Between June 2024 and June 2026, I watched all six of the Jane Austen adaptations in this particular box set, which includes:
Most of these adaptations struck me as boring, fussy and strident like a stage performance, or terribly incomplete.
More on various other adaptations below.
The movie Gattaca combines many things successfully. For one thing, visually, it is a retrostylized future with buildings, clothes, and cars designed to look like those of the past. For another, the society has several types of advanced technology: rocket science, embryology, DNA forensics, and electric cars, which, well, we have too, just not as good as theirs.
But do we want biotech as good as theirs? I mean, look what they did with it: Gattaca depicts a dystopia where people with unfavorable “in-valid” DNA sequences are consistently excluded from social and career opportunities.
When I’m on a long flight, I try to watch a movie or two from the entertainment system that I never would have heard of any other way, and this Palestinian black comedy is one example.
“When their father passes away leaving a large sum of money in the bank, two sisters put their differences aside and join forces against Sharia law, according to which their brother has the right to take double what they are entitled to.”
If you think it’s hard being a woman in general, try being a woman in Palestine… in this depiction, all the family and economic relationships are tilted against the women. The ambulance staff at first even refuse to state whether their father, who is lying in bed unresponsive, has died because no other male is present. I mean it’s like, a woman is still an adult, right?
In case you’re curious, the two sisters do manage to claim the inheritance for themselves; that’s not really a spoiler because it very much matters for the overall effect of the film how they try to manage it, and how they succeed… Do they enlist the help of someone’s boyfriend, husband, or son? Do they impersonate their dead father, or their undeserving distant brother, or some other male? Do they march into the bank with masks and a stolen gun and threaten the bank teller? Do they launch a protest campaign and achieve policy change? Do they just walk up to a series of ATMs and take out a thousand dollars 150 times over the course of a week?
Underequipped but relentless Chinese soldiers fight Americans in North Korea during the Korean War in winter 1950, ultimately forcing a retreat.
The news is always bad stuff, because that’s what competes best for our attention. And according to Rolf Dobelli’s book Stop Reading the News, we’re better off without it. I think that’s largely true. But, asks the mystical feel-good 90s TV show Early Edition: What if you got tomorrow’s news today? Would you try to change it? Prevent the bad stuff from happening?
Gary Hobson, a newly unemployed stockbroker, is kicked out of his Chicago apartment by his soon-to-be ex-wife and, while living in an old hotel suite, mysteriously starts receiving a printed copy of the Chicago Sun-Times a day in advance. The accompanying orange cat seems to want him to help people (rather than, say, place sports bets), so helping people becomes, well, not only his full-time job but his entire identity, his raison d’etre, like it or not.
In Asia, Michael Jackson never really lost his reputation like he did in the US. Here, he is apparently remembered as the King of Pop, and that’s it.
With the release of the 2026 biopic, which involved the cooperation of family members, the yuckiness surrounding his image seemed to recede substantially, returning his status to that of a fantastically successful and exceptionally gifted, if strange, artistic performer. In fact, my impression of him based on the movie (I didn’t know anything about his family life previously) is that he was for many years a pitiable victim of his father’s controlling tendencies.
Movies that are based on a true story tend to fail on one or both of two counts: they simplify, exaggerate, embellish, or otherwise bend history too much for the sake of manufacturing an engaging drama, or they keep too closely to the facts and wind up being boringly sequential—but I imagine that actually this latter happens seldom because it too obviously spells financial doom. In any case, the point is, real life doesn’t have plot; it doesn’t naturally supply one particular antagonist or challenge for a person to overcome. Life is messy. A film can’t afford to be, even though the process of making one, as in this case, is often anything but straightforward.
I don’t think there was *anything* I didn’t like about Project Hail Mary.
It was a grand, beautiful, mysterious, high-stakes sci-fi adventure, with a lot of comedy and drama and symbolism. Really the best new movie I’ve seen in a long while. 100% recommend.
What’s a flashy dialogue tag? Something exactly like “she advised sagely.”
The post title is an example of a fumblerule; a piece of advice that goes against itself.
In writing fiction, it is best to avoid flashy dialogue tags like “she growled angrily” and “he moped sullenly.”
Why? And what should we write instead?
*Image credit: Ebenezer Landells – https://www.abbottandholder-thelist.co.uk/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81100198
Continue reading “Don’t use flashy dialogue tags,” she advised sagely.
Below is an attempt to consolidate what I know and would like to share from my experience in and around publishing and my knowledge as a reader.
Here’s an outline of the post:
Writing advice
Literary fiction vs. commercial fiction
Save the Cat by Blake Snyder
SPJG posts about writing advice books
SPJG posts about avoiding writing mistakes
Miscellaneous links
Recommended authors: children’s and YA fantasy
“Recent” (1980s onward)
“Classic” (1900 to 1980)
Publishing
Purpose
Audience
Context
Process via self-publishing
Process via traditional publishing
Writing communities
Singapore Writer’s Group
NaNoWriMo
Reddit
Conclusion
There are blog posts that appear to be older than 10 years, but the blog was launched 10 years ago. It now has over 900 published posts totaling 537,731 words.
When I wrote the post title, “woohoo” made me think of my brother for some reason, and so then maybe “more than 900 posts” made me think of the “over 9000” Dragonball meme ‘cuz my brother is a big Dragonball fan.
