15 August, 2014

Retrospect — Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

[Reviews from HexWhyZed are not in any way timely or culturally pertinent, just the impressions from a dimly-lit island in the distance and the flotsam jettisoned along its shores. They may also contain spoilersyou have been warned.]

For all of humanity's polarizing inclinations, we frequently fail to realize that others are Not Like Us—that they don't share our experiences or internal chemistry or preconceived notions, so when someone reacts to a situation in a way contrary to our presumptions of normalcy, suspicion often percolates before empathy.

This is the initial propulsion of Gone Girl, the story of a wife gone missing, her husband's inappropriate behavior as Sisyphean catastrophe, the internal realities we keep consistently to ourselves despite protestations of love and hate.

19 April, 2014

Retrospect — The Stranger Beside Me

[Reviews from HexWhyZed are not in any way timely or culturally pertinent, just the impressions from a dimly-lit island in the distance and the flotsam jettisoned along its shores. They may also contain spoilersyou have been warned.]

I meant to start recording my thoughts of the various media from which I imbibe quite some time ago, and yet...and yet....

The first sacrifice is an appropriate one, however: The Stranger Beside Me by true crime author Ann Rule. Stranger recounts the career of serial killer Ted Bundy, but is more about the unique and shocking circumstances Rule found herself in writing it--old friends with Bundy,  hired to write a book on the Washington murders before he was ever named a suspect, her emotional ambivalence regarding his guilt or innocence.

27 March, 2014

Adaptation — Translation of Form and Effect

Adaptations come in many forms—painting to song, song to poem, poem to picture--but the ones we are most familiar with are adaptations of written literature to film, be it for television or movies. Many still seem to believe that an adaptation should be a simple visual illustration of the text and that any change to character, event, or plot is an affront to the integrity of source material (ASoIaF fans, I'm lookin' at you).

But adaptation is not illustration; it is much more akin to translation—you begin with one language (the novel) and must translate it into another (film). Writing and film are indeed separate languages, with functionalities, tropes, devices, strategies, tricks, and tools, some of which translate well into the new language and others for which no translation is possible.

25 March, 2014

The Necessity of Graphic Sex and Violence in Game of Thrones



Aside from various book readers complaining about barking dogs or intact noses, the most frequent gripes I've read concern the incessantly graphic nature of both sex and violence in HBO's rendition of Game of Thrones. "Why did they have to stab her in the stomach? Over and over and over??" "Is it necessary to show whores playing with each other in the background of this-or-that scene?" "Did they HAVE to show him cut that horse in half?" 

Did they have to? No, of course not. Should they? Abso-freakin-lutely.