{"id":37,"date":"2005-12-30T19:20:13","date_gmt":"2005-12-31T00:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/messofpottage.com\/blog\/?p=37"},"modified":"2005-12-30T19:20:13","modified_gmt":"2005-12-31T00:20:13","slug":"review-the-lion-the-witch-and-the-wardrobe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/2005\/12\/30\/review-the-lion-the-witch-and-the-wardrobe\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe"},"content":{"rendered":"

A neighbor was nice enough to take us and our kids to see The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe<\/em> last night. It was very good; better than I expected–much better than I was expecting in October and better than even some positive reviews had me expecting.
\n
\nComplaints:
\n* The only thing from the book that I missed in the movie was where the Dwarf tells Jadis, “this is no thaw, it’s spring. Aslan is coming.”
\n* I thought the waterfall\/ice floe sequence was overdone.
\n* Peter needs to be more willing to lop off a head when necessary.
\n* The Professor’s housekeeper was needlessly antagonistic.
\n* The dwarf was a little bit (3%) too comic.<\/p>\n

Kudos:
\n* the Stone Table sequence was done very well: not as much gore as _The Passion_ but enough to give the moment some weight.
\n* Jadis (the White Witch\/self-styled Queen of Narnia) was just what I hoped for: beautiful, cold, evil, repugnant. (My wife thought she ought to have been more alluring.)
\n* the casting was good all around, but Lucy (Georgie Henley) was simply amazing.
\n* the opening sequence during the Blitz was a surprise but a welcome one; few people today can immediately grasp why parents would send their children away indefinitely.<\/p>\n

I enjoyed the movie from the beginning, but the point where I realized that I _really_ liked it was when Jadis came to parley with Aslan, and in the background a cheetah was striding around. I thought it was awesome and wondered “how did they _do_ that?” I’ve heard it said that when you start thinking how good the special effects are it means the story\/acting\/… isn’t all that good. Maybe so, although I never felt that way. I just wondered how they did that cheetah, with its spring-loaded spine. (CG? But the _fur_! Puppets? But it wasn’t a closeup head-shot! Beats me.)<\/p>\n

I also liked the gryphons swooping around in the battle and the bat-winged whatever-it-was at the stone table.<\/p>\n

Finally, concerning whether the rating is appropriate, given the scenes of epic battles and mature themes: one of my children said it should be rated “PG-5, because (a 5-year old friend) might be scared by it.” My child isn’t much older; while there are some violent moments, none are especially graphic. The stone table sequence is, if anything, underplayed.<\/p>\n

If I gave out star ratings, I’d give this a prime number.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A neighbor was nice enough to take us and our kids to see The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe last night. It was very good; better than I expected–much better than I was expecting in October and better than even some positive reviews had me expecting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paRqpr-B","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}