Stardust

The movie is rarely better than the book, but Stardust is the exception that proves the rule. The movie plays fast and loose with the plot (something that tends to annoy me) but does so to build the characters and focus on the "magic" of the story. It is, after all, a fairy tale.

A town, appropriately named Wall, divides the fairy world and Victorian England. Tristan lives in Wall and has a crush on the prettiest girl in town. She informs him that, to marry her, he'll need to retrieve a fallen star. Unfortunately, a.) the star fell over the wall dividing the two worlds, so Tristan has to enter the fairy realm, and b.) stars aren't metal over there. They're people, and this one is a very grouchy girl.

Equally unfortunately, Tristan isn't the only one after Yvaine the star. Stars' hearts grant immortality and youth, so a witch is after her heart. There are also a pack of princes chasing after Yvaine, since she was knocked out of the sky when a king threw a necklace for his sons to retrieve. (The one who gets the necklace back home first gets the throne, so they're rather anxious.)

This is where the movie and the book start to diverge sharply. In the book, I loved how petty and mortal the bad guys were. Epic villains die in the cheapest ways, but it adds to the book. Nobody's safe. The villains are also gloriously dislikable. Between repeated fratricide and trying to rip someone's heart out, they make no bones about the joy they take in being eeeeeeeevil. And, let's face it, the monsters are usually one of the more interesting parts of any good fairy tale.

Plus, some of the villains don't go away after death; the princes all hang around as ghosts until someone wins the kingdom. So the surviving princes have a pack of bloody, partially dismembered, wisecracking undead siblings trailing after them. (The princes' catty comments were one of the best things about the book, incidentally. Apparently, there's little incentive to be nice to someone who poisoned you, so the ghosts take hilarious amounts of glee in their living siblings' screwups.)

The movie was more...cinematic, not to state the obvious. They cut down on the sudden, surprise deaths in favor of crazy, special-effects-laden battles, playing with the plot to make them fit in. Not unexpected, certainly, but I did miss the petty sniping. On the bright side, though, Michelle Pfeiffer as the evil witch? Excellent. And Robert DeNiro as the flamingly gay Captain Shakespeare? Ohhhhhhh...worth it just for that alone.

The best thing about the movie, though, was Yvaine. Granted, I'm in something of a cheerful and less cynical mood these days, so that might color my opinion of the grouchy star's metamorphosis, but Yvaine is a perfect fairy tale heroine. She literally glows because she's so in love and so happy. And that, for a star, is just perfect. Cheesy? Of course. But it's a fairy tale. Why not use the special effects budget to make Claire Danes shiny? (A question more directors should ask of themselves.)

Stardust is worth a read (quick read, too -- blitzed through it in less than a day) and definitely worth watching. If you only have the patience for one version, though, choose the movie. (If it's cute and charming enough to get happy squeaking noises out of me, it's pretty fabulous. And oh my god, DeNiro.)