I loved the Chronicles of Narnia movie. I even pointed out to my wife that the light pole came from [SPOILER REMOVED!!] when [EDITED FOR SPOILERS]. Anyway, Jay Pinkerton has a slightly different take on it. Excerpt to follow, but you need to read the whole thing so that I won't be the only person holding in gales of laughter at work.

Narnia, on the other hand, is like the K-Mart discount bin of mythology. Every monster or creature you've ever heard of is incoherently tossed in with the animal kingdom, and now they all talk. I like fantasy as much as the next sixth level cleric, but the bare minimum for me is knowing the author gave his ridiculous shit more thought than I'll have to. Narnia comes off like a shitty Trapper-Keeper drawing by a twelve-year-old who plays Dungeons & Dragons and really likes the zoo. In one scene a pair of badgers have a conversation with Santa Claus, and in another a human on a talking horse does battle with the White Witch of the North while griffins divebomb centaurs, and your headÂ’s just spinning from the random senselessness of it.

Let me break this down for Harry Potter fans, since there seem to be a lot of you: it'd be like if someone rewrote the Harry Potter books, and instead of having a clearly defined world populated by a hierarchy of wizards and witches where everything makes consistent sense within the reality of that world, Harry Potter was suddenly teaming up with Merlin, Robin Hood and Zeus to fight the Easter Bunny and a talking elephant that's also Ganesha. I hope your reaction would be "What the fuck?"

Posted by: Physics Geek at 01:58 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1 Come on, the chronicles are books designed to be read to children at bedtime. they are: 1/ morality plays 2/ aimed at young children 3/ often filled with drolljibes about contemporary England. The end of one book tells how the incompetent head of the school "was put in charge of other heads, but that didn't work out, so she went into politics, where she lived happily ever after." (Come to think of it, that still fits today.) If you want to understand where C S Lewis was coming from, read "The Screwtape Letters," (or better yet, get the audio book of John Cleese reading the letters.)

Posted by: frank borger at May 12, 2006 02:13 PM (kM4vx)

2 You seem to have misread Pinkerton's review as my own. I did mention how much I enjoyed the series. And I'm fairly well versed in Lewis' work, seeing as I own copies of The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity.

Posted by: physics geek at May 12, 2006 02:33 PM (Xvrs7)

3 Hi, I do not think there were any stinking badgers ; were they not beavers? What a dunce. I had heard that Narnia was good, so I bought it for my niece and nephew and then got it from Netflix. I gave it 5 stars. I did not bother to read the whole Pinkerton post. It did not seem worthy of the effort. The guy is obviously an arrogant fool. Mike

Posted by: Mike at May 17, 2006 11:28 PM (3p7Up)

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