From the internetless depths

It sucks not to have internet, but at least one misses out on the rabid fanbases that thankfully don't exist offline.
After a while, they get boring anyway, and even the stupidity starts getting repetitive. After watching HEROES 2x07, I could at once predict which complaints the fans would have. I took a peek, and I was right.

Something is bothering me, though, namely the recurring complaint that Mohinder is coming across as more stupid than he is, due to the writers constantly putting him in situation where the audience knows more than he does. This is then described as "bad writing".

Well, disregarding the sad fact that about anything is considered "bad writing" in HEROES fandom, and letting aside that I honestly don't know what it is that the audience is currently supposed to know that Mohinder doesn't know and that makes his decision obviously stupid...

Hitchcock. Suspence. Dial M For Murder.

I enjoyed that movie a lot. It is built on the principle that the audience knows more than any of the characters. The questions that are supposed to keep you on edge is: How is the bad guy going to betray himself, what mistake will he do, or what will the heroes do to figure out the truth?
I realize that the HEROES fandom would consider the female main character "stupid" for not knowing right from the start that her husband is conspiring to kill her.
They would consider the movie "badly written".

So who is at fault? Are the HEROES writers overestimating their audience because they trust them to remember that the characters don't have all information available to them? Are the HEROES fans underestimating each other? Or do they just love being nitpicky, and try to find flaws where there aren't any?

Would movies like Dial M For Murder fail, be considered boring and frustrating and stupid? Probably... no car chases, no action scenes... Hmm. I'm a little bit sad now.

... and more.

I realize I named the blog "Of books and movies", but I did not mean to exclude any other media.
Fact is, it's not just novels and movies I like, but also comics, television, theater and videogames. Anything that can tell a story and entertain.

So what I want to share is that I have finished "The Fourth Bear" and have started playing "Sam & Max: Season One". And maybe I am simply biased at this point, but I think that there is a similarity between the two, in the setting, a similar sense of nothing's-too-crazy creativity.

I used to love adventure games, as a die-hard Lucasarts fan. I had stopped and fogotten because... well, google it yourself. There's nothing more frustrating than to be deemed irrelevant by the very company you once supported with glowing enthusiasm.
This year's Games Convention in Leipzig threw me right back into my old favourite genre, and I'm in love again all over. At the same time, I understand why companies choose to make action game after action game instead of adventures. You need a good story, interesting characters, entertaining dialogue and fascinating riddles. It's a genre where you really need originality instead of just technical improvements.
Geez, my choice of words, totally crazed-worshipper. I'll go away now.

Jasper Fforde is one crazy dodo.

Amazingly, I've lived for the past few days on little more than coffee, and have dropped two kilos. On the downside, this means I feel absolutely stressed out and my mind feels rather like wool.

I did read the books "The Big Over Easy" by Jasper Fforde and "The Devil in Amber" by Mark Gatiss and have started with "The Fourth Bear" by Jasper Fforde again. I plan to properly catch up with the good man so I can dive into "First Among Sequels" with a clean conscience.

The Thursday Next series boggles my mind. I have some issues with it, but I can never hold anything against the series, it's just so... disarmingly cocky.
Like, when was that, in book 2 or 3, after over a hundred pages of entertaining, but disconnected things the character did, when a plot had not yet decided to materialize in earnest, I was sceptically thinking to myself: "Now, after all that exposition, it would be really nice if the story finally started!"
Bang, on the next page, a character asks Thursday "How was your day today?" and she echoes my thoughts: "Very... expositional."
It made me fall in love with the series all over, when I was considering giving up on it for the time being. Geez... I'm easy.
That having said, I'm sceptical again. The fourth book concluded the series in the perfect way, I found. It was a good point to stop, everything considered, and picking up a series after it has been concluded in a perfect way, that's lame. Then again, this is Thursday Next we're talking about... conventions of literature are there to be poked and broken.

Oh, and "The Devil in Amber" was nice to read. Movie-ish flow to it. I originally picked it up because a) the cover looked funny and b) there was a Jasper Fforde quote on the cover. I'm easy.
I am influenced by cover art and I'm influences by quotes. I once did not buy a book because Dan Brown was quoted as saying it was good.

