HEREWITH A (BELATED) REVIEW OF THE THE GOLDEN COMPASS CINEMATIC PICTURE EXPERIENCE

So as any regular reader (ha) of this blog knows, I'm a big ol' nerd for Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials kiddie fantasy series, of which The Golden Compass is the first book. Said hypothetical readers will also likely know that I've been anticipating/dreading Chris Weitz's adaptation of same for a few years now. So keep in mind that the following opinions are coming from someone with absolutely NO PERSPECTIVE on the subject; they are coming from someone with a vested interest in seeing two polar bears fight in a "two men enter, one man leave" cage match. Also keep in mind that there are going to be SPOILERS ahead, especially if you haven't read the book but also maybe if you have. Here's the short, spoiler-free review: parts of it are good or even awesome, parts of it aren't are maddeningly terrible. Go see it if a polar bear cage match sounds appealing. Also, just go see it, because I want to see New Line just attempt to make the third book into a movie, and that won't happen if nobody goes to see this one. End of spoiler-free review.

Here are the parts that are good and/or awesome: Sam Elliott could not be more perfect as Lee Scoresby (and Kathy Bates is the voice of his daemon Hester, which is possibly even better). Nicole Kidman is suprisingly good as Mrs. Coulter--she's got the right mix of slippery charm and ruthless devotion that the part requires. Daniel Craig has about five minutes of screen time, but he acquits himself well and certainly gives the impression that he can easily handle Asriel's expanded roles in the second and third movies. Though Dakota Blue Richards is not the Lyra I envisioned, thankfully she doesn't embarrass herself, and steps up her game when the scene demands it. She's better here than Daniel Radcliffe was in the first Harry Potter movie, so my hope is that she'll continue to grow into her role as he has.

Iorek Byrnison turned out better than I had hoped. The CGI is frequently astonishingly lifelike, and even when it's not it's not distractingly fake, and Ian McKellan is a fine (if unimaginative) choice to give the exiled bear king voice. His ferocity, his nobility, and his tender paternal relationship with Lyra are all well-realized and believable. It's also a hoot to hear Ian McShane chewing the scenery as Ragnar (the movie's renamed version of Iofur Raknison, the usurping bear king), and the fight between the two bears is spectacular, and ends in one of the most shocking moments I've seen in a movie this year.

So the cast are mostly varying degrees of excellent, but I know that wasn't your main concern. You want to know about the churchy stuff. For those of you who haven't read the book, haven't read any articles about the book or the movie, or didn't get your official boycott invite from the Catholic League, the Big Bad in this story is basically the Catholic Church. In the book this is made pretty explicit; in the movie, as you can imagine, it is not. This Atlantic Monthly article gives a pretty good overview of the book's journey to the screen, the contoversy over its antireligious elements, and the controversy over the removal of its antireligious elements. (And when I say "elements," I mean "basically the whole point of the series.") What's interesting, though, is that in turning the Church into the all-emcompassingly evil Magisterium, Weitz and his collaborators have actually made the Church look even worse than Pullman did. Seriously: anybody who's paying attention at all cannot fail to see that the Magisterium is a stand-in for a religious organization. The costumes may have a military flavor, but they're still pretty damn clerical, as are the actors who play the Magisterium's officers: Christopher Lee and frickin' Derek Jacobi. They talk about "heresy" ALL THE TIME. Mrs. Coulter goes on and on about how the Magisterium just wants to tell people how to think, but in a nice way. The Magisterium is like the Catholic League's worst nightmare about what Secular Hollywood Liberals think the Catholic Church is like. Everybody connected with the Magisterium practically radiates EEEEEVIL. It's been a while since I read the book, but I seem to remember Pullman at least making his villains seem sort of human. The antireligious stuff has been toned down, but it's also, weirdly, been turned up to 11. (It's also hard to miss the God stuff when literally every single review or article I've read about the movie has made a point of mentioning it, which I more-or-less predicted here.)

