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3) "Winter Holiday" - Arthur Ransome.
Kind of an automatic win for me, since it featured a geeky kid who's so completely focused on whatever branch of science he's currently studying that he completely ignores normal human interaction. :) Typically of this series I tended to feel as though the story was a little slow up until the end, and then I obsessed about one plot point that came to nothing.
4) "Terry Pratchett's Hogfather, the Illustrated Screenplay" - by Vadim Jean.
I've read all sorts of reactions to this movie, from utter disappointment to great delight, but after reading the book it doesn't even matter to me if the movie is actually good or not, I just desperately want to see what all these still come from. They did some great jobs with costuming and sets. I wasn't keen on the guy they cast as Nobby, but that's thankfully a short bit. Oddly, the person who I would have cast as Nobby is in the same scene as a different character - Tony Robinson plays the department store manager, and looks really quite dapper in little round glasses a suit with a high collar.
The script has some really odd points every now and then - lines that don't make sense either because of the wording (they just aren't sentences) or because they seem to come from no-where (there's no set-up for them). This IS supposed to be the version of the script before they actually shot the movie, so I hope that in the finished version those odd lines got sorted out, or the delivery makes them work, or they just got cut entirely. Which just gives me another reason to want to see the movie.
I also made some headway on an Asimov's and Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Thirteenth Century" - that last I've been picking at for at least a year and am not a quarter of the way through, so don't expect a post saying I've finished it any time soon. :) It's one of those things I pick up and put down, but the past couple of weeks it's been pulling me back in. Perhaps because I got to the part where the English are invading France, Jean le Bon is doing lots of really stupid things, and Charles de Navarre is stirring up trouble. He sounds like quite an interesting character! I think he was actually Loki, in disguise. I can't think of a better explanation for why Jean le Bon didn't execute him when he had the chance. Unless there's some unwritten rule of the universe that everyone has to keep their worst enemy alive to keep striving against. Or, they had been lovers and Jean just couldn't stand to do it? (Jean apparently was lovers with his cousin who Charles had killed.) Ah, the French - who can understand them?
Although I suppose it's hard to understand any people who had such gruesome games at fairs.
A couple of the favorite fair games:
1) Guys chase a pig and bludgeon it to death.
2) Tie a cat to a pole (I think by a rope) so that it's claws are free, then tie the contestants hands behind their backs, and the contestants try to beat the cat to death with their foreheads. Is that brilliant or what? I wonder if you won a brightly colored stuffed animal.
In at least one instance a town ran short of convicts to kill, so they bought one from another town just so they could have the fun of watching someone drawn and quartered.
Kind of an automatic win for me, since it featured a geeky kid who's so completely focused on whatever branch of science he's currently studying that he completely ignores normal human interaction. :) Typically of this series I tended to feel as though the story was a little slow up until the end, and then I obsessed about one plot point that came to nothing.
4) "Terry Pratchett's Hogfather, the Illustrated Screenplay" - by Vadim Jean.
I've read all sorts of reactions to this movie, from utter disappointment to great delight, but after reading the book it doesn't even matter to me if the movie is actually good or not, I just desperately want to see what all these still come from. They did some great jobs with costuming and sets. I wasn't keen on the guy they cast as Nobby, but that's thankfully a short bit. Oddly, the person who I would have cast as Nobby is in the same scene as a different character - Tony Robinson plays the department store manager, and looks really quite dapper in little round glasses a suit with a high collar.
The script has some really odd points every now and then - lines that don't make sense either because of the wording (they just aren't sentences) or because they seem to come from no-where (there's no set-up for them). This IS supposed to be the version of the script before they actually shot the movie, so I hope that in the finished version those odd lines got sorted out, or the delivery makes them work, or they just got cut entirely. Which just gives me another reason to want to see the movie.
I also made some headway on an Asimov's and Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Thirteenth Century" - that last I've been picking at for at least a year and am not a quarter of the way through, so don't expect a post saying I've finished it any time soon. :) It's one of those things I pick up and put down, but the past couple of weeks it's been pulling me back in. Perhaps because I got to the part where the English are invading France, Jean le Bon is doing lots of really stupid things, and Charles de Navarre is stirring up trouble. He sounds like quite an interesting character! I think he was actually Loki, in disguise. I can't think of a better explanation for why Jean le Bon didn't execute him when he had the chance. Unless there's some unwritten rule of the universe that everyone has to keep their worst enemy alive to keep striving against. Or, they had been lovers and Jean just couldn't stand to do it? (Jean apparently was lovers with his cousin who Charles had killed.) Ah, the French - who can understand them?
Although I suppose it's hard to understand any people who had such gruesome games at fairs.
A couple of the favorite fair games:
1) Guys chase a pig and bludgeon it to death.
2) Tie a cat to a pole (I think by a rope) so that it's claws are free, then tie the contestants hands behind their backs, and the contestants try to beat the cat to death with their foreheads. Is that brilliant or what? I wonder if you won a brightly colored stuffed animal.
In at least one instance a town ran short of convicts to kill, so they bought one from another town just so they could have the fun of watching someone drawn and quartered.