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keifus is behind it.  don’t worry, i’ll get him…but first, The Pharyngula mutating genre meme!

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

You can leave them exactly as is.
You can delete any one question.
You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.
You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.
You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.
Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-great-great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My great-great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My great-great-grandparent is archy.
My great-grandparent is Why Now?
My grandparent is Over the Cliff, Onto the Rocks.
My parent is Keifus Writes!
(edit) My other parent is Self-Absorbed Boomer

The best sociological novel in SF/Fantasy is: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin

The best “bad” movie in scientific dystopias is: Mad Max

The best drinking song in pop is: Piano Man

The best romantic comedy in film is: Shakespeare in Love

alternatively:

The best sword and sorcery novel in SF/Fantasy is: The Lord of the Rings (trilogy).

The best “bad” movie in scientific dystopias is: Starship Troopers.

The best Gulf and western album in country music is: Living and Dying in 3/4 Time by Jimmy Buffett.

The best short story in speculative fiction is “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”, by Harlan Ellison.

Grant Miller Media…
switters…
Constant Winter…
consider yourselves all tagged.

you too, miz actual size. on the off chance you swing by.

EDIT: apparently, the good claude scales, of Self-Absorbed Boomer, tagged me naught but an hour after Keifus did. can we consider him a step-parent? screw it, we are.

well, perse and i saw the latest harry potter flick on friday. easily the worst of the films so far. actually, it was god-awful. based on the mediocre reviews, we’d lowered our expectations and were still disappointed in the movie. it’s almost amusing: with one of the weakest books (azkaban), they produced the strongest film. yet handed, perhaps, the strongest and richest of the books, they’ve managed to produce a rushed, confused and sloppy debacle.

how? with a brutalized script and even worse editing. the acting is what’s you’ve come to expect: harry (radcliffe) is servicable, ron (grint) is good as comic relief and hermoine (watson) still believes that talking loudly and swiftly is the way to convey emotion. the adult supporting staff is still strong. it is the story itself that has been bastardized. if you haven’t read the book, you’ll not be able to make sense of anything. even if you have, you might still be scratching your head. the writer, director, editor and, i presume, producers managed to not only cut out all the threads of character development that bind the plot together; they also managed to focus on the wrong points of the plot.

anyway, some SPOILERS:

opening, along with the entire movie, actually, is rushed. but you aren’t told that harry is being constantly protected by the order of the phoenix. nor do you get the scene where harry’s aunt gets the howler after his uncle threatens to kick him out. it’s small, but vital and would have taken just a few more minutes.

you never get a sense of how cut off harry feels. you don’t get much of a sense of how scared he is that he’ll be tossed out of school. how he feels that dumbledore is ignoring him, or angry with him. anything related to school is thrown out. ron and hermoine made prefects? gone. harry trying to have a relationship with cho? glossed over and then twisted. the slowly building rebellion against umbridge? happens in an instant and focuses only on the weasely twins. the conflict between umbridge and the hogwarts staff is near absent. especially between mcgonnagal and umbridge. my god, you’ve got maggie smith playing her! woefully under used. the importance of the exams (OWLs)is never made clear, or how ridiculous it is that harry’s class isn’t going to be allowed to practice spells they’ll have to perform on them. that’s part of the reason they start the damn DA. the actual Order of the Phoenix is an afterthought. you see a small snap of them, then poof! gone till the ending.

and ah, that last battle with the death-eaters. terrible. so poorly done. oh, sure the cgi is okay. but there is no tension. no conflict. no danger. you actually feel these vicious, murderous dark wizards are going easy on harry and friends, cause they are kids. you actually feel like malfoy would just let them go if harry hands him the prophecy. ridiculous.

order of the phoenix is one of the best of the books. the film version is a debacle.

what is it about lovecraft stories that inspires people to make such terrible movies from them?

halloween is nearly upon us, so it’s time to watch creepy movies. so, whilst scanning what was on, my lovely pers selected “beyond the walls of sleep”, noting it was an adaptation of lovecraft’s story, and knowing that i thourghly enjoy reading lovecraft. awfully kind and thoughtful of her. however, the look of dismay and disgust that overwhelmed my face after about 2 minutes of watching that dreck quickly resulted in us watching “the omen” instead.

there were two grievious fault in the film: one forgivable, one not. the forgiveable fault was that it was just plain bad. a prime example of the downside of inexpensive and easily available digital cameras. while they do allow for talented filmmakers to show their potential, without having to have much in the way of a budget, they also allow the same opportunity to hacks with willing friends. note to all young, aspiring film makers: spastic cuts and editing do NOT bestow an atmosphere of horror and suspense. they just irritate, annoy, and occassionally cause seizures. we won’t comment on the acting, because there wasn’t any.

the unforgivable sin though, what what these assholes tried to do to lovecraft. i think they were trying to make the story hip and modern. lovecraft is not hip. lovecraft is certainly not modern (no lovecraftian character would ever call someone a cunt). certainly there are faults in his work (racism, sexism, a tendency towards purple prose, having inspired far too many hack imitations, etc.). however, they are still a pleasure to read. much of that pleasure is derived from the peculiar lovecraftian elements of his writing. high on the list here is setting. lovecraft is one of those rare writers whose work must remain rooted in it’s time and place. just doesn’t work otherwise. the turn of the century atmosphere is important, because it defines the character of his protaganists. who are dillatantes; amatuer scientists and men of “society”. thoughtful, sensitve souls capable of attuning to the eldritch mysteries of the cosmos. lovecraft’s heros faint, often as a result of their exposure to blasphemies from beyond the stars. they are not men of action, they are men of thought and theory (for the most part).

moreover, his brand of horror depends on what you do not see, not what is shown. the indescribable, the unnameable. actually, most good horror works off of this. it is what we don’t see, don’t know, don’t understand that terrifies us. once the horror has been defined, it loses some of its power.

so what do people do with this? try to make slasher flicks. it’s just plain wrong.

it’s not hard to figure out what makes lovecraft enjoyable. what i cannot figure out is why filmmakers try to change it.