Chronicling Me Some Narnia, Part 3

I found this out a while back from Television Without Pity, but I wasn't excited to write about it because it's a bummer. Disney has dumped the Narnia series. Something about blah, blah, blah, hard economic times. Whatever. Maybe The Voyage of the Dawn Treader wouldn't be the biggest movie of summer 2010, but it would make you money.

There's some hope, I guess, that a different studio will pick up the project, but as those links indicate, the timeframe is tight. They only have the actors locked in for a certain amount of time.

Here's the thing: Dawn Treader would be a totally kickin' movie. (This lady agrees.) It's a nice mix of cohesive plot and episodic adventures (they're on a sea voyage to the end of the world, but they land on various strange and mysterious islands). They meet lots of interesting characters and, since it's Narnia, learn Important Lessons.

Plus, this is the book where C.S. Lewis discovered that children could have personalities! It features Annoying Cousin Eustace (the snotty British child you love to hate!), who has his own redemption arc within the plot.

After seeing Prince Caspian last summer, I gave some thought to the potential of each of the remaining Narnia books as films. Dawn Treader tops the list, I have to say. It's definitely better raw material than Caspian was; it would need less tweaking.

The Silver Chair would be tricky. (Also, even Disney's original deal only covered the first three movies.) By book 4, all the Pevensies are out of the picture--it stars Redeemed Cousin Eustace and his friend Jill. Jill could be fun, though. I like Jill. It would be a darker film, however. The main characters spend most of their time isolated, much of it on a cold, desolate landscape, and most of the rest in a miserable underground kingdom. And their adventure isn't fun like in Dawn Treader. It just wouldn't be as enjoyable to watch.

Then there's The Horse and His Boy. This is my favorite of all the Narnia books, but I don't know if that's a widely shared opinion. One thing I like about it is that it's the deepest you delve into Narnia--it's from the point of view of people who are from and live in that world. The Pevensies appear, but it's something of a mid-quel to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, since it takes place when the Pevensies are all grown up and ruling Narnia. The main characters aren't anybody you meet in any other books, but they're interesting and likeable. There's fun, there's happiness, there are pretty locations, and there's even some glitz (what with the royalty and all). I think it would be a lovely movie, but it might not be what audiences are looking for from a Narnia film.

The Magician's Nephew might be the best book qua book of the series, now that I think about it. This is the deepest you delve into the real world; it's the story of the professor from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe back when he was a kid. We see him interact with his family (his uncle is kind of evil!) and everything. Then he and his friend Polly go to a couple different planes of reality, and then they see the very creation of Narnia. I can't decide whether his alternate-reality adventures would be really cool or just too weird on film. Either is possible.

Then there's The Last Battle. I flat out do not know how they would make this a movie or, if they managed it, how they'd get anybody to watch. Most of it is just creepy and dark and unpleasant. (I remembered when I re-read it recently why I had only read it once before. It's not any fun.) Redeemed Cousin Eustace and Friend Jill show up to help the King of Narnia try to save the kingdom/world, but . . . well, they fail. They lose and Narnia is destroyed and then everybody dies. Even the Pevensies. But then everybody gets to go to Heaven (except for Susan, because she's a slut now? Or something?), so they're totally stoked about having died. Which makes sense with Christian theology--after your earthly life, you get to kick it in this fantastic place and hang out with Asla--I mean, Jesus forever, and it will be awesome. Nevertheless, it would be a hard sell in a kid's movie. The whole package is just not feasible as a summer blockbuster.

So basically, my guess is that even if somebody rescues Dawn Treader, there might not be any more made. I'll certainly take whatever I can get, though. Click here to read more . . .

Chronicling Me Some Narnia, Part 2

(Oh, there was a Part 1. Sure, it was almost eight months ago, but I hadn't forgotten.)

Wherein I Talk about Order

As I have mentioned before, I really can't handle it when the Narnia books are printed so as to lead people to read them in "chronological" order. (Seriously, I kind of freak out.) Here is why I am RIGHT that they should be read in publication order.

For reference:

Publication order
1. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
2. Prince Caspian
3. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
4. The Silver Chair
5. The Horse and His Boy
6. The Magician's Nephew
7. The Last Battle

Chronological order
1. The Magician's Nephew
2. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
3. The Horse and His Boy
4. Prince Caspian
5. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
6. The Silver Chair
7. The Last Battle

Reasons Publication Order is Better

A) They were clearly intended to be read in the order they were written. As you go along, it's obvious that Lewis assumes that you've read the books that were previously written, since he makes explicit references to them.

