Stardust

Neil Gaiman's account of his first look at half an hour of assembled footage from the Stardust film adaptation makes me want to see the film right now:

It's not the book (it would take a 6 hour miniseries to do the book exactly), but in a lot of ways it's much more the book than I expected – watching the Limbus grass scene where the Witch (Michelle Pfeiffer, beautiful and very scary) first meets Ditchwater Sal, or Tristran promising to bring Victoria a falling star, or the unicorn rescuing Tristran from the poisoned wine in the Inn just made me blink and smile in recognition. The Robert DeNiro – Ricky Gervais scene made me laugh immoderately, as did Rupert Everett's star turn as Secundus, while Charlie Cox is amazingly Tristran and transforms from geeky shopboy to confident hero through the course of the movie. Mark Strong's evil Septimus steals scenes shamelessly.

And Claire Danes is lovely, and keeps it real. I'd received a lot of "Sienna Miller!! — how could you let them do this??!!???!" emails, so was a bit nervous, but she's great as Victoria Forester.

It looks like all the money is up on the screen. Best of all, it felt like its own thing. I've been trying to think of what to compare it to, but it's leaving me a bit blank — it exists half-way between The Princess Bride and Pirates of the Caribbean, and there's nothing I've seen quite like it out there in the world before.

I know it takes more than a good cast to make a worthwhile film, but with Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert DeNiro and Ricky Gervais and Rupert Everett and Mark Strong and Claire Danes and a screenplay based on a Neil Gaiman story there's every chance that this could be very good indeed. Possibly even good enough for me to forgive director Matthew Vaughn for dropping out of X-Men 3 and leaving us to Mr Ratner's tender mercies…

Gaiman hopes to take a slightly truncated version of the footage he saw to a forthcoming convention: I trust it'll end up online somewhere before long so the rest of us can get a look.