Some afternoons you just feel more isolated from your culture than others

I want to draw a perhaps-thin distintion. I don't like to see anyone criticise things they don't know about; so I'm going to be trying not to do that in what follows.

What I want to talk about is why I find myself with surprisingly little interest in seeing The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. And I'll acknowledge up-front it's been getting generally good reviews, and it's entirely possible that I'm "wrong."

Certainly like many of you, I grew up reading the books by C.S. Lewis, just as I did Tolkien's Hobbit tales; each fired my imagination just as they did yours. Yet I was curious to see Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy; anxiously so after I saw the first. But I don't seem to feel quite as great a curiosity to see this one.

I think the reason is that I haven't been able to shake an idea of mine, since I first heard the new film announced. I think it was born not of people who loved the books. But of people who saw the grosses of Lord of the Rings and The Passion of the Christ and put two and two together.

Given that one accepted reading of the Narnia books is as Christian parable (IIRC, this gets heavier as the books go on), I think they figured:

"If we could make a movie that appealed not only to the special F/X and sweeping saga storytelling crowd..."
"But also to the newly-discovered Christian market...we'd be on the gravy train for life!"

I don't quite know why this should bother me, though, when certainly the people who made Lord of the Rings (or any movie ever made) did so with some expectations of profit (expectations that were just-as-certainly realized).

I'm also bothered by the idea that New Zealand has now become the apparent default filming location for the aforementioned sweeping sagas. Narnia is not Middle-Earth. Not in my head, at least. But the ads sure make it look like it.

And I'm irritated by those ads for the film that trumpet "Directed by Andrew Adamson" at the end, in an obviously tacked-on voiceover. I don't believe if you asked any three people at your local QFC who Adam Adamson was, they'd know, so it's not like he's a selling point. This seems likely to be Mr. Adamson's ego speaking, possibly through his agent.

As it happens he's the director of the Shrek movies. So why wouldn't they just say "From the director of Shrek and Shrek 2?" This would seem a much more likely selling point. Answer? Because then the apparently anxious Mr. Adamson would not get to hear himself identified as the auteur of someone else's story, one that had only lasted over 40 years before he got his hands on it.

I may be wrong, but I don't recall any of the Rings pictures being promoted as "directed by Peter Jackson," and especially not the first.

Finally, glancing at the credit information, I note with numb resignation that it apparently took four screenwriters to bring to the screen what it only took one man to put in my head. This seems like a good time to cite what I think of as "(Harlan) Ellison's Rule," which states that if a film or television show has any more than two writers listed, odds are it's going to suck rocks as a story. There may be other compensations, and there are always exceptions that test the rule. But as a handy-dandy should I see this or watch this guide, that works a treat.

I'll close with the last paragraph from a review by Roger Ebert, who liked the film (and as I say, it's quite possible that he's right) :

...it's remarkable, isn't it, that the Brits have produced Narnia, the Ring, Hogwarts, Gormenghast, James Bond, Alice and Pooh, and what have we produced for them in return? I was going to say "the cuckoo clock," but for that you would require a three-way Google of Italy, Switzerland and Harry Lime.