House of the rising Moonglum

Finally finished the Golden Compass, and followed it quickly with watching the movie. I’ll just assume that everyone else read it a long time ago, so no need to recap them here. The one thing I will say, Harry Potter has really upped my required level of prose for kid lit. I went into reading the book really expecting some outstanding writing. Pullman did an interesting thing in changing the style depending on who Lyra was trying to be, but to me it ended up falling short, as if he bit off more than he could chew. It ended up feeling disjointed rather than someone who flowed smoothly from one persona to the next.

As for the movie, it actually left me with a similar feeling, though for different reasons. In particular it felt like they were trying to hit every single plot point (up until the end anyway) while not giving nearly enough time to the characters or getting the plot from one point to the next.

Negatives aside though, both the book and the movie drew and interesting world, the book through a neat variation of steam punk, and the movie with some trantoresque CGI London. All in all worth reading and watching, but not my favorites. (Oh and could they have messed with Serafina’s discussion of free will any more in the movie? That was one of (IMO) the more interesting parts of the book, and they reduced it to one word?!?)

Blu-ray has just delivered some solid blows. Enough of this and I can finally go out and get my PS3 and HD (not to mention digital) TV. The battle rages, but today Warner Bros threw in with Blu-ray saying that it was confusing for customers. YA THINK!?! Idiots. Over the holiday Target only sold Blu-ray. Nothing final yet, but it does look to me like Blu-ray is winning, 6 to 2 (Warner, Fox, Disney, Lion’s Gate, MGM, and Sony for Blue-ray and Paramount and Universal for HD DVD.) Paramount and Universal are huge though, and both have massive libraries to bring to bear, but between the PS3 and the upcoming transition to digital, I think that we will see more and more consumers transitioning one way or the other.