Ah choo

[threemonkeys]

I have a cold. Nothing serious - just a bit of a sniffle really. Anyway, I thought I'd look after myself and wrap up warmly and watch a DVD. I looked through my collection and found something light and fun. It wasn't until after I started watching it that I realised just how appropriate it was that I chose Cold Comfort Farm. Well I was amused.

There is something about the DVD of this film that I really like. Something that other production companies should take note of. When you put the disk in the drive, it immediately boots to the main menu. No preliminary anti-piracy notices and the like, no trailers for other films and no overblown animated opening sequences for the production company that you cannot bypass. You can go from putting the disk in to watching the film in just a couple of seconds. I appreciate that.

Comments

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

It'sa good film, too. Not as good as the book (nothing can ever be as good as a favourite book) but still, a great deal of fun.

[angriest.livejournal.com]

I have three times in my life loved a book and then found the film to be actually better, and that's The Silence of the Lambs, Fight Club and The Lord of the Rings.

But every rule needs exceptions.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

I've not read the book for Silence, or seen either of Fight Club, and - being a Medievalist - the things tht make Lord of the Rings slow are the things I love most. From which I deduce two things. The first is that JRRK (why is it disrepsectful to abbreviate his name, simply because he has a funny acronym?) was writing chiefly for himself and Jackson was filming for other people. The second is even more obvious: I need to see more films and read more books.

[angriest.livejournal.com]

I think the difference for me was that Tolkien would extensively describe a very beautiful mountain range for four paragraphs, whereas Jackson had the easy advantage of just showing you a shot of a very beautiful mountain range for 10 seconds.

It's a taste thing. I'm a very impatient reader, so deliberately measured and lengthy books frustrate me a bit. Which is not to criticize The Lord of the Rings, which is a masterwork of literature. It's a bit unfair how it gets saddled in with all the other high fantasy stuff, because it's much more like a Norse epic than Terry Brooks or David Eddings, and should really be dragged out of popular fantasy and dumped in with classic literature where it would fit more appropriately.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

Or we could be consist in classifying back. Richard III would go alongside The King's Grey mare, while A Midsummer Night's Dream would fit nicely with Luna's new paranormal romance imprint. The Old Man and the Sea would be classified with adventure novels and the Secret Seven books alongside books by Nicholas Freeling. Not that I'm makign any statements about these books, you understand (I love them all for different reasons). Just finding thematic links, like the LOTR/fantasy one.

[angriest.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting idea. I love the idea of shoving Shakespeare's plays into new sections. Midsummers and The Tempest go into fantasy. Macbeth goes into horror, etc.

The way bookshops classify stuff is all about the marketing anyway. I remember a convention I was involved with once getting knocked back about a particular author we'd considered as a guest of honour because their publisher had re-categorized their work from SF to Literature, and therefore the author in question couldn't possibly attend a sci-fi con any more.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

The funny thing is so many authors hover in between and spend half their lives trying to pretend they live in one group or another. I'm just working on my hovering skills, personally, because I refuse to write non-speculative fiction and I want to write small tales about small lives.

[angriest.livejournal.com]

The thing that annoys me the most about genre is authors who have clearly written a work of science fiction or fantasy but are too snooty to admit that this is what they've done.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

The genuinely snooty need to learn a lesson about intellectual and creative origins. Most literary writers, though, I suspect are guilty of trying to explain that they don't write 3 volume epic fantasy to audiences who mainly know Peter Jackson rather than trying to disown a hoi polloi. We need to find better vocularies :). 'Fantasy' only works as a description of a novel that plays with realities when it doesn't have a 3 volume default setting.

[littenz.livejournal.com]

"deliberately measured and lengthy books frustrate me a bit."
You are confusing long winded and poorly edited (or worse, unedited) with literary style.

While I disagree with you about LOTR being a masterpiece of literature, it is head and shoulders above most fantasy wannabes. LOTR had characters that changed and developed through the course of the books (reflecting I presume JRRT's life experiences), whereas characters in the other books suffer similar journeys and remain unchanged.

JRRT - realise must defeat powerful overloard, become anxious and suffer doubt.
TB or DE - realise must defeat powerful overloard, get new sword and haircut.

At least the unfashionable Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant stopped being a whining, self-pitying, self-obsessed, neurotic.