Archive for December 8th, 2007

The Golden Compass Preshow

Before watching The Golden Compass, I got to sit through lots of ads and trailers. Citizen Soldier The National Guard has a new and appallingly bad recruiting campaign, featuring a (commis­sioned?) “song” and “music video” by allegedly “popular” alter­native rock band, 3 Doors Down. The video, which is over four minutes long, cuts between shots of the band performing on a blasted heath under a tenebrous sky (complete with bad, fake anamorphic lens flare), shots of National Guard soldiers helping recovery efforts in a disaster area of uncertain origin and locality (complete with obnoxious narrow shutter effect, a.k.a. the Saving Private Ryan Effect), and shots of [ . . . ]

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The Golden Compass

Achtung! This post is full of spoilage. It assumes you’ve read the books and seen the film. If you don’t want either spoiled, go away! I was neither disap­pointed nor blown away. The film begins with a somewhat awkward prologue explaining the whole parallel worlds slash dust slash daemons slash Magesterium thing. When it started, I was somewhat upset, because I felt it explained too much up front instead of letting us discover these things as the film proceeds. Having finished the film, I still feel this way, but I under­stand better why they chose to do it. As with all epic novel series film adap­tation, important stuff [ . . . ]

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