I'm reading The Golden Compass right now. (yes I'm loving it)

Took the daemon test, mine is a tiger.



Wouldn't it suck if your daemon was Paul Petro's dog?




- L.M. 5-26-2008 11:27 pm

I also got a tiger, but Cait got a snow leopard (jealous!). Apparently a black house cat is also an option, though it seems far less sexy (no offense to cats).

I didn't hate the movie. I just hated how many things were changed from the book and probably would have been disappointed by any adaptation. I guess I just wanted the movie to be a little more magical and a little less cerebral because it didn't totally sell me on some of the more outlandish stuff the way the book did (a bear that makes armour, how evil her parents were, etc.)
- Gabby (guest) 5-26-2008 11:58 pm

I got a friggin SPIDER. I hate spiders, I am an arachnophobe. Stooopid test
- galenagalaxian 5-27-2008 1:15 am

hmm weird, I tried to put in 'an action' from my old online days, ie kicks computer, with angly parentheses before and after, guess that must be some kind of formatting thing because it did not appear, though it is still there if I go back and edit
- galenagalaxian 5-27-2008 1:20 am

To add insult to injury, MageJB gets to be a tiger too, sucky test
- galenagalaxian 5-27-2008 2:31 am

hm...spider daemon eh? I think that sounds pretty cool.

That stuff about evil/absent parents is endemic to British children's fiction. I think it has to do with the war, when London kids were sent away to the country while the adults blew stuff up.

(I think Paul Petro's dog would be a cool daemon too.)
- sally mckay 5-27-2008 2:41 am

The movie looked great, actually wonderful.... but they threw out the story.
- J@simpleposie (guest) 5-27-2008 1:04 pm

i got a whippet, which strikes me as bizarre. ray got a racoon. i have yet to see the movie, though i am worried about it, because it has nicole kidman, and i just saw margot at the wedding.
- anthony (guest) 5-27-2008 5:04 pm

Margot at the wedding was a funny movie.
- J@simpleposie (guest) 5-28-2008 2:11 pm

I got a tiger too, named Gabriel.
- J@simpleposie (guest) 5-28-2008 2:21 pm

That's funny that all you three Toronto art bloggers got tigers. I'm gonna take the test again and see if I can skew it toward Tiger.

I thought Margot at the Wedding was very squirmy (creepy co-depedent sister dynamics) and pretty good.
- sally mckay 5-28-2008 3:21 pm

It was good, though creepy squirmy, painful at times. I liked The Squid and the Whale better.
- J@simpleposie (guest) 5-28-2008 4:37 pm

I once lived with a marvelous big fat, FAT tabby cat named Gabriel - we called him El Guapo.
- J@simpleposie (guest) 5-28-2008 4:40 pm

I'm a female fox (not a foxy female) named Vyena. I was hoping for a lobster (a foxy lobster) named Carl.
Lord of the Rings has set the bar for fantasy book adaptations and Golden Compass, in comparison, came up woefully short.
1. You are going to have to have dialog that does not exist in the book because the characters are going to have to describe what's going on. This dialog should not be written by the intern! Hire, oh I don't know, how about the actual writer of the book?
2. GO ON LOCATION. I never felt that they left LA to do any shooting. Go stomp around New Zealand for crying out loud (or Alaska). It felt more like a play than a movie.
3. This movie needed CGI that was not just okay. It needed to blow the doors off the joint. Goleum was way better and that was giga bytes ago in CGI years. I never felt the animal's feet actually touched the ground.

