Stardust
Paramount Pictures, 125mins, PG-13

Written and Directed
by Matthew Vaughn

Niel Gaiman is one of our premier fantasy writers of our time for a reason. He knows how to write a fairy tale. When he and Charles Vess put this novel together it didn't make the best seller lists, but became a kind of underground hit. It also makes a splendid movie.

As in most fairy tales, this is about a magical world in the edge of town. Tristan  (Charlie Cox) is a young man who is really from another world, but he doesn't know it yet. He has the hots for the beauteous Victoria  (Sienna Miller), who's holding out for better things, and she sends him off on a quest to prove his love, to catch a falling star and bring it back. Unfortunately it fell in an alternate universe and is named Yvaine  (Claire Danes). It also has a really bad temper.

But our Tristan isn't the only one to see star fall, for the evil witch
Lamia  (Michelle Pfeiffer) and her evil sisters need it for returning their faded youthful looks, and the two remaining sons of the king of the land  (Peter O'Toole), Secondus  (Rupert Everett) and Septimus  (Mark Strong), need her necklace to find out who's going to take over the kingdom now that Dad is dead. So with three groups of people running around who are about to collide, they inevitably do.

There are the usual thrills and chills, Robert De Niro as a sky pirate with a secret, and all sorts of nifty stuff. Matthew Vaughn has expanded Gaiman's worlds a bit to add a bit of Peter S. Beagle and Rob Reiner, and it works like a fine sufflé. See it.



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