I’ve contributed a blurb on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to the Matthews House Project:

Like a zombie version of the classic children’s tale, Andrew Adamson’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe goes through the motions of C.S. Lewis’s story but drains it of its spirit. A few moments work fairly well (Lucy’s first meeting with Mr Tumnus among them), but the characterization of Aslan and the White Witch is all wrong, and at times conveys an impression exactly opposite to what Lewis intended (here, instead of Good being superior to Evil and fully in control, it is on equal footing and, at times, even a tad inferior; notice how it is Aslan, and not the Witch, who loses his temper at their first meeting). These thematic problems are aggravated, on a cinematic level, by Shrek veteran Adamson’s fitful efforts to make the transition from animation to live-action; at times it seems he is awkwardly imitating Jackson, Spielberg and other filmmakers rather than bringing his own vision to the table.

With any luck, this will be the last thing I say about this film for a while — there are lots of other items on my plate right now.

Time for another few newsbite quickies.

1. The Chronicles of Narnia grossed $67.1 million in its opening weekend, according to studio estimates. This is the 2nd-biggest December opening, after 2003’s The Return of the King; the 3rd-biggest opening of 2005, after Star Wars III and Harry Potter IV; and the 23rd-biggest opening weekend of all time.

2. Jeffrey Wells reports that Jesus might make an appearance in Oliver Stone’s movie about September 11:

Andrea Berloff’s script is about the true story of two Port Authority cops, John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and William J. Jimeno (Michael Pena), who were buried under the rubble of the fallen World Trade Center towers on 9.11. It’s been reported that the ex-Marine who drove down to the WTC site from Connecticut and wound up digging the cops out and saving their lives (In The Bedroom‘s William Maptoher is portraying him in the film) was a born-again Christian who he believed he was doing the bidding of a higher celestial power in performing his rescue. But what hasn’t been reported is that a late ’04 draft of Berfloff’s script has a scene in which Jesus Christ appears in a hallucination that Jimeno “sees” as he’s slipping in and out of consciousness due to a lack of water, and Christ offers water to him. This scene could easily have been tossed or not filmed, but if it stays and makes the final cut, Paramount Pictures, distributors of the Stone film, will obviously have marketing hook to try and attract the crowd that supported The Passion of the Christ and are soon expected to turn out big-time for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

3. The Times reports that Disney is replacing Christopher Robin with a “tomboyish girl” in the new animated series My Friends Tigger and Pooh.

4. FilmStew.com reports that Sean Connery, 75, is “tackling a lifetime first” by lending his voice to an animated short film, Sir Billi the Vet, for his “first-ever voice-over role”. It seems to me, though, that Connery didn’t lend more than his voice to the fantasy film Dragonheart (1996).

5. The Hollywood Reporter says Scarlett Johansson has joined Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Michael Caine and David Bowie in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige. She will play “a magician’s assistant named Olivia who is sent to spy on the competition.”

My review of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is now up at CanadianChristianity.com. Shorter versions of this review will appear in the print editions of ChristianWeek, ChristianCurrent and BC Christian News.

I’m feeling like a real contrarian right now. I am honestly stunned by the gushing praise this film is receiving, and from such unlikely quarters — five out of five from The Guardian, four out of four from The Globe and Mail, etc. I can think of many films superior to this one — I am listening to the score for one as I type — and surely some room ought to be left on the rating scale for them.

UPDATE: Click here for a debate between me, Jeffrey Overstreet, Steven D. Greydanus and Barbara Nicolosi on the merits of this film viz a viz Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.

DEC 10 UPDATE: Link to ChristianWeek review added above.

JAN 2 UPDATE: Link to BC Christian News review added above.

Just a few quick thoughts about the marketing of the new Narnia movie.

1. I saw an ad in the newspaper yesterday, letting people know that they can buy advance tickets to The Chronicles of Narnia and King Kong, both of which open in the next ten days. The ad had a picture of Aslan, the lion, next to a picture of Kong, the gorilla. And I suddenly realized that, just as The Lord of the Rings invited comedians and TV shows like Saturday Night Live to make all sorts of jokes and pop-culture references about Gollum and Frodo and Gandalf and so on, so too we might end up seeing, e.g., skits and editorial cartoons in which Aslan and Kong duke it out for box-office supremacy. And I wondered if Christians were ready to see Aslan become just another pop-culture figure. And, assuming some of them aren’t, I wondered if there might be something almost idolatrous — Aslanolatrous? — about this. Just a thought.

2. Last night, I went to the local Chapters and discovered that a whole slew of movie tie-in books have already been released — including a children’s novelization of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe which includes descriptions of scenes from the film that are not in C.S. Lewis’s original book. As my friend and colleague Steven D. Greydanus has pointed out, it kind of makes you wonder why there has been so much talk about the movie being so “faithful” to Lewis’s book; and it also makes you wonder why Walden Media, a firm that specializes in films based on books with “educational” value, is authorizing dumbed-down versions of Lewis’s original story that will essentially be competing with it for the book-buyer’s dollars. I mean, really, did anyone publish novelizations of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movies?

3. I’m still getting used to the fact that the first song that plays over the closing credits is sung by Alanis Morissette.

DEC 5 UPDATE: Re: my second point, Jeffrey Overstreet sums it up well: “It’s faithful to the book. But we’ve published our own alternative version of the novel, to reflect all of our changes.”

I don’t know how legitimate this “previously unpublished letter” is, but the website nthposition has posted this item, purportedly written by C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia:

The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
18 Dec. 1959

Dear Sieveking

(Why do you ‘Dr’ me? Had we not dropped the honorifics?) As things worked out, I wasn’t free to hear a single instalment of our serial [The Magician’s Nephew] except the first. What I did hear, I approved. I shd. be glad for the series to be given abroad. But I am absolutely opposed – adamant isn’t in it! – to a TV version. Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare. At least, with photography. Cartoons (if only Disney did not combine so much vulgarity with his genius!) wld. be another matter. A human, pantomime, Aslan wld. be to me blasphemy.

All the best,
yours
C. S. Lewis

Having recently reviewed two versions of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — the 1979 cartoon version and the 1988 live-action version — I can agree with Lewis. Cartoons, like plays and radio and books, allow for the engagement of the imagination, whereas audiences always approach films looking for “realism” — and certainly in Lewis’s day, there was no way to create a realistic portrayal of Aslan. Even in the 1988 version, Aslan might not be a human in a costume, but he still comes across like an oversized doll. So, as far as I’m concerned, the cartoon, as over-the-top and panto-like as it is, is infinitely preferable to the BBC version.

The interesting thing about the new film, of course, is that it is produced with computer-generated images — that is, the Aslan of this film is a cartoon, but a photorealistic cartoon! So, Lewis’s concerns might not apply to the new film.