You may have noticed that the big movie for this Christmas period is The Golden Compass, a $90 million adaptation of the first volume of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.
It's got talking bears, witches on broomsticks and Nicole Kidman, as the film's villain, Mrs Coulter. It's the best performance in a film that has many surprisingly smart casting choices (Tom Courtenay, Daniel Craig, Jim Carter, Derek Jacobi), despite its rather hamfisted handling of the source material.
Feeling a bit queasy right now, after watching five minutes of Jean Michel Jarre's new DVD while wearing 3D glasses. I can't vouch for the whole disc of "Oxygene", but Jarre seems to eschew the youthful sort of 3D stunts and go instead for shots of him and his mates playing some lovely old synths. Quite strange, not least because it seems to have had the unusual effect of making me both bored and dizzy at the same time.
So I arrived at work this morning with the plan to write about the pretty fine new Wu-Tang Clan album. I’ve been momentarily distracted, though, by the discovery that Def Jam are streaming the entire new Ghostface Killah album on their website.
Apologies there was no blog on Friday: I spent the day at home, mucking about with several thousand CDs and trying, successfully, to buy My Bloody Valentine tickets. Today has been another complicated one of meetings and Italian lessons and list-making, but it did come to a happy zenith about an hour ago when we saluted the undervalued excellence of U-God, footsoldier of the Wu-Tang Clan and one of the stars of their new "8 Diagrams" album, which miraculously arrived in the office this morning.
