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Re: The Screwtape Letters, by Focus on the Family

PostPosted: August 30th, 2010, 12:03 am
by Matthew Whaley
You are right about those extended versions! My two teenage daughters love those movies and have been watching them over and over again to the point where even I can hardly stand to watch them anymore! Which reminds me, I think it's time for me to go back and read those books again, if only to reestablish the way my imagination interprets what Tolkien wrote.

Re: The Screwtape Letters, by Focus on the Family

PostPosted: August 31st, 2010, 3:02 pm
by larry gilman
By the way, where exactly did Lewis make this "undesirable hybrid" remark about style? If we're going to agree or disagree with Lewis, we should know what he actually said, and where he said it, what the context was.

Re. the movies: If people like a movie version of a book, then they like it, and that's taste, and that's just a fact, as far as it goes. But the eternally recurrent argument or excuse that an adaption makes converts for this or that book seems to me irrelevant, non sequitur, an attempt to switch to a completely different discussion. If I argue that a given adaptation is emotionally shallow and aesthetically stock, then that is an artistic criticism. Ticket and book sales have no bearing on it at all. As an individual reader or watcher, my reaction, what I experience and feel, my judgement on the artistic merits, isn't even touched by the question of what millions of other people are buying or not buying.

Bluntly, then, I simply don't care that the LOTR movies have boosted book sales sixfold (which they have -- http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... t=0&page=1 ). That is a datum for the marketing department, not for a reader or viewer _as such_. I have nothing to do with it.

"At the end of the day, a film can only include so much." Exactly: and what if that "so much" is not enough? What if the best things about a book, its voice, its spirit, its suggestiveness, its sprawling imaginative wealth, its sense of passing time, happen in a given case to be the sorts of things that don't go into film at all, by the nature of the medium? What if the result is a spiritually truncated, flattened out, hollywoodized, action-packed dumb-down of the original vision? Like an indoor grove of plastic trees in an amusement park -- when the alternative would be to go walk in a real forest? At the end of the day, an amusement park can only include so much. True. Too bad for amusement parks.

Also at the end of the day, people are free to make these movies or not, and go to them or not, and like them or not. So there should be nothing threatening about my growlings and barkings. Free speech for all, and hurrah for that.

Another by the way: Nerd42, I am a left-wing, anti-capitalist American (though from your posts, I guess that we actually have a lot in common). But I would object to adaptations of Lewis that tweaked him to make him ideologically friendlier to my own views. I hate that kind of meddling or touching-up (or misleading selective quotation, a tactic that has sometimes been used to make Lewis look like a Creationist). I'm betting that you actually are against such exploitations too. So let us have the full complexity, the whole sandwich. There is a reason why" Bowdlerize" is a term of derogation . . .

Re: The Screwtape Letters, by Focus on the Family

PostPosted: September 1st, 2010, 2:18 am
by Nerd42

Re: The Screwtape Letters, by Focus on the Family

PostPosted: September 2nd, 2010, 5:12 am
by Stanley Anderson

Diabolic letter box

PostPosted: September 3rd, 2010, 5:14 am
by Kanakaberaka
It's always great to discover yet another letter to Wormwood from his uncle. The Screwtape Letters was my introduction to the works of C.S. Lewis. And I still enjoy going back to re-read it. Thank you Stanley.

I wonder what Uncle Screwtape would have to say about that new film The Last Exorcism?

Re: The Screwtape Letters, by Focus on the Family

PostPosted: September 3rd, 2010, 6:39 pm
by archenland_knight
Nerd42: Your post was hilarious. I could picture the little people running around in your head. I'm not sure if you are old enough to remember a sitcom called "Herman's Head", but your post reminded me of it.

Stanley: Also very funny.

Re: The Screwtape Letters, by Focus on the Family

PostPosted: September 8th, 2010, 11:15 pm
by larry gilman