HOT DAMN!

Saturday night we snuck into the sneak peek and saw The Golden Compass!!
IT WAS SWEEET! Two thumbs up. It was very exciting. The boys (Z & Evan) were very happy--Filled with chase scenes and explosions. The director skimmed over the top of the story and It certainly wasn't as "chewy" as the books; but what can you expect? (Actually Peter Jackson set the bar for MY expectations very high--if he can do "it*" everybody should--including the HP directors!) They changed Iofur's name for some bizarre reason; and the guillotine (they changed it to a cage???) scene was heart wrenching. Izzy and I were both in tears. Kidman had AWESOME costumes and I am in love with the whole "steam punk" genre. Which wikipedia handily defines as such, "The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date. Other examples of steampunk contain alternate history–style presentations of "the path not taken" of such technology as dirigibles or analog computers; these frequently are presented in an idealized light, or a presumption of functionality. Steampunk is often associated with cyberpunk and shares a similar fanbase and theme of rebellion, but developed as a separate movement (though both have considerable influence on each other). Apart from time period and level of technological development, the main difference between cyberpunk and steampunk is that steampunk settings usually tend to be less obviously dystopian than cyberpunk, or lack dystopian elements entirely."

Golden Compass was very effective at portraying just that flavor. I'll give it a 8.5 outta 10.

There was a Spiderwick trailer in which Iz already spotted some errors/changes (she is our Spiderwick scholar) and the Inkheart trailer looked pretty damn good, Capricorn seemed a little giddy for my taste...more like the joker in Batman, than Tony Soprano, but Brendan Fraser is a big fan of Funke (he did the narration on the audio books) he will be great as Meggie's dad.

*"It" of course meaning fanatical attention to detail and dedication to original narrative, ie LOTR-- I don't think I should ever write screenplays!! Every movie in the world would be verbatim text!