The third Narnia is out, thought I’d watch the first one to recap but couldn’t manage all of it. I cant’ help but note that the acting is poor, and although there are a few good scenes, it hardly lives up to the version I envisaged when reading the books. You loose half of the script and all of the description. I can hardly agree it is reflected intently enough to fairly replicate Lewis’s words.
This is the issue that a less booksmart generation will face. Theirs is a computer literacy; a digital and technological comprehension that is in its own right can be an artistically filling meal to digest. But this isn’t a rant about people not reading anymore, people still read - no it’s just a few thoughts on the need to re-adjust imagination, redirect it and keep it alive. Children don’t play ‘pretend’ so much now, they play WII and ps3 and fair play, because the imagined world is transformed in to an actual visual, a world can be realised through technology in such a way that it is arguably as engaging as reading and imagining it for yourself. The problem with that is we’ve lost that process where you read and build up the characters and the world yourself based on the ingenuity of the writers ability. Instead we’re just spoon fed it by a director. It’s a bit like being drunk, all this choice and tecky redevelopment of literacy, it gets a bit fuzzy sometimes and you tend to forget the string of occurrences that got you to where you are.
However, as long as the director hasn’t skipped this step its all good, and there are some thriving examples, I don’t just mean special effects, but take Avatar, it wasn’t just visually stunning and beautifully filmed but the creativity within the detail of the plants, animals and backdrops is a positive salute to the wanderings of a creative mind being put to good use.
So I think my point, obviously as an advocate of enjoying a good book and hoping to make writing a career, is don’t stop reading!- and secondly, the digi. revolution was a good thing as long as the creatives driving it sustain their imagination and keep chasing that hunger for inspiration. Technological advances may be able to keep spitting out the goods but you’ve got to put something worthwhile in to begin with.