It must be love, love, love.

Part of me knows that I should not even be writing about Uwe Boll. If everybody stopped writing about Uwe Boll, stopped talking about him and stopped giving his movies any attention, even the negative feedback, maybe he would just go away.

But the interview on Wired got me thinking. Boll has a point there. He isn't the new Ed Wood. Ed Wood is enjoyable and loveable. And Boll has yet another point, namely that Ed Wood and his career were heavily romanticed after his death, and we see him through rose-coloured glasses. This is not just due to the Tim Burton movie, though.
It is just so easy to romantice Ed Wood. He had this immense enthusiasm, but sadly no talent, no budget and no good actors hat his disposal. He struggled to make movies against all odds, and they were bad movies in every sense of the word, but Ed Wood was at least following his dream. I get the impression of unconditional love from his movies. Yes, this is an oversimplification of this man's life and career, a romanticed image that formed during the decades after his death. It doesn't matter.
How will we remember Uwe Boll? An arrogant, untalented bully, an immature jerk who spewed verbal insults at his critics. Who made videogame adaptations that made the fans of the original games cringe in pain. Who had money, good actors and special effects, and still made abysmal movies. Who made abysmal movies, but still managed to get money for more projects.

While Ed Wood can be made into a symbol of the spirit that should drive Hollywood, Uwe Boll can be considered a symbol for everything that is wrong with the industry.
A capitalistic, greedy, unartistic production machine that ruins everyhing that it touches, enabling crap to clod the cinemas while good low-budget projects have to struggle for attention, leaving nobody satisfied except for the investors and the creators (given that all they care for is profit, of course).

That aside, I just cannot decide with Uwe Boll. He can't be serious, can he? He must be doing this on purpose, creating this persona of the dumb, arrogant jerk? But why? How can he live with himself, and is this really the way he wants to be remembered?

Fiction within fiction within fiction...

I could not help myself and bought Stranger than Fiction on DVD. Apart from being an utterly loveable movie, it fascinates me because it tackles one of my favourite subjects in the world: fiction within fiction. A movie about a book. Of course, in Stranger than Fiction, the line between the two is extremely blurred or maybe even nonexistent.

Which might be the biggest reason why I like Inkheart by Cornelia Funke: a novel about a novel. About the escape of the "fictitious" characters into the "real world", and later about the people from the real world entering the fiction. Come to think of it, my childhood-favourite The Neverending Story (the book!) deals with a similar subject matter. And Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels, books about books.

It is the ultimate daydream. To enter a story, or to have the story's characters enter your own world. Or maybe consider that we are ourselves works of fiction. If I am part of a story, I am sure I am only one of those people who do not even get as much as a passing mentioning. I'm one of those whose existence is merely implied by sentences such as "the city's population had grown considerably over the years".

Bookporn.

Glennkill made me pleasantly nostalgic for Ireland. I went there in 2000. Connemara. I was picturing the Cliffs of Moher for the book's setting, which worked perfectly well. The grass there was so soft, you wouldn't believe it.

This is where I got my fantastic and beloved Ireland Mug. It has sheep on it. It gets along very, very well with the book about Irish sheep who solve a crime:

There's a story to tell about this mug. To make it short: I won it for making dirty jokes.

More bookporn:


Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which I liked, by the way; three of the candles I lighted in memoriam of various deceased characters, a practice I soon gave up due to limited amount of candles in the house; my coffee-filled Ireland Mug; and some wool, which we can all pretend symbolizes the plot thread.

Irony

I do not know whether I read a real or a fake spoiler. (Not "read", really. More like "jumped into my eye".)
This means that even if it was a real spoiler, I cannot fully believe it, and as long as I do not fully believe it, I have not been spoilt, since the excitement and uncertainty will still be there.
I do not know whether I should be happy or unhappy about this state of affairs.

Glennkill, in the meanwhile, continues to be one of the most relaxed and cute crime novels in the world. But how scary the life of a sheep can be.