Narnia: Tim's Review

So we saw Narnia. And of course the question is, How was it?

Excellent. It was worth the four year wait and all the anxious nitpicking of each little piece as it was released. I had worries about changes that might deviate from the book's spirit, but although there were many changes, virtually none of them changed the meaning or spirit of the story. Was it better than the book? No. No movie could be. But was it the best movie, speaking realistically, that could be made from the book? In my opinion--yes!

We arrived at the theater, in costume, a little after six o'clock. We waited in line for about forty minutes before they started seating for the movie. By that time the line reached all the way back to the door. We found out later that every single one of today's showings (nearly a dozen) were sold out. Hooray!

Of course there was the long, long wait watching advertisements and previews after we had taken our seats. But once the movie started our audience grew very quiet. There was hardly a whisper through the whole movie; only wrappers crackling and laughter at the humorous parts. My eyes only left the screen once (that was to hand out the Turkish Delight we had brought--at the appropriate moment, of course). We clapped when it finished. Not only us, but the rest of the audience too. Hooray again!

The structure of the movie was very good. The script had a few weak lines, but overall it was also very good. I think we have a new quote source in our house. A good deal of action was added or magnified. The characters of the Pevensies were much more fleshed out than in the book (which was actually a good thing). A lot of emotion and humor was added. The camera shots were good, the costumes were good, the score was good (though not, I think, particularly memorable), and the acting was very good. There were two aspects that disappointed me. First, the CG: although it was very, very good, it was not photoreal as I had hoped. However, it did not detract from the movie as a whole, and the animals talking were certainly believable. Second, Aslan's character seems to have been weakened. More on that later.


Here followeth ..:: SPOILERS ::.. Be forewarned.


The highlights of the movie? Hmm. I had thought I could select just a few, but as I think about it there were too many good parts. There were a couple that gave me shivers up my spine: Peter and Edmund drawing their swords for Narnia, Aslan's resurrection, and the of the White Witch when Aslan said "It is finished." (Astoundingly, Andrew Adamson added that line without realizing the reference. That certainly makes one think.) The children being sent away, Aslan's resurrection and the final reconciliation of Peter and Edmund were more moving parts: what I would call tear-jerkers (only for me I can't). I liked Aslan's appearance in the fireplace, which made him seem to have a hand in preventing Lucy's kidnapping. I also loved the nods to the original, such as the line about the stars falling and the blue-bottle in the windowsill. Yes, it was a fly. (Sorry, inside joke.)

The worst part of the movie, I think, was that Aslan's power and character were slightly changed. He is still the King, and the part about the Laws or Deep Magic governing even Him did not trouble me. But the things that happen--Father Christmas arriving, the Winter ending, the Witch's reign being broken, and even Aslan's appearance--were attributed more to the arrival of the Pevensies and the fulfillment of prophecy than the direct actions of the Son of the Emperor-over-the-Sea (which title is not mentioned, by the way). And Aslan's line about Narnia being his family: perfectly alright, in perspective, but leaning more towards New Age philosophy. However, Aslan still conquers death and kills the White Witch, so perhaps I should not be complaining.


Here endeth ..:: SPOILERS ::.. You may start reading again.


We enjoyed it very much. Because the excitement of the first viewing has not worn off yet, I can't trust myself to give an honest judgment of where it rests in my Top Ten Movies--but it is certainly there. We will be going to see it again at least one more time. I don't mind in the least.

Today is the Day!

The Narnia movie!!

Tim has been following this movie for four years (when it was still a rumor), and checking its progress online almost daily for two years. The boys have costumes ready to wear to the movie, and we have tickets reserved. We would have loved to go to the midnight premier, but our town is too small to do that. (Our town is so small that Pride and Prejudice isn't even being shown here at all!) Miss M will be walking around the mall with Daddy during the movie (I'll have my turn in a couple of weeks, when he takes the boys to see it a second time!) They're all too excited to eat.

