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Friday morning, I saw an amazing sight.

We'd had an ice storm the night before. All the ice had melted off the roads and sidewalks. But the trees, bushes and plants were still coated with ice. When the morning sun touched them, they gleamed white and crystal above the slightly dingy streets. It was magical.

If only I'd been carrying my camera, and could have taken a picture of it.

But maybe it's better that I didn't play the photographer. Part of the magic was that I knew the sight would be gone by midday if not before. Frost was right; "Nothing gold can stay."

esrblog and I just got back from a trip with pmat and shakati to see "The Golden Compass," the movie version of the first volume of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy. There's no need for a cut here, since it's possible to name what's right and wrong with the movie without referring to any plot points at all.

I enjoyed the movie. Visually, the movie was a powerful and surprisingly accurate rendition of the world Pullman describes in the book. The casting was excellent (Nicole Kidman was particularly good in the role of Mrs. Coulter), and the scriptwriters did a wonderful job of compressing the action into movie-length without compromising its flavor.

There's only one problem with Compass. Most of what makes Pullman's novel compelling, or at least interesting, are the motivations of the characters and why they are fighting on the side on which they're fighting. Those motivations are sufficiently complex that they can't be described very well in a movie, and the movie accordingly abbreviates and glosses over a lot of them. The result is a movie that will be powerfully evocative for anyone who's read and enjoyed the book--and cryptic and frustrating for everybody else.

Well, that explains why it's doing so poorly at the box office, at least in the U.S. Sorry, New Line; not all fantasy trilogies are created equal.

[EDIT: In light of pmat's comment I should probably amend "cryptic and frustrating" to "cryptic, boring, and/or frustrating."]