Molly Likes Movies

Molly Likes Movies!

The Golden Compass--I read the book eons ago and liked it a lot—it was supposedly a children’s fantasy, but aimed for an older audience than the Potter books, and featuring a girl as the heroine (nice change, that). The movie is amazingly gorgeous, and things look in it the way they looked in my head when I was reading it. Nicole Kidman as Mrs. Coulter, especially, nuked her role, while Daniel Craig was surprisingly good as Lord Asriel. Sam Elliot was brilliant as Mr. Scoresby, the American aeronaut, while Ian McKellan was truly the voice of Iorek Bynarson, the armored bear.

The special effects for the daimons (the little animals that represent a person’s soul) were extremely well handled. Daimons change their shape till someone is through puberty, and then settle down into a single shape, and they were handled seamlessly and well in this movie. I’m glad CGI has progressed this far. In fact, the only change I would have made would be to give Hester, Mr. Scoresby’s daimon, a tiny set of horns—she was a large rabbit, but would have made an even bigger impression as a common jackalope.

Lyra was a delight; ‘cheerful limb of Satan’, ‘a smarter, cuter Bart Simpson’, ‘destined to become a Weasley twin in another life’ are just a few phrases I would choose to describe her. She is not the sort to be cowed by nearly anything; and her actual relationship to Mrs. Coulter, who has clearly learned how to become Madam Satan in evening dress later in life should not surprise anyone. Lyra, luckily for the rest of the world, has decided to use her powers for good instead of power for herself. I laughed out loud when she fooled the Evil Bear King for the sake of a better one.

The movie moved a little slowly at times, but never wastefully. Any information carelessly dropped ended up being useful later, so pay attention to what people are saying when you go see it, all right? Everything in the script hangs together pretty well, and there aren’t too many places where it’d be safe to sneak out to the can (so you might want to get the 20 ounce instead of the 32 ounce on your pop).

Naturally a bunch of the book had to be left out, because this was only a two hour and some movie, not the six hour miniseries that it would actually take to explain everything. Go ahead and read the book, too, it has a lot of good stuff. And as a Baptist, I should take exception to the whole anti-church aspect of the book, except that we’ve all known preachers with a bad case of big head that we rather weren’t in actual power. There was at least one serious weasel boy desperately trying to stab Mrs. Coulter in the back (hey fella, combovers do NOT help) that made me sympathize with the woman, however rotten she is in person.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen it yet, give it a shot. It’s a really gorgeous movie, and unless you really do have Frank’s 2,000 inch TV, it will look a lot better in the theater than on DVD.