I'm actually glad they are not making the rest because I don't think the toothless glossy treatment could handle the dark turn the 2nd and third books take. With the bite taken out of the church debate, the story lost it's edge for me.
- joester (guest) 5-28-2008 7:25 pm

it WAS better than Hitchhiker's Guide. What they did to that book is chilling.
- joester (guest) 5-28-2008 7:43 pm

I didn't have that reaction (although I agree about Hitchhiker's guide, the decisions they made for that movie were just plain silly---Marvin with a round head? WTF?). I'll confess that I read the Dark Materials books all at once over about 48 hours. I realise the plot's been changed, and that would probably bug me a lot more if I remembered it! I thought they depicted the world really well, and the psychology was right. Didn't mind the clunky animation one bit. The animals looked like characters from Shrek, and that made sense to me. No need to pretend it wasn't animation. All the art direction felt constructed, like you say, and I had no problem with that. And the important animation, like the way the daemons changed shape, the way they went up in red dust when people died, the way they fought with each other, was all scripted and choreographed really nicely. When I decide to shoot the sequels myself, the daemons will be made of foamcore, dragged around behind their people with bits of string. If we want to get fancy maybe we'll duct-tape one to somebody's shoulder.
- sally mckay 5-28-2008 10:05 pm

Also, Joester, most of your complaints sound like you wanted the producers to cough up a budget like LOTR or Narnia got. Which was never gonna happen. Pullman's only been around for a few years, there aren't enough adults who care to guarantee the box office revneue.
- sally mckay 5-28-2008 10:54 pm

I don't want to seem like too much of a stage mother, but have you given any thought to a role for Batty as one of the daemons in your upcoming movies since HE IS SO FUCKING FANTASTIC AND BEAUTIFUL.
- L.M. 5-29-2008 12:03 am

He can be Lord Asriel.
- sally mckay 5-29-2008 1:52 am

LOTR has a lot more battle scenes that require a lot more money. Chain mail is expensive. You can't tell me GC was made on a shoestring. It's funny I actually kinda liked the Narnia treatment . The cartoonish CGI fit the stupid story - jesus should be fuzzy and huggable.
What I like about the GC books were that they didn't treat the audience like idiots. I wanted Golden Compass movie to feel like the Martix, not Beatrix Potter. This is our world - deal with it. That you can lump it in with Narnia, the Last Mimzy, the Seeker, Harry Potter, the Bridge to Tabitha, or any of these other current pre-teen fantasy movies makes my skin crawl. And when you listen to Pullman he wrote the books in the first place because he felt that fantasy for teens was all formulaic crap.
- joester (guest) 5-29-2008 6:57 am

AND I'd watch your movie in a heartbeat. I'm not sure which character ico should be - we might have to write him in special. Ico's so baddasses his deamon ... is also ico.

- joester (guest) 5-29-2008 6:59 am

Maybe Ico should be Scoresby. His daemon could be Grizzly. I'm posting a picture so readers can see who we're talking about.



I think my favourite thing about the Golden Compass movie was that it was for little-ish kids and it was still dark and scary. That's what I liked about the books too, as you say, no insulting the audience. Compared to Narnia, where the creepy faun is using yucky flirtatious adult powers on Lucy that are not explicit, power dynamics that belong to adult understanding, not to kid understanding. But it's not explained as such, it's just a narrative device. In GC the kids are kids, and Lyra's confusion around adult behaviour is an explicit part of the story.

I was disappointed by the Matrix. Having read a ton of cyberpunk by the time I saw the movie, I thought it was overly simplistic and insulted the audience. But I'm clearly in the minority there too, cause people friggin love it.

- sally mckay 5-29-2008 2:24 pm

In this picture Ico and Grizzly could pass for Zaphod Beeblebrox.
- M.Jean 5-29-2008 5:17 pm

YAY The boys! I'm on a two week stint at the headlands art center and haven't seen them in a while.
I never got that sense with the movie that we were seeing Lyra's world as she saw it, but I'll agree that it was a great part of the book. Did you see Pan's Labyrinth? That movie had the visual style that I was hoping for from Golden Compass, and I really did get a sense of that girl. She didn't seem like she'd won the "Be Lyara" contest at the local mall.
Pan's Labyrinth budget 14.5 million
Golden Compass 150+ million

What made the Matrix so great is that it tried all sorts of new things visually that really worked. And here's a secret about Cyberpunk, it's pretty over simplistic to begin with. Storywise, I'd hold the Martix up to Neuromance and call it a draw.
Right now I'm reading Blindsight by Peter Watts. It's a "first contact" story. The twist? The captain is a vampire and the narrator can talk to machines. Pretty good still (I'm at page 118).


