Douglas Adams, Narnia, and Trailers 380
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.
Excercised options... (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course that doesn't mean it will get any further than the film on Doom did.
Sam
Re:Squeezing (Score:5, Insightful)
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
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Score:3, Insightful)
But anyway, it's sort of a shame to see the best literatre of my youth ("'The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe', 'Lord of the Rings', etcetera) turned into Hollywood extraveganzas. Where's the imagination? The visualization of the scenes and characters was, for me, the whole joy in those works? Perhaps it's just a sign of our times, that an active imagination is now considered to be a Bad Thing.
Admittedly, a fantastic job has been done with LotR, so I'll keep my fingers crossed.
Narnia (Score:5, Insightful)
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
And what the hell is wrong with
(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
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!
Adams (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:How to Make a Trailer: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a common tactic
Re:Narnia (Score:3, Insightful)
Do they use Greek Mythology as part of school work or assignments? If so, I smell a double standard that may need exploration.
Re:Narnia Movie (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Narnia (Score:2, Insightful)
Lewis was in many reagrds a fine writer, but he was also a deeply fucked up guy with serious problems vis-a-vis women. He was a strong opponent of tertiary education for women (unlike his friend Tolkien), amongst other things.
Don't watch The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe! (Score:3, Insightful)
If, like I did, you remember the Narnia books as being one of the high points of your childhood, for pity's sake leave it like that. Returning to the material as an adult reveals them to be the most hopelessly inept and clumsy stream of the most sickly Christian propaganda ever written. ONLY children could read this stuff without feeling nauseous.
Leave the memory intact is my advice.
TWW
Re:Narnia Movie (drifting slightly OT) (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think so. Just because arguements are lousy doesn't mean their conclusions are wrong, and just because I think his apologism is lousy doesn't mean I think all of his conclusions are wrong.
From all available historical accounts, Jesus was respected as a teacher and perhaps even a prophet, even by those who were not his followers. (Both Jewish and Islamic tradition regard him as a very noteworthy ethicist, etc.)
Not sure if you mean this to be your arguement or Lewis', but it is highly misleading. Not all historians agree on this, and certainly not all Jews (and some Muslims, though Jesus IS religiously validated in their tradition). In a way, Lewis is trying to refute exactly these people: that respect Jesus but don't think he's God. But Lewis entirely ignores that many of these people have much more complex reasoning than simply praising Jesus as a great ethical teacher: many, like Jefferson, did so only after rejecting certain aspects of Jesus' claimed teaching and acts that they DID find to be immoral and nutty. In addition, almost none of Christ's ethical teachings are original to him. Indeed, the one major contribution he made has: eternal suffering for unbelief: precisely the teaching that many people who like his other teachings, consider a moral abomination.
Yet, he claimed to be God. Not just "a god," which would not be all that noteworthy. He went into a Monothiestic culture and claimed to be the One-And-Only divine being.
First of all, this is not as obvious as Lewis claims it is. Jesus' claims about his own divnity are controversial, not straightforward, Lewis' reading is hardly the plain or only one.
Now, when somebody makes a remarkable claim like this, there are really only three possible conclusions you can draw:
This set of carefully constrained options is begins the very weak line of argumentation. It's also possible, for instance that he was misquoted, or that he was misunderstood, possibly by later followers who needed to create a new theology about him and his life to rescue his teachings after his death.
Lewis pointed out that anybody who actually believes himself to be God, and isn't, is a complete nut.
Except this relies upon, yet again, a very closeminded concept of sanity. It's perfectly possible that a person could have some brilliant beliefs, and some delusional ones. It's perfectly possible that their views develop over time.
When we examine the record of Christ's words, deeds, and how people and society reacted to him, it looks like the chance of him being a nut can probably be ruled out.
Why? Many people in the Gospels clearly thought he was a nut, and there is plenty of behavior that would most certainly be nutty IF he wasn't in fact god, which would assume Lewis conclusion. The NT gives these interpretation into his actions: but that simply begs the question we are supposed to be considering (for instance, the killing of the barren fig tree, which is certainly loony unless you first assume that its a metaphor for Israel).
The liar arguement works the same way: by pleading ignorance as to why and how someone could possibly do that. And the plain of the matter is that MANY people, even in Christ's time, did that. In fact, the lord/liar/lunatic arguement could be used by anyone to argue that countless other professed gods were real gods, or indeed that countless non-Christian religious phophets were real phrophets.
So, that's the gauntlet that Lewis threw down: Jesus is either Lord, lunatic, or liar.
But the guantlet is a tricked out situation. Most real people, even the greatest, are a mix of lunacy, lying, and powerful insights. Lewis' arguement requires that we forget that, not to mention the usual ignoring of the possibility that Jesus's followers developed their theology of his teachings over time. But regardless of ones opinion on this, the fact that Lewis ignores this possibility invalidates the force of his deductive arguement, even if we grant the fantasy view of human psychology that he thinks rules out the liar/lunatic arguement.
Re:Narnia (Score:3, Insightful)
The funny thing is, when I first read this post, for a second I was vaguely ticked off that someone might ban a book based on its simple religious allusions, but then a little voice in the back of my head said "yeah, right. Nobody banned any 'Chronicles of Narnia.'"
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
A few seconds later, and it turns out that little voice was correct. "Banned" in this case is being incorrectly used to mean "not included in the curriculum." Big deal. Lots of books weren't included in the curriculum. Those crazy liberals! They ban books but forget to like, try to stop anyone from reading them.
People must be reminded that it IS possible to get through schooling without punching and fucking your way from one class to the next
I hate people like this cause they talk about high school like it's one long orgy of drug use, oral sex, compulsory homosexuality, and secular indoctrination. If that's the case, then WHY DIDN'T I GET ANY?
Re:Narnia Movie (drifting slightly OT) (Score:3, Insightful)
Lewis pointed out that anybody who actually believes himself to be God, and isn't, is a complete nut. Charles Manson, for example, is one such complete nut. When we examine the record of Christ's words, deeds, and how people and society reacted to him, it looks like the chance of him being a nut can probably be ruled out.
The problem here is that neither Lewis nor anyone else knows the odds that someone who claims to be God is a complete lunatic. I happen to know several people like this (they all accept the premise that Man is God, and they appear, at least to me, to be sane and honest). Implicit in Lewis's argument is the fourth case where Jesus claims to be God, is wrong, and is not a lunatic -- either because he's actually mistaken, or because he's speaking metaphorically. If I had to weigh these four options against each other, then the mostly-sane-but-wrong option strikes me as the most likely.
Lewis does some impressive hand-waving to try to make us believe the false dillema that he's created, but it's still a false dillema.