The Chronicles of Narnia

Amidst my ranting in an earlier entry, I forgot to mention which movie I ultimately saw---it was The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, which I'll now discuss in this entry.

The movie was good but not great. The fantasy creatures and talking animals were cool and well-done (and I have an inclination to like such things anyway), and many of the landscapes were gorgeous. The tale was a bit heavy-handed in its message, as expected from the book, but Disney's touch seems to have lightened that at least a bit. (They turned The Hunchback of Notre Dame into a tale with a happy ending, so I think they can lighten anything.) I was originally going to see it on a day other than Christmas because of the potential heavy-handedness for which I am never in the mood on that day, but I figured the fact that Disney was involved would help in this respect. I decided that I would just put everything into a D & D context and consider those analogs---the Lion had a contingency spell precast, and Father Christmas gave Lucy (the young girl) a damn fine cure light wounds potion (each drop of which was actually like one potion!), etc. Maybe it was really cure serious wounds or something, but there were a lot of doses in that flask!

Lucy comes across as the wisest of the characters (by far), and I am told that is the way it was in the book. (I only read the book as a child, and right now I am thinking that I might have only read part of it rather than the whole thing. It's possible I knew the basics of the rest of the story because of somebody else's book report or something. I don't remember anymore.) All the older kids have issues of some sort, and the saying about the wisdom of youth is around for a reason. I certainly appreciate the relative lack of pretense in most youngsters even as they annoy me tremendously in other respects.

Tilda Swinton was well-cast as the White Witch. In general, I think she's very good at playing creepy characters (see Gabriel in Constantine), and perhaps it's partly because she typically comes across as vaguely adrogynous. (She did a very good job in Thumbsucker, by the way.) In taking a look at her IMDB bio, it also seems that she has a long history of playing such roles on screen.