On Times Past

"Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind,
long years numberless as the wings of trees!
The long years have passed like swift draughts
of the sweet mead....
Who now shall refill the cup for me?" ¹

"Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly flow the days
Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers
Blossoming even as we gaze." ²

The flow of time sometimes brings a lingering sadness and a desire for the past. Most, I think, have known this desire; for "the hours pass, and the days and months and years," says Cicero, "and times past cannot be regained, nor can the future be known." Why do we have this desire? And will it ever be satisfied?

"And when I die, and when I'm gone,
There'll be one child born and a world to carry on,
There'll be one child born to carry on." ³

Perhaps this is the answer: an endless cycle from birth to death, life to life, and time to time. But this is not what the heart desires. We enjoy the present but desire the past; love each new life but mourn at each death.

We meet death not only in the loss of life. Death comes at the loss of each year, at the end of each day, at the passing of every moment. Death is what life is full of. So it has always been: we live but to die; each moment dies even as it is born. So it will continue, age upon age, life upon life, time upon time, until time ceases. Must it be so always? Is the reality indeed so unequal to our longing?

What is this longing? What is the reality it longs for? There is nothing extraordinary about times of the past, nor in their loss; and each present moment, when it departs, will become part of that elusive longing for the past. This present does not satisfy the desire now; once past, how could it satisfy the desire if it were to be regained? Each of our other desires can be satisfied: if we are hungry, we may eat; if we need love, we can be loved. But when we think we desire the past, we find the past will not satisfy the desire. The desire must be for something else. But it is not in the present or the past. All desire must look to the future, yet this desire is not satisfied by the future. So what can it be? If past, present, and future fail us, we must look beyond them. Our desire must be for something outside of time.

But how can we find the source of our desire if it is outside of time? We are bound by time and cannot leave it. Our life is a part of time; we cannot go beyond time and yet remain in this life. Therefore the fulfillment of our desire must be beyond life—and to pass beyond life we must first pass beyond death. There is both the riddle and the answer: there is death in life; there is life in death.


¹ "Galadriel's Lament" by J.R.R. Tolkien
² "Sunrise, Sunset" from Fiddler on the Roof
³ "And When I Die" by Peter, Paul and Mary

Seven Sevens

I was tagged by - my own son!

Things to do before I die:

1. Learn to know God better. < ditto
2. see all of my children grow to be sincere Christians
3. Read Plato
4. see Hawaii
5. understand poetry
6. stop and 'smell the flowers'
7. read a lot of Tolkein, CS Lewis and Chesterton

Things I cannot do:

1. Play the piano (or any instrument, for that matter)
2. find my way around a city
3. cook
4. listen to jazz
5. feel at ease in public
6. dance
7. create music or poetry

Things that attract me to my spouse:

1. Honest
2. Silly sense of humor
3. hard-working
4. Forgiving
5. Strong sense of traditional values
6. values family
7. patient

Seven things I say most often:

1. basically
2. Think, Mommy, think!
3. I don't think you're supposed to have that (to Miss M)
4. and 5. socky-wocky and feety-feet (baby talk)
6. Smoothies are ready!
7. Bedtime! (I asked the boys what they wished I wouldn't say so much and that was their response)

Seven books (or series) I love:

1. Art book about Waterhouse
2. Chopin in Paris
3. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
4. The Charlotte Mason series
5. Endangered Minds
6. James Herriott
7. Little Women

Seven movies I watch over and over again (or would watch over and over if I had the time):

1. Pride and Prejudice miniseries
2. Wuthering Heights (with Lawrence Olivier and Merle Oberon)
3. Our Mutual Friend miniseries
4. A Little Princess
5. The Sound of Music
6. Ever After
7. Groundhog Day

Seven People I want to join in, too:

Madame B at Sunny Day
thimblecottage
Dawn :)
Amy
Phyllis
Firefly
erinee

Seven Sevens

Pipsqueak at The Common Room tagged me to do the seven sevens game.


