Thursday 6 October 2005

Movie review!

Posted by speedygeoff on Thursday, October 06, 2005 with
While waiting here in Adelaide for the Australian Masters Athletics component to start, I have been watching many DVDs, including all the Lano and Woodley episodes (great!) and The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy (pretty great). And here’s a movie review of something yet to arrive.

The lion, the witch, and the wardrobe, is coming (are coming?). My favourite book as a child was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis. A movie of the book is rumoured to be opening on 26 December this year – like the three LOR movies did in turn for three years.

Author C. S. Lewis was a colleague of J. R. R. Tolkien and they would frequently discuss (over an ale or two) their respective novels, sharing ideas and criticising each other’s significantly different approaches to writing fantasy.

In their novels, while the return of Tolkien’s king was facilitated by massive armies sweeping across the plain, the return of Lewis’s king/god Aslan was unspectacular - until his Christ-like sacrifice brought victory over the darkest evil, a victory won not out of force or violence or vengeance but out of inherent strength and virtue – far more effective and of practical significance.

Of the six other Narnia novels, I think it is planned to make three or four into movies in due course. As a child I read avidly the other six books as well – The Magician’s Nephew (a parallel to the creation story), Voyage of the Dawn Treader (about the hope of eternal life), Prince Caspian, my current favourite The Silver Chair (hence the band’s name), The Horse and His Boy, Prince Caspian, and The Last Battle (an End Times story). They would all make marvellous movies.

The Magician’s Nephew features rings as power objects. I often wonder which came first, Lewis’s rings or Tolkien’s rings? The moral is the same – playing with power objects you don’t understand is fraught with danger.

Speaking of power – I approach the racing this weekend with some trepidation – the left calf seems very tight and I am going to test it to the max! It’s make or break time; throwing caution to the winds, ignoring my pain and seeing what I can do. Ah, the perils of entering national events months before they are held. At least they are not team events; no one else is relying on me to do well.

And by the way there are some great photos of Team Moore runners in the masters program booklets.

Thank you all for your comments on the previous couple of posts. You are truly a Company of Heroes. I will keep you posted on how things go in the next few days. A big field in the M55 5000 on Monday, and some names I recognise of runners I haven't seen since the sixties, so no chance of a medal, but I will run like the wind.