Narnia Fans » 2006 » March

Narnia fans can meet noted actor and stuntman Kiran Shah, who played the dwarf Ginarrbrik in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, at The Gathering of the Fellowship, taking place at the Sheraton Centre in Toronto July 1-4 and celebrating all things Tolkien and C.S.Lewis.

Kiran joins Craig Parker, Bruce Hopkins, John Howe, Cliff Broadway and Carlene Cordova, Ted Nasmith, cast and crew members from Ancanar, Ring Lord John Daniels, Mike Foster, Colin Duriez, Jef Murray, Lingalad, Scott and Brenda Maple of Kropserkel and many, many more.

In addition to Narnia, Kiran appeared in The Lord of the Rings and a long list of classic sci fi, fantasy, and adventure films including Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Return of the Jedi, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Dark Crystal, Titanic, and Braveheart.

Kiran will join Craig Parker, Bruce Hopkins, and John Howe in a discussion of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy and Narnia, moderated by co-writer and on screen interviewer Cliff Broadway of Ringers: Lord of the Fans. which will be screened at the event.

Gathering programming includes art, music, costuming & armor, stage and screen interpretations, scholarship, language & writing, and the Inklings.

Special events include a banquet and masquerade, the new Lord of the Rings musical, picnic and fireworks on Toronto Island, trilogy screening, and VIP reception, as well as art gallery, dealers’ room, fan art and literary contests, and more. Many registration options are available, including single day admissions. Airfare discounts are available through Air Canada, the Gathering’s official airline.

For all info on events, registration, and travel, go to http://www.gatheringofthefellowship.com/convention/index.html

It may only be for a few days, but this could be final. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe hits DVD in a couple of weeks; and in some parts of the country, it is still playing in theatres. If the weekend estimate holds, then it is now the number 2 film for 2005, topping Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by a few hundred thousand dollars.

As of March 19, 2006
LWW: $289,847,008
HP4: $289,710,552

[See the numbers at Box Office Mojo]

Producer Mark Johnson won an Oscar for producing 1988’s Best Picture, Rain Man, but that’s nothing compared to how his Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe kicked Kong’s butt at the box office last winter. (Okay, he didn’t say that, but he should have!)

The result, Johnson told EW, is that ”we are frantically trying to get Caspian ready for next year. For the end of ‘07.” And then what? ”And then, you know, we have a tentative lineup. The question is, How soon do we start them? Do we do them — this going to sound wrong — in a factory assembly line sort of thing, sort of the way the Harry Potters are done? And I don’t mean that in any critical sense.” Oh, of course not. He continued: ”The problem with The Chronicles — it’s both its strength and its problem — is that each book is so different from the other. And with the exception of Aslan, there’s no one character who repeats in all of them.”

We’re currently looking at the 2-Disc Collector’s Edition DVD set of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and will have a review up, probably next week, as the DVD has a LOT of features on it.

We may have to postpone our full review until just before the release date of the DVD, but we’ll let you know if that is the case, but I’m sure we can tell you a little bit about it for now, at least.

I’m also going to go through the film with the script and perfect it with the subtitles on, so I’ll also plan on getting that done in the next week or so as well.

We’ll also be updating the fan art and fan fiction sections as soon as we can, plus adding Narnia Fans Beanies to the shop! (Only $10/ea.)

On Saturday 6 May, Douglas Gresham, Co-Producer of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, local members of the crew, film and TV industry, and writers are taking part in the first ever Australian national C.S. Lewis Conference in Sydney.

Along with Douglas Gresham, Don McAlpine, Director of Photography, and Tracey Reebey, Make-up and Hairstyle (and member of the BAFTA and Academy Award-winning team) will take part in a conversation with Linda and Robert Banks (co-authors of a new discussion guide, The Wonderful World of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia).

As well as a book signing of his recent biography, Jack’s Life: Memories of C.S. Lewis, Douglas Gresham will give a talk on his stepfather entitled “C.S. Lewis: The Man and the Myth”, followed by a time of discussion.

At the final session, award-winning scriptwriter Tony Morphett, well-known poet and children’s fantasy author, Andrew Lansdown, and Christopher Mitchell, director of an international centre for research on Lewis, Tolkien and Sayers in Chicago will discuss Lewis’s ongoing influence and legacy.

