film: December 2005 Archives

I guess two years makes a tradition, right? Once again, as we did last year, I and an extremely select group of geeky pals will spend New Year’s Eve watching the entire Extended Edition of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. We’ll stop only to watch the ball drop in Times Square at midnight... and since it’s now past noon and we haven’t started yet, we’ll be up until the wee hours of New Year’s Day before Sam marries Rosie.

And if you think that’s geeky, there’s a guy who’s clearly spent a whole lotta time researching the sex lives of elves in Middle Earth, and he doesn’t even appear to have been motivated by an unhealthy attraction to Orlando Bloom in a blond wig and blue contact lenses. Though he does note, quite amusingly:

Ever since the movie of the book Fellowship of the Ring came out, there seem to be two popular ideas about Elves' sex lives. Either they are radiantly asexual, or they are all screwing each other madly, along with any dwarves, hobbits, and men who happen along. Whichever you prefer is usually based on how attractive you think Orlando Bloom is.

His essay What Tolkien Officially Said About Elf Sex is informative and cheeky, and he’s also got a much more scholarly look at elvish naughtiness called Warm Beds Are Good.

Enjoy, and Ná alya i vinya loa! (That’s Elvish for “May the new year be blessed.” Found that at Some Useful Elvish Words and Phrases.)

So I got to meet Tilda Swinton recently, and had to resist the urge to grovel at her feet, she’s so damn cool. We were talking about The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (my review is coming on Friday, but here’s a sneak preview: Kick ass) and she had just the right attitude about the Jesus-osity of the flick: It’s not religious, she noted, "it’s prereligious. The children’s story is about surviving and being self-reliant. It’s the opposite of relying on a belief system."

That’s how I feel, too: Narnia utilizes the same mythological basis that Christianity and a whole bunch of other fairy stories use (even if it was C.S. Lewis’s intent to write a Christian allegory). There’s not a lot of point in getting worked up about the film, like Polly Toynbee in the British Guardian does. Though she recognizes that "[m]ost of the fairy story works as well as any Norse saga, pagan legend or modern fantasy" and [SPOILER ALERT] "[t]he lion exchanging his life for Edmund's is the sort of thing Arthurian legends are made of," she also flat out says "adults who wince at the worst elements of Christian belief may need a sickbag handy for the most religiose scenes." And as an adult who does indeed wince at the worst elements of Christian belief and who has now seen the film twice and can’t wait to see it again, sans barf bag, I can say that that’s just not true.

I’m struck by the fact that Swinton has played two very similar characters this year in geeky spins on Christianity: Narnia’s White Witch, the evil queen of Narnia, and the rather demented archangel Gabriel in Constantine, as caustic and cynical a look at the Bible as I think I’ve ever seen. So I had to ask her if she saw any similarities in the characters. She pondered this for a moment, then said, "No. They’re bookends -- they’re very different. The archangel is righteous, and the witch is truly evil." And then she thought on it some more, and came to an interesting conclusion: Gabriel, she conceded, isn’t such a good guy; he’s "the illustration of the idea that the road to hell is paved with good intentions." The queen has no good intentions, of course, but like Gabriel, she’s "absolutely unswayable. They’re both without doubt."

Not that the Christian fans of either film will see that as a problem.