Colin Duriez quotes CMR at Church Times of London

One of my goals in founding Catholic Media Review was to provide an authentic Catholic voice in the world of media. It has been my great honor to be quoted in a London Episcopal Weekly, The Church Times by CS Lewis expert, Colin Duriez.

 Colin Duriez is the author of A Field Guide to Narnia (The History Press); The C. S. LewisChronicles (DLT); and J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The story of their friendship (TheHistory Press), among other books on Tolkien and the Inklings.
Despite such an impressive resume, Mr Duriez was interested in the opinion of a Roman Catholic film critic, this demonstrates the prominence of our work here at CMR. Unfortunately the articls is subscriber only, but here are the quotes Mr Duriez used from our interview.

This might suggest that the films are ambiguous about portraying the exclusiveness of Christ as Saviour. Leticia Velasquez, the founder of the blog Catholic Media Review, finds the films uneven. For her, the portrayal of Aslan is integral to a faithful representation of Lewis’s stories.

She very much approves of the lion-creator’s portrayal in both The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. But she is critical of Prince Caspian: “Some editing of the book for length, clarity of the storyline, are forgivable. However, a watering down of Aslan’s role as the Christ figure was not justified in my eyes or in that of the Christian audience. The downplay-ng of Aslan in Prince Caspian was the downfall of the film.”

Velasquez believes that the strength of the stories and characters contained in the Chronicles of Narnia will ensure that the series will survive the Hollywood treatment: “Lewis, like Dickens, has provided substantive story lines and exquisite characters, and, like Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, will survive various film interpretations and remain part of the cultural heritage.”