Prince Caspian and The Pursuit of Happyness

Two relatively-well acclaimed and successful films at the box office.

Both were good, but neither was outstanding.

I was more disappointed by The Pursuit of Happyness because my expectations for that one had not been diminished. It had some good messages, but dragged in places and was too slow to be that predictable. Setting the film in 1981 was interesting-- with an implicit reference to the inflation we've had since then (the Clark bar is $.25-- and letting someone borrow $5 or selling a machine for $250 was a much bigger deal then), the glorification of stock brokers, the massive influx of homeless people following the de-institutionalization around 1980, and the oddity of a father getting to keep his son especially in that timeframe.

Prince Caspian is not nearly as strong as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It is more difficult to translate to film. The battles were well-done but too numerous, substituting action for drama, narrative, etc. I almost expected Schwarzenegger to make an appearance at some point. And Susan kissing Caspian didn't make any sense.

For better/worse, it deviates much more from Lewis' writing. I had blogged on a good article
about this previously. I thought the highlight was Peter's struggle with pride and his pseudo-competition with Caspian.