Friday, July 27, 2007

Indulging my Inner Geek (Fantasy Edition)

Speaking of beloved fantasy novels made into movies, I am unduly excited by the upcoming version of The Golden Compass, the first in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Here's the trailer:

From this clip, it looks promising indeed. The filmmakers seem to have grasped the proper tone for the film adaptation (sinister, yet wondrous). The kid playing Lyra looks the part, and Nicole Kidman is just about perfect for Mrs. Coulter. Daniel Craig is pretty good too, although in my mind, Lord Asriel ought to have a long, black cloak at all times. One worry: the trailer seems pretty thin on the characters having daemons (in the book, all humans have talking animal companions who are manifestations of their soul), although IMDB assures me that Lyra will not be separated from her Pantalaimon. Best not to mess with the daemons.

In contrast, this trailer completely misses the tone of the book in question (Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising):


I guess you never can tell if a trailer will be an accurate representation of the movie, but this looks quite a bit like sacrilege. I want to know what marketing moron decided it would be a good idea transplant the story from England to, um, America and to give Will Stanton some sitcom-level girl problems. Seriously? It's a great book, so why would they want to make it just like a thousand other "teen" movie clones. I'm still holding out hope that this will be decent, but sheesh.

To cleanse the palatte, the movie version of Neil Gaiman's Stardust looks pretty good too:

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