Results tagged “christopherlee”

Although The Golden Compass is being compared to the Narnia Chronicles in some of the ads, the series that the book it's based on is a part of - Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy - is really the anti-Narnia: equal but exactly opposite to C.S. Lewis' saga of Christian allegory. Some people are saying that The Golden Compass is anti-Catholic - and they're right. The movie doesn't emphasize it as much as the book...

Unfortunately, they imagined out all the good parts.
Gone is the thought provoking nature of the film, the tension, the sense of mystery, the fantastic soundtrack (in fact I missed it so much in this version that I'm downloading it from the iTunes store even as I write this), Christopher Lee's insidious whimsy and, somewhat surprisingly, the emphasis on titilation and sexuality that was so prominent in the original. In its place is a misogynistic mess of a movie; which, although visually stunning, is poorly plotted, strangely edited, replete with eminently quotable B-movie grade dialog, and insistent on pushing the metaphor of "society as beehive" beyond its reasonable limits.
The breakdown, for those of you not in the know, is that Nicholas Cage's character, Edward Malus, is an officer of the law who hastens himself to a small island in response to a letter regarding a missing child. Once there, he encounters a culture both cut-off from the modern world and built around ancient religious traditions. He then struggles not only with solving what looks increasing like a murder mystery, but also with the reality that this culture exists concurrently with his own. More after the jump...

Editor's note: Jim Genzano attended the first night of Exhumed Film's terrifying triple features series. It resumes this Saturday night at 8 p.m.