Review: The Golden Compass

I saw The Golden Compass twice in less than 24 hours (the first viewing was on Friday, at the little cinema on Baker Street, truly a terrible place, where seats collapse, screens are tiny, and, in this instance, a badly-marked and inaudible print was run), and the second time, the sound was as it should have been.

I read the novel on which the film was based about nine years ago, in Budapest, and enjoyed it immensely. The introduction of a talking polar bear, and a cowboy balloonist, among other elements, was as quirky as the anti-theology was thoughtful, and the plot was gripping. Lyra seemed a classic character. I didn't expect the film to be this good, simply because I feared the rather English essence of it (based on Exeter College, Oxford, and other very British traditions, like stiff-upper-lip explorers) would be drained away (as was done with The Dark Is Rising film, ruining it).

Instead, the movie is a treat to watch. It is very retro in feel, and texture - a bizarre cross of Oliver Twist, Pippi Longstockings, and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. To that should be added the other obvious, if startling, filmic inspiration, Dune (a film that one day will be seen as brilliant). The movie is, as Peter Bradshaw has noted, far stranger than anyone could have hoped it might be. The shadowy close-ups of aging British movie icons, the art deco zeppelins, the old-fashioned, thrillingly strident music, and the unusually slinky Mrs. Coulter (Kidman) make the film run like a very classic show from the start.

That being said, the movie is so good, it reveals the weakness of the novel it is based upon. Most everyone says Pullman is a master-storyteller, but that is not true - more interestingly, he becomes a better writer as his trilogy progresses, and in this first novel, Northern Lights, what were clever were the elements (the souls outside the body, the off-kilter anachronisms) - not the overall storyline. In short, the film exposes the lack of any central dramatic journey in the work - yes, there is a race to rescue children, but the battle for their lives is won easily, and no powerful resistance is made - and so the film ends with a great sighing anti-climax. Meanwhile, the theology and anti-God stuff putters along, a little winded and alone, by the side of the main plot, basically bewildering and unfun. The Magisterium (aka The Church) seems as threatening as a museum - simply a big dull place to wander in, and its members are either sexy women, or weak-looking men. Their one weapon is an automated fly that is quickly cupped in a normal glass. Okay, they also have an ineffectual recourse to poison Tokai. The cutting machine is dispensed with so simply, it comes across as a gizmo, not the ontological-killer it is.

The movie works as a great children's yarn, full of wonder, innocence, and spectacle. The sequels, if there are sequels, should up the darkness and danger factors, considerably. And also include a genuinely engaging dramatic issue to be resolved.

Still, well worth seeing. Twice.

Reunion

This no country for old men. If rock music is demonic - in the best, Bloomian sense - and it seems it is at least Dionysian - then hard rock is more so; and the true fathers of heavy metal are Led Zeppelin, satyrs of swing, starting in '69. It is hard to think of a string of albums (I-IV) that are more intensely thrilling, varied, and yet of a piece - the core quality of these albums is a darker sublime: bluntly, music that mirrors youth's reckless exploration of sexuality, excess, and realms of the spirit angels sometimes fear to tread in. "The Battle of Evermore" still sends shivers down my spine (I first heard it in Berlin). They're a great band - easily better than The Stones or The Doors, The Who or you name it. Put on a Led Zeppelin album, and you are in a sensuous hell of your own making, one that tempts you with the idea that's the best place to be. This power, and this skill, in terms of vocal and performative ability - a striking, unsurpassed pop culture charisma - is nearly uncanny at moments. It led to bad - or at least debauched - things happening. It made people money. It somehow became a subject of humor (Spinal Tap is what happens next). Now they are playing, even as I write, in London. Roll over Bo Didley, and tell Crowley the news.

A Good Book To Buy For The Holidays

Eyewear recommends Lifemarks: Poetry about the Big Events of Life. In this new collection, some of Britain's finest poets write about the great events of our lives. Poems by Ian Duhig, Julia Copus, Paul Farley and others mark these moments in a remarkable and life-affirming anthology. All poems have been freely donated and the proceeds go entirely to the Motor Neurone Disease Association.

All orders received by 21st December should have their book for Christmas.

Copies of Lifemarks @ £6.99 each. Add p&p @ £2 for first book, £1 for additional books.

Send your name and address with a cheque payable to the Motor Neurone Disease Association to: Bell Jar, Unit 4.3, Banks' Mill Studios, 71 Bridge Street, Derby DE1 3LB

Hey Kids, Look, More Poetry!

The Internet, far from being "inane", is allowing younger, emerging poets to reach an audience, and generate a community of readers. In short, the web is allowing poetry to pass on to the next generations, with verve. Check out this new project, Pomegranate, for example.

Stockhausen Is Dead

Sad news. K-H Stockhausen is dead.

Hard Lessing

It is one of the paradoxes of our age that, even as the Internet - comparable in scope and range to aviation or the phone, perhaps combined - alters our imaginative landscape, and permits extraordinary freedom of expression and transmission of information - certain vested interests, and older literary figures seek to cancel out its achievements. Latest to protest too much is Nobel laureate Doris Lessing. Her new anti-net diatribe is not new, but stale invective. It is a retread of that old canard that books will be killed off by digital enjoyments. Blogging is singled out for its addictive, time-wasting effects, a new opium. Sadly, Lessing ignores the fact that blogging encourages writing, and reading - and is a new genre of creative writing. Just as comics were once seen as the ultimate foe of literacy, and are now revered as a new kind of classic, so too may be certain works of the Internet-era, in future. At the very least, the enemy of great writing is not the web. It may, instead, be the mind-dulling latter stages of capitalism, which increasingly bamboozles us all. The Internet can oppose, as much as support, this ad-copy-world. Lessing, so good at some things, has thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

Poem By Sarah Lang

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome the Canadian poet Sarah Lang (pictured) to its pages this Friday. Lang (one wants to say "out on parole"), according to Wikipedia, shares her name with "a game show winner" and was born in 1980. In the spring of 2004, she completed her MFA at Brown University. She began work on her PhD in Chicago in the fall of 2005.

Her work, which includes poetry, prose, personal, critical and medical esssays, has been published in Canada, Great Britian, and the United States. She has translated work from Latin, Ancient Greek, French, Ukrainian, Japanese, and Mandarin. Her first poetry collection (recently out), from which the text below is an excerpt, is The Work Of Days, from Coach House Books. She's one of the future directions of contemporary Canadian poetry.

from Videos in Montreal

Admittedly, there are ends. I no longer wanted. There are ways
to sign season, home; a body is not tender. I knew change; no,

things grow where they will. To what use? You mimed
movement with the skill of one who has moved. A snail

without shell bruises and bruises easily. Our house is thin,
flat flesh. I never could have swallowed all expectations,

or yours. You were the first instance. Where fall
flames, that is flowers, your bones like the trees

are a new season. A chest blooms with demands.
A body is erstwhile in its delicate, radiant finery.

---

The city has drawn a blank. How big
you are; a tarmac in the cool summer.

You pretend to love them all. Let
is a word like a creek in spring.

We are strangers; there are ways
to lie. There are trees, there are

trees, there are trees. The wind
does many things. A Hungarian sign

is not unlike your mouth. I never claimed
gravity, strength. From the left, a cot

has great significance. Like the city
we squeeze in tight for a photograph.

poem by Sarah Lang