It's Seen Been!

Señor Finifter tweeted a link to a Salon article which summed up the Hunger Games book series perfectly in one sentence: The Hunger Games trilogy is a story which refers to ideas without actually being about any.

I only saw the first half of the film (technical difficulties in the theater -- I'm going to give it a complete viewing this weekend probably) but I will say it improved on the material and made it more engaging. I like the verite style too, although it could stand to use wider lenses and fewer cuts.

One thing that stood out to me: not a lot of emphasis on hunger, all things considered. My screening pooped out right in the middle of the dinner scene after the parade, and they were just sitting there at the table eating -- picking at it casually, even -- like it weren't no thang, rather than being completely overwhelmed by the abundance of food after lives of starvation.

Agreed -- IF it remained super faithful to the source material.

If an adaptation were done that was copacetic with dismantling the book/series to its component parts and rebuilding it for the 21st century, you could make a tremendous sci-fi/fantasy epic. It's GAME OF THRONES IN SPACE, full of lasers, murders, and giant worms. It has all the elements of a blockbuster, they're just not put together that way because blockbusters didn't exist when Frank Herbert wrote it.

You could easily make a mega-violent, gut-punching STAR WARS successor, so long as you didn't make JOHN CARTER's mistake of resting on the laurels of the source material, expecting the audience to reward you just for showing up. Or protesting "all those other movies ripped off this story" instead of designing a movie with the benefit of knowing what those other movies looked like and not doing that. "It may look like Tatooine but that's because Lucas was influenced by Dune!" ain't gonna fly. You've got millions of dollars, figure out a damn way to make Arrakis not look like Tatooine (EDIT: Or Geonosis) or hire someone who can.

YOU

I'm currently taking another go at reading Dune as a direct result of the topic coming up in the LOTR thread.

While I am having an easier time of it than I have on previous attempts (I'm about halfway through), I still find it extremely frustrating and the only reason I haven't thrown it against the wall yet is because I'm reading it on my Kindle.

It's not the made-up words and concepts that are getting me -- as a regular reader of scifi/fantasy I'm used to that kind of heavy lifting -- it's the way characters behave that I can't always get my head around. I get the broad strokes of the political intrigue and tensions, it's the nuances that elude me.

About half the time, Herbert seems to understand that I'm not going to realize the significance of a certain word choice without it being explained, and there will be conversations where every innocuous sentence will be followed by three paragraphs of the other character mentally sussing out how every word and breath meant something, and what it was (good luck visualizing that, BTW -- no wonder they haven't made a decent movie yet). That's fine.

But then there's other conversations that go like this:

And I'm going... what the fuck are they talking about?! When they're so deep into the subtext, and Herbert declines to explain what that subtext is, it's impossible for me to track the conversation in any meaningful way, aside from like I said the broad strokes "Okay, this guy's pissed at her because...some reason...which leads to his actions later."

A lot of neat ideas for sure but, man.

Huh, I hadn't heard about this. Tell us more.

But those are the good ones!

I'll have to check him out. Also good in that vein is Richard Wiseman, whose Paranormality ought to, IMO, be required skeptical reading. 59 seconds is pretty darn good too.

Just finished the first Discworld book, The Colour of Magic. It was fun, I can see myself reading others but I'm not dying to do so. If anything I'd read them to try to osmose the sense of humor.

I tried to read Moby-Duck, which Trey mentioned in some episode or another, but I just couldn't do it. The topic was interesting but the writing style was so overwrought it was turning into an endurance test to look past the overuse of adjectives and thesaurus abuse and appreciate the topic. When it got to the point where he described his newborn son as "meconium-besmirched" I was like:

I also just finished Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy, which I enjoyed and had some myths I held busted. Been a while since I read a science book and was a good one to get back into.

Right now I'm reading On Stranger Tides, the non-PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN book they strongarmed into being the fourth POTC movie (which I still haven't seen). I'm enjoying it a lot, it's a really fast read and I'm looking forward to comparing it to the film when I'm done.

Also reading Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth, which I was surprised to realize came out almost three years ago and I still hadn't gotten around to it. It's interesting because at that time creationism seemed to be going through a resurgence and the book was especially appropriate, and reading it now just makes me realize how thoroughly beat-down the creationist movement got. Obviously they're still out there, but as a political force to be reckoned with, I never hear about creationism/"Intelligent Design" any more.

Re: Game of Thrones, I say read the book first, but that's always my position. My roommates watched the series having not read anything and they loved it and tracked with it just fine.

I need to take another run at Dune. I've tried to read it and could never get more than 50 pages or so. But the last time I tried was, in fact, around the last time I read LOTR. So maybe this time it'll stick.

I'm still good with my iPad 2. Maybe I'll get next year's model.