And that's this movie's biggest failing: it engages only superficially with the source material. It's been a week two weeks since I saw the movie (and since I wrote everything above), and my feelings for it have only dimmed in that time. It's not just the theology that gets ignored--it's the story itself. Even more than the first couple of Harry Potter movies, The Golden Compass is just a Cliff's Notes for the book. Scenes barely have time to make their point before we're on to the next one. Everyone speaks in exposition. Important story points, like Lyra learning to use the alethiometer, are glossed over in favor of fakey CGI and chosen-one hoohah. (Also, nobody can say "alethiometer" without saying it like this: "The alethiometer--the golden compass--is the most important etc. etc." Yes thank you movie people we are not all idiots who need our hands held.) The relationship between humans and their daemons is never adequately explained, and so scenes like Lyra finding the "ghost child" or the intercision do not have the horrific effect they should have. We're barely introduced to Iorek before he's fighting Ragnar for his kingdom. Even just setting up the most basic plot elements--Gobblers are stealing children--seems beyond the capabilities of the filmmakers. And so on and so on and so on.

But the single most galling thing about this movie, which just seems worse and worse the more I think about it, is the ending. Anybody who's read the book could not help but remember the ending: Lyra finally reunited with Lord Asriel, the man she now knows to be her father, and triumphantly delivering the alethiometer to him, only to realize that what he needed was a child--her best friend Roger--to provide the energy for the engine that would enable him to travel between worlds, find the source of Dust and defeat God. It is a thrilling, heartbreaking ending, the kind of thing that turns an above-average fantasy adventure into a classic, and makes you salivate for the next volume.

So, of course, the movie cuts out about twenty minutes before that, with some generic "we saved the day but we've still got some more day-saving to do, hopefully in some future movies" bullshit. Now, I know why this was done: A) to give the movie an ostensibly "happier" ending, and B) to avoid the scene where Pullman-via-Asriel lays out the story's blasphemous theological underpinnings. Too bad the "happy" ending fails to make you excited for the next part of the story in any way. "We wanted to end the first one as up-note as possible," says writer-director Chris Weitz in this Entertainment Weekly article, which is chock-full of similarly infuriating quotes from the filmmakers. In that same article, producer Deborah Forte says "[they] don't know" if that scene, which was filmed, will be included in the (increasingly unlikely) Subtle Knife film, which just lays bare how everyone involved with this movie is either completely misunderstanding or willfully ignoring the text--not just the subtext, the actual text, right there in black and white for everyone to see--of Pullman's books. Not including that scene is like adapting The Lord of the Rings and cutting out the Ring. Like maybe Gandalf just says "Hey, Frodo, maybe you should go to Mordor for some reason okay."

The irony is that all these changes were obviously made in order to make The Golden Compass more "palatable" for a wide audience, but the changes have turned a wonderful, timeless story into a barely coherent, frequently boring adventure flick, soon to be consigned to the bargain DVD shelf at Best Buy after disappointing reviews and a weak theatrical run. There is no reason an adaptation of The Golden Compass--one of the few fantasy novels that doesn't owe a massive debt to Tolkien--should be inspiring critical comments like this: "In fact, so much of The Golden Compass is fantasy-by-numbers that all that really interests you is what makes this world so special that some studio had to spend millions to bring it to life. The uniqueness is there if you look for it, but it labors under so much rote storytelling and sweeping CGI vistas that it takes an inordinate amount of time to get anywhere remotely interesting." Perhaps if Weitz, et al. had made a movie that stayed true to Pullman's vision--the vision that has already captured millions of readers--they might have earned that wide audience after all.

Also: I can't help but think that this awesome news is the result of someone at New Line slapping his/her forehead and saying "Hey, we fucked up The Golden Compass, maybe we shouldn't do that with The Hobbit, maybe." Hopefully Peter Jackson will soon announce he's directing too.

