My Daemon's a tiger. Grrr.

So The Golden Compass is pretty disappointing. I have been reading the books in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials saga recently (I still haven't started Amber Spyglass, so don't spoil nothin), and have quite enjoyed them. Frankly, anything William Donohue hates, I love. However, the film is a (nice to look at) trainwreck. While the casting is mostly awesome (Nicole Kidman is perfect as Mrs. Coulter, and the girl who plays the main character Lyra is full of spunk and verve, as she should be) and the look of the movie is really densely imagined and faithful to the books, the script is a piece of horrible dreck. The dialogue goes mostly like this:

"Exposition exposition exposition."
"But no! Exposition exposition!"
"Fine. Exposition exposition exposition exposition. Clunky stupid platitude. Our target demographic is retarded."

One of the best things about the book is how densely plotted it is, as well as how the incidents all flow together in a logical and forward-rushing way. The movie scraps all of that, so that major events that actually make sense in the book are completely unexplained coincidences. It's really too bad - although given the relative unlikelihood of the film being a business success, I guess it's nice that the filmmakers won't have the opportunity to muck up the other ones.

In any case, my Daemon (in the world of the books, peoples' souls are embodied as animal companions) is a friggin Tiger. Take that!