I saw The Golden Compass last night. I went in with lowered expectations and found it enjoyable. I could completely see how people who didn't read the books would find it incomprehensible. The pace was a little too fast for significant character development, but the main actors did a fabulous job. The actress who played Lyra was perfect; she captured Dickensian waif well. Nicole Kidman is the queen of the Beautiful but Evil character. She added complexity and conflict to the manipulative Mrs. Coulter. As a side note, her costumes were breathtaking. They should win the Academy Award in that field. The daemons, particularly Pantelaimon, were done really well. I want a daemon!



I find it strange that people call His Dark Materials an atheistic fantasy. It's not. It's a Gnostic fantasy. The Gnostics believed that eating of the tree of knowledge was a good thing, and original sin isn't bad in their eyes. The world is imperfect because the being (the Authority) is imperfect-to put one of Gnosticism's central tenets in a nutshell.

Hexperos, The Garden of Hesperides"

The Secret History Moscow

The SciFi Channel's Tin Man was not good. The music, the sets, the special effects were amazing for that channel, I'll give it that. However, the story itself? Eh. Unlike Maguire's Wicked, there wasn't any illumination of Baum's fictional universe. It was just done because it Sounded Cool. Thus, the land of Oz is now the O.Z., as in The Outer Zone. The Outer Zone of what? The story is called Tin Man. And yet the titular Tin Man's story (so named because that's the slang for cops in the O.Z.; it's how they roll) isn't even the main character. We don't meet him until the middle of the first hour.



I could spend many paragraphs about the plot, which revolves around the battle between Queen Lavender Eyes (Glinda) and her two daughters, the good DG (guess who) and the evil Askadelia (WW of the W). However, I would have loved to have been sitting in on the production meetings.



You know that some fan boy came up with the idea of making Askadelia a hot, evil babe in form-fitting Jean Paul Gauthier outfits, and the nice touch where the flying monkeys (aka mobats) are living tattoos that reside on her milk-white breasts. The Hot Babe of the West even gives her O face when the creatures spring from her exposed cleavage. At least that has campy potential.



But who decided to make Toto an older, portly black man with mutton chops? Toto is a shape-shifter, and the characters occasionally refer to him as a 'pooch.' Um, no. I know its fantasy, but don't they realize every image has a subtext? I kept on waiting for someone to call him, "Uncle Toto." I reminded me of the crypto-stereotypes in The Phantom Menace: the Fu Manchu aliens and the Semitic hovering insect that owned Anakin Skywalker….

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