SUBLIMINAL SATANISM: NOT JUST FOR LED ZEPPELIN ANYMORE

This is the poster for the upcoming Robin Williams "comedy" License to Wed. Take a good look at it; squint until Williams's insufferably smug mug blurs and all you see is the general pattern of light and dark:



What does that look like to you? Perhaps...



PURE EVIL?

Run, John Krasinski, run before the darkness swallows you too.

LITTLE MISS BLEAAAARRGGGHH

"At the most basic level, it is nearly impossible to dislike Little Miss Sunshine." Not true. Right here, hand raised, dislike in action even as we speak. I've had a little rant brewing on this most overrated of 2006 trifles since I finally caught it on DVD back in December, and I figured I might as well get it down on paper (or whatever) before the Oscars. If LMS wins Best Picture, it'll be the biggest triumph of feel-gooder mediocrity over, y'know, legitimately good moviemaking since...um, last year.

Okay, I will say this: Little Miss Sunshine isn't exactly bad, per se. Everybody involved seems to have put their all into it--I mean I've got no bad words to say about Alan Arkin or Steve Carell (well, I kinda do--see below), and as far as weirdly precocious child actors go, Abigail Breslin is less annoying than most. Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris made a whole lot of swell music videos before LMS, and they certainly demonstrate a lot of potential in their feature debut. I liked the Devotchka song "How It Ends" before I saw the movie, and it was nice to hear it in various permutations throughout the film. There is a lot to like about Little Miss Sunshine.

But all these talented people are bringing their considerable gifts to bear in service to a story that, in the end, says very little we don't already know. The real-life story of the ordeals writer Michael Arndt went through to bring his story to the screen, and his eventual success (WGA award, an almost certain Best Screenplay Oscar, deal to write Toy Story 3, etc.), are the kinds of things that make you feel warm and fuzzy about Making It in Hollywood, and make people like me a little jealous (full disclosure). It's a movie about the little guys, made by the little guys, and that's the kind of thing you want to get behind. But get behind it I shan't. The script is a mess, an odd mix of broad comedy and emotional heaviness that never gels into anything coherent. It's possible to strike this balance and make it work--see for instance Wes Anderson's Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums (yeah, I know I'm a fanboy, but that doesn't mean it's not true--and even he couldn't quite pull it off in The Life Aquatic, though his cowriter Noah Baumbach did in his own The Squid and the Whale). The characters are all broadly drawn types--suicidal gay intellectual, winning-obsessed striver, randy grampa, etc.--and it's only through the excellent work of the actors that they become anything resembling real people. And that would be fine, except LMS isn't trying to be a broad comedy, it's trying to be an insightful portrait of the American family (and, by extension, America). The melancholy yet driving "How It Ends" underscores nearly the entire movie--that ain't comedy music. That's Quirky Indie Drama music. The music is being used to take the audience to a place emotionally that the story can't--and hey, you know, that's filmmaking, but it's also a bit of a cheat. The broadness of the characters and the contrived situations prevent the drama from having as much impact as intended. The family's decision to all take the little yellow van to the beauty pageant is so contrived it reminded me of Lloyd and Harry deciding to go on their road trip in Dumb & Dumber. (Speaking of which, LMS also borrows a scooter gag from D&D, with diminishing returns.) And again, that would be fine for a goofy comedy, but that's not the tone LMS is aiming for. If it was, it would have to be funnier.

