2007 looks to be a good year for fantasy adaptations, at least of books I’ve read. What I’ve seen of Stardust (Neil Gaiman & Charles Vess) looks great. I’m psyched up for His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass (Phillip Pullman)—and I’ve got to say I’m glad they’re doing each book as its own movie, instead of trying to condense the whole trilogy. And Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J.K. Rowling, as if you didn’t know) looks promising as well, though most of the Harry Potter films have suffered from condensing too much.
I’m a little more apprehensive about The Dark is Rising (Susan Cooper), mainly because the IMDB page says they plan to start early this year, but the Los Angeles Times has it down for a September release. For the record, I do think this is the one to start with, not Over Sea, Under Stone, because as I recall it has a much greater sense of tension, which will translate better to screen. Plus it provides more of an introduction to the world and the conflict, since Will is dropped right in the middle of it, while I remember the other book being set more solidly in the “real” world. The Drews don’t get involved as deeply until later.
On a related note, I don’t think I’m in the target audience for The Number 23. We saw the trailer for it on Friday when we saw Pan’s Labyrinth (which is quite good, BTW), and I could not stop laughing. Not because of Jim Carrey, but because of the premise. Perhaps it comes from reading the Illuminatus! trilogy. There’s a great sequence in the book where one of the characters is starting to look for certain numbers, including 23, in everything. Of course, since he’s human, he finds them, using ever more convoluted arithmetic to prove that they’re significant. While reading Illuminatus!, I looked up stuff on synchronicity and found the tech term for this tendency to see connections where none exist: apophenia. And here I’m watching this preview, and there’s a sequence in which the lead character starts finding the number 23 in everything, using ever more convoluted arithmetic…. I don’t think I could take the premise seriously enough to get into the movie.
