Articles tagged with: Golden Compass
After Catherine Hardwicke left Twilight 2 for whatever reason, its studio needed to think extremely carefully about her replacement. After all, the Twilight 2 director would need to be adept at dealing with teenagers, understanding the romantic pull of the source text and - most importantly - be able to follow the lead of the first movie by creating an expansive fantasy book adaptation that ends up as a horribly unintelligible mess that nobody could ever genuinely be proud of. And that's why the director of Twilight 2 has been announced as Chris Weitz, the director of The Golden Compass. Clever move, movie studio, clever move.
You don't want to get on the wrong side of the Vatican - not only does it have the power to send you to hell, but it can also deliver quite a nasty movie review, as The Golden Compass is discovering.
The Vatican newspaper l'Osservatore Romano has launched a scathing attack aimed at The Golden Compass, and what it calls the movie's "cold and hopeless world." Quite what the Vatican's problem is with The Golden Compass, a movie about shifty-eyed bishops trying to kill children that may as well be called All Catholics Smell Of Bumholes, we don't know. But when you go and see The Golden Compass, just you remember that it isn't really the Pope's cup of tea. He much prefers Piss Crazy Lesbian Sluts 2, you see, and says it's a high watermark of the piss crazy lesbian slut genre. Or something. Possibly.
Anybody revelling in the recent revival of the epic fantasy flick and expecting similar repercussions with The Golden Compass will be pretty unnerved by the shoddy results on display here.
While we, at first, put down our relentless fidgeting, itching, scratching and belching to poor seating arrangement, we quickly came to realise that it wasn't the chair causing our discomfort, it was this strange, manky moving cinematic sludge glaring before us.
Since Christmas 2007 doesn't have a Harry Potter or a Narnia or a Lord Of The Rings, the wintry epic title this year goes to The Golden Compass - but how did it do at the weekend box office?
It did alright. Ish. We suppose. For a festive family fantasy blockbuster with a budget of $180 million, The Golden Compass managed to top the US weekend box office, but only by taking a relatively paltry $26 million. The Golden Compass' failure to ignite the weekend box office any more than, say, Flubber or S.W.A.T will be a disappointment to many, but a timely reminder that there's only a certain amount of dads in the world able to convince their children to see a movie just because Nicole Kidman wears a tight gold dress for about three minutes in it.
