A really good movie...

...is one of the highest forms of art, for me.

The Sea Inside – just saw this on DVD. Awesome movie. I cried, and I don’t usually.

Beowulf - I read something about “The new Angelina Jolie movie” yesterday. As though a movie is nothing but a celebrity limo. The fact that Neil Gaiman has been working on this project for ages now is not newsworthy enough I guess. Anyhow, the “new Angelina Jolie movie” is actually a long standing project called Beowulf, and is based on the Anglo Saxon epic poem of the same name. Hero Beowulf fights evil Grendel “descendant of Cain”, and Grendel’s mother, and dragons and things: “...Thus these warriors lived in joy, blessed, until one began to do evil deeds, a hellish enemy. The grim spirit was called Grendel, known as a rover of the borders, one who held the moors, fen and fastness...” It should be a dark and thunderous adventure and I’m looking forward to it.
They are also going to do a movie of Neil’s astonishing novel, Stardust. You should rush out now and get a copy of this book, it’s not like anything you’ve read before and yet you will recognise it all. He is doing the screenplay himself, so it will translate into celluloid beautifully I think.


Rant…

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe -

Don’t read this rant if you don’t know the books and you want to go see the movie and enjoy it for what it’s worth.

I was afraid to go and see this movie. I lived in these stories as a kid, wore them like coats, and tried often to go through my own wardrobe. They were my best friends and gave me courage.
Maybe it had something to do with the 20 minutes worth of ads I had to watch beforehand (Hey! I am paying for this ticket and this stale popcorn and this flat cola and these buzzing speakers! You should be paying ME to watch these ads!), but I was right to be afraid. While the movie looks nice enough on the surface, some of the CG animals, like the fox and the wolves, (and yes, even the lion that they’ve been bragging about so much) fall seriously short. You just can’t really believe in them. And surely there’s a better way to make animals talk? Like maybe let them think aloud or something? Busting guts and harddrive space to make them photo-real and then giving them human mouth movements and facial expressions is just silly. It’s not bending the truth, it’s breaking it clean in two. The faun/satyr/phoenix/mermaid thing works well with CG because you’re not trying to fool yourself about them being real to start with.
With Jadis, I got the feeling that they were onto something, but then they got lazy. She’s cruel and cold and selfish, sure, but not enough. The mere sight of her should stab your heart with a steely icicle, you should tremble at the very thought of her. This does not happen in the movie and her sleigh makes far too much noise. She should be snake-like. She isn’t.
Peter is smarmy. Susan is an afterthought. Aslan… what can I say. You don’t actually end up understanding what all the fuss is about, they don’t explain: What’s so special about this Narnia place anyway? Why is this lion so beloved? Why are they all so keen on fighting this battle? So what if he dies? At one point, he’s supposed to be about to roar a roar that will shake the foundations of Narnia and fundamentally alter all who hear it, it must put courage in some hearts and fear in others. Cover your ears, he says. He roars. Rrooaarr. So?
And then, they’ve censored it silly. Come now. Not one drop of blood. I had to censor it myself when I read it to my kids when they were very small, and they went on to read it for themselves a little later, in full. But telling it this sweetly to a generation of wiseass kids who are playing Doom and Quake and even Vice City (yes, they are. 10 year old kids are playing this. If you’re a parent and you don’t know this then you need to catch a wake up), and who have unrestricted access to adult material of all kinds via their cellphones… that’s just stupid. Does Disney think it’s going to undo decades of gratuity now, by telling only half of a really good story? Now that Disney owns Narnia… oh god. I have a headache.

Well anyway. Lucy and Mr Tumnus are great in the movie. But then, they are not complex characters. So this ends up being just another kids holiday movie, unexceptional. Which is nothing short of a travesty. I wonder how it will go with the rest of the Narnia stories, should they decide to go on with it? There is enough material for another ten years worth of spin-off figurines.