The humor in Little Miss Sunshine is, with few exceptions (most involving Arkin), supremely lazy: the repetition of "Did I ever tell you I'm America's number one Proust scholar," which wasn't that funny the first time; the use of the chicken bucket and (specifically, strangely) Sprite as condescending shorthand for This Is What Has Become of the Modern Family; the treading on well-trodden ground in Beauty Pageant Land. "It's quite a high-wire act, the misfit family comedy Little Miss Sunshine," Adam B. Vary writes in the February 2, 2007 Entertainment Weekly, the annual Oscar-nominee-hagiography issue. "The Pollyanna papa, the pragmatic mama, the gay uncle, the disaffected teenager, the horny grandfather, the adorable little girl with a dream--all on a road trip, in a beaten-down VW bus, with a dead body in the trunk, heading to the deeply creepy world of prepubescent beauty pageants. It just about screams 'sitcom.'" That it does. The thing is, Little Miss Sunshine isn't even funny enough to pass muster as a sitcom. It just coincidentally happens to star Steve Carell, who also stars in the sitcom The Office, which in any given episode is both funnier and more deeply felt than LMS, and which more sharply etches the exquisite despair of real life. Take the scene in LMS, for instance, when Carell's Frank meets his former lover in the gas station while buying porn for Arkin. The scene is played for the obvious laughs and the obvious emotions; it works because it works exactly as we expect it to. Contrast this with almost any scene between Michael Scott and Jan Levinson on The Office: the "double date" at casino night, say, or Jan admitting her feelings for Michael. The Office mines these situations for both unexpected humor and for complex emotions; the laugh and the cringe are inseparable, and though we know both are coming, it's always a surprise when they do. The Office forcibly takes laughs from the audience; try as it might (dead body + cop + gay porn), Little Miss Sunshine merely earns the laughter we give it, as a wage.

Little Miss Sunshine gives us what we expect of it, and does so briskly and competently, and that may be why it has earned so much praise. It flatters the audience by telling us things we already know: Your family can be hard to deal with, but in the end, family is all you have. Beauty pageants are creepy. Suffering is a part of life, but if you get through it, you'll be a stronger person. And, of course, the big one, the theme that's hammered hard right from the beginning: Winning isn't everything. "Winners" (i.e. the creepy pageant contestants) can be losers. "Losers" (i.e. the Hoover family) can be winners. The film climaxes with the entire Hoover family joining little Olive on stage to dance to "Super Freak" and show all those "winners" what winning really is, and it's about as forced and hacky an ending as one can imagine. But, as such, it is perfect. We would expect nothing more.

******

Well, that was certainly rambling and poorly thought-out, but at least that bile is out of my system. For the sake of my Oscar pool chances (I won two years ago but was robbed, I tell ya robbed last year), I hope we don't get a reprise of that family dance party on Sunday night. Go The Departed, go! Woo! In case you were wondering, Children of Men was the actual Best Picture of 2006, with Brick in a respectable second place.

HIS DARK MATERIALS UPDATE

AICN's Drew McWeeny visits the Golden Compass set. So does this guy.

Not much new information here, but you takes what you gets. McWeeny's piece is notable, though, for anticpating what is likely to be the thrust of every story about The Golden Compass from now until it's released: the "Can this find an audience?" angle. (There's also the "Will the Catholic League throw a fit?" angle, which McWeeny doesn't explicitly mention, but which is surely just as likely.) While I do understand McWeeny's pessism--five years ago, when I was a development intern, I wrote coverage of the book that essentially said "this is a great book and can make a great movie, but it will be insanely expensive and will probably alienate/piss off a considerable section of the audience, which wouldn't really be a problem except you need those people to buy enough tickets to justify the enormous amount of money it's going to cost"--I can already see this pessism becoming the story, when the story should be the movie itself. This kind of thing happens all the time. Last year the Mission: Impossible III story wasn't "TV genius J.J. Abrams makes a really fun spy caper," it was "Do people still want to see tinfoil hat-wearing Katie Holmes-brainwashing psycho nutbar Tom Cruise in a movie?" The answer turned out to be "not really," and you have to wonder how much of that was a self-fulfilling prophecy. If all anybody says is "Is The Golden Compass too controversial/smart/whatever for the average moviegoer?" then the answer's probably not going to be too surprising.