Things to do before I die:

1. Learn to know God better.
2. Read everything Lewis, Chesterton, and Tolkien ever wrote.
3. Play the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata.
4. Learn broadsword-fighting.
5. Make a film.
6. Write an epic.
7. Get even close to finishing my language.
7b. See The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, see Ancanar, read Cicero and Beowulf in their original languages.


Things I cannot do:

1. Ride a bicycle.
2. Dance.
3. Speak Anglo-Saxon.
4. Bounce down a tree.
5. Bounce up a tree, for that matter.
6. Sound like Christopher Lee.
7. Listen to good music "in the background."


Things that attract me to my spouse:

I'm MARRIED? < ditto. < same

Seven things I say most often:

1. "Really?"
2. "We'll see."
3. "- - - !" (Miss M's name.)
4. "Thank you."
5. (whatever elvish word I currently have stuck in my head.)
6. "It's from the Narnia movie..."
7. "Hopefully" in starting a sentence. (It's a habit I'm half-trying to break.)


Seven books (or series) I love:

1. The Lord of the Rings
2. The Chronicles of Narnia
3. Beowulf
4. The Space Trilogy (Lewis)
5. Ivanhoe
6. Jane-Austen-novel-series
7. Time Quartet (L'Engle)


Seven movies I watch over and over again (or would watch over and over if I had the time):

(The last three I'm not so sure about)

1. Sense and Sensibility (with Emma Thompson)
2. The Adventures of Robin Hood (with Errol Flynn)
3. the A&E Pride and Prejudice < ditto
4. Ever After
5. The Lord of the Rings
6. Star Wars
7. Pirates of the Caribbean

Seven People I want to join in, too:

I don't have seven people either:

1. Tim's Mom
2. Just Here For Now from Sunny Day

Top Ten Desert Island Christmas Albums

Queen Shenaynay from the Beehive posted her favorite albums here, and, after I do a little shopping at amazon.com for one or two from her list, I'll be posting our own list. :)

Our tastes are pretty basic, we like traditional carols and we don't need our carols gussied up to make them palatable for modern listeners. Last year I wanted to buy a couple of new CD's to play at our church services, so I sampled quite a few current selections at the Christian bookstore and couldn't like any of them. Instead, I went online and looked for old favorites - Bing Crosby, Julie Andrews, Nat King Cole, and liked those much better. I didn't learn to like classical music until we'd been homeschooling a couple of years, so we're only beginning to discover what's out there in that genre. I expect our top ten list will change when we find more classics to love.

Here's our list --

A Christmas Album (Amy Grant) It never seems like Christmas until we play this. I haven't been as thrilled with her later Christmas albums, but I love this one, it never gets old.

Light of the Stable (Emmylou Harris) especially the song Beautiful Star of Bethlehem, which the Judds popularized recently

The Nutcracker (Tchaikovsky) We have three copies of this. We sometimes listen to the whole thing, and sometimes just highlights.

Nine Lessons & Carols (The Choir of King's College, Cambridge) A new tradition for us that just started a couple of years ago.

Greatest Christmas Songs and Christmas with Julie Andrews - We love both of these, and can't pick between them, so I just included both of them

Handel's Messiah (Our copy is conducted by John Eliot Gardiner) The Messiah has been growing on me over the years.

Christmas Day in Hawaii Nei (Makaha Sons) Mom's addition: "This isn't the only Hawaiian Christmas music I have, but it's my favorite."

A Christmas Carol (Focus on the Family Radio Theater Drama) We listen to this every year, I prefer this to any of the movie versions

Merry Little Christmas (Linda Ronstadt) I just picked randomly from a few others that we like to make it an even ten. (Tim wants to replace this with a favorite of his own)

In Autumn

Another poem written for creative writing class (which is finished now).

