More religion on the screen

I keep on finding things to talk about which aren’t particularly funny but which interest me. This is a problem for the writer of a humour weblog, but I’ve decided just to write and try not to draw too much attention to the non-amusing nature of the pieces. Tonight, two screen-related links of interest:

1. A tale of two kitties
We went to see the Narnia film and I have to say I did really enjoy it. I think it works well on the big screen and if you haven’t seen it it might be worth trying to see it in the cinema soonish as I suspect it will finish before long.

However, also worth considering is this piece on the Christianity today site thinking about how Narnia has been marketed and comparing it to the non-commercial approach by comic book artist Bill Watterson, creator of ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ (who I wrote about here).

If you’re a fan of Narnia, comparing Aslan to Hobbes may seem incongruous, if not sacrilegious. After all, Aslan is the Creator and ruler of Narnia, an obvious Christ-figure who sacrifices his life to save the undeserving Edmund. Hobbes is a stuffed tiger with a weakness for tummy rubs. As feline characters go, Aslan is far more serious than Hobbes.

Or so you would think.

Thanks to John Carney’s Lake Neuron site for the link.

2. Sinfully bad TV
You may remember that the other day I mentioned ‘the Book of Daniel’, a TV on in the USA at the moment. Well, it isn’t on over here so I have nothing constructive to say about it, but I must pass on this piece by top blogger ‘Real Live Preacher’. He’s writing it on the Salon.com site which means that to read it all you do have to click on an advert briefly, but it is fairly painless.

Pardon me for a moment; I need to talk to my people.

Yo, brothers and sisters in Christ. They weren’t making fun of you. It’s much worse than that. The folks at NBC don’t care about you enough to make fun of you. They don’t even know you exist. You are not a part of their world. They want to make money, that’s all. This is no great mystery or secret. They’re not hypocrites; they’re capitalists.

This particular Christian church is simply a setting in which the TV people are playing out yet another dramatic comedy series. They use the same exaggeration and distortion when the shows are about police stations, hospitals, legal offices and entire ZIP codes like 90210. They don’t care about you. They really don’t care about anything except ratings.

Stop taking things so personally. You’re giving the rest of us Christians a bad name. Learn to laugh at yourself, or do what I did. Just turn off your TV, look at the person next to you, and say, “Well, that sucked!”

In case anyone doesn’t know about it the Real Live Preacher’s blog is here. A must-read if blogs blogging from a Christian sort of a point of view are of interest to you.