Last weekend I took my oldest son and his friends to see the new Narnia film; “Prince Caspian”. They were entranced: this is a near-perfect movie for eight year old boys. And the story remains faithful to the spirit of the book, and even improves upon it.
As a child I loved the Narnia books. Though their deficiencies are obvious: there is a general distrust of women, a certain middle class priggishness and occasional racism. But the values of C. S. Lewis were typical for a man of his class and background at the time he wrote them; and the same attitudes were equally found in other children’s books of the period, like Frank Richards’ Bunter books or the Biggles books by W. E. Johns.
The difference is that the Narnia stories are so good that the books are still read, while childrens’ books by C.S Lewis’s contemporaries are not. This is of course something that Lewis shares with another great writer with outdated social attitudes, Rudyard Kipling.
Gore Vidal once wrote that L. Frank Baum, who wrote the Wizard of Oz, was one of the most important influences upon him, because if children learn to dream of alternative and different worlds, then they learn to dream that our own world could be changed for the better. Narnia is a beautiful imaginary for children, where animals talk and magic is real.
The religious content of Narnia is very clear, reflecting Lewis’s devout Protestantism, but only in the weakest of the books, The Last Battle, does the religion become so pompous as to drown the story. Generally, the didactic content of the Narnia books is a discussion of ethics, questions of right and wrong, free will, temptation and redemption that are useful ideas for children, and go beyond Christianity. …
The Second World War that contextualised Narnia also saw the shift of popular national understanding of what England and Britain represents. The old Britain of Empire loyalism and Anglicanism was reimagined as a new Britain that defined itself by the war against fascism, and the promotion of egalitarianism, of Beveridge and comprehensive schools. Narnia was dead.
Imagine there’s no evolution: Yoko says oh no to Expelled
Yoko Ono is incensed that the antiscience film Expelled: No Intelligence used a snippet of late husband John Lennon’s 1971 paean to peace Imagine sans permission. So she sued the film’s producers and distributors, demanding that they yank the track from the controversial movie, which stars Nixon-speechwriter-cum-actor-cum-pitchman Ben Stein.
The BBC reports that the former Beatle’s widow balked when, among other things, the film triggered a blogospheric backlash against her, because it appeared that she had authorized the song’s use and, so, endorsed the movie’s creationist antievolution claims. Joining Ono in the lawsuit against Premise Media Corporation; C&S Production, LP; and Rocky Mountain Pictures: Lennon’s sons, Julian and Sean, and publisher EMI Blackwood Music, Inc.
Sex and the City killed at the box office. Maybe now Hollywood will stop only making movies geared at teen boys.
Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last week or so you know that the women from the TV show Sex and the City are back, this time on the big screen. Four years after we said goodbye to Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte, the women have taken the movie industry and the country by storm, besting all projections with an opening weekend take of almost $56 million dollars.
Sex and the City made almost $27 million on its opening day, which is the same amount that The Devil Wears Prada made in its opening weekend. It earned the highest opening box office for a romantic comedy ever. The most stunning news is that it won the weekend by beating Indiana Jones, a feat not even the most optimistic observers predicted. Variety reported that “Sex and the City whips Indiana Jones” and went further, stating that the “film’s performance took Hollywood by utter surprise, shattering the decades-old thinking that females, particularly those over 25, can’t fuel a big opening or go up against a male-driven summer tentpole.”
Carrie & Co. have sent Hollywood into a frenzy — and according to website Deadline Hollywood “looking through their film and TV libraries to see what else they can produce for the fortysomething-and-older female” — thinking that maybe women, even those over 40, are a real potential audience. Finally.
Whatever your thoughts on the actual content of Sex and the City, you can’t help but acknowledge that this is a cultural watershed moment for women’s films; that’s true for a couple of reasons.
* Everyone (who talks about movies) has spent the last couple of weeks discussing a film that stars and celebrates women and women’s friendships. Indiana Jones, which has two of the most successful moviemakers attached to it in George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, is so yesterday’s news, just one week after being released after an almost 20 year wait!
* Everyone (who talks about movies) was scratching their heads trying to figure out how much money an R rated movie targeted at adult women could make. Imagine, women preoccupying the minds of Hollywood’s men. The New York Times reported that studio execs were shocked at the interest.
