>I saw it last night and LOVED it.
As reluctant as I am to show any signs of dissent from my wife, I'm moved to forward this entertaining review from the FT. She went to see the film when I was out of town knowing that I wouldn't have gone anywhere near it.
Doug
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Financial Times - December 8, 2005
All aboard for a nightmare trip to the hereafter By Nigel Andrews
It is never too late to honour one's parents, but always too late to honour them enough. That they never read C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia to me in my childhood showed a wisdom, I now realise, beyond their honest, war-scarred years. I can scarcely remember a more cringe-making two hours in the cinema than this faithful (I am told by Lewisites) rendering of the Christian academic's folklore epic about faith, love and moral rearmament.
Lewis sometimes denied, sometimes confirmed, that Narnia was a New Testament allegory. But in America and elsewhere, evangelical Christians have swarmed to the film like locusts at plague time. The tale of four children passing through a wardrobe into a wintered kingdom contested by a bad witch and good lion, where virtue ensures resurrection while wickedness guarantees gory demise, is the stuff of Sunday school sermons through the ages: the kind that peddles a swap-shop Christianity, simple but messianic, in which a Kindly Martinet forever looks down upon us, ensuring a continuing, unhindered exchange system in which goodness buys grace, malefaction earns divine censure.
Directed, astonishingly, by Andrew Adamson, the merry iconoclast who made Shrek, the film oscillates between the insipid and the sanctimonious. Whey-pale lighting and drab compositions sometimes give way to sickly pre-Raphaelite glows and choirs soaring over pantheistic crane shots. I credit Lewis's original book, or books, with storytelling skill. Something must explain their popularity. But the awfulness of this Disney version - the pilot episode in a projected Narnia franchise - is its one-step, two-step pacing and its glutinous pictorialism in the aid of preachiness.
The obvious is communicated in every scene, then communicated again. Tilda Swinton's White Witch is laden with icy light and choreographed for coldly commanding voice and gesture: she is like a nightmare flight attendant on a jumbo trip into the hereafter. Liam Neeson's voice as the digitised lion dispenses a treacly, echo-chamber paternalism. And in case we forget that, for more than half the story, Narnia is under winter's spell, the scenery is like adepartment-store Christmas grotto where no one has said "enough!" to a designer decanting his Styrofoam snow andPlexiglas ice.
Disney clearly hopes that the film will leap into the vacancy left by the exit of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Happily Jackson has meanwhile made King Kong, which arrives shortly - a thoroughgoing fantasy masterpiece - to expose The Chronicles of Narnia for what it is: a ghastly mixture of don's dinner and sugar-coated cine-sermon.
The religious right, which is now totally out of control west of Plymouth Rock, US, has also embraced the hit French documentary March of the Penguins. For sane onlookers in- and outside America, the cry "Is nothing sacred?" must now be replaced by an equally despairing "Is nothing secular?" The poor Antarctic birds who trudge 70 miles to breed and give birth, in a long, slow march resembling a procession of maîtres ds heading for a Claridges interview, are now - insists the God lot - evidence that Christian family values exist in the animal world. So does "intelligent design", the Bushite replacement for, or cosmetic improvement on, Darwinism.
Life at the South Pole, we soon learn, is quite some design. After the mass birth the males stand huddled in the cold for four foodless months, keeping the eggs warm under their lower fur. Some dads topple over and die. Many eggs break loose and freeze. Mum treks to the sea and back - which with new-season ice is even further away ("just 100 miles, dear") - for grub. When the chicks are hatched, many are savaged by carnivorous gulls. In a bad year 80 per cent of chicks can die. If this is intelligent design, show me some creationist cock-ups.
The film's photography is fabulous, the commentary by Morgan Freeman is bearable and the penguins are adorable. At the press screening, when the even more adorable chicks were hatched, every critic in the house - or those I could see - resembled some daft parent making goo-goo eyes into a cot.
But God, if He exists, has no sentimentality. He is quick to restore terror, suffering andeveryday deprivation. The feathered babes and their fathers battle minus-80 temperatures, off-the-chart wind chill and the possibility that mum won't make it back with the shopping. By this point some religionists will already have had their fuses blown by the God-approved role-swapping in this community, which lets Dad mind the child while Mum hunts and gathers. More of this sort of thing and we might have - horror - a rise in the population of female priests.
But you cannot argue with those blinded by divine un-reason. Perhaps they think that in this surreal canvas of discomfort, death and the survival of the fittest (to re-invoke that outlaw Darwin), the penguins should give thanks for the gift of free will and for God's wisdom in resisting the temptation to design every moment of their lives. Or perhaps the race just needs C.S. Lewis to come along and explain the problem of pain. I like the documentary. It's the cheerleaders I cannot stand.
Calvaire has a different attitude to religion but is another argument for banning it from the screen. Fabrice Du Welz's horror-film-cum-black-comedy hies from Belgium, where surrealism has long flowered among the burghers and bureaucrats, and includes crucifixion among its treats. A travelling singer (Laurent Lucas) falls foul of a deranged hostel-owner (Jackie Berroyer) deep in the countryside. Menace and mystery build nicely, until the whole edifice falls apart, as in many a thriller, when the filmmaker addresses the simple question "pourquoi?"
Or in After Midnight, "per chè?" The writer-director Davide Ferrario clearly fell in love with a location: Turin's fabulous Mole Antonelliana, that temple topped by a dome topped by a spire (and once Europe's tallest brick building), which now houses a magical Museum of Cinema. But Ferrario fills the place with a perfunctory plot and characters - two men and a girl snagged on a moody eternal triangle - and fails to answer the most important "why" of all: why are we watching this? The humans do not interest us, the story is paper-thin. Only that beautiful, tremendous folly awes us, a great setting awaiting a great movie.