Movies; Stardust in 2007

Many years ago I subscribed to magazines like Entertainment Weekly and Premiere, to keep up with all the movies and TV that were going to be coming my way. I loved knowing well in advance about all the new stories I would be able to choose from and also what my favorite actors/writers/directors were working on right then.

So I ate up the big 'season preview' issues with their listings of ~50 productions being released over the next few months; even though almost all of them were dross, I still liked knowing about them. I watched a lot of them.

Since then my priorities (or at least my practices) have shifted far to the other end... now I see very few movies in the theater, and we try very hard not to add any new TV shows to our regular watching habits.

I have no subscriptions to entertainment magazines any more. My free substitute for the glossies is the weekly Ebert & Roeper Revue, so I mostly find out about movies when they're released. Also, I check out the weekly Best Buy/Circuit City ads to see what's out on DVD this week. And I pick up some coming-attractions intelligence from Ghost in the Machine. I find out about some TV events from my Tivo wishlists and from Laurel's TV Picks. But that's about it.

So I did not know they were going to make a movie of Neil Gaiman's Stardust; it turns out they're already way into production, and the author has seen a half-hour compilation of what's together so far:

Neil Gaiman's Journal: Waiting to exhale...

It's not the book (it would take a 6 hour miniseries to do the book exactly), but in a lot of ways it's much more the book than I expected - watching the Limbus grass scene where the Witch (Michelle Pfeiffer, beautiful and very scary) first meets Ditchwater Sal, or Tristran promising to bring Victoria a falling star, or the unicorn rescuing Tristran from the poisoned wine in the Inn just made me blink and smile in recognition. The Robert DeNiro-Ricky Gervais scene made me laugh immoderately, as did Rupert Everett's star turn as Secundus, while Charlie Cox is amazingly Tristran and transforms from geeky shopboy to confident hero through the course of the movie. Mark Strong's evil Septimus steals scenes shamelessly.

And Claire Danes is lovely, and keeps it real. [Sienna Miller is] great as Victoria Forester.

... Best of all, it felt like its own thing. I've been trying to think of what to compare it to, but it's leaving me a bit blank -- it exists half-way between The Princess Bride and Pirates of the Caribbean, and there's nothing I've seen quite like it out there in the world before.

Stardust is one of Gaiman's best stories, and I do think it could be a great movie. Not as silly/funny as Princess Bride, but in the same class. This one, I'll see in the theater.   Movies   1 comment(s)  

Sorry, I tried to help!

I was very impressed by Matthew Vaughn's Layer Cake, so am looking forward to seeing what he does here.
      ...posted by Kevin on July 17, 2006 11:13 AM

Add a comment...