The folks at New Line are offering free tickets again, this time to California screenings of the ambaric extravaganza, The Golden Compass, adapted from
Philip Pullman's
novel (titled
Northern Lights in the UK), and the first of the "His Dark Materials" series.
There are two screenings:- Los Angeles – 12/4 – The Grove Stadium – 189 The Grove Dr. , Los Angeles , CA 90036 - 7:30 pm (pass)
- Orange County – 12/5 – AMC 30 @ The Block – 20 City Blvd West , Orange , CA 92868 – 7:30 pm (pass)
Click on the link to get a pass, print it out, and bring it to the screening (each pass admits two people). Both screenings start at 7:30pm, and admittance is on a first-come-first-served basis—so get there
early! They'll start letting people in around 7pm.
If you don't know, the movie has aroused some controversy over its—or at least the book's—anti-Christian themes. This is more overt in the later books. Indeed—without giving anything away—in a literal sense, it's utterly overt!
As you might expect, boycotts have been called, angry letters written, etc. And, of course, LibraryThing members are talking about it. Check out the
conversations page for
The Golden Compass for Talk posts on the book. Some recent highlights:
Opinion!* If you haven't read it, I recommend you do so straightaway, before the movie comes out. New Line doesn't pay us for the free promotion, so I'm happy to bite the hand here. If past adaptations of this sort are any guide, the chance that it will be any good is low, and the chance it will satisfy die-hard fans of the book virtually nil. Will I see it? Of course!
For whatever my opinion is worth, it's a
great book. I started it a few weeks ago, when I had a lot of driving to do, so I got the audio version. I was immensely enjoyable. I find that listening to a book most closely resembles the reading experience of childhood, when you really
lived the books you read. For about a week I lived that world. I went on to the second and third, again in the audio, and even avoiding a paper copy someone had because I didn't want to rush. (They're not as good, but I'll leave that topic aside.)
It's certainly anti-Christian in the litteral sense. The Catholic Church—in a parallel universe which also had a Pope
John Calvin—and God himself are the villains of the series. Anyone who's looked at
my catalog might think this a strike against it. It's not, and many others with the same opinions (and books?) are with me. (See the
Wikipedia article or the review in
First Things for a taste of that side of the argument.) For my part, I found it pitch-perfect in both language and underlying sentiment.**
*And MY opinion, not anyone who works for LT, so far as I know. Abby said she's going to read it. I await her verdict.
Labels: movies, philip pullman, the golden compass
Miramax Films is giving us 25 copies of 
Want to see a free advance screening of a movie next week? New Line Cinema is giving LibraryThing members in California* an invitation to see the film Love in the Time of Cholera before it opens. Details below.
