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:

• The Read YA Lit group is having a group read, already to 42 messages.
• There’s a spoiler-free thread and another post-reading spoiler-ific thread in Green Dragon. Opinions are mixed, but polite.
• In Book Talk inkdrinker started a thread about efforts to oppose the movie on religious grounds. Hot and now rather far off-topic.
• There’s a shorter thread in the Banned Books group.
• There are threads in both Happy Heathens and Christianity groups.

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.**