Chronicles of Narnia Movie Tones

Hey y'all. I really need to work hard on posting more. I'll try to do a bit more. My boyfriend's back from his trip, so I'm hanging out with him more.  Naturally.  For now, a rant. Yay for ranting!

Okay, so, I'm hear to talk about the Chronicles of Narnia movies. At this point, I have seen the first two, and I haven't seen the third. It hasn't been long since it came out, so yeah. I'm sure I'll see it at some point, more than likely on my parents' Netflix account. Bad movies tend to come out on there faster than good ones. Yep, I'm already calling it a bad movie. I've seen the trailer. You don't always need to see a thing to know how bad it is. Sometimes it's just incredibly obvious.

So the first movie, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (or LWW as I will now refer to it) was actually pretty good. I liked it fine. I had some problems with it, namely the presense of the centaurs -- for the love of God make them do something other than stand there like melodramatic statues! The battle scene was too melodramatic as well, and I didn't like the battle involvement of Susan.

Susan in the books was more of a girly-girl, and to make her more tough is cheap and too Hollywood. There are some women in the world that care more about makeup than shooting arrows, y'all. Reality is far more entertaining than feminism. Besides, you've got Lucy, who was plenty tougher than Susan, to go be the woman hero archetype. Sheesh, if you portray women with having one dang flaw then you must be a sexist. Yeah.

Anyway, the movie was actually pretty good. It was entertaining, had a pretty good script, and Tilda Swinton was a great villain. Aslan was digitized well and had a great voice actor. The kids did good, other than Susan being whiny -- though you might blame that one on the scriptwriters. I'm not sure I really liked the waterfall scene, but Hollywood had to have its thing, I guess.

Warning, I'm going to be putting plot spoilers in this rant from now on. But I mean, these books have been around like sixty years, so you're not missing much. Go read the books. They're awesome.

In any case, I was all set up to go see Prince Caspian. Now, as a kid, this book was my least favorite (other than The Last Battle, which I hated because it got rid of Narnia). I was sort of hoping to get through it and go on to better things, but the badness of this movie actually made me realize how good the book was. I mean...this movie was such a pile of drudge. It wasn't entertaining at all, other than a few moments thanks to Reepicheep. It was just a bunch of actors going around and doing really stiff impersonations of characters.

Quick plot summary: in Prince Caspian, the young prince Caspian is raised by his uncle, King Miraz, who, unbeknownst to the boy, has murdered his father and stolen the throne. Caspian always loved stories of the older days of Narnia with talking animals and dwarves and the like, but everyone except his half-dwarven tutor tells him that these things are all nonsense. On the day that Miraz's own son is born, Caspian runs away and must gather the old Narnians to go and fight against Miraz and retake the throne. He is helped by Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy, the four heros from the LWW.

Let's get more specific about the problems of this movie. For example, in the movie they get really political. There's so much emphasis on the dull, political nonsense going on with the usurper Miraz that it really detracts from the feel of the original story. Since there's very little real political discourse going on in the book, then all of the political stuff has to be grafted into the movie, something that really can't be done without a properly skilled writer that follows along with politics. Yeah...that wasn't the case here.

A risky choice was to make Caspian and the Telmarines (the race of humans who entered Narnia and took it over), of more or less Spanish nationality. This possibly could have worked out, if the plot were better. My personal objection to this was the rather stuffy portrayal of the Telmarines in the book, making them not look like lively Spanish people. Or maybe the whole "lively" Spanish thing is a stereotype. In any case, the pretentious, dull, and unimaginativeness of the Telmarines as portrayed in the book doesn't really seem to fit with Spanish people, who seem far less uncreative by comparison.  They fight bulls for fun.  Stuffy people wouldn't do that.

Also, when you think of Spanish people, you automatically think of brilliant colors and flamboyant style choices. Why then do the movie's Spanish-based Telmarines dress only in black? This is not only weird, it's downright lazy. All peoples have a culture, and by throwing them all in generic costumes you really detract from the reality of the movie. Come on, if you've got millions of dollars, can't you afford to at least let them wear a few brighter colors? Something that says more than "I'm a random peasant"? The Telmarine soldiers did have awesome helmets though.

