The Golden Compass
…was a blast as expected. Laura was annoyed at the liberties taken with the plot, but I was too busy soaking up the Terry Gilliam silliness to notice. Evil minions in funny hats, fisheye lenses, the whole thing — it reminded my suddenly how long it’s been since Brazil, and what an impact that movie had on the way I watch movies. The bears, which loom large in the physical world of the book, are even more impressive on screen. They are an animation slam-dunk. The animators let a little fuzzy-and-cute slip into the bear characters and if anything it adds to the overall towering monsters effect. The screenwriters mostly dropped the author’s anti-church broadsides, but the usual suspects are getting upset about it, which is all to the good.
Categorised as: Laura, Read this to me
Many good things in this movie, and not just the armored bears and the steampunk visuals. The fight for free thought rests on an alliance of the University and the Rabble (aka Salt of the Earth).
And it can’t be a coincidence that the evil and venomous leggy blonde defender of power & privilege is named Coulter….
Hm. The Coulter thing went right past me. I need to watch more TV.
What excited me the most about these books was their explicit opposition to the treacly, manipulative Narnia series. It took a lot of guts to try that “Republic of Heaven” idea in what was essentially a children’s story, and I thought Pullman really made it work. I just wish the filmmakers had gone with that, instead of taking the Clintonian route of hiding the good stuff so deep one forgets where to find it.
Yeah, I didn’t mean earlier comment as an unqualified rave. But since I would have been kept very happy just by the armored bears, everything else was a pleasant bonus. Had heard how much the anti-organized-religion theme got bowdlerized, so I was pleased to find that the film still maintained some sense of “which side are you on” (besides that of the talking armored bears, of course)….