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Oh yes! «The Golden Compass» is coming

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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

Kidman in Golden Compass

Or Daniel Craig as the Byronic and mercurial Lord Asriel

Daniel Craig, 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.