I like to think that the Telmarines were based off of a real people group, but that's neither here nor there for the moment.

Friggin' melodramatic centaurs!!!! I swear, Dawn Treader better not have any dang centaurs in it.....

In Prince Caspian, it seemed like nobody could really act. Things happened in sequence....and yeah. I'm really disappointed with Trumpkin the dwarf. He was really lively and fun in the books, and in the movie he was dull, sour, and barely relevant. Caspian was an emo kid, Peter seemed to have made no growth in maturity since the first movie (since it's beginning, no less), Aslan was being a weirdo and not really doing much, and overall there seemed to be no real love for the characters, excepting possibly Reepicheep.

The worst part of the movie for me was this one quote by Aslan to Lucy, something like "if you were any braver, you'd be a lioness". In the book, it was "you are a lioness". This is essentially the symbolism for the movie vs the book: the movie was nerfed, weakened, and expected to just be normal Hollywood schlock. I'm now going to call this "Star Wars Prequel Disorder". The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, and one of those evils is stupid movies.

I was hoping that with the change of studios going on for the production of the next movie, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, would result in a better movie. Nope! No need to see the movie: it's Hollywood schlock. Telling the future isn't that hard, not when it basically tells itself. You don't need to touch the stove to know it'll burn ya.

First of all, they have Tilda Swinton coming back as the White Witch. What the crap is this crap? I mean, it did make some logical sense to give her a cameo in Prince Caspian, despite that being not the greatest scene in the world. Is it because she was the only decent villain this movie series had that they have to keep bringing her back?

I heard that they added some crap about finding these seven swords to go defeat some smoke monster. Why in the world was this plotline added? Just in case you were wondering, this has nothing to do with the book. I mean, at one point they go to this dark island, and I guess that's sort of smokish, but that was more of a phenomenon than a malevolent force or person.

What the real plot was, Caspian was going on a voyage to seek out what happened to seven good Telmarine lords that had left Narnia when Miraz stole the throne. Lucy, Edmund, and their selfish cousin Eustace all appear in Narnia and join in on the voyage. The story goes along several different islands, the adventure of each is different and unique as they discover each lord or what happened to him. This trip takes them to the ends of Narnia, which isn't a round world but a flat one.

The wrongest part of this movie was basically the same thing with Prince Caspian: the movie makers tried way too hard to make the movie an "epic adventure" and "thrilling ride". The trouble with this notion is not every movie is supposed to be an epic. This is especially true of the Chronicles of Narnia stories, as each book is different in tone from the next. Voyage of the Dawn Treader isn't about driving plot, rushing forward to a wild conclusion. It's a dwelling plot, where you learn about interesting phenomenon and peoples all while trying to survive the latest threat to the ship. You're supposed to enjoy each island almost as a separate tale, having fun with characters that were established in the first two books. You'll notice that the only major character in the Dawn Treader who wasn't established in a previous tale was Eustace.

To continue my point that each book has a different tone, I'll go over the others. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe was the closest thing to an epic adventure in the Chronicles series. You have new characters coming from the normal world into an unfamiliar and magnificent world where they have to go and save the day. Prince Caspian (the book) is the story of dullness and drudgery overcoming what was once a beautiful place, and good has to retake it again. Imagination and wildness are stifled under dull rule and tedium. Huh, maybe the movie version was more poignant than I thought.

Let's see, after Dawn Treader is The Silver Chair. That one has a special place in my heart. It's the story of Jill and Eustace, who go to Narnia in search of Caspian's lost son Rillian. They are joined by Puddleglum, the Marsh-Wiggle. The three go on an adventure that isn't an epic, but has a very tragic tone as they proceed to screw up just about every instruction Aslan gave them. They finally rescue Rillian, freeing a species of underground trolls from an evil witch as they do so, and Rillian is able to meet his aged father just before the older Caspian dies. The end of the book allows the now dead Caspian to become young again in Aslan's country, and Caspian actually gets to take a trip to England. It's a paralell to real life, trying to find your way and trust God when you make mistakes. Life isn't about getting every little thing right.