* The male misogynists in the film blogosphere have outed themselves in a big way with their extreme meanness about the film, one actually calling it a “Taliban recruitment film.”
* The film sold 1 million advance tickets through Fandango, at one point selling 10 tickets per second.
The moment that changed me for ever … was the death of [Clement] Blair Peach [the New Zealand-born teacher who, during a demonstration [against nazis] in London in 1979, was killed allegedly as a result of police brutality]. My family were in some way connected to him; I was only seven, but it was a major event even for me. I can clearly remember seeing the posters with the images of the policeman.
My greatest inspiration … is love.
My real-life villain … is Augusto Pinochet. Of course, he’s not the only dictator who behaved in such an extraordinary way – there have been many regimes that have been pretty objectionable in the last century – but his legacy has survived. I have a few Chilean friends in London who have been very much affected by the way the government operated. …
My life in seven words … Big, tall, reckless, precipitous, straddling two centuries.
A LIFE IN BRIEF
Saffron Dominique Burrows was born in London on 21 October 1972. The actress and former fashion model is also known for her political activism. Having joined an anti-racism group aged 11, she later became vice-president of the National Civil Rights Movement. Following her relationship with director Mike Figgis, she announced she was bi-sexual in 1999. Burrows’ films include Circle of Friends, Miss Julie, Frida and Troy. She lives in Los Angeles and currently stars in Dangerous Parking, in cinemas now.
So Sharon Stone thinks the Sichuan earthquake was caused not by friction between tectonic plates on the Longmenshan fault, but by Beijing being “not nice” to the Dalai Lama. Given that Tibet has been under Chinese rule since 1951, karmic retribution must have a 57-year time lag, but that didn’t stop Stone musing on the seismic catastrophe: “I thought, ‘Is that karma?’ When you are not nice, bad things happen to you.”
Sharon Stone’s nonsensical statement became extra bitter because Sichuan province, where the earthquake struck, is close to Tibet, and many Tibetans live there.
Bad things did happen: within 24 hours of her statement, the Xinhua news agency had dubbed Sharon the “public enemy of all mankind”, perhaps an epithet more suited to US televangelist John Hagee, who in 2005 announced that God unleashed Hurricane Katrina because He was cross after a “homosexual parade”. And, to prove that retribution-based stupidity hasn’t bypassed the UK, Glenn Hoddle also asserted in 1999 that “some people have not been born [with two hands and two legs and half-decent brains] for a reason … the karma is working from another lifetime. It is not only people with disabilities. What you sow, you have to reap.”
Worryingly, though all this lunacy generated the ridicule it deserved, the last few years have seen a spate of new age “self-help” books blaring out an identical, if less targeted, message: that everything in an individual’s life is created by them. From infamous bestseller The Secret (DVD excerpt: “everything that’s coming into your life, you’re attracting into your life”) to weirdo-manual Ask And It Is Given, which channels “the teachings of the non-physical entity Abraham” (sample chapter title: “Unwanted things cannot jump into your experience uninvited”), the philosophy is the same: whatever is happening to you, it’s your fault.
It’s religion for the non-religious, with all the shame, guilt and illogical pronouncements but none of the community. Instead of acts of God, we are told there are no accidents; instead of God’s will, all happenings are manifestations of our own consciousness. And many people accept either the religious or new age explanations because, given the devastation caused by disasters and traumatic events, it’s less scary to think they are a response to wayward human behaviour. That way, if we just change our actions, we won’t have to fear pain and suffering in the future.
In truth, we can only make sense of the world by rejecting these ideas and the more pervasive “everything happens for a reason” mentality, and by accepting that life is random and unjust. Bad things happen to kind people every day, for no reason at all. Our chances in life are largely predetermined by our place of birth, and religious people are as likely to die in tragedies as atheists. Earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes hit for scientific reasons alone; to attribute them to the wrath of God or “the universe” is to deny the victims of these catastrophes their innocence.
