Saturday, May 17, 2008
Movie commentary at NRO's Corner:For Prince Caspian: I have not yet seen Prince Caspian, the Narnia movie that opens on Friday, but the early reviews look encouraging.
It certainly promises to be a movie for our times. Of the seven Narnia books, Prince Caspian is the most militaristic. There's a big battle scene in the movie version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, of course. Yet it's a relatively small part of the bookâit takes up roughly a single paragraph. Prince Caspian is different. One of its major themes is just warfare, and there's plenty of fighting ...
If Hollywood wants to make a mint at the box office, it will produce a Black Hawk Down-style film about Marines in Fallujah. Americans will flock to buy tickets. But Hollywood refuses to meet this demand. Instead, we're bombarded by a series of anti-war flicks that few people want to see. On occasion, however, we get excellent films such as 300, which appreciates the importance of martial valor. Here's to hoping that Prince Caspian is equally subversive. They love war.
posted by Quiddity at 5/17/2008 10:27:00 AM
3 comments
That bit was written by John J. Milller, whose Wikipedia page is full of wingnut welfare sinecures.
Oddly enough, it doesn't list any military service, despite him admiring "just fighting," and "the importance of martial valor."
Fortunately for John J. Miller, the recent raising of the recruitment age due to dire need for warriors means that he can serve his country and display his true love of martial valor.
He was born in 1970. He's had 7 years since 9/11 to act on his impulse. He has a couple more years to put his money where his mouth is.
C.S.Lewis was a fundamentalist but he would rotate in his grave fast enough to provide power for a minor city, if he saw what has been done to his books. He stated again and again that their purpose (apart from the Christian allegory) was to encourage the imagination/creativity of the young children that would read them (or would have them read to them). What these movies do is to completely smother that by drowning the viewers in an ocean of prefabricated images that leave nothing to the imagination. The "cheap" BBC adaption of the books did the opposite and followed more the model provided by old Willy from Stratford http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/poetry/william-shakespeare.html
Lewis was also far from glorifying war and saw it as a sometimes necessary evil (not excluding heroism though). He also did not ignore the unpleasant aftermath of even "just" and "won" battles.
HB
There's nothing more subversive than a Hollywood movie with explosions and fighting! Those types of movies are hard to find, but well worth it, since you're sticking it to the man!
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