B) You get attached to certain characters based on how early you're introduced to them. This is a complaint I heard from someone who read a set that was presented chronologically--his favorite character was young Diggory, but after The Magician's Nephew, he was only present as the mysterious old guy that the Pevensie children stay with. If you start out with the Pevensies, it's more satisfying, since they carry most of the stories.

C) There's an increasing complexity to the writing as you go along in publication order. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is very, very simple, while The Magician's Nephew has much more going on, both in the writing style and the ideas presented. It makes more sense for the complexity to increase incrementally as you go along, instead of ricocheting back and forth.

Anyway, that's why I'm glad that when they decided to make the movies, they decided to release them in publication order. (It was probably less for my reasons than because The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is by far the best known and therefore the most marketable, but the ends justify the means!)

Of course, this might not matter anymore, but I'll save that post for tomorrow. (Really tomorrow, not eight-months-from-now tomorrow.)

Click here to read more . . .

You Know What You Should Watch Tonight?

How I Met Your Mother (on CBS at 7:30 Central [the best timezone!]).


I alluded to my great love of this show during yesterday's post. I rented the first disc of the first season of it a month or two ago, on a whim, and Neal and I went a little crazy over it. (We bought the second season because Netflix would have taken too long and Blockbuster didn't have it.)

It's a very funny show (yes, even though it's on CBS), with focus on characters and continuous plot as opposed to one-off gags (although those can happen, too). But there are three things that really set HIMYM apart:

1. The characters are actually nice to each other.
When you think about it, it's the default for characters on sitcoms to be mean to each other. I don't notice it much until I see the characters on HIMYM treating each other like real people do. Sure, they tease each other sometimes, but generally they're inclined to help each other out because they're friends instead of having a "what's in it for me?" mentality. Also, the married couple (Lily and Marshall) are goofy sweet with each other, instead of hating each other with a blinding rage (see: Ray and Debra, Doug and Carrie, Ross and Rachel).

2. Solid continuity/in-jokes.
HIMYM has probably the second-most impressive dedication to continuity of any comedy I've seen. (It comes after Arrested Development, which is no slight on HIMYM, as AD's continuity was crazy amazing.) This means that HIMYM really rewards its viewers for paying attention and watching the episodes in order, as there will be callbacks to previous jokes.

Some are obvious: in Season 2, Barney and Marshall made a slap bet. Marshall was awarded five slaps that he could use on Barney at any time. He's doled out three so far, in three separate episodes, one of which was all about the impending slap. In the other it came out of nowhere, for Barney and for the audience. Some callbacks are more subtle: there's a running gag that Barney had a romantic liaison with Madeline Albright--Barney mentioned telling "Madeline" something about world affairs, just in passing, last week.

The upshot is that the makers of the show respect not just their own story, but the viewers as well. It's not like how in season 1 of Friends, it was a big deal that Ross had only been with his ex-wife, and then years later we were supposed to buy a joke that he had slept with a dorm cleaning lady in college.

And finally 3. Neil. Patrick. Harris.
Doogie Howser grew up into somebody totally hilarious. NPH's Barney is the most cartoonish character on the show, with his crazy womanizing, insistence on dressing in nothing but suits, mysterious evil corporate job, and dedication to his own awesomeness. But he absolutely pulls it off.

In fact, Barney is in the midst of a serious, for-reals storyline, and NPH is managing to juggle it with Barney's requisite goofiness beautifully.

I'm such a sucker for this storyline, too. See, he's realized he's in love with Robin, who used to date Ted. The real problem, though, is that he's against relationships and monogamy and all that boring stuff, preferring to remain awesome. So he's in love with her, but he can't see how she would go for him even if he could manage to tell her, because she knows all about his one-night-standing, lying, and womanizing. Basically, I will go for any "He's secretly in love with her!" story, especially if there's a healthy does of "He's not the type of man who falls in love!" on top of it.* And, like I said, NPH is doing an amazing job with it. Boy about broke my heart last week.

Anyway, I don't know exactly what tomorrow's episode is about--the commercials have something with Barney and Ted bartending, while the totally unhelpful CBS summary is "Three Days of Snow: Lily and Marshall retire another ritual, forcing them to reflect." (If they keep up their pattern, it will be a few episodes before they come back to the Barney/Robin thing. They want to keep me in suspense.)

