07-20-2021, 11:10 AM | #31 | |
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I haven't watched Star Trek since TNG, aside from that awful J.J. Abrams movie. Is that a good example of the state of the franchise now? Have they abandoned the cerebral stuff for Star Wars spectacle and space battles? |
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07-20-2021, 11:10 AM | #32 |
Brash Fumbler
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Also, when you see the other shows that were airing on the three TV networks at the time, Star Trek makes a whole lot more sense.
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07-20-2021, 02:32 PM | #33 |
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Even Hemingway, who sneered at Fitzgerald, acknowledged that he could write. I continue to love it. Mind you, I don't like Hemingway.
Last edited by Pajamaman; 07-20-2021 at 02:59 PM. |
07-20-2021, 02:35 PM | #34 | |
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07-20-2021, 02:43 PM | #35 | |
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The trouble with Gatsby is that he has no real depth. He is more of a symbol. Hence why Fitzgerald wrote from another POV. As a character, he is impossible and 2-D. Consider re-writing book from the POV of Gatsby. It would make for shallow characterization. One would have to invent a lot. |
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07-20-2021, 02:47 PM | #36 |
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A good example of a less than great "classic". The Spielberg movie did it justice; i.e. it was bad. I suppose what retained it in mind is the image of the tripods and heat-rays from Mars. Are some classics subjective, or simply overrated? Moby Dick has that reputation. I haven't read it. Too long and boring
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07-21-2021, 06:32 PM | #37 |
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You guys remind me of that friend I took to see 'The Maltese Falcon' who kept laughing all the way through because 'it's so full of clichés'.
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07-22-2021, 02:25 AM | #38 |
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07-22-2021, 09:10 AM | #39 | |
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Some people need some learnin' before they should be allowed to see a famous movie. The filmmakers and Dashiell Hammett invented those clichés -- or perfected the ones they didn't invent. So did authors like Raymond Chandler. (Shout-out to Carroll John Daly, who is credited with writing the first hard-boiled detective story.) In college, I once proudly showed a Raymond Chandler paperback to one of my friends. It was a newer edition with new cover art, but the cover was a tribute to pulp art. She laughed at it and said something about how it looked like trashy fiction or whatever. I tried to explain that this author is highly respected and now studied in universities, etc., etc., but I don't think she truly believed me. I've heard that people who see the early Westerns (like the silent film The Great Train Robbery) often have the same reactions. They see them as chock full of cowboy movie clichés. Those movies invented those clichés. (Today I learned that The Great Train Robberywas made so long ago (1903) that they were not using the term "director" yet.) |
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07-22-2021, 10:20 AM | #40 |
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A good point. I'm sure there were people around when various 'classics' were written who didn't like this one or that one for various reasons. And you do see the same thing in other media like movies. Some like a given movie or genre or movie and some don't.
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07-22-2021, 10:23 AM | #41 | |
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07-22-2021, 10:28 AM | #42 | |
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07-22-2021, 11:19 AM | #43 | |
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I always like talking to someone who is civil about shredding the merits of a classic tome. Some tomes deserve it, perhaps.
When my first (and still unpublished because it's embarrassing!) novel was being considered by Fiction Collective, one of the judges told me he loved it until he got to the ending, which he said reminded him of The Grating Gatsby. I don't mind telling you my first instinct was to grab a Ruger Speed-Six, climb to the rooftop of an Ortiz Funeral Home and deflate the tires of several fancy-schmantzy hearses tucked out back. Gatsby, you say? In a word, r-r-r-r-wh-a-a-A-A-a-a-r-r-r-uh. That yiped, I have to bleat that, beyond the pellucid jazz-age prose that I'd never have associated with Princeton, what I've always admired about 'Gerald's famous novel is the double emotional meaning of its protag. Celebs have often compared themselves to Gatsby (the lovely Peed Iddy being a current example) because he seems to embody style and share an affinity with the reader even though anyone who's watching will realize he's vicious -- not in a natty-proto-hiphop-Iceberg way, but in a this-murderous-Bruno-ain't-the-pining-climbing-fop-oi-expected sort of way. I've always liked protags and narratives that can be construed alternately as romantic or vile. I love stories involving characters whom certain readers can moon over while others squint and fling mental spittle. One of my favorite moments during my brief career as a hack was when a woman approached me and said me she had read one of my stories and wanted to meet the writer because the main character was "so gentle and loving." "That's definitely how the character sees himself," I semi-agreed. "But did you notice that he nearly raped a woman who had passed out in his apartment and then buried her in a landfill after she went to the bathroom to self-medicate away the trauma and OD'd? He does sound caring in his own head while he's doing those things, though." So to retoin to your political theory, my good Walker, I'd say that readers who like Gatsby as a book but find nothing redeeming about the character are likely to at least appreciate the politics of the man who wrote Vapes of Graft. Whereas people who like Grabsy might entertain notions of socio-economic autonomy that put them at odds with Mr. Johb Neinstreck's beliefs. Quote:
But what I'm more excited about is Mrs. Dalloway entering the public domain: the original psychological novel that was directly informed by Woolf's friend Lytton Strachey's translations of Freud's Six Analytical Studies -- not because of Dolorway's academic significance but because I could take a leisurely shower in Virginia Woolf's style. ("Style is rhythm," she once said). Last edited by Prestidigitweeze; 07-22-2021 at 11:30 AM. |
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07-24-2021, 03:53 AM | #44 | |
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07-24-2021, 05:18 AM | #45 |
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