What's the last movie you watched? How was it? Tell us about it!
I'll start.
I've been collecting VHS this year because they're really cheap and I might as well get some use out of the VCR. Looking through some old stuff for things to sell, I found an old gift from my parents: the BBC production of the Chronicles of Narnia. Not the ones Disney put out a couple years ago. It's like I just unearthed my childhood on tape. Now, Narnia is caked with extremely blatant Christian fables because C.S. Lewis was about as subtle as napalm up your ass, but I don't give a fuck. They were the first novels I read as a child, they're classics, and I thought they were totally rad. I haven't seen these movies in years so I thought it would be fun to watch them again.
It's cold as balls in my room at night so I huddled up in bed early the other night and watched The Silver Chair, which is the last one they adapted; it's the most amusing story they did, and it has Tom Baker in it playing a pessimistic frog man thing. These were pretty theater-style in execution with elaborate costumes and sets, and like... fursuits for the animal characters. Some of them are puppets or animatronics or something. SFX are animated overlays, really obvious green screening, and stage props, like old 80's Doctor Who style. It's a lot of fun. Each movie is cut together from a bunch of serial episodes so I guess it's more like a miniseries, but I always just watched the whole tape.
I can't help but compare this film to the CGI-heavy new release of The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe, which I didn't like. That one tried too hard to be Lord of the Rings For Kids, when the two series don't have anything in common in my opinion, they're completely different works and barely share the same genre. People seem to group them together because the authors knew each other, which is retarded. I think Narnia has more in common with Harry Potter. Well, the BBC version of Narnia is shot pretty simply and more like a TV show than a dramatic film and that suits the tone and depth of the source material pretty well in my opinion.
The camera work is messy, but the directing is pretty decent and all. The content is good considering the scenes they were attempting to depict. The audio is bullshit-quality on my copies and I doubt it would be much better on DVD. The story itself was well-adapted in my opinion, they did it justice with what they had to work with.
I hope someone has that puppet Aslan head mounted over their fireplace somewhere.
Considering the vintage of this movie and the fact that it wasn't made for theater release, I'd rate it 4/5.




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