Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Muse: Monday Linky Love (With Added Geekery), in reply to Russell Brown,
Thought the second half was a fairly incoherent series of rutting scenes (our sons were a bit embarrassed by it). Oh well ...
So's The Tudors when you get down to brass tacks. :) I'm wondering if the real problem (if it is a problem) with Game of Thrones is that HBO has made a ten hour movie, not heavily-serialised episodic television. Will be interested to see how many people will make that kind of investment.
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Muse: Monday Linky Love (With Added Geekery), in reply to James Butler,
I find it marginally more engaging that an Austrian with terrifying steroid-nourished man-boobs, but YMMV. :)
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And props to Michael Chabon who is adamant that he does write Genre Fiction.
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@James Butler:
Hell, yes. That's falling into the genre snob trap of "Well, X. (which I happen to like) isn't really genre fiction because..."
Well, Margaret Atwood/Michael Chabron/Philip Roth/Cormac McCarthy are "real" writers, and they're not "really" writing genre fiction but allegories for things worthy of the attention of grown-ups.
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<i>Constantly denying that she writes science fiction? She doesn't deserve to live it down.</i>
And that's my big fucking bug bear about genre snobbery. You know something, Mags, if Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing (or our own Elizabeth Knox and Margaret Mahy) don't consider "writes genre fiction" an insult akin to "writes Tijuana donkey porn for drug money", you can deal.
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There seems to be some assumption here that the filmmakers should have adhered to BBC standards – never mind that our TV broadcasters don’t.
FFS, Peter, given the vitriol I've poured for TV broadcasters for their credulous treatment of Ken Ring, the scientifically fraudulent claim that there's a link between vaccines and autism etc. ad nauseum et infinitum you want to set your baseline that low? Really?
I'd suggest you sit down and watch Errol Morris' classic The Thin Blue Line -- most certainly an act of advocacy/activism but still scrupulously transparent about its own methodology and limitations.
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I will be spending the rest of the day sobbing at the news that Elisabeth Sladen – my Sarah Jane – has died at the age of 63 after a long (and very private) struggle with cancer.
Lovely tribute from IO9’s Charlie Jane Anders here
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Muse: Monday Linky Love (With Added Geekery), in reply to Lucy Stewart,
but on TV, that won’t wash
Bingo! I’ve seen some thoughtful qualified reviews that have said precisely that: In a perverse way, the show is too respectful of the book. The narrative mode Martin has chosen to tell his story (limited third-person through the eyes of a number of point of view characters) is a fascinating and tricky one, but it’s still a literary one that doesn’t translate to film or television well.
Something else: In a book, if you find yourself wondering “who the frak is this, and what the hell is going on” you can easily flip back in that old tech and refresh your memory. Slightly trickier when you’re trying to keep everything straight in a television show when you’re having new characters, and their knotty and toxic relationships, thrown at you every five minutes.
ETA: One of the best page-to-screen adaptations I've ever seen is LA Confidential -- which, wisely, took a chainsaw to Ellroy's trademark mare's nest of triple-crossing plot, sub-plots, batshit insane streams of consciousness Co-writers Curtis Hanson &
Brian Helgeland made the smart call to "to remove every scene from the book that didn't have the three main cops in it, and then to work from those scenes out". Because much as I love Ellroy, any literal transcript of one of his books would be a hundred hours long, triple-X rated and utterly incomprehensible. -
Given that prof Hodge commented after watching the film's two-minute trailer, that some of the documentary's content appeared to border on contempt of court.
I think we need to make a documentary investigating whether this film is part of an elaborate and fiendishly subtle disinformation campaign by Police agents provocateurs. :)
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Muse: Monday Linky Love (With Added Geekery), in reply to Lucy Stewart,
First, apologies for the gratuitously (and unintentional man-splain-y tone. Just been having too many waaaay creepy “book Dany and Guy-liner Man were so much more __romantic__” conversation. No. Really. Just stop. Now..
Think you’ve hit on a fair point: In the book (IIRC) she’s the POV narrator for everything that happens in the East, so can have a twenty page treatise on the customs of the Dothraki and her state of mind. Not so sure how you could ever translate that into television though..
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