Monday, December 05, 2005

It's All Wrong

I'm reconsidering my plan to go see A Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe - it's not because of the creepy religious marketing. But because I'm suddenly worried it's going to be all wrong - I saw the trailer again and there's a light shining out when Lucy opened the wardrobe - which is so totally and utterly wrong that I may have to avoid the entire movie.

Plus the paper says they've added a scene at the beginning when the children get bombed, which doesn't fit with the evacuation thing at all. Children were evacuated at the beginning of September 1939, and the first few months after that were called the phony war, because nothing happened. The bombing didn't happen till a good while later. Now the penvensies are clearly at least upper-middle class children, because they go to boarding school. So they probably wouldn't have been evacuated with everyone else, and their parents would have made private arrangements. But if they're not supposed to have been evacuated till a school holiday after the bombing started then why weren't there other evacuees in this big old house from the first wave of evacuations.

I'm overthinking.

5 comments:

  1. My partner has a film degree and really objects when I come up with that sort of thing - she claims I'm failing to "suspend disbelief".

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's not up to _you_ to suspend disbeleif , its up to the film to avoid doing things that break your suspension of disbeleif. The bar shifts, too. The things that break my suspension of disbelief for a film are either bad plot ("midichlorians", for example, or all of Highlander II) or poor costuming and props (excessive use of knitted chainmail, anachronistic tech, wrong tech for time/place/culture, etc.) Things that were ok in, say, 'The Princess Bride' or some BBC Shakespeare stuff, can be overlooked because of the quality of the plot/storyline, whereas if the plot is average, my suspension of disbelief holds longer if the costume/props are well done.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous7:06 pm

    I really dug the book when I was a kid, but the movie looks a bit sus. Apparently this kid steps through the wardrobe smack into a snowdrift and has no reaction to the rather dramatic temperature change.
    Mind you,"Suspending disbelief" is a funny thing and if you do it right you can get away with all sorts of crazy stuff. Like Oscar Wilde's "Happy Prince"

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oh I'm going to see this movie - I just suspect I'll be very annoying to the person next to me:

    "Why are they eating pie here? They're supposed to be eating fish damnit."

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'm pretty sure the light coming out of the wardrobe is just for the trailer, a kind of dissolve into the logo which won't occur at that point in the film itself. As for the empty house... maybe the last batch of children also found the wardrobe but got killed (or settled permanently) in an earlier phase of Narnia's history, or maybe Digory had sufficient connections to dissuade the government from foisting a bunch of kids on him?

    ReplyDelete