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Post by En on Dec 19, 2003 15:37:14 GMT -5
There have been 3 or 4 movie versions, Rubes, but imho they all stunk... sloppy acting, bum special effects, icky scripts. If they could make it more peterjacksonianly, I'd be happy. Like, translating it to the movie medium instead of transliterating, and casting well
Susan "growing out of it" made me sad, too, but it seemed very realistic. There are some people who will forget or gloss over anything for the sake of having a "normal" life. Boo, verily; I say again boo.
guin, tell us what you think! (hehehe, I love book stories like that, like all those times people didn't want The Princess Bride by William Goldman because they wanted the one by S. Morgenstern )
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Post by KoNeko on Dec 20, 2003 1:04:33 GMT -5
You know, I've never seen any of them as films, so I guess that's lucky, but hey they did make a stage version of LWW here last year and there were puppets and real people and stuff and it was quite good...
*grins* You know, all this talk in this thread made me go down to the library and I found "The Complete Chronicles of Narnia" all in one book, and it even has one of those ribbons in it to keep your page because it's so big and heavy. So yeah, I have plenty of holiday reading...
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Post by potterknowitall on Dec 20, 2003 21:54:46 GMT -5
Have any of you heard, yet?
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Post by En on Dec 21, 2003 0:19:57 GMT -5
NO WAY! The director of Shrek?! But I'm so glad it's going to be in NZ and that Weta's involved... that means it will be pretty to look at, no matter how bad the script and casting are
Interesting tidbit from another board's discussion on the subject:
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Calantha
Gryffindor Alumni
My name is Luck, this is my song, I happened by when you were gone
Posts: 4,493
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Post by Calantha on Dec 29, 2003 18:06:35 GMT -5
I just finished The Horse and His Boy. I liked it better than the the other two although I still like the other two. I guess the way it tied up in the end made me happy except I got really mad at Bree and had to stop reading it and then picked it up again when I wasn't angry with him. Where was Peter in that book? Did I miss something along the way?
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Post by En on Dec 30, 2003 11:29:57 GMT -5
If I remember correctly, Peter was back in Narnia managing the country while the other three formed a diplomatic party / negotiation team to deal with a Calormen nobleman's suit for Susan's hand?
*surprised* Why were you mad at Bree? (I got absolutely furious with a couple of the characters, so I'm curious )
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Post by KoNeko on Jan 1, 2004 4:03:13 GMT -5
Hmmm, nah, I think Susan and Edmund went to do the negotiations for Susan's hand to that Calormene guy and Peter was off fighting giants in the north or getting a treaty with them or something? I can't really remember, I read them all pretty much one after the other.
Hmmm, yeah, I think there's a side to Bree that I found annoying too. I wasn't like, mad mad with him, but he does have this arrogance/pride thing about being a narnian and being surrounded by dumb, witless non-talking horses or something. It's almost like a superiority complex.
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Calantha
Gryffindor Alumni
My name is Luck, this is my song, I happened by when you were gone
Posts: 4,493
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Post by Calantha on Jan 2, 2004 10:32:18 GMT -5
Yep. Umhm. If I read Bree saying something about what the Narnia horses thought...well...I wouldn't have done anything but put down the book. Anyway, his just general attitude about everything. There were certain times when I thought I should feel bad for him but I just couldn't bring myself to it. He was arrogant and he didn't listen to Hwin (sp?) at all even though he should have. He totally reminded me of my father . I wasn't mad at him when he ran from the lion because I think that is just natural instinct even though he left people behind and he didn't really show me any outstanding strength of character so of course he'd probably run instead of helping to save the others. But I did get mad at him when he kept harping on it because he was ashamed of what he did and was all moping around... *shrugs* He just struck a wrong chord. I also got angry with the girl Avris? Arvaris? Avaris? Something like that? And in the end she admitted she was being a prat to the boy but it sucks a lot that it took his past to be uncovered for her to admit she was wrong although maybe she could have if there was more time...but that made me angry... And I got angry at the King for just assuming that the boy could take the other boy's place as being king and that he couldn't have the confidence in his son to change and mature. He basically didn't even give him the option to change which probably stunted his emotional growth later on and caused a hidden jealousy between the two sons. Way to have confidence in your kid.
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Post by En on Jan 3, 2004 18:20:37 GMT -5
Hm. I disliked Bree's uppityness, too, and the mopey bit made me furious with him, but I thought he got past it all right. I actually appreciated his sense of humour a good deal, and of all the characters he was probably the one I sympathised with most, just because he was the one with the most visible philosophical side.
