Dave Winer blogs Shadowlands:
There's a great movie called Shadowlands starring Anthony Hopkins and Deborah Winger. ........ People who know all the answers, or pretend to, have simply forgotten to ask questions they don't know the answers to. [Scripting News]
Dave, I think yiou nailed the real message of Shadowlands, and the C.S.Lewis book which inspired it.
What you and I liked and what an apparently large portion of the conservative evangelical Christian crowd apparentyly did NOT like about this movie, was how apparently abhorrent Lewis found the "answers" clergy people offered him after the death of Joy. In A Grief Observed, Lewis' journal of the grief experience written after her death, we get to read some real gut-wrenching and powerful stuff about some of the "realities" he faced in his own experience of grief. After writing all his previous theological books (including his children's stories), Lewis apparently saw it as a further duty to his readers to explore the emotional realities one faces in grief, in contrast to the intellectual exploration of the meaning of death and pain (ie. The Problem of Pain, and earlier apologetic concerning God and suffering).
I made the comment about the conservative evangelicals NOT liking it because it seems to me that this movie would have been promoted so much more vigorously by them if it had only been "more evangelical", which usually means (though not to me) giving all the answers (which Lewis did not take too kindly to in the movie, and was a rather large part of the whole point of "Shadowlands")and then having an altar call at the end.
It was indeed a very powerful movie. It portrays so vividly the sense of emptiness and even rage that is part of the potpouri of emotions and questions humans face as they face separation from a loved one. I cry everytime I see it, and get a little misty just writing about it and remembering the feelings it brings me close to as I ponder it. HIGHLY RECCOMMENDED. Best Buy often has the DVD at about 6.99, which is a steal.
6:42:36 AM 
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