Review of Prince Caspian

How dare they?

That’s about all I can say to begin with. I am flabbergasted. I really don’t know how it could have been much worse. I wept for quite a while afterwards, in the theatre, in the car on the way home….

OK, Michael Ward, so you certainly got your Martial movie: brawls, fistfights, arguments, battles, battles, and more battles. And plenty of trees. The trees were good. And the sense of antiquity associated with Mars. Yes.

But that’s about it. I mean, seriously, how could a movie adaptation go that wrong? The plot was not even remotely the same. Some plot changes, I expected. Some theologically skewed implications, I anticipated. Some lines misspoken, even to the extent of obscuring Lewis’s meaning, I was prepared to handle. Even the stupid and malapropos romance between Susan and Caspian need not have ruined all [wonder how Lucy will feel in VDT when she watches him fall in love with Ramandu’s daughter? Awkward!] But this was over the top. This Prince Caspian does not deserve the title, for it is not the same story.

And I believe it is blasphemous.

I have authority for that claim. Lewis himself wrote in a letter to a woman who wanted to make Narnia into a radio and television series: “I am sure you understand that Aslan is a divine figure, and anything remotely approaching the comic (above all anything in the Disney line) would be to me simple blasphemy” (Letters vol. 3, p. 491, 19 June 1954; emphasis mine). Basically, don’t mess with Aslan, because He is a representation of Christ. Well, Aslan was totally messed with in this appalling film. He wasn’t made comic, thankfully, but He was rendered irrelevant. And the children’s carefully deployed responses to Him were altered beyond recognition. Peter, deciding not to wait for Aslan anymore, to go it alone, to reject his Saviour? That’s not the Peter I know, nor the one Lewis wrote.

Nor was this Lewis’s Aslan, nor a parallel to the God of the Bible. This Aslan was an absent, passive, weak figure who did not belong to the story. It seems that the Disney/Walden people, without the clear death-and-resurrection myth around which to center the plot, simply didn’t know what to do with Him. So they decided to write a new story, one about doubt and distance and only dreaming your faith is true. That story, they must have reasoned, is more relevant to today’s society. And they couldn’t have Aslan telling Lucy she’s a lioness; maybe that would be like saying someone is justified by faith in Christ alone! They could only have Him say that if she were any braver, then she’d be a lioness. That is more like a “works doctrine,” in harmony with all of Disney’s other “believe in yourself” messages. And it fits nicely with that other heresy: Lucy’s idea that “Maybe we need to prove ourselves before He comes to help us.”

What was Douglas Gresham thinking? Didn’t he read the books?

And what’s with the total Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Pirates of the Caribbean rip-offs? Edmund putting a Gandalf expression on his face and falling backwards off the tower into the claws of a griffin [eagle?]; orderly troops [clones?] marching in formation across a field; a drop of human blood to bring the dead back to life?!?!?!?! Hello! I think I stepped into the wrong movie theatre. Is this some kind of parody of the great fantasy films of the century?

This rant isn’t to imply there weren’t beautiful moments. The film is something of a visual feast, with lovely soaring griffins, flights of arrows, luscious costumes, some impressive architecture, and beautiful landscapes (New Zealand; again, stolen from LOTR). I liked the additions about how it feels to go back after 1300 years. The paintings on the walls of Aslan’s How were a nice touch, and I must admit I liked the wall of ice and the ghostly Witch. I hope they remembered that Queen Jadis in The Magician’s Nephew is the same witch and had Tilda Swinton sign a three-movie contract. The single combat was pretty good. It was nicely filmed, and had some good details in it, such as Peter “using his enemy’s arm as a ladder” and so on. It wasn’t played in a roped-off area of the field, but it was fairly well regulated. Trumpkin was well cast, but we didn’t get to know him much. The River God—now, that was great. The moment when we saw through his eyes was fantastic, as was the fact that he was pouring or flowing all the time, like a solid, animated waterfall. His head wasn’t “weedy” as if should have been, but he was still very good. The Centaurs were impressive looking, but their movements were unnatural. Can’t we do better than that with CGI? I mean, come on, you just take a picture of a horse and a picture of a guy and you glue them together, right? Sigh. But some of the cinematography was good, the music was nice, and the four Pevensie actors are still spectacular. Not to mention gorgeous. Those boys sure turned out hot. Caspian wasn’t bad either, but Peter gets my vote. I’ll miss him in the next movie. If I go to see the next movie. Maybe I’ll stay home and read the book. Maybe that way I’ll avoid ulcers. And I’ll escape getting tomatoes thrown at me by the other movie-goers who want to watch their flick in peace without my sobbing and shouting.

