Christmas in the Spender household:

If you haven’t read the book and are going to see the film, or even if you have read but are still going to see you probably don’t want to read this post.

Right, you’ve been warned. I’m not going to write a thorough review, I’m just going to list the things that really annoyed me. I’m glad I read some of the bad reviews before seeing it otherwise I’m not sure I’d have been able to sit through and not walk out.

Right, here we go:

• How on earth did Chris Weitz think that his screenplay stood up as good enough? Come on it was a series of ticks in the boxes covering the major happenings of the film. No characters were defined, back stories explained or anything. You might as well buy the audio book from iTunes rather than see the film. It will be a lot more interesting.
• Convenient member of the Magesterium along to attempt to poison Lord A. It would be far too complex to try to explain why the Master did it afterall.
• Hello I’m Mrs. Coulter do you want to come with me to The North? Yes please. Can I take her Master? I guess so. No bulding up of why Lyra was so taken by Mrs. C. and why she was so desperate to go to the North
• What happened to the two chapters worth of material about the journey from when Lyra is rescued by the Gyptians through to the roping? Not a single hint that she is being hunted the length and breadth of the country, the backstory about Lord A being her father, mother dying and being raised by Ma. Costa. None of the politics of the Gyptians and the expansions of Lord Faa and Farder Coram as characters at all.
• Cut out the above and you lose any ability to give the impression that Lyra comes to grips with the alethiometer largely by herself. Instead we get a ludicrous scene in which she gets it first time around after a couple of words from Farder Coram. If it was that easy then anybody could have done it.
• There was nowhere near enough explanation of the bond between a human and a daemon. The only nods being a quick explanation that one feels the pain of the other. Where was the detail about how the settling of the daemon’s form around puberty is an important time and how the settled form portrays the character of the person at that point? Including the scene onboard ship where Pantalaimon delights in being a porpoise and that worries Lyra in case he likes it so much that he wants to settle as one would have taken two minutes and really driven the point home.
• On a similar note to the above, why no scene where Lyra deliberately streches the link between her and Pantalaimon when trying to get Iorek onboard? Another minute of screen time at most for a powerful example of the importance of the bond between human and daemon.
• Why plonk Serafina Pekkala onto the ship and not her daemon as in the book? Just to give a minute of dialogue which helps to cut out a load of stuff by just explaining it point blank. Hardly any explanation of her back story with Father Coram and why she feels obliged to aid Lyra. Oh and to give Eva Green more screen time of course.
• Why find Billy Costa without his daemon instead of Tony Markarios? Oh and Ma. Costa wasn’t allowed along on the trip in any case. Actually, all of that is reasonable as Billy doesn’t really play any other role later on and it saves introducing another character, but then it all gets totally mucked up when Billy doesn’t die like Tony did. So getting cut off from your daemon is ok then huh? No, all we get is Mrs. Coulter briefly saying “intercision isn’t perfected yet” later on, when it’s too late to really highlight why those words instill real fear in Lyra.
• WHY, WHY, WHY totally switch the flow of the book to have the confrontation between Iorek and Iofur (oh, sorry, Ragnar – obviously having two bears whose names begin with the same letter is far too confusing) before the escape from Bolvangar? What purpose did that serve at all except to piss of people who had read the book that is. Imagine if they had switched the journey through Moria and the time in Lorien around in The Fellowship of the Ring for example.
• Oh no, the reason was that it gave you a way to end the film without the actual ending of the book. So not ending it on a cliffhanger (and a pretty big one at that) is understandable and let’s face it, it worked for The Two Towers, but to completely change the way the story flows to accomodate a happy ending is maddening.
• And on the subject of Iorek, why invent a totally false story about him losing a fight with Iofur and being exiled rather than spend a couple of minutes explaining that he was exiled for killing another bear – thus explaining the guilt he has which led him to where he ended up? The understanding that the book gives as to the fact that Iofur engineered the killing gives Iorek a motive for wanting to return and fight which the film doesn’t explain at all.
• Dust. No real explanation as to what it represents. Almost no disussion about the Aurora and the visibility of the other world which is what Lyra is really keen on seeing hence why she is so ready to go with Mrs. Coulter. Yes they didn’t want to piss off a significant market of people by going the whole hog with the church/original sin stuff but they really could have done a better job without being in any way controversial. “A long time ago, one of our ancestors made a terrible mistake. They disobeyed the authority. And that is what brought Dust into the world.” is the nearest thing we get.