A Horse and His Boy, the story of a boy and a talking horse fleeing Calormen for Narnia. This story (based during the time when the four Pevensies were kings and queens of Narnia) really gives the reader a sense of adventure. Not grand, epic adventure, but camping out and surviving, then suriving in a large culture that is strange and does things differently than the reader expects. And then the boy's misadventures gain him information for saving Narnia, but only if he is quick enough. It's the sense of going through hard times and environs to complete a mission that no young man would ever expect to recieve.

The prequel in the series is the Magician's Nephew, a story a boy and the girl that is his neighbor, and they unwittingly find themselves the guinea pigs of the boy's uncle's magical/scientific experiment. In the midst of adventures they discover Narnia. This two is not an epic, not with the subplot of the boy trying to find a cure for his mother's sickness.

Actually, now that I'm going through all of these, none of them are really that epic. They're not about being epic. It's about the normal versus the weird, the boring versus the vividly wild, and oppression versus freedom. It's all about normal things in wonderful adventures, mixing things like children from Britain and practical preparations for what lies ahead with mystical creatures and magical villians. This is fantasy that doesn't hold back from frighting things, like death and cannabalism and creepy gravesites, but somehow none of this taints the sheer magic that is the Chronicles of Narnia. It's not some flight of fancy, it's a dang adventure in the truest sense of the word: hard, bad weather, figuring out how to save the day, and genuine companionship. It's like Tolkien said in The Hobbit. Adventures are more than maying in the sunshine.

I guess the only real "epic" of the bunch was The Last Battle, though you might have a different opinion on the matter. While the plot might have involved more dangerous things - necessary in an epic - the tragic tone of the story really destroys that grand feeling. As a kid, I was so mad when I heard that Narnia disappeared in the Last Battle. I wanted very much to go there myself. Lol, yeah, I was one of those kids.

Look, Hollywood, back off. Don't feel you have to make a movie gratuitiously glam or glitz, or all CGIed up. Two of my favorite movies that recently came out are Gran Torino and Book of Eli, movies that are far more about characters and story than camera angles or fancy bullcrap. Honestly, when you have a really good story, you don't need that much flair. Book of Eli, which I watched again last night with my boyfriend, had a great story and an ending you didn't see coming. It didn't have an overly complex story, a lot of main characters, or a great big wad of computer generated images. It was fancy with the camera, if you like that kind of thing, but that just goes to show that the movie works to show off the characters, not to show off bullcrap stunts and obviously faked violence.

The closer your movie is to reality, even if it's a fantasy, the better your movie is. If you don't have realistic creatures, make them behave realistically. If you have a weird world, make sure that your audience feels that this world could exist, at least in some alternate universe. Reality makes the fantasy more intensifying. When you make big CG dragons and sea serpents, it really cheapens the feel. I dunno, I guess some people like it.

Anyway, that's my rant.  I dunno, I heard the Dawn Treader movie was better than Prince Caspian.  I sure hope so.  I'll be seeing either that or Tron tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes.

Reviews -- Blind Run, The Dark Tower

I have been on a quest of late to find books that are both modern and good. As you might imagine from reading that, it is indeed a quest: most of the things I have found thus far in the library have been inane, terribly written, or simply unfinishable by the grounds that the protagonist sounded like a self-centered jerk - and not the kind that's fun to read about. In my youth I had to finish a story because I wanted to know what happened. Fortunately I have learned to save myself from that notion.

One of the miserable books I have read recently, which had a very pretentious title I know longer care to remember, told the story of a man who was rich and known by millions, having a very popular variety show in a futuristic world. However, due to some interaction with a weird alien critter he suddenly wakes up in a nasty hotel and nobody remembers who he is, even the people he's known a long time.