See, the main thing is—well, the main thing. The kappa element. The “atmosphere” or “feeling” of the story. They got the military aspect, that’s for sure. But they missed the entire theological character of this volume, I believe. This is subjective, but perhaps verifiable. There’s a feeling of loss throughout the book. There’s a feeling that without Aslan everything is kind of scattered. All the bits and pieces of history and society need to be pulled together by Him. Other elements are important: suppressed history, faith without sight, and the gradual revelation of Aslan’s plan. But in the film, everything was more chaotic, more fast-paced, and more physically dangerous than spiritually dangerous. There was a lot of doubt, to be sure; too much! But Aslan’s delayed entrance, and [most of all] Lucy’s only dreaming that she saw Him in the woods, made this a different story. And a nasty one. That horrible massacre in Miraz’s castle belongs to the kappa element of The Last Battle, not Prince Caspian.

Finally, where were Bacchus, Silenus, the Maenads, and the Dryads? Prince Caspian has always been my least favorite of the Narniad, and the Bacchanalian bits saved the story for me. And they are so well suited to a visual media! Why, oh why would they leave out the wild young god of wine and his fierce dancing girls, the drunken old man on a donkey calling out for “Refreshments! Refreshments!” and the beautiful tree-people? Those are quintessential Lewisian moments.

But since Adamson or Gresham or whoever changed the entire plot, altered the characters, distorted the theological message, and imitated other more popular fantasies, I guess it’s only consistent to leave out the most imaginative and representative aspect of the book.

It breaks my heart.


~ Sørina

Art, Beauty & God: Recurrent Themes in Theological Aesthetics

Comment Magazine (in which I have published an article and a photo) recommends the following:

Comment author Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin will teach a course called "Art, Beauty & God: Recurrent Themes in Theological Aesthetics" this summer at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto.

"Since the early church Christian thinkers have been ambivalent about art and beauty. Some reviled them for their supposedly seductive or idolatrous nature, others revered them for their apparent capacity to serve as steppingstones to a higher, spiritual reality. Although since modern times art, beauty and religion stood in a troubled relationship to each other, both beauty and religion have made dramatic comebacks in recent discussions about art, as have art and beauty in theological debate. Co-taught by a theologian and a philosopher, the course will explore the relationships between: art and beauty; beauty and God; icons and idols; art and worldview; theological and philosophical aesthetics.

"The course will examine recent developments in theological aesthetics with a view to identifying which theories hold most promise for a holistic contemporary Christian aesthetics."

"Art, Beauty & God: Recurrent Themes in Theological Aesthetics" runs June 30 - July 11, 2008 at the ICS Campus. Registration deadline is June 21, 2008, online (icscanada.edu) or by phone (Robbin Burry, Registrar, (416)979-2331 x234).

May poem of the month

Please consider purchasing a copy of
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SWANS
by
SØRINA HIGGINS
with cover photography by Rosie Perera.
Sørina’s book may be pre-ordered online by going to Finishing Line Press, clicking on the “New Releases and forthcoming titles” link, and scrolling down the alphabetical list. Your copy will be shipped to you on 8 August 2008. Please assist with early sales by ordering this book soon. Tell your friends! Order multiple copies as gifts!


I'm thankful that this poem of the month, with the accompanying photo by Rosie, is no longer relevant! This year, unlike some, we have a beautiful spring with flowers and not a hint of snow. It's been rainy some days, but today is just a day of May perfection. Enjoy!














Photo by Rosie Perera



There is Heartbreak in Heaven
Meditations while listening to Chopin in the snow

I know what a heart feels like when it breaks.
I once knelt in a tiny chapel in the dark, under arched
stained glass, shaken with the kind of weeping
that is red like the inside of a broken body,
gold like threads of life unraveled, shaped
like shattered windows or unfinished songs. Lovely,

and unendurable. This day is nothing like it: lovely
with a gentle kind of comfort, but the beauty breaks
my heart nevertheless. It doesn’t take much: trees arching
over the path, heavy with sparkling winter, weeping
willows dripping into their own shadows, disembodied
cries of hidden kingfishers—the sounds and shapes

of a February run stretched out and quietly shaped
by a river curling its path to lead to loveliness
unbearable, out into solitude so silent I fear to break
the softness with my double tread. Larch
and lilac, sleeping: the very whiteness makes me weep,
as does the music of my pulse: the beauty of a body

that is young—yet knows the intimations of the body’s
coming age. I would not lose my memory for my shape,
would not lose ideas in exchange for imaginary love,
yet wonder how the mind goes on in broken
flesh, wonder if an ugly figure feels the archetype
of what it should have been. I should not weep

