Put the passages into the right order to know some extra information about the film and the book

Answer the following questions.

1. Did you like the way the director portrayed the fairy-like characters? How did you imagine them while reading a book?

2. Does the main idea of the film coincide with the main idea of the book? If not, name both of them.

A. On October 9, 2007, Weitz revealed that the final three chapters from Northern Lights had been moved to the film's potential sequel, The Subtle Knife, in order to provide "the most promising conclusion to the first film and the best possible beginning to the second", though he also said less than a month later that there had been "tremendous marketing pressure" to create "an upbeat ending". Author Pullman publicly supported these changes, saying that "every film has to make changes to the story that the original book tells — not to change the outcome, but to make it fit the dimensions and the medium of film." In addition to excising Northern Lights' ending, the film reverses the order in which Lyra travels to the Gobbler's outpost of Bolvangar and Svalbard, the armoured bears' kingdom. Neither deviation from the book features in Scholastic Publishing's The Golden Compass: The Story of the Movie novelization.

B. Series creator Philip Pullman suggested a scene not included in the books, in which Mrs. Coulter hits her dæmon. Although the character has black hair in the novel, Pullman responded to the blonde Kidman's portrayal by saying "I was clearly wrong. You sometimes are wrong about your characters. She's blonde. She has to be."^[

C. Numerous scenes from the novel were not featured in the film. On December 7, 2007, New York Magazine reviewed draft scripts from both Stoppard and Weitz; both were significantly longer than the final version, and Weitz's draft (which, unlike Stoppard's, did not feature significant additions to the source material) was pronounced the best of the three. The magazine concluded that instead of a "likely three hours of running time" that included such scenes as Mrs. Coulter's London party and Lyra's meeting with a witch representative, the studio had opted for a "failed" length of under two hours in order to maximize revenue.

D. Tasha Robinson of The A.V. Club argued that through the use of a spoken introduction and other exposition-filled dialogue, the film "bowdlerizes" Pullman's vision by "baldly revealing up front everything that the novel is trying to get you to wonder about and to explore slowly." Youyoung Lee wrote in a December 2007 Entertainment Weekly that the film "leaves out the gore," such as the book's ritualistic heart-eating that concludes the bear fight, "to create family-friendlier fare." Lee also said that the film "downplays the Magisterium's religious nature", but Robinson argued that the depicted "hierarchical organization of formally robed, iconography-heavy priests who dictate and define morality for their followers, are based out of cathedrals, and decry teachings counter to theirs as 'heresy'" while doing "ugly things to children under cover of secrecy" would make "most people" think of the Catholic Church.

The book “Northern Lights” by Philip Pullman

Pre-reading

Дата добавления: 2017-01-13