in boys! As I child I enjoyed the books, but now I find them reprehensible in their treatment of women.
Judaism is not a proselytizing religion and never has been.
That's not true. Judaism used to be a proselytizing religion. By some estimates, up to 10% of the Roman Empire was Jewish and much of that through conversion.
Judaism stopped being a proselytizing religion after Christianity begin.
Not exactly. Christians believe that Jesus came to free us from the legalism of the Torah; no more sacrifices, no more strict adherence to Levitical dietary laws, etc. Messianic Judaism (which is what you're describing, I believe) is Judaism that believes that Jesus was the Messiah prophesised in the Hebrew Scriptures. Obviously there's still no more sacrifice (as the temple's the only place where it can happen, and the temple hasn't been in Jerusalem for two thousand years), but Messianic Judaism and Christianity are still two different... sects? Religions?
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
A popular modern fantasy series primarily directed at children but with appeal for adults as well is Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials.
Surprisingly negative portrayal of organised religion, especially Catholisism, in the third book, and I say this despite being an atheist. Still, a breath of fresh air from the religious stuff in Lewis work.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
No, no, no, the Chronicles are not allegory! Aslan is not a symbol of Christ, he is the "literal" (from Lewis' perspective) Christ fictionally incarnated in an other world! The end of the 7th book of the series makes this perfectly clear. To believe these books are allegory is to be completely ignorant of the yawning gulf between allegory and imaginative fiction. (Lewis wrote one explicit allegory, "The Pilgrim's Regress". Compare it to the chronicles...!) The Narnia books speculate what other worlds might be like, and what the (presupposed) "Christian realities" might look like there. This is often overlooked by those of other faiths--one must remember that to Lewis the Christian realities are taken for granted in the same way that the rest of us take the existence of gravity. I don't hear anyone asking what the gravity of Narnia "symbolizes"! It's just gravity, same as in "our" world. So for all the elements in the Chronicles: e.g., the death and resurrection of Aslan does not symbolize the death and resurrection of Christ, it is the death and resurrection of Christ as it would inevitably appear in "Narnia". It is, from Lewis' perspective, "realistic fantasy fiction", not allegory. For Lewis, the realistic elements include the children, England, Christ, Creation, Incarnation, Resurrection, etc. The fantasy elements include talking animals, magic, dragons, werewolves, dwarfs, etc. There are no author-intended allegorical elements! Lewis believes he has some notion of what this fellow Jesus (whom he believes in explicitly) is like, based on his acceptance of early Christian history and personal "spiritual" experience, and fantasizes his incarnation in a world of talking animals--using as his model Christ's "actual" (from the author's perspective) incarnation in a world of men. When analyzing any piece of writing, determine first the author's intent! Note I say "determine", not "speculate as to". The man wrote dozens of books and scores of essays and articles; his beliefs and intentions (whatever one's own) are no mystery to those who care to do their homework. For Lewis, the Christian elements are just elements of reality, inevitably part of any and all human stories, and no more extraneous to any fictional setting than space and time themselves.
The Crusades were a defense of territory historically owned by the Roman Empire peacefully for over a thousand years against its invasion and subjugation by Islamic hordes conquering and plundering their way out of Arabia.
If you think that an empire defending its territory against invasion is "brought about by christianity" ... you need to learn a little more history there, friend.
Oh my, oh my! For someone to write such historically inaccurate stuff is one thing, and for it to get +5 Insightful is totally another. I was going to waste a mod point on this at first, but thought that this better gets a proper response.
You really need to read more history, and not just watch a movie.
First the Roman Empire as you refer to it had ceased to exist before Islam existed. The successive Barbarian invasions, and many other factors caused the Roman Empire to disintegrate. Nor was the Roman occupation of the lands in The Levant ever peaceful. Go and read about the successive revolts by the Jews against Rome from the time of Jesus, to the siege of Masada, to the destruction of the temple by Titus in 70 C.E. Rome as colonial and as imperialistic as any empire, old or new. So much for the "peacefully" part of your claim.
Second, the Roman Empire did not "own" the areas there. They encroached on territory that was owned by others successively (Jebusite, Canaanites, Philistines, Hebrews, Seleucids).
Read Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire sometime. It is available for free on the net in several places.
You could not be talking about Byzantium, because the Crusades originated in the Western half of what used to be the Roman Empire, and not in Byzantium. Even if you are, they were as much hated in the area as the original Romans. The Egyptians hated them so much that they helped the Arab armies against the Byzantines. Jerusalem hand over was done by the Patriarch/Bishop to Omar, the Muslim Caliph, without much of a skirmish.
Did you ever ask why it took the European Christians four centuries before they remembered to take Jerusalem back?
Did you read about Pope Urban II Council of Clairmont in 1095, and how his fiery sermons played among the nobles and lay people alike? Did you know that he asked the Christians of the time to turn the swords against Muslims, instead of their infighting? Did you know he mentioned "land flowing with milk and honey"? Did you know that a common sentiment at the time was that the recapture of Jerusalem (1099) was necessary for Christ's second coming? (Sounds familiar today with Left Behind series, and other Christian Zionist movements?). Initially, his sermon was about helping fellow Christians (Constantinople) against the Turks. Over the years, his message was morphed by chronicles, after hindsight, to recapturing Jerusalem as a religious duty.
There is no doubt that the Crusades were fuelled by Christian sentiment to a large extent, and that they were spearheaded by the church authorities at the time.
There is also no doubt that the Crusaders . Read how Christian chronicles glorified the massacre of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and relished the bloodshed, even after people took sanctuaries in synagogues and mosques. Read about it on Halsall's collection of Medieval sources at Fordham.
I don't know if your view is colored by the Kingdom of Heaven movie by Ridley Scott or what. I haven't seen the movie yet, and I have an upcoming article on the Crusades in the works. Perhaps I will see the movie sooner now.
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