Thursday’s specials:
DEFENDING LEWIS
Hooray for GetReligion, as they expose the bloodthirsty journalists trying to get their knives into C.S. Lewis. I’m confident that the “deeper magic” of Lewis’s stories will rise up and conquer character assassinations.
DEFENDING POTTER
You’ve seen my review at Looking Closer’s movie page. Now here’s Chattaways’ review. Sounds like we agree on most things. We’ll continue to defend the boy against those Christian film critics who continue to condemn the series by saying it “glorifies witchcraft” instead of understanding the tradition of magic in literature as a versatile device representing mystery, talent, technology, etc. (Apparently Focus on the Family still insists that good parents will steer their children clear of Potter.)
DEFENDING PROPER PUNCTUATION
Hooray for the Apostrophe-Abuse blog, the most delightful site I’ve stumbled upon this week!
OFFENDING MANY
Hooray for John Malkovich and Johnny Depp, two actors I dearly love! But it’s FAR too early to issue a “hooray” for their new movie The Libertine. Hey, kids who like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you’d better ask your parents before you go see Depp’s newest film!
DEFENDING CATHOLICISM
For those who read my previous post on Mars Hill and erroneous objections to Catholicism, please check the updated version of the post. Steven Greydanus has stepped in to clarify some things.
I suppose that there wouldn’t be such a need on the part of writers like Gopnick (whose articles on being an American in France I quite enjoyed when I subscribed to the New Yorker) to “de-mythologize” Lewis if there weren’t such energy put forth on the part of certain American hagiographer’s to completely whitewash Lewis’s life and discredit the accounts of certain other of his biographers for the strangest, most prurient reasons.
The linchpin for me came when I came across a passage in a certain book on Lewis in which the author believed they had further demolished a certain biographer’s credibility due to his accounts of Lewis and friends regularly enjoying evenings drinking port and smoking cigars. The author’s dismissal of these accounts as guff was based entirely on the devastating testimony of an American college student who had apparently spent a semester or something at Oxford and claimed that the people there would never dare to ruin their enjoyment of port by smoking those foul, icky cigars. I think I actually laughed out loud in the bookstore, and decided I need never bother myself with this writer’s agenda again.
Re: “hagiographer’s”
D’oh. Nothing like leaving a stray apostrophe in a comment on a post with a link to a blog dedicated apostrophe abuse.
I meant to do that… yeah, it was *ironic*.
Yup, Jeff, we agree on most things Potter, I think.
FWIW, I don’t think I’m as bothered by the formula as you seem to be, since part of what makes Rowling’s books so much fun is the way she brings so many genres together (the Billy Bunter style of boarding-school story, the fantasy genre, the mystery genre, and probably others besides), and part of what made reading Goblet of Fire so much fun was trying to guess which of the good guys would turn out to be a bad guy this time, or vice versa.
As it turns out, I guessed correctly at a certain point in the book that is completely missing from the movie — it involved the Marauder’s Map, which never comes up in the film — but even then, the revelations at the end of the book still had their surprises. Alas, due to how severely the story has been compressed, the film doesn’t allow us to savour this mystery quite so much.
I could have not put the 10 mistakes any better. It is so true.
You’re very welcome, Jeffrey. 🙂
I love James Cameron’s Aliens. Ridley Scott’s Alien is more of a stylish but still standard-issue monster movie, so I like it, but don’t love it. Thus, I am neither angry nor sad.
Honestly, David Fincher ruined the franchise when he killed off all of the franchise’s surviving characters in Alien3, most of them in the first five minutes. And Alien Resurrection was a joke. So I’m not surprised Cameron would say that Alien Vs Predator was the best of the last three movies, though that’s definitely faint praise, kind of like saying Revenge of the Sith was the best of the Star Wars prequels.