- joester (guest) 5-29-2008 7:20 pm

Gibson is pretty straightforward, but Stanislaw Lem? I wanted Matrix to be like Futurological Congress. Oh well. I wasn't too keen on Pan's Labyrinth, too much murky-muddy-Freudy. Tideland was kind of like that too, but I had less of the feeling that I was at a 19th century lecture about the female psyche, and more of the feeling that I was watching a Terry Gilliam movie (yay). Blindsight sounds interesting. I just read both Dahlgren and Einstein Intersection by Sam Delaney- really good experimental sci-fi. Delaney gets away with things that other writers could never pull off (like having a writer as his main character).
- sally mckay 5-29-2008 8:42 pm

RE: the "Be Lyara" contest at the local mall...

Did you see this news from China?



- sally mckay 5-29-2008 9:23 pm

But the Matrix never strove to be anything but a Gibson style Sci-fi fantasy so to expect it to be the film of Futurological Congress makes no sense. Golden Compass already WAS a good book that they managed to turn into Finding Nemo. (Besides, it's Peace On Earth I'd most like to see as a movie.)

I agree with your reading of Pan's Labyrinth - it's mostly the art direction and the step away from computer generated scenes that I was advocating. Take a look at the images of Golden Compass in your post. Each frame has been created entirely in the computer and it's so chock full of lens flare, blur effects and has such a shallow depth of field that nothing is sharp. I wanted to take the whole movie and run it through a sharpen filter before I watched it.

- Joester (guest) 5-30-2008 1:13 am

MageJB did the questions for me and got me up the food chain to a crow called Remus

Did you read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson's? very good, cyberpunk

I also found The Labyrinth an amazing movie, quit Golden Compass half way through, vaguely irritated, and I did want to like it. I will read the books and look at it again.
I have to confess, I did see and love all the Harry Potters, movies and books. MageJB worked the book at midnight parties at Flying Dragon. We even have an HD boxed set while waiting for HD to beat blueray. I guess Sony won this time
- galenagalaxian 5-30-2008 2:14 am

I thought that the Matrix was the dumbest thing I've ever seen in my life. When it came out on DVD I was working at a corporate media studio that hired too many vice presidents and forced us to wear company T-shirts and go bowling. (one of the VP's once asked me why I wasn't wearing my company t-shirt so I told him that I vomited on it) Anyway, part of the forced fun was to watch The Matrix together, but they asked me to leave after 20 minutes because I was heckling too much. But I wasn't heckling, I just couldn't stop asking whether I was a programmer dreaming I was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I was a programmer, and now I wonder if I am a blogger dreaming I am a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I am a blogger, and what about my dog? Is he a dog dreaming that he's a butterfly and therefore does he dream that I am a butterfly too or is it that he is a butterfly dreaming that he is a dog and then am I a butterfly or a blogger in his dream? Do we get to be butterflies together? It's hard walking him if I am a butterfly while he isn't, but do butterflies need to walk each other? I think not.
- L.M. 5-30-2008 3:04 am

"...See the dog and butterfly. Up in the
Air he like to fly. Dog and butterfly
Below she had to try. She roll back down
To the warm soft ground laughing
She don't know why, she don't know why
Dog and butterfly..."

I recited this song for a live audience in Rolla, BC, in 2006.
(VB via SM).
- sally mckay 5-30-2008 3:57 am

That clears up a lot of my confusion.
- L.M. 5-30-2008 5:14 am

I love Harry Potter because it reminds me of Wizard People Dear Reader, one of my favorite things ever. HP and the f'in Bear!
http://www.illegal-art.org/video/wizard.html

LM, when I have a company you won't be kicked out for heckling, you'll be given a mic and a raise. That's an awesome story.
- joester (guest) 5-30-2008 10:31 pm