Doesn't this sound like a good set up? However, the book failed by two different ways. First of all, you expect to read about how the guy tries to reclaim his life all while going on an adventure the likes of which we would have trouble imagining. Yet this is not the case. Several of the earlier chapters are bogged down by him interacting with an insane woman who is faking his identification, and she wants him to sleep with her or else she'll turn him into the police. The main character has several boring conversations with her, and they go on an inane outing to a restaurant of no plot-importance. Getting past that, the man finally leaves the first town he encounters as a stranger, only to go to a married woman, sleep with her, and then proceed to have a stupid and irrelevant conversation with her on the nature of love. Very little of the narrative doesn't have to do with sex, and every initial observation of the main character on a woman was based on her sexiness, not on her character. I don't care how "realistic" that is -- it's downright boring, sexist, and irrelevant. Thing is, there is nothing about sex that can't be discovered by anyone. It's normal. The plotline of losing your identity is not normal, and that is what the plot gains interest from. By ignoring this part of the plot for sex you're shooting your own story in the foot.

Secondly, at no point does the author do any worldbuilding. At least not in the first ten or so chapters that I read (I wasn't going to finish this trash). Worldbuilding is the creation of a place in which the story happens, and it comes with certain rules and a level of technological ability. I will go into this topic more later, but suffice it to say that every story has a setting. This story was set in the future, with futuristic television, vehicles, and a weird sub-plot where people were trapped in some sort of "universities" and the main character was something called a "six". Again, this could have been a point of interest, where the author could describe to us what sort of future this is and why there is an inferior subset of people in the world that must be contained. He never does so. While holding back certain points of this world for intruigue would be fine, the author never tells us much about this future at all at the beginning. We must merely assume that it is futuristic while the main character does stupid things that don't matter. In fact, the future nature of the place serves to hamper the story, as identification is more important in that world than in this. In America, you can go a great distance without ID. You cannot do so in this world, and it only serves to limit the freedom, and thus the capability of adventure, for the main character.

But this blog should not linger so long on that story. It sucked, quite frankly, and I am confident in knowing that none of you will ever read that book. It is by no means popular. The library is increasingly pretentious these days, and if I lived closer to the downtown library then I think I would have access to better reading materials. What I want to discuss in this blog is two different stories. One is Blind Run by Patricia Lewin, and The Dark Tower by C.S. Lewis.
I should make no secret of it that I love older books, which you have likely already gathered. My parents in this respect are dinosaurs, having themselves loved and cherished old books themselves. I don't blame them. There is a depth and power in Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and the like that modernity has no comparison to. Stephanie Meyers? Pssshht. I really shouldn't despise her because she writes to a different audience than people like Lewis, but at the same time I feel no obligation to read anything she's written, my dislike of vampires aside.

On to the books! The first I read, Blind Run, is a successful book in one sense: it is the first book from the library I actually managed to finish without throwing it down in disgust. Other than that, it's simply okay. I found the narrative a bit pretentious, but that didn't hamper the book too much. The story follows the life of Ethan Decker, a man who worked for a secret government agency that made for anti-terrorism. At the outset, he had left the agency for three years because of the death of his son, and he wanted to stay away from his wife so that no one would go after her on his account. The story begins with him alone in the desert with no prospects. He lives there only because he feels he deserves it for not protecting his son. Shortly thereafter, another former agent shows up, leaving two strange children on his doorstep before driving off.

Not a bad premise, huh? Well, the book itself was fairly meh. It had characters with no particular depth, unoriginal plotlines, and the feel of a generic action movie. I will now spoil the book. The first chapter speaks of a man who works in a secret lab on an island and children are not supposed to escape. Bam! Immediately it springs into the reader's head that this island does experiments on children. While this is obvious to any reader over fifteen, the book treats it as if this is some sort of mystery plot, never revealing a deeper revelation about the importance of the children on the island. It does go on to say that later on the children were meant to be immune to all diseases, and at one page late in the story it mentions in passing that the children were meant to be an invincible army that would spread germs without getting sick as well. However, the fact that this is only mentioned on one page, and that nothing else in the story haunts the reader that this could possibly become reality, this idea becomes ho-hum. At no time are we actually afraid of the bad guys or think that they're going to do something lasting to the main character. Come on, can't the children be used for something original? Like discovering aliens or building sophisticated robots, or being supremely intelligent beings that overthrow the scientists that created them and take over the world and force everyone to listen to techno? Something I can't guess after reading only one chapter of the book?