on such a day for thoughts; yet I am weeping
to the music that I wear close to my body
in my very ears: a study in the colors and shapes
of sorrow. Each stricken string a single tone of beloved
melancholy. I wish I could stop the breakneck
pace of snowflakes: slow them so the gothic architecture

of each microcosm lifts its tiny architraves
and crystal naves against the silent sun and sweeps
the sky with leaded glass. I believe anybody
could pray in a cathedral made of ice, a shapely
sepulcher of frost. If that is so, more lovely
still the vaults and domes of unbreakable

splendor where I will break my heart on every archway,
dance and weep inside a body formed of perfection,
heal the shape of inside wounds, and laugh for love of sublime sorrow.

-- Sørina Higgins

Debut Poetry Chapbook now available

Announcing the publication of “Admonit’s” debut poetry chapbook!!

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SWANS
by
SØRINA HIGGINS
Sørina’s book may be pre-ordered online by going to Finishing Line Press, clicking on the “New Releases and forthcoming titles” link, and scrolling down the alphabetical list. Your copy will be shipped to you on 8 August 2008. Please assist with early sales by ordering this book soon. Tell your friends! Order multiple copies as gifts!


photo by Rosie Perera


You have already read many of Sørina’s poems here on the blog as poems of the month. Here is what other readers have said:

I’m moved by the passionate pilgrimage of these poems. Sørina Higgins has a composer’s ear and a painter’s eye. She’s such a crafty poet we shouldn’t be surprised when her lines catch us up and transport us into a state of wonder.
—David Huddle, Author of Grayscale and Summer Lake: New & Selected Poems

Sørina Higgins wanders through the both natural world and the world of mythology, asking questions, some unanswerable, in her pursuit of the ineffable. Like a young Anne Sexton, in her rowing towards God, Higgins wants “something more than mundane, something like the sky inside my soul.” We all do. Join her on this journey.
—Barbara Crooker, author of Radiance and Line Dance, winner of the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award

White birds, black birds, and every shade of gray sky and green yearning—all are lit by Higgins’ flickering, searching, tested faith, to become signposts to the ineffable.
—Louisa Gilder, Author of Age of Entanglement



Local readers of Iambic Admonit are also invited to a reading:

Saturday, 7 June 2008
7:00 p.m.
The Master’s Academy of Fine Arts
258 Main Street, East Greenville, PA
for more information: 484.866.2147 or iambic.admonit@gmail.com.

Student composers will perform their musical settings of Mrs. Higgins’ verse, and an open mic will follow.

There will be an entrance fee of $3.00,
and refreshments will be available for purchase.


Sørina Higgins and her husband live in Allentown, PA, where she teaches courses in literature, writing, music, philosophy, Shakespeare, and The Inklings. Her writing has appeared in Stillpoint, Relief, Innisfree, Studio, Perspectives, Alive Now, Windhover, Bible & Spade, and idiom. She is the author of an entry on Charles Williams in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Christian Literature. She holds an M.A. from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. This autumn, she will begin teaching English and Drama at Lehigh Valley Christian High School.

Review of Expelled

Imagine Michael Moore. Now give him slightly more stylish clothes (at least down to the ankles) and a mock-shabby-chic-geek attitude. Then take his worldview, turn it upside-down, and add some faith. Trim off some of the nastier edges, and you might almost have Ben Stein. Ben Stein, the host and writer of Expelled, asks a lot of good questions in this low-budget but intelligent film. It’s one of these increasingly more common feature-documentaries, with more spin than science, more propaganda than journalism, but well worth the price of the ticket. I advise you to go see it, and to see it right away while it’s still in the theatres, because I do believe we should send the box office message that we want more thinker-films that consider a theistic point of view.

That’s really what this movie is: a theist piece of propaganda. I don’t mind that, being a theist (and more) myself. And the previews were totally up front about the pro-God perspective. This isn’t really a documentary about science; it’s more about religion. And that’s fine. But it’s a bit over the top analogically. Let me explain.

So, the premise of this film is that top-level scientists and (especially) science faculty of major universities get in trouble (lose funding, lose jobs) if they even dare to suggest that there might be something to Intelligent Design. Mr. Stein interviews about four such individuals, which you might think isn’t quite enough to make a case. Anyhow, Mr. Stein got curious about Why all the fuss, so he started interviewing several interesting individuals with various connections to science, Darwinian Evolution, and Intelligent Design.