In conclusion, give HIMYM a try tomorrow (or on the internet) if you haven't before.

Also, if you want something to watch at 7:00, The Big Bang Theory is pretty entertaining. It's no HIMYM, but that's a bit much to ask for.




*The best examples of this I can think of are: Joey falls in love with Rachel, season 8 of Friends (which pulled Friends back up from the hole of season 7, even if it couldn't sustain the goodness into season 9), August Falcon (in a reference that only my mom will get), and the Todd Rundgren song "I Saw the Light", which I was completely wild about for a couple years in high school. I'm sure there are more that I'm not remembering right now. Suggestions? Click here to read more . . .

Songs I've Downloaded Recently

Three categories here: Guitar Hero, How I Met Your Mother, and Weird Al.

I've downloaded several songs that I enjoy playing on Guitar Hero, the most recent of which are Wolfmother's "Woman"


Blue Oyster Cult's "Godzilla"


and the Scorpions' "Rock You Like a Hurricane." (Sorry, there was nothing they would let me embed that wasn't a live show accompanied by an orchestra, footage from Guitar Hero, or a small child playing bass over a cassette tape.)

That last one doubles as a How I Met Your Mother song--there's an episode where Barney has a mix CD, and as he explains, his mix CD philosophy is not that it should rise and fall. It should be "all rise!" I found a playlist of this CD through an old link to the CBS website, which is how I knew that "Rock You Like a Hurricane" was on there. The only song they play on the show is Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name." (Ditto on the embedding problem, except replace "small child with a bass over a cassette tape" with "clips from NCIS for some reason.")

Because when you hear those first few lines? How can you not get pumped?!

In a different, and possibly the greatest ever, episode of HIMYM ("Slap Bet"), it is discovered that Robin was a teen singing sensation in her native Canada. I had to download the song from the fantastic music video:


Finally, Weird Al has a new single out (well, fairly new to me--I forgot to check his website for quite a while). Like his best songs, it gets ever funnier as it goes along.
Click here to read more . . .

Keeping Up With My Correspondence

Dear Obama,

Hey! Congratulations on your impending inauguration, and all that hoopla. Quick thing, though: stop it about pushing the digital switch back. Stopitstopitstopit. The commercials have been on for a year; anybody who didn't realize that and precisely when the switch was coming clearly never turns on their television, so they won't miss it when it's gone. Also, this article is right--pushing it back will just confuse the issue and continue to cost TV stations money running the same channel in two ways.

Just, c'mon, stop it. You have more important things to focus on, like introducing a playoff system for college football.

Love,
Rachel

* * * * * * * *

Dear Saturday Night Live,

Man, you are terrible. You're good for what, one laugh per hour? Maybe you should only exist in election-spoof form.

Sincerely,
Rachel

P.S.: Kristen Wiig? Why are you, or anyone, employing her? Click here to read more . . .

Olympics in Madison, 2016?

I had been seeing headlines the past day or so about cycling events maybe taking place in southern Wisconsin if Chicago gets the Olympic bid, but I just now actually clicked on one of the stories--it turns out some events might take place in Madison itself:

The road course would begin in Madison, have a couple loops in the city, then head west for five loops and the finish over demanding terrain in the Blue Mound area; the time trial road course would be entirely in Madison; and the mountain bike course at the Tyrol Basin ski area in Mount Horeb.

This sounds like a great idea to me. Sure, it wouldn't compete with the whole Forbidden City/Great Wall mystique that the Beijing biking events had, but Madison and the surrounding area is very pretty. And the end of the article points out, correctly, this town is full of bicycle enthusiasts. Bicycle lanes, bicycle stores, bicycle conventions--Madison is collectively a cycling fool.

Even if it happens, it would be unlikely to affect us directly, as the odds are very small that we'll still being living here in 2016. Still, even if we won't be able to walk down to Capitol Square to see some Olympic cycling (which would be pretty awesome even if it is just cycling), it would be pretty cool to watch Olympic coverage and watch people competing on what used to be your home turf. Click here to read more . . .

Some Project Runway Opinions

Fact: Project Runway is awesome.

Everybody I know who's tried watching Project Runway likes it, regardless of gender or sexuality. The 'sband, Craig Ferguson, my dad . . . everybody likes Project Runway.

One great thing about it is that it's a competition reality show that's actually about the quality of work the contestants do, not about the contestants having tv-drama-friendly personalities. That said, nobody (and no show) is perfect, and there have been a few egregious judging decisions. Here are the top three.

