not so dusty

[freckles_and_doubt]

Watching Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring for the first time was an amazing, breathtaking experience: I came out of the cinema on a sort of fantastical high, completely seduced and absorbed by the sudden vivid reality of my favourite fantasy realm and its people. Of course, I then had the happy daze burst, like a bubble, by the bloody depressive boyfriend of the time, who turned to me and said dismissively, "Well, the first third was total crap, of course", thus coming, had he only known it, a hairsbreadth from death by strangulation.

I am happy to note that, while Stardust induced the same sort of glowing euphoria, my fellow watchers were far more civilised, and were happy to join me in babbling enthusiastically about the film. Now that I've come down from the high, it might be possible for me to talk about the movie more or less objectively, although I did find myself recommending it to my fairy-tale class yesterday in somewhat extreme terms only slightly leavened by academic sense of any sort ("It's beautiful! cute hero! wheee! Oh, also adult fairy tale, blah."). I shall, however, cunningly conceal my ramblings behind the cut, as otherwise strawberryfrog and other benighted UKers (hee) will grumble at me, possibly justifiably.


It turns out that my Evil Landlord, shockingly, has never read the Gaiman novel, although that Shall Be Remedied posthaste, always supposing I manage to persuade him to come home from work early enough to actually do any reading. Before and after the film I told him two things, respectively:
1. If you used a compass to mathematically bisect a line drawn between The Princess Bride and Ladyhawke, you'd run the perpendicular straight through the middle of Stardust.
2. The book is even better.

Gaiman is always an astonishingly visual writer, which I suppose is inevitable for someone who started out plotting comics. Stardust is rife with visual realisations of plot: the Wall as the separation between realms, the chains which depict servitude, the brothers haunted by their murdered siblings, the gem which represents kingship and competition, even the glowing beauty of the star. Given this, perhaps it's not surprising that this was a darned good adaptation, extremely faithful in flavour to Gaiman's writing. As he himself acknowledges, while there were reasonably extensive changes to the plot, they all made sound cinematic sense. The balance between humour and romance in the book is quite delicate, and it was a relief to see that the film manages to retain the unabashed romanticism (unicorns! glowing stars! true love!) despite slightly stepping up the campy comedy. I was terrified that Robert de Niro might chew the scenery with Captain Shakespeare, but in fact his performance was strangely poignant and surprisingly restrained.

Things I Really Liked:

• The leads. Yvaine was simply beautiful, with a glowing quality even when the astonishingly delicate special effects weren't giving her shiny edges. And Charlie Cox is (a) simply cute, and (b) bloody good at depicting the change from bumbling youth to confident man: just the body language in his final confrontation with Victoria's noxious suitor spoke volumes. (OK, jo and I were drooling. She liked his lounging, dressed-up entry to the pirate ship; I liked the swordfighting bits, on account of how I'm a pushover for swords).
• The incredible inn-building special effects.
• The transformed goat-man - lovely bit of character acting, and surprisingly caprine.
• The ghostly brothers, who were cast well enough that one mourned their limited screen time. (Less than a minute of Rupert Everett? practically sacrilege! Hopefully there will be missing scenes on the DVD).
• The horrid fate of Victoria; not just being told to grow up, but the Shakespeare/Humphrey wink was just wickedly appropriate.
• Surprisingly, the changed ending with the pair of them heading back to the star's home. Not as diffuse and realistic as Gaiman's closure, but cinematically appropriate.

Things I Didn't Really Like:

• Ferdy the Fence. I don't like Ricky Gervais, who is an irritatingly greasy little man, and I thought the character was gratuitous.
• The bit with the soothsayer, I'm not sure why - possibly because it felt like an unnecessary addition or substitution for all the inter-brotherly deception and misdirection.
• The last fight scene, the epic confrontation with the witches - it took slightly too long, had slightly too much in it, and was far too unbased in anything from the actual book. Also, was it just me, or was the coronation slightly lame and awkward?

Minor kvetching aside - oh, yes. This one's a keeper. It's always a good thing when one wanders out of the cinema already planning the next viewing. But the interesting thing is that, while it was a stunning film, it has inevitably lost detail and texture from the book; I still think the book is a better story. And it doesn't matter, since this is an alternative artifact, complete in itself, and enjoyable alongside the book without compromising its more literary pleasures.


Last Night I Dreamed: I had to stand in for Britney Spears in a rather athletic dance routine at a variety concert in North Africa. I was somewhat worried that I didn't know the song or the words well enough to lipsynch, but fortunately the building was attacked, just before I was due to perform, by a horde of Muslim fundamentalists who abseiled in through the roof. My momentary fear that they may mistake me for Britney, and off me in the interests of decorum and good taste, was allayed when I realised that, having run out of their own deposits of lead and mithril, they were after the region's iron mines. I apparently survived the experience, as a later segment of dream involved Rhieinwen running me an amazing bath, in a giant Victorian tub, with lavender-scented bubble bath she'd given me for my birthday.