 Last night we sat down as a family to watch "The Golden Compass" on DVD. The film started with one of those "It was the times of the Bingly Bong and the Tookah Hoo had fallen into the hands of the Wankesterium" kind of narratives, so I knew what we were in store for. I had forgotten it was a Philip Pullman book (I tried reading one of the Dark Materials books once... I think I threw it out the window). The action began with people running around, each with some kind of talking animal next to them/above them/stuck on them.... called their demons.... oh, please, I was thinking up (REALLY BAD) poetry and stories like that when I was an eejit (I really was an awful drip) thirteen-year-old....This film was a load of drivel, nonsense, poppycock and piffle. And not because it was a children's story. Children's stories should be as good as growed-ups'. I find these stories of "other worlds" by JRR Tolkien, JK Rowling (listen, when Gordon Brown said the other day that JK was one of our greatest authors, I know he had to say SOMETHING because she is a friend of his and she'd just given the party a million quid, but come off it Gordon...one of our greatest authors?), CS Lewis, P Pullman et al so damned tiresome, don't you? When something is a complete fantasy, it feels like it's too easy to tell the story, getting bogged down with silly magical objects and characters with spiritty names to get the story to move from the start to the finish. The Dingly Dangly witch from the lake of the HHHHhhhhhh will have a magic pixie on a stick to help them get to the Hoofly Maaaaachchchchch Island with some godawful superimposed floaty spirituality in the shape of someone who looks like Tilda Swinton (or sometimes, Tilda Swinton) talking in hushy hushy tones, with floaty hair and a diaphanous dress to appeal to the terminally shallow and not particularly interesting thirteen-year-old girls of this world. Twaddle. Just saying, like. You know I'm right. And I'm expecting the dolphin crowd in.
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