Oh yes! «The Golden Compass» is coming

Poster

Two Christmas seasons ago that mindless namby-pamby drivel known as Narnia assaulted my eye-sockets in San Jose. The only blessed moment of that two hours of tooth scraping was when a certain screenwriting lawyer-friend of mine abruptly turned and “Ssshhh!’d” a chatty 12 year old behind him.

…CGI lion comes on screen and mutters something…
Kid: It’s Qui-Gonn!
Lawyer-Friend: ¡¡¡Shh!!!!!

This Christmas, the gorgeous Golden Compass is coming to theaters near you and it’s envisioned the world of His Dark Materials in a lush, dream-filtered, techno-steampunk richness. The plot is compleling and the charaters rich. It’s sort of what Narnia would have been, had it been written by Richard Dawkins.

The casting looks great:

Nicole Kidman playing the fundamentalist Mrs. Coulter equal parts seductive and adamant, like fundamentalism and ignorance themselves

Or Daniel Craig as the Byronic and mercurial Lord Asriel

I think it will be a winner.

And I, for one, am excited to see computer effects bring to life the Nordic-named, heroic, armor-wearing polar bear named Iorek Byrnison.