In Autumn

The wind comes from forgotten lands
of ancient hills and elven strands
to tease remembrance in the mind.
You'd think the air was brought
purposely to wake the thought
of elder day or foreign clime.

The leaves are like an unknown tongue,
each a word, in piles flung,
sentence-deep around the trees.
The earth speaks, too (squish! squash!)
And the treetops (swish! toss!)
In a roil of branchy seas.

They tell of something just beyond
mortal grasp; like a fond
memory, but deeper, higher.
I cannot see what's behind
the invitation of the wind—
I know the Something stirs desire.

This Month's Books - November 2005

Beowulf by Anonymous, translator unknown (this online version)
The first time I've read this translation. It's more literal than Burton Raffel's, and it seems to have heavier alliteration, which sometimes makes for better reading aloud (it's almost impossible to read it silently). But it is harder to understand and I don't think it grasps the original meaning as well as Burton Raffel's. Still, Beowulf is Beowulf.


Persuasion by Jane Austen
Very good, all of it. The writing quality and characters especially (the character introspection was excellent). I will have to read them all again, but this may be my favorite of Miss Austen's books so far.


On Directing Film by David Mamet
Mr. Mamet is both a screenwriter and director. In this book he propounds his theory of film and how, therefore, a film should be made.

A film is a story told by a series of juxtaposed images. The film is built of smaller story segments, the scenes, which are in turn made of smaller segments--"beats," he calls them--which are made of several shots, which are the smallest segment. The job of the smaller segments is to show action in the simplest possible way, and combined they form a meaning in each of the scenes and the ultimate story of the film. Because a film is built this way, the shots or beats themselves do not have to be "interesting"--they do not have to tell the story. The same goes for the actors--they don't have to act interestingly, they just have to perform the actions. The story itself will make them interesting.

He also talks about some of the problems with modern filmmaking. A lot of modern films do not have a good story or structure, and a lot of modern directors are more concerned with personal expression or making things "interesting" than they are with telling a good story as simply as possible. Because the story itself is not interesting, they have to add things to make it interesting: eye candy or "artistic" style, or graphic detail. But if the shock value is all that holds the audience, then each successive film will have to be more and more graphic. If moviemakers would simply concern themselves with telling a good story as simply and clearly as possible, we wouldn't have a lot of the problems we do. (Personal note: I think by this standard Alfred Hitchcock would be a very good director but Peter Jackson would be a very bad one. Artistic expression and all that.)

It is a good book, well worth reading if you are interested in making films or just interested in the filmmaking process. (Be warned, however, that there is some mild language and a few other things that might not be suitable for children.)

Apple Cinnamon Muffins

Apple Cinnamon Muffins (1 dozen)

I tweaked a recipe for "basic muffins" that I found online to make whole wheat apple cinnamon muffins. These use oil, but no butter or shortening, so they have no hydrogenated/saturated/trans-fat.

1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup unbleached flour
1 Tablespoon cinnamon
1 Tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 Tablespoons sugar

1/2 cup soy or rice milk
1/4 cup oil
1 egg
1 cup applesauce
1 teaspoon vanilla

Mix the dry ingredients in one bowl, the liquid ingredients in another. Then combine both and mix it all up. I use foil liners in a cupcake tin so they don't tear apart when you try to remove them from the paper to eat them.
Bake 400 degrees 20-25 minutes.

Teacups

I've always thought that someday it would be fun to collect teacups. As it turns out, my collection has already started! I love pretty teacups, so if you have any pictures of yours online, I'd love to see!

My very first teacup, and still my favorite. My mother and I saw this while shopping at an antique mall during a visit, and she bought it for me. She suggested that any teacup collection should be based on a color. That was easy - pink!

When I saw this one, I thought it was the prettiest teacup I'd ever seen. Until I brought it home and put it beside my favorite! But it's a close second.

These beautiful cups were gifts from my favorite tea partner, Ginger.

Not really a teacup, but I love it.