Paradoxically, though Stone apologised for her errant statement - which seemed more an ill thought-out comment on China’s treatment of the Dalai Lama than an intentional slur on the victims of the disaster - she has been pulled from the country’s billboards, and her films are now banned in its cinemas. The authors of books like The Secret have profited from pushing sinister anti-scientific nonsense on to the disadvantaged, sick and desperate, but have never been forced to deliver an acknowledgement or apology, let alone been penalised. And homophobe John Hagee has become a millionaire by driving the fear of God into the weak and gullible while also endorsing John McCain, who might just become the next US president.
Such is the relentlessness of Tony Blair’s public immersion into matters of faith these days that Alastair Campbell’s “we don’t do God” assertion in Downing Street has now been fully exposed for what it was: a skilful piece of diversionary spin.
Half a millon demonstrators participate in AntiWar Protest in Washington DC on January 18th 2003.
Representatives of many countries in the world (England, Palestine, Philippines…), Jessica Lange, Martin Luther King Jr, Brian Becker (ANSWER coalition), made virulent speaches against the impending Invasion of Iraq.
Marine scientists marvel at vast “Brittlestar City” found on huge seamount in Antarctica
Census of Marine Life-affiliated scientists, investigating the secrets of a vast underwater mountain range south of New Zealand, captured the first images of an amazing “Brittlestar City” that, against daunting odds, has colonized the peak of a seamount - an underwater summit taller than the world’s tallest building.
Its cramped starfish-like inhabitants, tens of millions of them, living arm tip to arm tip, owe their success to the seamount’s shape and to the swirling circumpolar current flowing over and around it at roughly four kilometres per hour. It allows these brittlestars to capture passing food simply by raising their arms, and it sweeps away fish and other hovering would-be predators.
Discovery of this marine metropolis, along with important new insights into seamount geology and physics, were the highlights of a month-long expedition to survey the Macquarie Ridge aboard the Research Vessel Tangaroa of New Zealand’s National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research, host of the Census of Marine Life seamount programme, CenSeam. The voyage was largely funded by the New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology.
Changes to the Antarctic ice shelf are causing seals to fight for air and penguins to give up on their young, here.
Maze prison was as bad as Guantanamo, say producers
By Arifa Akbar, Arts Correspondent, in Cannes
Friday, 16 May 2008
Reuters
A film documenting the final weeks of the IRA gunman Bobby Sands has been defended by its makers at the Cannes Film Festival as a useful insight into the mindset of modern suicide bombers.
Hunger, a 96-minute film by the artist Steve McQueen, in competition at Cannes and part-funded by Film4, tells the story of Sands who died on hunger strike at the Maze prison; some critics say it is creating a hero out of a terrorist.
But Jan Younghusband, the executive producer of the film and commissioning editor of arts at Channel 4, said the harrowing story merely exposed the mentality of someone ready to die for a cause, such as the London suicide bombers. “You look at suicide bombers and wonder what it is that drives them to kill themselves in their attempt to make the world better,” she said.
“This is a very contemporary issue, destroying your body for something you believe in. We look at terrorists and we think, ‘Aren’t they horrible; they are blowing us up’. But we have to ask what is our role in that? We are not without responsibility.”
Using only sparse dialogue and including violent scenes of IRA prisoners being beaten, the film’s writer, Enda Walsh, spent weeks interviewing Sands’ fellow prisoners and guards. The makers say the story draws a parallel between IRA prisoners in the Maze and those in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib and the US-run detention camp, Guantanamo Bay.
Ms Younghusband added: “We think it is an awful situation in Guantanamo but we had exactly the same situation here. Let’s remember we were doing this before Guantanamo. The film asks so many questions, including, ‘What is the point of this kind of incarceration?’.”
The drama, the directorial debut for McQueen, the Turner Prize-winner, focuses on the last six weeks of Sands’ life. Jailed for possessing a gun, he died in 1981 at 27 after 66 days on hunger strike, a protest at prisoners losing their political status.
Sands was elected as a Member of Parliament 25 days before he died; his death prompted days of riots in nationalist areas of Northern Ireland and drew 100,000 to his funeral. Some believe the film is likely to rekindle bitter feelings. Sands’ family was invited to see the film but declined a personal screening.
McQueen said: “The film, for me, has contemporary resonance. The body as site of political warfare is becoming a more familiar phenomenon. It is the final act of desperation; your own body is your last resource for protest.”
