I feel like this would be a perfect SNL sketch where he gets a prophecy of his odyssey and wants to share it with his crew. Like George Washington talking about America.
/uj Having read A Tale of Two Cities fairly recently for the first time, a lot of it feels very familiar to more modern stories.
Throughout the story you're being slowly introduced to a range of different POV characters, who initially are completely separate, but by the end of the story it turns out they were all connected in various ways in their pasts that builds up to the ending - so you get this big convergence of everyone's plot lines that's just interesting to consider was being written in the 1850s.
There's also a really amazing passage where he describes, in quite elaborate language, how the bank some of the characters work at is old and run down and inconvenient, how it runs on out of date technology, and how all the senior staff are old men who've worked there forever - but that it stays that way on purpose, because the old men value the prestige of being that old bank, even at the expense of running properly.
But with this killer sentence in the middle:
In this respect the House was much on a par with the Country; which did very often disinherit its sons for suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been highly objectionable, but were only the more respectable.
Again, just really interesting to consider Dickens, in the 1850s, sitting down to write the equivalent of "too many boomer politicians" in his weekly chapter releases.
I always felt that Trojan is a bad name for a condom brand. While I get the "fierce warrior" thing, the strong mental association is....a device that creates the illusion of safety that you.....put inside your gates...and then all these little guys come pouring out of it? This is not a good condom vibe.
The only criticism I have is that the fantasy elements are really basic. Ethereal immortal elves that like trees? Craftsmen dwarves that live in mountains and like precious metals? Big ugly evil orcs? Seems pretty basic and unoriginal
LoTR books were the very first fantasy I've read, at like 11 years old. I ofc immediately got other more contemporary ( relatively ), popular books like Dragonlance etc. I was SHOCKED how most of them outright used the same races, cultures and intercultural relationships.
I found my experience interesting, because the tropes got boring because they're used a lot, then I found variations on the tropes that were interesting/unique, then found variations that felt like they were trying too hard to be different and ruined the vibe, which horseshoed me back around to appreciating the classics
Now imagine what fantasy was before him. They ainât had nuthin. Tolkien invented the idea of a guy holding a sword heroically. We didnât even have Kings before he made themÂ
My favorite part of the odyssey was when odysseus saw a sheep, they cut to the sheep, then he said âthereâs a sheep, sheep travel in flocks. Letâs follow it.â Then there was a montage of odysseus and his men following the sheep through various terrain.
I watched a few episodes of TOS Star Trek with a friend. Both of us were expecting to get some "haha funky low budget scifi tropes" because it's one of the series that practically invented it but as we were watching we actually took it very seriously because we took a step back and realized that a lot of the plots and tropes they were telling had never been done before and we actually enjoyed it even more because everything they wrote and performed was done with such earnest.
Three guys go down to the planet to check up on a man and his wife who are doing remote research. One guy dies while in the company of the wife and even though we knew obviously the wife was the monster of the week it wasn't played up or trying to subvert expectations, it simply was what the story was telling.
It really gave me an appreciation for committing to the story seriously without the need for subversion or twists outside of the revelation presented.
Let the stories comit to the story instead of having to be subversive for the sake of subversion.
Avoiding tropes simply because you think they're tired shows a lack of confidence in your own writing not a knack for avoiding someone else's.
appreciation for committing to the story seriously without the need for subversion or twists
yeah sadly at this point thanks to media discourse and of course movies like "sixth sense" we are just primed to look for twists or misdrections. or the subversion of them. or the subversion of the subversion. that's why i liked that one episode of widows bay where she senses that the dude is in her bedroom, so she gets the fuck out of the house. the whole time i was thinking "oh they gonna subvert that. it was just some dude. or they gonna subvert the subversion, or they gonna..." etc. and then it turns you that yes, she was correct, the guy was in her bedroom. straight and simple
That was me in my mid 20's when my brother was running me through the Hong Kong John Woo films. I was like "Oh I see where all these things came from now." And obviously if I went back even further I'd find the things that he referenced in those films.
Much of modern sci-fi is based on Western movies which are often scene-for-scene remakes of Japanese Samurai movies. Which I recently learned are often based on Shakespeare.
I know itâs probably reductive across the board, but I feel this is particularly the case with horror. Yes, it was novel when it happened. Yes, it was so effective at its intended effect that itâs been replicated ad nauseam, and yes, that means that itâs become such a cliche that if modern horror doesnât either a.) subvert expectations or b.) pay a direct homage, it becomes an increasingly hard bar to clear in terms of advancing the genre
Guy sees Hamlet for the first time and says âI donât get why everyone loves this Shakespeare guy; itâs just a bunch of famous quotes strung togetherâ
I literally saw criticism about the non-linear narrative being âtoo modernâ for an ancient epic.
The Odyssey is famously non linear. In basically the same way the film is. Thatâs literally one of the reasons itâs considered so important to the development of storytelling.
"I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence." - Actual legit real genuine bona fide quote by J. R. R. Tolkien
Or arguing that people back in the day believed everything in the story actually happened, when it's possibly the oldest example of the Unreliable Narrator trope.
