Bronze doodle pad

I'm in love and it's wonderful, she's wonderful. But it's too precious, I can't make words about it yet. So for now I'll just complain about the Golden Compass movie.

I haven't read the book. Laurie has. Neither of us liked the film. Not that there was nothing to like, but there's too much blunt exposition. Too much telling us that this and that is thus and so, instead of letting us discover it. The fight scenes were video-gamey; fantasies of effortless conflict, exciting but harmless. The almost monochromatic color scheme iss a good idea in theory, but it comes off a bit drab. When extraordinary characters appear they aren't presented in ways that express the magic and mystery the characters should have; it's pure plot mechanics, with cheap Hollywood shorthand (familiar character actors playing stock roles)filling in for numinuousness. Instead of the appearance of something or someone uncanny, it's just another oddball character actor or CGI conjuring trick walking on camera. And when the protagonist uses the prophetic Compass, the visualization doesn't convey the excitement of putting things together and figuring them out; it's just "here's some pictures of some characters in the movie who are relevant to the plot point in contention." Everyone who's read the books assures me that they have real heft, but this film is a routine Hollywood exercise in refining wheat into chaff.