So, throughout the course of the story, Ethan has to go and rescue his ex-wife Sydney, and once they meet up the plot is consumed with reminding the reader of their relationship, pretty much saying that they are going to get back together by the end of the book. And of course Sydney's erstwhile boyfriend turns out to be a baddie. Ho-hum. What irks me about it is that the couple talks amongst themselves, ignoring the two children they have with them just as the author does. We learn little about these childrens' nature or motivations. They are things not unlike characters, but they have otherwise little personality. Instead of demonstrating the grace of the younger one, a little girl, they merely say that she has a joyful nature and leave it at that. The older child, Danny, is allowed to show his intellegence, mostly in the form of rebelling, but otherwise he too has little depth.

The only character who we possibly could be frightened of is Marco Ramirez, the man that is believed through most of the book to be the one behind the death of Ethan's son. However, he is shown to lose his cleverness and get caught by Ethan, only to help him rescue the experimented on children and turn out to not be the killer. The true bad guys of the story are given little opportunity to gain the haunting fright that Marco's character sort of had in the beginning.
This story did a few things to annoy me. The first of which was the Anna Kelsley, the former agent who dumped the kids on Ethan in the first place. What authors do with tough women characters far too often is to just go on and on about how tough or smart they are, leaving any other aspects of their personality completely unexplored. I hate that. Also, it had Marco randomly saying things in spanish. You'll notice this in badly written stories, where a character says random foreign things for no reason, only serving to delay any real dialogue and make the person sound like a stereotype. Not unlike cartoons. There are other ways to make a person act ethnic, ones that make this person seem more real.

The thing that was the worst of all was when the ex-wife and children would continually rebel against Ethan's knowledge of how to evade or attack dangerous people. It's absolutely despicable when a military expert says for his wife or girlfriend to stay in a safe place while he goes into danger, and then the girlfriend acts stupid and says it's more important for her to be with him and completely disregard that a non-military person is more likely to get people killed than help. Even worse is when they make it so that the soldier or expert is helped by his rebellious girlfriend or annoying child because they refused to listen.

Listen. If you are in a place where someone has worked for a secret agency for six years, and they tell you to stay out of danger and not follow them, do what they say. You'll only put yourself and others in danger if you disobey. Also, Steve Harvey once mentioned in his book Think Like a Man, Act Like a Lady, that men will freak out if their loved one is in danger. Harvey was on a boating trip with his wife, and he decided that he was going to remain on board while she went scuba diving. In a moment of paranoia, Harvey had a panic attack and was afraid his wife wasn't going to make it back on the ship. He swore that if something happened to her then nobody was getting back to shore. Thing is, danger to loved ones makes men freak out and lose their rationality. If you as a girlfriend stay out of unnecessary danger (particularly if you know people could potentially shoot at you), it will be easier for the man to do what he needs to do in complex situations. It's a man thing.

Overall, the story spends too much time explaining the past without creating a deep and interesting present. The conclusion of the book is meh, with them all running away because the government is obviously too corrupt to listen to. I'm so bored of government conspiracy books! This one in particular doesn't even go into how the government is corrupt, it just merely says that it is and moves on. So this book isn't the worst thing I've ever read, but it lacks depth and originality. I could have written it in my sleep. You could have written it in your sleep. It's like a generic action movie, except that it can't really be because it has too much violence toward children.

The second book, The Dark Tower, is actually a few notes done by C.S. Lewis that he never published. There are a few reasons for this. One of them had to have been a passing interest in the nature of memory, and since this had apparently waned in Lewis over time, the story was never finished. It was meant to be a sequel to Out of the Silent Planet, the first of his space trilogy. The Dark Tower, while in and of itself interesting, is not a fitting sequel to this book, which Lewis must have realized at some point because he went on to write Perelandra as the sequel instead.

The Dark Tower starts out as a meeting between several professors at the college Lewis worked at. He himself is a character in this story, just as he played a minor role in the space trilogy. The other characters are Ransom (the protagonist of the space trilogy), MacPhee (who went on to have a significant role in the last of the space trilogy, That Hideous Strength), Scudamour, and Orfieu. Orfieu invited them to his study because of his studies in time travel. He has a very weird notion of why you can't travel in time, namely because years in the future your atoms would have become other things - you would have rotted into the soil to be nutrients for plants and things of that sort. He doesn't believe that you can simply take your present body with you because you cannot add matter to the universe or take it away. So you can't take the mass of your body from the present into the future.