The program also features days for educators (4 May) and scholars (5 May) earlier in the conference.

For further information about any of these events and how to register, check the conference website at www.cslewistoday.com/.

Press Release Follows:

The C.S. Lewis Today Conference in Sydney 4-6 May 2006 is open for registration.

Join Douglas Gresham (Lewis’s stepson and co-producer of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe ), Dr Christopher Mitchell (Director of the international Lewis study centre, the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton, Illinois), plus academics, theologians, Lewis scholars and fans from Australia, New Zealand and America over three days of panels, talks, debates and workshops.

The conference aims to reach educators, scholars and the general public, exploring all aspects of Lewis’s life and work, in light of the recent commencement of the Narnia film series.

Thursday 4th May will see teachers, pastors and the public gather at the Wesley Conference Centre in the Sydney CBD. Poet and pastor Andrew Lansdown will speak on fantasy and faith, and Christopher Mitchell will talk on ‘The gospel in Narnia’. Afternoon workshops explore Lewis in the classroom, dramatic presentations of the Narnia stories, and the latest Narnia resources.

Friday 5th May is aimed at scholars and academics, but all are welcome. Hear Douglas Gresham interviewed about the Inklings, Chris Mitchell on ‘Faith and Learning in Lewis’, plus 15 scholars presenting short papers on all aspects of Lewis’s writing—from the apologetics to the science fiction trilogy to his study on grief. Join in the evening debate on “Misogynist, madman or mere Christian? The debate about the character of C.S. Lewis.”

Saturday 6th May is for all interested in Lewis. Featuring a keynote talk by Douglas Gresham on “C.S. Lewis: the man and the myth”. Also hear Douglas Gresham, Tracey Reebey (make up, Narnia), and Don McAlpine (cinematography, Narnia) in conversation about the making of the film with Linda and Robert Banks. Afternoon session includes book signings and panel discussion on Lewis’s influence on the imagination with Andrew Lansdown and screenwriter Tony Morphett.

Full conference details are available at www.cslewistoday.com/, where you can also register online.

It’s not easy to put a year in the palm of your hand, but the Disney Insider Yearbook: 2005 Year in Review aims to do just that. Or at least to put the year on your coffeetable – this is a large and lavish book. The Yearbook is an effort to put all the excitement and events of last year in one place, packed with the people, events, and pictures we’ll want to remember in years to come.

The yearbook is a treat — a deluxe, richly illustrated volume covering the events and memorable moments of the past year, as well as some retrospective treats and a few teasers for works in progress (you’ll get the scoop on “Pirates of the Caribbean 2″ and “Cars,” just for a start).

But the hardcover edition of the yearbook will include something more …

Yearbook features an article entitled: C.S. Lewis Meets Walt Disney: Two Mythmakers Journey Into Narnia by Brian Sibley
A comparison between the Chicago-born, Missouri-raised Walt Disney and the Irish-born, Oxford-educated C.S. Lewis seems somewhat unlikely, but not where worlds of wonder are involved.

It will also feature a look at the Premiere of Narnia.

[Disney Insider Yearbook: 2005 Year in Review]

Tami Lane walked through the door of her parents’ Dunlap townhouse Friday, lugging a backpack weighed down by clothes, magazines and an eight-and-a-half pound, gold-plated statue.

Minutes later, the Oscar was glinting under the living room lights, in the hands of her father, Roger Lane. He passed it gently to her mother, Linda, and her sister, Tracy, 34, all of them smiling and, like so many Oscar winners, marveling at how heavy it was.

Lane, 31, a Woodruff High School and Bradley University grad, took a seat on the couch and obliged her curious public with the details of last Sunday, the day she won best makeup for “The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” at the Academy Awards.

It began at 10 a.m. Lane and her friend Penny Mackie, part of Narnia’s costume team, arrived at co-nominee Howard Berger’s house, where a team of makeup and hair specialists awaited them.

They arrived at the Kodak theater just before 3 p.m. “It was kind of a bummer” to get to the theater before the swarm of celebrities and popping flashbulbs, she said, but there was plenty of that to come.

Just before the award for best makeup was announced, pages ushered Lane, Berger and the other nominees backstage. Keith Urban, Nicole Kidman and Judi Dench greeted them. (If you’re wondering about those shots of Lane in her seat, waiting for presenters Will Ferrell and Steve Carrell to open the envelope, those are special seats in front set up just for the cameras, she said.)

