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Dec. 8th, 2007 08:53 am
media madness
Movies I want to see: Juno and The Golden Compass and I Am Legend. And Speed Racer. The NYT describes Juno as a "feminist, girl-powered rejoinder and complement to “Knocked Up." (About time!)
There is some controversy over The Golden Compass, which is based on the Philip Pullman trilogy of His Dark Materials. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has warned against seeing the movie, which they claim is anti-Christian and anti-God. I am not going to link to them as I find the argument entirely stupid. But I am going to link to this BBC article which has a Catholic and an atheist review the film. Anyway, yes, His Dark Materials was intended as an argument against organized religion, but I don't think it's specifically Catholic - especially since Pullman himself is the grandson of an Anglican vicar. I loved the trilogy - I mean, come on - daemons and armored polar bears and gay angels! I found the ending of the trilogy a bit disappointing after the adventure-filled rush of the first two novels, but it didn't piss me off the way the ending to the Chronicles of Narnia did.
I think a lot of the reference material would fly over most kids, but it totally exposes them to Milton's Paradise Lost in an ingenious way. (English major love alert!) I didn't have much patience with Paradise Lost itself, but I love a lot of the work that arises from its influence.
I recently finished the Ursula K. LeGuin Earthsea trilogy - A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore. I didn't know anything about this prior to reading it except for the fact that the main character, Ged, is supposed to be non-white and that the Sci-Fi channel completely whitewashed the adaptation. (Not to mention the appalling treatment of the book's beliefs, which the director describes as "great duality of spirituality versus paganism and wizardry, male and female duality". Not even close to a cigar. The covers of my books, which are old, show white people. In her essay, LeGuin writes that she wanted to ease white readers into the fact that Ged is non-white, which explains my what-the-hell-is-the-big-deal-anyway-since-his-skin-color-is mentioned-for-two-seconds reaction. If I didn't actively look for those sentences, I would have glossed over them and thought that Ged was white by default.
Overall I really liked the story, even if I didn't love it. I think I would have loved this if I read it at a younger age. I think I was expecting more from it, especially since I really loved Left Hand of Darkness and her other works. I think overall it was too boy-centric for me. There's Tenar in Tombs of Atuan, but she's not very interesting to me. There's a part where Ged is attending a school for wizards and I did the hey-Harry-Potter! thing, but this trilogy is so much better. For one thing, it's concise. For another, it has action that you can follow and non-stupid plotting. You know what I did love? The Taoism. I never get to see that school of thought (I hesitate to say religion) embodied in any sort of fiction, ever, so all that talk of balance and lightness gives way to darkness and vice versa - I was all over that. It made me really happy.
There is some controversy over The Golden Compass, which is based on the Philip Pullman trilogy of His Dark Materials. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has warned against seeing the movie, which they claim is anti-Christian and anti-God. I am not going to link to them as I find the argument entirely stupid. But I am going to link to this BBC article which has a Catholic and an atheist review the film. Anyway, yes, His Dark Materials was intended as an argument against organized religion, but I don't think it's specifically Catholic - especially since Pullman himself is the grandson of an Anglican vicar. I loved the trilogy - I mean, come on - daemons and armored polar bears and gay angels! I found the ending of the trilogy a bit disappointing after the adventure-filled rush of the first two novels, but it didn't piss me off the way the ending to the Chronicles of Narnia did.
I think a lot of the reference material would fly over most kids, but it totally exposes them to Milton's Paradise Lost in an ingenious way. (English major love alert!) I didn't have much patience with Paradise Lost itself, but I love a lot of the work that arises from its influence.
I recently finished the Ursula K. LeGuin Earthsea trilogy - A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore. I didn't know anything about this prior to reading it except for the fact that the main character, Ged, is supposed to be non-white and that the Sci-Fi channel completely whitewashed the adaptation. (Not to mention the appalling treatment of the book's beliefs, which the director describes as "great duality of spirituality versus paganism and wizardry, male and female duality". Not even close to a cigar. The covers of my books, which are old, show white people. In her essay, LeGuin writes that she wanted to ease white readers into the fact that Ged is non-white, which explains my what-the-hell-is-the-big-deal-anyway-since-his-skin-color-is mentioned-for-two-seconds reaction. If I didn't actively look for those sentences, I would have glossed over them and thought that Ged was white by default.
Overall I really liked the story, even if I didn't love it. I think I would have loved this if I read it at a younger age. I think I was expecting more from it, especially since I really loved Left Hand of Darkness and her other works. I think overall it was too boy-centric for me. There's Tenar in Tombs of Atuan, but she's not very interesting to me. There's a part where Ged is attending a school for wizards and I did the hey-Harry-Potter! thing, but this trilogy is so much better. For one thing, it's concise. For another, it has action that you can follow and non-stupid plotting. You know what I did love? The Taoism. I never get to see that school of thought (I hesitate to say religion) embodied in any sort of fiction, ever, so all that talk of balance and lightness gives way to darkness and vice versa - I was all over that. It made me really happy.