Think of that what you will, because it's not too relevant to the story. Orfieu reveals to the others his "chronoscope" which allows one to see into the future or past. Since this is a new science, none of them know exactly where into it they are seeing. I'll go ahead and spoil the plot for you, since this book has no end. So they look into it, discussing their theories about what they see, when it turns out that the tower they are seeing is the tower of the college in their world. Also, there is a strange character in the strange realm they see that is basically a double of Scudamour -- only he has something like a bee's stinger on his forehead, which he uses to sting certain people in the spine and render them as happy dolls that obey his orders without question.

Things get even worse when one of the people sent in to get stung is a double of Scudamour's fiancee, and then the personalities of both Scudamours get switched, leaving a college professor as the dark leader of a bizarre race that must defend itself from the "white riders", whose true nature is never explained. The story is cut off when Professor Scudamour is in the library of stingerman Scudamour, trying to figure out what's going on.

I like this story very much. It's a bit tough to comprehend (or so it is while my foggy head is trying to recover from its sickness, at least) because of its deep thought and complex pseudo-science that it has to explain. But I love it. I want to read it and figure it out, enjoying every mystery I come across. Fake science has always intruiged me, as long as it deep and interesting, resulting in my former like of Star Trek and Dr. Who (I grow in dislike for the directions they both have taken of late, bad acting aside). Also, going to an alternate dimension that is as bizarre and evil as this one is ridiculously intruiguing. You really have to read it yourself.

Sadly, the lack of ending to this story depresses me, because it's very good and I want to know what happens. Also, it renders it pretty much uncomparable to Blind Run, as who knows what would have become of this book in the end? However, I do like it because you can't automatically guess what's going to happen from the first chapter. Also, it goes to show that the older realm of fiction has a greater tendency to expand the things it writes about. I have particularly disliked romances (not romance in a story, but genre romances) because they ignore everything else in the world besides romance, and if they wax philosophical, that philosophy is only relevant in the story itself, not in reality. It seems like everything these days is focused on romance or mindless action, neither of which appeals to my thirsty brain.

For example, The Dark Towers describes the alternate race as having an ignorance about things like outer space, and they think that the planet is flat. However, this race has a very advanced view of time. Time doesn't merely move forward and backwards, it moves "eckwards and andwards" -- more specifically, across. Imagine something that is woven or plaid. Actually plaid works best here. Okay, so look at the lines of the plaid that go left and right. Imagine this as time, past and present. Each line is a world with different science, different people, and the like. Then look at the vertical lines. These also are different worlds with different people, except that they cross into the worlds that are horizontal, leading in similarities. Like the two Scudamours for example. Lewis also describes in the book that the people in the alternate world have these myths called smoke horses, yet are revealed with more observation to be trains.

The only comparable thing I have read in a modern book is in Dean Koontz's Seize the Night, a book that explores not going backwards and forwards, but up or down in time. The difference between this and the dark tower is that the protagonist does not find an alternate world, but Hell itself. The Dark Tower talks of perpendicular lines (two more or less equal worlds that cross each other), while Seize the Night talks of paralell lines (two worlds that run alongside each other and are related to each other). My problem with Koontz's work is that his books seem all alike, in the sense that they all involve people that are demented in some way and the guy gets the girl in the end. Seize the Night is my favorite work of his because it is the most intruiging, and it revolves more or less around real people, not those that are insane. Real people that are demented to some extent will try to go up or down in time if they can (if such science existed in reality) to see what they can see, so I don't think the scientists involved crossed any bounds in that manner.

So, Blind Run? I'll rate it "very meh, but read it if you're bored". The Dark Tower I'll rate "Wonderful and will rescue you from memory loss as you age". Yeah, exercising your brain does keep you from losing your memory. All factors aside, the human brain could last up to three million years, if exercised, so don't let anyone tell you you're dumb because you're old.