“All I heard was ‘How-’” said Lane, “and I was whipped up on stage.” She stared out into a crowd she described as “like your own 3-D People magazine,” with Jack Nicholson and George Clooney looking up at her.

Berger, as Lane’s loyal supporters have pointed out repeatedly since the Oscars, got to do all the talking. But Lane’s not bitter. “We had that worked out” in advance, she said. “I’m not upset at all by it.”

And in fact she did say a few words, after the mike cut out: “Thank you for making dreams come true.”

Then ushers marched her and Berger past Morgan Freeman – the first to congratulate them on their win – to have photos taken. They ate dinner at the Governor’s Ball and zipped past Elton John’s party (much too crowded) to the Vanity Fair party. “Madonna was there, but I didn’t see her,” said Lane, sounding a tad disappointed.

By 1:30 a.m., the party slowed down. “It went way too fast,” she said.

Lane isn’t sure yet what the effect of her win will be. “I’ve been told that my rate will go up and I’m more in demand,” she said. She’ll begin work soon on “Prince Caspian,” the sequel to Narnia.

And for the next few days she’ll be home in Peoria. “I love this town,” she said. “There’s so many people I want to see.”

She’s having a party tonight from 8 to 11 at Agatucci’s restaurant in Peoria – a chance for friends to catch up.

She might bring the Oscar, she said, even though it’s already a little worse for the wear. The sapphire rings she wore left tiny marks around the statue’s legs. “I don’t know,” she said, surveying the scratches. “I kind of like them there.”

JUDY BRADFORD
Tribune Correspondent

Since its release in December by Disney, “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” has exposed millions of children to the works of C.S. Lewis and his themes of spiritual darkness and the struggle toward light.

But for 20 years, Tom Key has explored those themes through his one-man show, “C.S. Lewis On Stage,” which he brought to the South Bend Christian Reformed Church on Sunday night.

A desk, a chair and a podium are all that Key needed to put the audience of about 200 in the presence of Lewis, a prolific and wildly witty author who also penned his autobiography, “Surprised by Joy,” published in 1955.

The show, with plenty of laughs, demonstrates Lewis’ contention that longing is joy and happiness. Our constant search for God, even in everyday, humdrum life, is the ultimate joy.

During the show, “Surprised by Joy” serves as a tool for narration and advancement, while Key takes side trips into Lewis’ other works including “The Great Divorce,” “Mere Christianity,” “The Problem of Pain” and “The Screwtape Letters” as well as his poetry.

This was largely an older audience. Many likely were first exposed to Lewis through “The Screwtape Letters,” where Lewis puts himself in the place of the devil and imagines what it would be like to connive against God, “the enemy.”

As if to satisfy them, Key delivers a lengthy and timeless monologue culled from the letters of Screwtape, a professional devil, to his nephew Wormwood — who is trying his best to perplex a human and steer him away from God.

One can’t help but pay attention to the allusions to war, which were relevant then, and are now.

“Pacifism or patriotism. … It doesn’t matter what the cause is, it would take his mind off prayers,” says Keys, delivering the devil’s advice with a heavy English accent and enthusiasm for debauchery.

Key makes grand use of the stage in the 75-minute show, and especially during a segment on The Great Divorce, where a man boards a bus to heaven and hell to witness the consequences of choices others have made in life.

His voices depicting either world become hilariously Monty Python-esque with their nonstop pace and extreme low and high intonations. But he pauses for humor and gets a self-knowing laugh from the audience with the line: “It’s all a clique up there, all a bloody clique up there.”

The use of Lewis’ autobiography takes the audience through Lewis’ most difficult years. He was tortured not only physically and intellectually but spiritually — which continues to make Lewis accessible to his readers, including devoted Christians. For them, the hardest part of the search may be over, but there is still work ahead.

Key’s monologue hints at the joy of struggle, the serendipitous moments that Lewis chalked up to fate, or to traps set by God to ensnare him initially into faith.

The monologue moves through explanations of Lewis’ physical handicap, a deformed thumb that disallowed sports such as baseball and led him to hold a pen instead.

It talks of his father, a man who never listened to his sons, in comparison to a private tutor who always listened to his students even while constantly correcting them.

