Redbird's Drive-by

The Coming Movie Firestorm

This December, look for church groups to protest the soon-to-be-hyped film, "The Golden Compass," starring Nicole Kidman. Take a look at the movie trailer here.

The film is already being hailed for its amazing animation. The howls of protest are less about the movie than the book it's based on and the author who wrote it.

The movie is based on Philip Pullman's children's book series (which includes "The Subtle Knife" and "The Amber Spyglass"). Books in this collection have sold 15 million copies worldwide.

You can read a chapter of the book here.

Catholics are already protesting the film, which critics have reported is a watered-down version of the book.

In the film, witches rule the northern sky. Every human soul lives on the outside of the body as a  demon that takes the form of an animal.

The compass, which is a key in this film, seeks not True North. (As real compass users know, compasses really seek out "magnetic north," but I digress.) This compass seeks out "Truth." If you know how to set the dial on this device, you can get the answer to any question, but nobody really knows how to use it except for the film's teenage heroine, Lyra.

But, as Rotten Tomatoes, a film critic Web site, points out:

Unfortunately for the filmmakers, Pullman's books also include a fair amount of what has been perceived to be anti-Catholic rhetoric; in the first book, for instance, the church is in the business of kidnapping children and conducting some rather unpleasant experiments on them.

A group called The Catholic League is critical of the movie and book series, and launched a two-month campaign against it. The Catholic League, often described as a "conservative watchdog group," says this film is "selling atheism to kids."

The Baltimore Sun reports:

"Right now, it's hard to see where it's going to have a real impact on the movie," speculates Gregg Kilday, film editor of The Hollywood Reporter. "Historically, these warnings sent as many people to see the movie, once they were labeled 'forbidden fruit,' as they kept away."

His Dark Materials centers on a world run by the sinister and dictatorial Magisterium, a force that suppresses free will, demands conformity and punishes anyone who deviates from the norm. "The first volume, the one that's being adapted, doesn't have much in it, in terms of the author's philosophizing," says Kilday, who has read the trilogy. "The latter volumes do have more, and they are a kind of metaphorical attack on the church."

Golden Compass director Chris Weitz recently told the London Daily Telegraph: "In the books, the Magisterium is a version of the Catholic Church gone wildly astray from its roots. If that's what you want in the film, you'll be disappointed."

The filmmakers didn't go so far as to change the name Magisterium, which in Catholicism refers to the teaching authority of the church. Still, Thomas Doherty, author of Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration, decried the changes, telling The Daily Telegraph, "This is part of a long-term problem over freedom of speech."

Doherty has written extensively on film censorship. He says protests like those spearheaded by Donohue and the league are far less effective today than they were in the past, when the Roman Catholic Church could slap a film with the dreaded "condemned" tag and seriously affect its box-office potential.

"Basically, today, Catholics themselves are far less willing to obey either the priesthood or their alleged spokesman and forgo seeing a film," says Doherty.

Snopes.com, a credible urban myth-busting Web site, goes on to point out that the author of the book series the film is based on is a self-professed atheist who said the books "are about killing God."

Over the years, interviews with the book's author, Pullman, have explored how he portrays God as an invalid and suggests the toppling of heaven that is replaced by an atheistic republic on earth. No wonder his work draws so much heat. See this 2004 piece in The Sunday (London) Times.

There is quite a bit more to this author, including his passion for children's literature. Read more about it here.

Whether you do something on the film or not, I thought you would at least want some background.

From: By Al Tompkins (more by author)