Avaris made me crazy. I mean, I really dug that she was a capable girl -- and for a book written in the 50's, that was really a leap forward -- but the arrogance groded my gut bigtime, in ways that Bree's didn't because at least he got self-conscious about it.
Hwin... didn't ever get into her as a character. I guess I was a bit anti-feminine at that point, and Hwin had to take the brunt of that
The Boy himself... dunno. I couldn't get into the being a foundling thing. But being shipped off to a strange place and made to work as a dummy, now that struck a chord with me, because when I got these books I had just moved towns and skipped a grade. Then again, when I read the books just this year, I got more into the boy because I saw in him more of the shock of dealing with the fact that his nature and nurture were different. And I could relate to that more than I could to Bree's confident chivalrousness.
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Calantha
Gryffindor Alumni
My name is Luck, this is my song, I happened by when you were gone
Posts: 4,493
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Post by Calantha on Jan 3, 2004 21:13:15 GMT -5
I felt for the boy. At times he made me angry...but that's just because I kept on thinking that if I were him I'd do such and such and he never did such and such. Go figure.
Because I was able to see so many sides of him, it lets me feel like he's more human. When he was scared while waiting for the horses and Avaris or when he went back and helped her with the lion or just his escape in general.
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Post by guinevere on Jan 5, 2004 2:25:10 GMT -5
I read the first one--Magicians Nephew--and it was okay--I felt like there was a tad too much of a religious angle (or am I reading too much into it?). I will start the second one later this week. I found a series by Margaret Weis that looks promising...
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Post by En on Jan 5, 2004 18:43:25 GMT -5
Cal, yeah, he is the protagonist and all Actually, I did really respect him for the tombs bit and the lion bit. He makes a good Gryffindor.
Guin... Hehehe... just bear in mind that Tolkien was a devout Catholic, but Lewis was an atheist, and both of them were out to see how many Really Important Mythical Archetypes they could work into their books. It was a bit of a dare Also, Lewis really struggled in general with morality and ethics for post-theists -- his generation of people who had lost faith, lives and/or family in the utterly senseless first World War or the hard and often hopeless, but eminently justifiable second World War. He capitalised on a lot of the moral philosophy of (Anglican Christian) England, but he was looking for the reason, the sense of meaning, in what the church offered -- not for the faith itself.
So think of Lewis as a Diggory-like boy, and (when you get to Caspian) as a Cornelius-like man. A naturalist, who wished much of his life to have been a wild child, a philosopher and a bright person but often at odds with the Establishment. A stepfather and grieving husband with Oxford dons for chums. Also think of him as Treebeardlike, since evidently, Treebeard was a caricature of Lewis ;D
The Christian symbolism has been made much of by a load of 'scholars' in the last 50 years, but probably the best analysis I've seen was by Paul Smith, who did a sort of Guide to Narnia thingy that lists allusions and so forth, and he (correctly, I believe) attributed a lot of Lewis' back material to several ancient Greeks, particularly Plato. And since I happen to believe that the Christians lifted a load of their symbolism from the Greeks... there you go
Weis... rings bell, but I can't remember exactly... don't think I ever read those. If you do pick them up, tell me how they are.
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Post by sparksy on Feb 10, 2004 19:49:36 GMT -5
I read all of them, but by far my least favourite was A Horse and His Boy. It was soooo boring for me, but I have attention span problems over here. Also, when I first read the series a couple years ago, I never would have thought that they were related to religion, but that just goes to show how poorly I'm educated (religion-wise, of course). I enjoyed the Magician's Nephew, and I also liked the end of The Last Battle cuz it was like the Never Ending Story, except for I couldn't fall asleep in the middle of it.
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Post by KoNeko on Feb 11, 2004 3:43:14 GMT -5
Hmmm, after reading all of the Narnia Chronicles in order over the holidays, I think that one of the reasons I enjoyed the Magician's Nephew so much is because it set the scene for LWW. I mean, stuff with the tree and the wardrobe and the lampost and stuff. I still don't like how they made Aslan create the world though, but yeah. I also thought it was weird (but somehow amusing) that they had that ongoing "that's such a typical boy/girl" quibble going on between the kids when they were in Narnia, regardless of who they were.
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Post by En on Feb 11, 2004 12:17:07 GMT -5
*flips one of the books open and points to copyright date, which is 195_* That might be why there's a load of typical boy/girl stuff
I liked The Magician's Nephew because I thought it was deeply mythical and got a lot more into the philosophy of the stories, and it was also darker and had more depth to its adult characters; but ultimately, my favourite stories are always the journey ones (like The Odyssey and the Lord of the Rings trilogy), so that's probably why Voyage of the Dawn Treader is still my favourite.
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