The cruelties Lewis suffered under “The Bloods,” or athletes, in public school pushed him into compassion and forgiveness, and a logical acceptance of the mystery of pain.

“C.S. Lewis On Stage” was presented free of charge by South Bend Christian Reformed Church through a grant from the Lilly Foundation. Key has performed the show all over the world, from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., to Oxford University, where Lewis once taught. Lewis died in 1963.

Vadim Perelman, who made his directorial debut with the critically acclaimed adaptation of “House of Sand and Fog,” has signed on to turn the award-winning children’s book “The Giver” into a feature.

The story centers on Jonas, a 12-year-old boy living in an idyllic future society where all memory of human history has been erased. His life is thrown into turmoil when he is designated to inherit the role of the Giver — the sole keeper of the vast range of human emotions.

The Walden Media project will be distributed by 20th Century Fox. Walden Media executive Alex Schwartz called Lois Lowry’s Newbery Award-winning book “a jewel in the canon” of children’s literature. The family-friendly filmmaker recently produced “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe.”

Perelman is in preproduction on “Truce” for Warner Independent Pictures.

The University of Pittsburgh Film Studies Program, with support from the Office of the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, will sponsor a March 14 appearance by internationally acclaimed actress Tilda Swinton, who starred as the witch in Andrew Adamson’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005). In conjunction with Swinton’s visit, the Film Studies Program will screen Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991) March 13 and Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) March 15. All events are at 7 p.m. in the Carnegie Museum of Art Screening Room, 4400 Forbes Ave., Oakland. Admission is free.

Swinton will participate in a dialogue March 14 titled “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” with Colin MacCabe, University Distinguished Professor of English and Film, and Isaac Julien, visiting Andrew Mellon Professor in Pitt’s Department of English.

Swinton was born in London in 1960 to a Scottish aristocratic family. She attended West Heath Girls’ School with Lady Diana Spenser. After graduating from Cambridge University in 1983 with a degree in the social and political sciences and English literature, Swinton joined the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company as an actress. She left after a year to pursue a career in film, beginning by working with filmmaker Derek Jarman that led to a starring role in Caravaggio in 1986. For the next seven years she worked for Jarman, including her roles in Edward II and Orlando.

Following Jarman’s death in l994 and the birth of her children, Swinton withdrew from acting, but she returned to the screen in 1998 in Love is the Devil, directed by Muriel Belcher. In 2005, Swinton played Penny in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers and housewife Audrey Cobb in the Mike Mills film adaptation of the novel Thumbsucker, in addition to her role in The Chronicles of Narnia.

MacCabe teaches literature in the 17th-Century and Literature and Media in the 20th-Century courses at Pitt. His research interests include a history of English since 1500, psychoanalysis, James Joyce, and linguistics. MacCabe is the author of James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (2nd edition, Palgrave, 2002) Godard: Portrait of the Artist at 70 (Bloomsbury, 2002), and Diary of a Young Soul Rebel (British Film Institute, 1991), with Isaac Julien. MacCabe also is an editor of the journal Critical Quarterly.

A former head of research at the British Film Institute in London, MacCabe has been a producer, executive producer, or associate producer of more than 20 films. His A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies, a 1995 documentary of Scorsese’s role in Hollywood filmmaking, was commissioned for television by the British Film Institute. In addition, MacCabe co-organized and coproduced a world premiere media installation of the latest work by French filmmaker Chris Marker at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York last year.

Julien, a native and resident of London, is teaching at Pitt this term. A 1984 graduate of St Martin’s School of Art, Julien studied painting and fine art film. He founded Sankofa Film and Video Collective and was a founding member of Normal Films in 1999.

Julien was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001 for his films The Long Road to Mazatlán (1999), made in collaboration with Javier de Frutos, and Vagabondia (2000), choreographed by Javier de Frutos. Earlier works include Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1996), the Cannes prize-winning Young Soul Rebels (1991), and the acclaimed poetic documentary Looking for Langston (1989).

A research fellow at Goldsmiths University of London and a trustee of the Serpentine Gallery, Julien was visiting lecturer at Harvard University’s Schools of Afro-American and Visual Environmental Studies and the Whitney Museum of American Arts’ Independent Study Program. In 2001, he received the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts and in 2003 won the Grand Jury Prize at the Kunstfilm Biennale in Cologne for his single-screen version of Baltimore.