| Dec. 8th, 2007 @ 01:30 am Golden Compass Movie Mini Rant--Quality not Content Spoiled |
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Mrs. Gidlund, from 6th grade, she apparently saw my mom this week and said "I bet Angelina's excited that the Golden Compass movie comes out this week!" Yup, apparently I really liked that book, so much that she remembers it 13 years later. . . has it really been that long? I'm beginning to realize that I am an adult now, and it's a bit scary. . .
Just saw the Golden Compass movie. . . my advice, go to a matinée and have low expectations. I went with a couple people who had never read the books, and they were pretty much lost and called it the worst movie they'd seen in a while. . . me personally, I'm conflicted. I wanted to like the movie so bad, being so invested in the books, that trying to see it for what it is was hard. So many parts of it are done so well, with so much attention to detail, that I really just want to kill whoever did the editing. Seriously. Like a slow and painful death. What were they thinking?!? But so many scenes were good, or had the potential to be, and the CG and sets are really amazing. They also explain too much, if that's possible. Part of the fun of the books is discovering things, like that daemons are your soul, does it really need to be stated in a voiceover in the first minute? Apparently it does. Where's the mystery!?! Don't those people get it, it's the unknown that drives people to keep caring about things, science, medicine, reading, UFOs, relationships, God. You can't just tell them, you have to pick one--if you're telling a story, you can tell it simply because there are no visuals to create details, the details are in the mind of the listener. I recently re-read the "Madeline" children's book, and I was struck by how little was actually written and how simple the drawings were, because in my mind, they were so much more because of my imagination. But if your medium is pictures, it behooves you to create the story through scenes, to let the viewer catch the narrative, to let them have those "ahah" moments, to lead them along. Why did people really like "The 6th Sense", it's because the viewer was led along with certain assumptions and then had those challenged by what they *saw*. Novels accomplish a mixture because they are able to paint pictures based on the reader's imagination. Bad novels tell you straight up what's happening, without leading you along. it's "they went to the castle" versus "As the crossed the verdant valley, a lone spire peeked out from beyond a distant ridge, its blue pennant snapping gaily in the breeze, seemingly welcoming them home after their long absence" or something. I don't write for a living. But I wish I edited films, so I could have saved my paragon of modern literature from a hack job it didn't deserve. |
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