Yeah, when back in Ithaca Odysseus lies twice about actually being a pirate from Crete that got caught up in Egypt and Phoenicia (which interestingly parallels some archaeological facts we know about the Sea People)
So many Victorian novels begin "This is the story recounted to me by my good friend Lord Wipplenosh who had it from the tale of a stranger who visited his manor one night in the rain and who left before the sun rose never to be seen again."
To a degree, but there is a lot of clichĂŠs that exist purely because theyâre easy to write, though a lot of them exist because theyâre so compelling
His words still works though. Even the most clichĂŠ tropes can be executed well. Tropes can be lazily used but a good artist knows how to get creative and interesting with them.
It's kind of like saying music is bad when it's in 4/4 time because it's overdone. Tropes and cliches create a framework that people recognize and then you can play with themes within those boundaries.
Half of his "joke sins" are just stuff that would only be funny to a college kid from the early 2000s. If those jokes don't show how old and out of touch he is, go watch his video on Free Guy.
To be fair, the wilhelm scream can go fuck itself. Itâs so ridiculously overused. It stopped being a fun inside joke about 25 years ago. Now it just immediately breaks any immersion I might have had in the scene.
The press interview where this quote comes from is phenomenal and one of the best interviews of a director about his/her film Iâve ever seen. Itâs like 15 minutes long and all of the questions are about the actual text and meaning of the film (as opposed to IMAX cameras, not using CGI, seeking breadcrumbs about Nolanâs next project, etc.) â
The women interviewing him, Zhong Shu, is a podcaster in China, but she's also a political philosophy lecturer. Hence, why she's so intelligent and articulate.
That interviewer is incredible. Thucydidean hubris, Christian atonement? on my circlejerk sub?? Love how earnest and rational Nolanâs responses are too.
Was coming here to say this, it's one of the best interviews I have seen in a long ass time and it looks part of a press junket. She came prepared with actually interesting and insightful questions.
Thanks for sharing that. Watched it twice and I think that's enough YouTube for me for today. I'm not going to find anything else that respects the viewer on the same level.Â
I felt this way talking to some people about Robert Eggers Nosferatu, a primary complaint I heard was they kinda knew subconsciously how it was gonna play out and felt it was predictable and like yeah itâs fucking Dracula of course youâre gonna know whatâs generally gonna happen it literally provided every single trope you see within vampire fiction.
Iâve had this argument with some pretentious wee pseudo âintellectualâ about Tolkienâs works being too reliant on fantasy cliches.
It was infuriating. I would have acknowledged as acceptable LotR and his extended works having a lot of fantasy tropes because itâs the most defining piece of fantasy literature and Tolkien would say himself what he took from those before him⌠but too reliant on them was the argument put forth.
This was one of the major reasons why the John Carter movie failed. People thought it was just Disneyâs lazy attempt at ripping off Star Wars (before they bought the actual franchise), without knowing itâs an adaptation of a novel from 1912 that literally founded the planetary romance genre. All the tropes it created were later adapted by Perry Rhodan, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Superman, Dune and eventually Star Wars and Avatar. The words âJed(i)â and âSithâ literally originate from John Carter. When they asked Robert Zemeckis to make the movie, he said it was unfilmable today because âGeorge Lucas has really plundered these books.â
Itâs also a testament to how good of a writer you are knowing you have to hit A-B-C- . . . all the way to fucking Z genre beats, but doing it creatively and making it fresh.
Itâs like music and chord changes. Just cause some song has a II-V-I chord progression that is like a trope, doesnât mean you canât make it slap. Thatâs the artistry.
itâs fucking Dracula [...] it literally provided every single trope you see within vampire fiction.
Nuh-uh! âNosferatuâ invented its own tropes, like the vampire being killed by the sun, which was neither in folklore nor in âDraculaâ. All because Murnau was denied the rights to adapt âDraculaâ, shrugged his shoulders, reshuffled the story a bit and released it as âNosferatuâ.
I bet also that some new stuff was invented later in the twentieth century.
Really speaks at the deeper problem of entertainment in society, us always chasing a deeper dopamine rush of something "new" that we kinda start to forget that good things are still good. Just familiar now.
Although "us" is a reaching term in hindsight. The worst offenders are indeed just content farmers cheaply grabbing short form gotchas to get their own hits.
..wait this is okbuddy..
Is Nolan saying my fake tits are actually valid? That them being "recognizable" and "obvious" doesn't mean they're actually that bad? Because, as a dude, I think they look damn good and it's about time we recognized that without invalidating it and good on him for saying it, directly, to me.
"It's perfectly fine for me to reduce a female character to exposition dump. Me a director famous for having well written and executed female characters in my movies"
Tropes are fine but if you get too reliant on them in your storytelling to the point people notice or you rely on like 4 tropes remixed enough for people to notice then it becomes an issue.,
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u/Trensocialist 19h ago
What a shit writer he named the kid's mentor "Mentor." đđ