I also think that McWeeny's not placing enough faith in the audience; I know nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, but condescending and pandering to them is a recipe for disaster too. One of the great strengths of Pullman's books is that they deal with weighty ideas, but are intended for children, and so these ideas are presented with clarity and no sense that the author is talking down to the reader. So, really, it shouldn't be all that difficult to communicate these same ideas to an audience of adults, especially when they're couched in cool special effects and action. You can get away with a lot of Big Ideas if the adventure is rollicking enough. And who ever sold a $150 million fantasy movie on Big Ideas anyway? You sell it on the story and the spectacle, neither one of which is difficult to grasp. McWeeny's suggested trailer isn't bad, but for some reason he seems to be deliberately ignoring the very basic story at the core of the book: Someone or something is stealing children. When Lyra's best friend disappears, she sets out to find him, with the help of her golden Magic 8-Ball, her talking, shapeshifting animal pal, a cowboy and a witch, and a super-awesome badass armored polar bear king. Seriously, if you can't sell moviegoers on Iorek Byrnison, who's basically Gladiator's Maximus as a polar bear, you need to get out of the movie-selling business. Same with the daemons, which is the kind of idea that anybody who's ever loved a dog or cat should be able to immediately understand (and also want to buy a toy of). If you want to get really creative, you also throw in "Lyra's an orphan whose uncle is James Bond. He doesn't want her hanging around, so she goes to live with Nicole Kidman, who seems nice but is always hanging out with some crazy monkey, so she's probably evil." This is not brain science. This is basic fairy-tale, Star Wars, Harry Potter-type shit.

I recognize that HDM doesn't have the name-recognition of Potter, LOTR or Narnia. I also recognize the possibility that those church groups who helped make The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe a hit could organize against The Golden Compass, once word gets around what it's really about. But at this stage, when the movie hasn't even finished shooting yet, wringing your hands and crying "How are we ever going to get the unwashed masses to come to this movie?" isn't helping at all, particularly when the answers are right there in front of you.

PERSONAL BETTERMENT PROJECT KICKOFF

There are a lot of movies I haven't seen. A lot of classic movies, movies that it's even a little embarrassing to admit I haven't seen. For someone who works in Hollywood (tangentially, at least, at the moment) and enjoys a status among his friends (who really ought to know better) as some sort of film expert, there is really no excuse for never having seen, for instance, Casablanca or Gone With the Wind. And yet, I am that person. Me is I.

So, in an effort to correct this one small defect in my person, I have decided to spend this year (and probably part of the next) watching the movies on the AFI Top 100 Movies list. You could quibble with this list; you could say it's safe and obvious and middle-of-the-road, and you wouldn't be wrong, exactly; but see above for but two of many obvious movies I have never seen. So this is what I'm doing. (Of course, just as soon as I decide to watch all these movies, AFI decides to go and make another list, but I'm sticking with the one we've got. I'm not in any rush to see Crash again, I'll tell you that much.)

So anyway I'm starting at the top and working my way down. First up is Citizen Kane, a movie I actually have seen--on the big screen, no less, but in a pretty crappy print. I'm going old-school with this project, so each movie will have a newsreel (15 minutes of Headline News, I guess) and a cartoon--I think it's possible to pair each movie with a Simpsons episode that references it. At least a half-dozen Simpsons episodes have alluded to Citizen Kane, but the best one is the fifth-season episode "Rosebud," in which Mr. Burns pines for his childhood teddy bear Bobo. Kane also gets an overture, courtesy of The White Stripes. The lyrics of their song "The Union Forever," from White Blood Cells, are made up entirely of quotes from the film. Here's a recording from their 2001 Peel Session, along with its sister song "Little Room."

MP3: "Little Room/The Union Forever (2001 Peel Session)" by The White Stripes

I'm firing up the DVD player Saturday at 2:00 sharp. Feel free to drop by.

HIS DARK MATERIALS UPDATE

Pictures!

More pictures!

Yeah, this is looking good. (I'm going to assume the lack of daemons in the pictures just means they haven't been CGIed in yet, because how badly would you have to miss the point to cut the daemons from the movie?)