There are a load of other more minor things that I found annoying, but to be honest they pale into insignificance. If you are a fan of the Pullman novels and also somebody who watched Fellowship and got annoyed that Tom Bombadill and the razing of the shire were left out then seriously don’t go and see The Golden Compass.

How can they mess it up this much?

The three online banking facilities I have access to (one UK, two Irish which is another post in itself…) all require me to have a passcode of variable length which they use as a form of wish-it-was-two-factor authentication. They each have a different approach to how to enter it: one asks me to select three numbers at random from drop down boxes with the other numbers represented by ‘*’, whilst the other two just ask me to enter three of the numbers by keyboard into three provided entry fields. Obviously the numbers requested differ on each login attempt.

What they are trying to guard against is the ability for key loggers or other such malicious software being able to read the numbers entered. Hence the drop down box approach to encourage use of the mouse rather than keyboard, the mouse being harder to track.

The subject of this post leads to an interesting technique used by the UK bank. Instead of asking for numbers 1, 3 and 6; or 2, 4, and 5 it asks for first, third and last; or second, fourth and next to last. The help for said bank actually states that “next to last” is an attempt to help mask the length of the passcode. The thing is ever since they introduced this it has been very noticeable that “next to last” seems to get asked for a lot. The question though: is this because it is actually being asked for more than the other numbers because the code behind the site knows that this is a special case number and that influences the “randomness” or is it simply because it stands out more and I just think it pops up more often?

Why don’t some people watch where they are going and make an effort to get out of the way?

Why do some people need to park right outside the entrance door to our apartment block when there are free parking spaces 10 yards away?

Why do people see the need to go the wrong way down a 1-way aisle outside the shopping centre just to get to a car parking spot 20 yards closer to the shops?

Why when the fire alarm goes off at 2am and indicates that a heat sensor in the underground car park is registering 62C am I the only person out of about a dozen who thinks it is sensible to perform a visual check rather than just turning off the alarm and going back to bed? At least the other eleven actually got out of bed I suppose.

Why do people who serve me always seem to need me to say things twice?

Why does the minimum possible standard seem to be the one that is delivered?

And finally…

Why have these things started to get to me all of a sudden?

I’ve just updated this blog to WordPress 2.3.1, which was as painless as it always is. I took the opportunity to freshen up the plugins I use as well. There shouldn’t be any noticeable difference, however I have picked up the latest version of the excellent Share This plugin. You will see the share this icon under each post and this is the easiest way to publish any of my entries to Facebook, delicious, digg, stumbleupon or numerous other places.

There are some times when checking the news in the odd 5 minutes at work brings me great delight, and this is one.

It is fantastic to see the Avro Vulcan take to the skies again, after years of hard work, setbacks, lottery funding and more setbacks. Brings back memories of seeing it fly at Mildenhall airshow in the early nineties.

Can’t wait to see it in the flesh if it can make any airshow appearances.

I’ve just enabled splicing of my del.icio.us bookmarks into the feed for this site. For those that subscribe to the feed (via Feedburner which hopefully every feed link on this site should go through) will get a single daily digest of any bookmarks I make. I’ve done this partly to make more use of del.icio.us than I currently do. I’ll aim to add a small personal comment to each item I bookmark to help people work out if they will find it worthwhile following any links. Another reason for doing this is that I’ve found quite a few links this way from Andy, Roo and other’s feeds.

Apologies for the lack of updates to this blog in recent weeks. This due to a combination of being too busy in my new job, not having broadband at home yet, and the fact that my weekends have been taken up with wedding planning, football, stag do and this coming one with my parents coming over.

Normal service will probably be resumed just as soon as we get our phone line sorted out and can get broadband connected. I don’t care about being able to make calls, just give me an IP address!!