#3: Season 3, the recycled materials challenge--Allison is eliminated instead of Vincent

OK, so Allison's dress was not good. But Vincent's dress was horrrrrrrrible . As one of the other contestants pointed out (angrily) to Vincent, his model couldn't even walk in that dress.

Where Allison went wrong was A) that weird hair bow thing on her model and B) not being totally, perhaps clinically, crazy. Allison was cute but mild-mannered, which is not a good recipe for sound bites. Vincent, on the other hand, was always doing something totally weird, which the cameras love. That's why he got by week after week with designs either out-of-date or just boring (there was a challenge where they had to make outfits for themselves, and he made a plain black shirt and plain black pants. And didn't receive a lick of criticism from the judges). It had to be the crazy that saved him, which was never more egregious than with his childish, non-functional trash dress.







#2: Season 2, the designer makeover challenge--Nick gets eliminated instead of Santino

Well, I tried and tried, but couldn't find a picture of the suit Nick made for his fellow designer, Daniel. Suffice it to say that judges were correct that it looked like a woman's suit and that the fabric puckered in many places. But Santino's jumpsuit for Kara? Was, for one thing, literally falling apart (the left arm was falling off) and, for another, was uh, a jumpsuit. And it looked gross and ill-fitting. Although, show me a jumpsuit that isn't gross and ill-fitting, and I'll give you a cookie.

But Santino was Season 2's designated villain, so he had to be kept around as long as possible. Admittedly, as far as "villains" go, Santino wasn't all that bad. He was pretty funny (killer, killer Tim Gunn impression), and he did make good stuff sometimes. Far superior to, say, Wendy freaking Pepper.











#1: Season 1, the Grammy/Nancy O'Dell challenge--Wendy Pepper wins, Austin is eliminated.

This was the problem with Wendy Pepper (besides being mean and not a very good designer): she had watched too much Survivor. Everybody else was there to kickstart their careers in fashion design--they wanted to make good things, and they were perfectly willing to help each other make good things (this is another way in which Project Runway is superior to other reality shows--they give each other advice and sometimes even use their spare time to give other designers a hand). Wendy thought she was there to be on A Reality Show, with alliances and strategies and junk. It was the first season; when you think about it, she didn't really have a good reason not to think that way (until of course she observed that no one else did).

So Wendy was an ideal villain. That's why, I am convinced, she was crowned winner of the last challenge before fashion week, meaning that she got into the final three who got to have shows on the big stage. They were supposed to make a dress for stupid Nancy O'Dell to wear to the Grammy Awards. Wendy made that dumb orange thing with, like, a feather skirt. Nancy was like, "Oh, I could just edit that and it would totally work!" (Why couldn't edit somebody else's?) Whereas Austin made a beautiful dress, because that's what Austin did. Nancy insisted it was just too fancy for the Grammys. Austin had talent, but Wendy had drama, and the producers decided they needed the latter in the season finale.

But! Like I said, such decisions are rare--usually the judges choose well.

And now I wll tell you what I think have been the best and worst challenges--in terms of the concept of what the designers have to do and the quality of work they come up with.


Worst: Season 4, the Tiki Barber menswear challenge.

There were three problems with this: first, that the designers come on the show with the understanding that they're going to make womenswear. They are, by and large, women's designers. Similarly, menswear is clearly harder to make. It demands separate pieces (no dresses), pants (no skirts), and pretty rigid construction. Finally, Tiki Barber is totally boring. Even if a designer had the ability to make something interesting, they were limited by having to make something for a dull guy to wear on the Today Show. How can you make something original for a guy who needs a boring suit?

The best stuff they made was dull, and the worst stuff was just shockingly bad--like Carmen's over there. As you can see, she never found the time to make a shirt.

They should never repeat this one.












Best: Season 5, the drag queen challenge!

This was just a great episode. Drag queen wear is the opposite of menswear--you can do almost anything, as long as it's loud and fun. There were a bunch of great ones with this (Korto made this fantastic red dress with 3-D flames on one side of the collar--I loved it). Joe's sailor/Ann Margaret thing at left was the winner. Plus, the drag queens themselves were great TV. I don't know if they could repeat this one either, since it was so memorable, but it's the kind of drama and originality they should shoot for.














Also, here's a creepy picture I found of Tim Gunn, Andrae, and Santino.

Click here to read more . . .