Stardust

Well, I probably won't actually get to that backlog promised in the last last post, except perhaps by special request (ie, you writing in the comments that you want to know about something). So to satisfy my throngs of eager readers [*snicker*], here's my latest review:

I read "Stardust" over the weekend, then watched the movie. Now, I will say that I read the book in Spanish, so it's possible that I missed something in the translation... that it might have actually been funnier or maybe deeper... but frankly I don't think so.

I found the book to be disappointing and the movie to be better, but still confusing. The book was, for the most part, written like a children's book, almost a deliberate imitation of The Hobbit (which I hated). Characters go along, do things, run into almost no difficulties, and when they do, they extract themselves with teeth-grinding simplicity. 80 pages in, nothing had really happened. At 100 pages, the "mission" of the book is accomplished, and all that's left is getting home. The problem with seeing it as a sweet children's book would be the explicit language (more an issue in English than it was in Spanish), one fairly graphic sex scene, and a couple scenes of rather descriptive violence perpetuated against a unicorn. These scenes were all the more discomfiting because they're so unexpected in this sort of book. It's like you're watching..."Aladdin" say, and Jasmine suddenly takes her top off while Aladdin yells "Holy fuck! Check out those knockers!" ...and then you're right back to the regular movie.
It lacked depth, it lacked character development, it lacked conflict. There are two other groups of people chasing the star, but it never really all comes together in the grand finale the way you'd expect; the other plot lines just peter out before the end.

The movie was better...in that it wasn't a total waste of my time. We get the grand finale, which is really quite good, and there are some scenes of visual humor that were really entertaining - though they had little to do with the book, that was a good thing in this case. My only beef with the movie is that some of the funny bits were WAY out there - ie, the smart-alecky ghosts and the gay pirate - that I found myself wondering whether the movie was deliberately a spoof/parody or whether it had just ended up that way. There were parts that took themselves seriously, and parts that I said to Eric, "Okay, this HAS to be a parody of a fantasy movie." Anyway, it was a cute bit of fluff, but I'd still recommend going to see "The Golden Compass" for those wanting a bit of high fantasy to go with their evening.

I have a collection of Gaiman's short stories coming in from the library soon, so I'm pretty excited about that.