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 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, ...
There’s definitely something wrong with me. No matter how dazzlingly good I found The Incredibles to be, what’s left in my memory are the things that I reckon are flaws. And it’s hardly the film’s fault, because there’s nothing that doesn’t have flaws. It’s me. I measure things ...
It’s not the detail. We pretty soon forget all of that, and — if forced — have to go back to the manual or the text book or whoever taught us the damn thing in the first place. No, what we truly remember of things we learn consists of general principles wrapped up in phrases, ...
So much to write about. Kerry Conran’s (and by gum is it his) Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is the best fun you’re likely to have at the movies (and by gum is it ‘at the movies’) this year, if you go into it with the right expectations. It’s not great art, but ...
One of the most useful ideas which spins off philosopher and cognitive scientist Margaret Boden’s categorisation of human creativity into the ‘P-creative’ and the ‘H-creative’, is that it asks us to value the P-creative far more than we might otherwise. P-creativity (the ‘P’ stands ...