The accepted wisdom with Rowling is that her world-building skills trump her thin characterisation and flat prose and make them irrelevant, but I think that’s a myth. She’s actually not all that good at world-building. What she’s good at is ideas, but in practice they don’t really fit together to ...
In another life, I did some structural analysis of stories. For the sake of practicality, some were as simple as Grimms’ Fairy Tales (various publications insist that they’re “Grimm’s Fairy Tales”, but, dammit, there were two of them). For the sake of seeing how scalable my analysis was, I also ...
I’d like the DVD right now, thanks very much, because until I can watch Were-Rabbit, oh, maybe several hundred times more, I won’t be able to compare it meaningfully with A Close Shave and (especially) The Wrong Trousers. In the meantime, I’ll just mention in passing that I had a great time, and giggled ...
I never did go back to see how my Bad Wolf musings turned out. Not so well, as it happens. I’d hoped for a new nemesis, and that didn’t really appear; Davros always worked so much better as Evil Genius than some bland Dalek Emperor, for obvious reasons: it’s possible to take something which clearly ...
I think this is one of my problems: I’m stuck for too much of the time in the meta-level processing of stories. Now, as I could bore on the subject for hours, I think meta-level story processing probably overwhelms story-level processing in a modern culture. Rather than relating to story characters as people whose ...
Now that it seems Bad Wolf spoilers are creeping out of the BBC, it might be time to stick my neck out a bit before all is revealed. But first, a bit of appreciation, because the whole affair is a wonderful exercise in viral something-or-other. Not marketing, exactly. Just viral fun, I think. Most viewers ...
Not sure where this thought comes from today, but it’s pleasingly inconsequential. The work I did along the road to an aborted PhD in some ways boils down to advocating for the importance of a reader model in any system of automatic story generation. Forced to compress my ideas into a ten minute conference talk ...
Not the least of the problems facing any film adaptation of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide (I prefer it with the hyphen, so there) is this, and it’s a big one: Adams’s structural skill was something very Pythonesque, or maybe Carrollian; it was for elaborate, precise, whimsical play with words and ideas, and not, ...
Almost the first thing I wrote on this blog, almost a year ago, was a small piece about the beginning of filming of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide. Almost a year later, spare a thought for the film itself, because it’s become the locus of so much baggage and anger that it’s no longer just a film. ...
A. and I saw two films yesterday, and my reactions to each of them probably say a lot about what sort of person I am. We headed over to Hollywood in the afternoon, got caught in one of those inexplicably snarly patches of LA traffic, missed the start of the film we’d intended to see, ...