He went to the Discovery Institute, which has been the primary force behind the legal battle to get Intelligent Design into schools. The people there said that ID is largely misunderstood. First, they claimed, it’s not a religious battle. The people on their staff are from various religious backgrounds or no religion at all. They’re not, they say, trying to claim that God made everything. They’re just trying to suggest that there’s some intelligence of some sort back starting this whole process. I think.

He went to Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion, who contradicted himself by saying that Evolution has nothing to do with faith or the lack of it, but that it drove him away from belief in God, that people should be allowed to keep their comfortable little religious beliefs, and that everyone should be told that their faith is horrific nonsense.

He went to a variety of physicists, geneticists, biologists, to try to clear up the confusion surrounding Intelligent Design. Frankly, I got more confused. I’m still really bewildered. Here’s what I think—but please go see the film and then come back here and tell me if I’ve got it right, would you?? So, Ben was trying to find out exactly what Darwinian Evolutionists and Intelligent Design people disagree on. They seemed to have mostly the same explanations for the mechanisms of natural selection and so on. There were some differing opinions on the descent of one species to another, but Ben kept talking them back and back in time. Finally he got to the point, and then he hammered this into every interviewee: How did it all get started? I understand that there was this one cell and everything came from it, but how did we go from no organic life to organic life? Where did that one cell get life? And most everybody said, “We don’t know” on the evolutionary side, and the implication (but not ever stated, as I recall) was that the ID people said, “God started it.” Neither of which seems to me to be a very “scientific” statement. So, here’s my confusion. I guess the debate is no longer between “Creationists” in the old sense (young earth, about 10,000 years old, six literary 24-hour days, Adam and Eve created at once, no natural selection, no descent from apes) and “Evolutionists” (Big Bang, primordial slime, amoeba, monkey, man)—instead, I guess the debate is between “Evolutionists” and what we used to called “Theistic Evolutionists.” I guess. So when you see it, would you come back and tell me: Is that it? Is that all the debate is about? Whether God started it or not? That doesn’t seem like much. And if that’s the case, then I imagine Ben Stein’s exaggerating things.

Because he overplays a metaphor throughout the film: the Berlin Wall. He says there’s a wall built through (hum, now I’m not sure through what) the mind, or the Institution, or science or something. On one side of the wall is Evolution; on the other is Intelligent Design. ID, he claims, is oppressed and suppressed and ignored. It’s not allowed out, into the press or the peer-reviewed journals or the classroom. OK. Fine metaphor. But then Stein did what a lot of the sort of sensationalist Evangelical Fundamentalist speakers used to do in my childhood. [They probably still do; I just don’t go to hear them anymore]. He said that Evolution leads to genocide. He was careful to say (or to record one of his interviewees saying), “Darwin didn’t cause the Holocaust, but the Holocaust could not have happened without Darwin.” Then he took the viewer to a “hospital” in Germany where, long before National Socialism, handicapped people were “eliminated,” “liquidated” in gas chambers. He mentioned the eugenics campaign in the U.S. in (when was it?) the 30s (?), in which 50,000 people were forcibly sterilized because they were thought unfit to breed. He warned us that this is where we could end up again, or even worse, if we don’t face up to the mental wall Evolution has erected. I think.

And the overall message was that our American freedoms—of speech, the press, assembly, and religion—are in jeopardy. I guess that’s because 4 people got fired for teaching or publishing about Intelligent Design. But hey, Ben made a movie about it, and it’s showing in all the movie theatres. So I guess as long as you go buy a ticket and watch this film, your freedoms are guaranteed. We can assemble there. And talk and publish about it here.

But I’m still not sure what the wall is….


~ Sørina

another review of Planet Narnia

Here is my first published review article of Michael Ward's Planet Narnia, in the quarterly magazine of [one of] my alma mater[s], Gordon College. The illustrations are by one Grant Hanna, also a Gordon alum, and are in my opinion, fantastic! I don't know anything about technique, etc., but he expresses Ward's and Lewis's (and even Charles Williams's) ideas beautifully, with great profundity. The one above, for example, incorporates Aslan in his Lion, Witch, & Wardrobe character as Jove with Jupiter's "bleeding" red spot (which CW took as a wound in the dying and rising king) and snowflakes morphing into blooming roses. Fantastic!

The one below show Mars in both his military and his vegetative functions, as he influences Prince Caspian. Don't forget that the movie comes out on May 16th. When I watch the trailer, I don't know whether to cheer or weep -- probably some of each!

Transforming Culture Symposium

Rather than posting it again here, I simply refer you to my other blog to read my summary of the Transforming Culture Symposium, a conference on the church and the arts, which I attended in Austin, Texas, last week.