Coalescent

It's a possibility, admittedly, but it doesn't normally happen to me. I thought Amelie was just as good as the hype, for instance. Ditto The Two Towers.

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hmm, magic ingredient? i am wondering what else you could have asked for.

stylistically speaking, though it was dazzling, it was the last thing that impressed me and i didn't pay that much attention to it. to put it concisely: it told a good story and it told it well. the fact that much of it was true doesn't detract nor add value to my mind. i just know that i gave a shit about the characters and what hurt them, hurt me.
and a film can make me feel that much and i can relate and feel for a character, then it's doing something more than right.

let me say now that i sick to the back teeth of people talking about this film looks: that's absolutely NOTHING to do with it. if that's all the impressed you most, then it won't surprise me to hear that person (not just you specifically, niall!) underwhelmed.

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i just read that over and it sounds unintentionally arsey.
i know that it all just comes down to the fact that different people like different films. lord knows why i wish that everyone i like, likes the same stuff as me!

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and a film can make me feel that much and i can relate and feel for a character, then it's doing something more than right.

...And therein lies the difference between us, I guess. It is very, very rare that I care about characters, and that's true for pretty much any medium you care to name. It's why the "Oh my god! They destroyed [insert character name here]" exclamations in fandom never bother me. I watch for plot, mostly, theme and visuals second.

(I'm not going to apologise for liking films that look pretty. Films are a visual medium)

In the case of City Of God, the only character I could say I knew anything about was L'il Ze, and even he was barely more than a cliche gang lord. But like you said, the effectiveness is in the telling, not the materials.

(And no, you didn't sound arsey. Well, not more than usual. :-P )

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It is very, very rare that I care about characters, and that's true for pretty much any medium you care to name. It's why the "Oh my god! They destroyed [insert character name here]" exclamations in fandom never bother me. I watch for plot, mostly, theme and visuals second

whoa! what is plot, theme or visuals without characters? everything is played through the characters on screen: if you never care about them, then you must have an amazingly different film experience from me. you are right indeed, it is the difference between us.
i'm not cricising, i'm just truly taken aback. you haven't done that in a while :p

(I'm not going to apologise for liking films that look pretty. Films are a visual medium)

i didn't ask you too :)
i love pretty films too (in a sick and unhealthy way most of the time), but it wasn't the most important thing about city of god.

he was barely more than a cliche gang lord

i'd choke, cough and splutter at this comment but your lack of care or concern for characters shows why you would say such a thing. that you do feel sympathy for a murderer and a rapist is part of the power of this film. a factor that would just pass by you if you viewed him as one-dimensionally as you did.
again, not a criticism, just trying to explain what worked for me.

And no, you didn't sound arsey. Well, not more than usual

i love you too.

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>whoa! what is plot, theme or visuals without characters?

You must understand - Niall is the dispassionate voyeur; the ultimate intellectual, the very epitome of utilitarian ideals. As such, he finds the sum of the dramatic experience to be no greater than the sum of its most technical parts, subjective though one's judgement may necessarily be on those parts.

In short - he's a cold-hearted bitch with no empathy.

The boy lacks sap.

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i know all this. well, i wouldn't quite have put it that way :p
rather, i know that he views films and such (dare i say LITERATURE) in a rather different light than i do, which means i'm the fool for even bothering to question it!

we must sap him up.

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Would LITERATURE in this context be an acronym, hence the capitals? Like, say, SF?

Hey! Here's a wacky idea! Combine the two! SF LITERATURE!

Is such a thing possible? Does it make sense?

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Would LITERATURE in this context be an acronym, hence the capitals? Like, say, SF?
Hey! Here's a wacky idea! Combine the two! SF LITERATURE!
Is such a thing possible? Does it make sense?

i'm not getting into this (though david and i discussed it this very night in relation to the niall-ster (just to introduce some irl-online overlapping there)).

/me forces self to stay quiet.

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David knows about Niall?

Does he... I mean, have you told him... about us? You and me?

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oui, david knows about niall.
he knows of you too, but he probably knows more about niall (because of his debating ways).

and there's an 'us'? :p

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So you keep our love secret?

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yeah

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So that's why you insist that I gag you during sex, then?

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ex-toastie256.livejournal.com

asking her *after* you've put the gag on doesn't count.

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david knows about niall.

/me looks fearfully over his shoulder.

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if you knew david, you'd fear him as much as you fear tim :)

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SF LITERATURE! Is such a thing possible? Does it make sense?

"M. John Harrison proves what only those crippled by respectability still doubt - that science fiction can be literature, of the very greatest kind. Light puts most modern fiction to shame. It's a magnificent book" - China Mieville.

And you don't want to argue with him, believe me. He's got really big arms.

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the argument is not whether science fiction is genuine literature: of course it is.

rather, it revolves around the bizarre all-encompassing term that you have known as SF, meaning speculative fiction. then sometimes you use that interchangeably with SF meaning science fiction, as you just did there.
that's the confusion.
and i'm going to kick myself in the head now before i type anymore because i wasn't planning to revisit the issue just yet.

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then sometimes you use that interchangeably with SF meaning science fiction, as you just did there.

It's a Venn diagram thing. Tim's comment obviously refers to 'speculative fiction literature'. 'science fiction' is a subset of 'speculative fiction', so China's comment is a valid response. You see? It's perfectly simple. :-)

(There was an old copy of the Guardian knocking around at work today; Naomi directed me at it because there was a feature about Jose Saramago. Even leaving out Blindness, Saramago's novels have included such exciting narrative developments as the Iberian peninsula splitting off from mainland europe and a man discovering he has the power to literally rewrite history. Yet the article went to great lengths to explain why these plots weren't fantasy, and they certainly weren't science fiction. Grr, argh...)

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ex-toastie256.livejournal.com

that you do feel sympathy for a murderer and a rapist is part of the power of this film

i felt little sympathy for him, myself. except for the nightclub scene where he completely fails to understand how to get a woman to like him and goes apeshit. for the most part i hated lil ze and wanted him to die, but i loved that i hated him so much if that makes sense.

iirc i emailed you about this already, but i loved this film because it made me feel so very sorry for all the characters as a collective. i felt sympathy for them as a whole that all they knew was this environment and nothing better.

as for being a cliche gang lord, oh dear. not really sure where to begin with that one, other than to point out that the vast majority of the characters were children in some sense or other. maybe you need to have lived in an area where you can see how desperate kids act when they have no other hope or meaning to get this film, i don't know.

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L'il Dice was chilling, certainly. But as the film went on, I thought the character became less and less an individual and more and more a cliche. And no, I didn't feel much sympathy for him, either; he was cool, in a bad-ass way, and he was nasty, but not sympathetic.

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whoa! what is plot, theme or visuals without characters?

What you get when you grow up reading Asimov, I guess. Try Foundation if you don't believe me. :)

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i'm not the biggest asimov fan...

you know what's really strange is that whenever there's a niall-nat disagreement of some kind, i always tell david about it - because although we oppose it's usually quite interesting.
david is so very baffled as to why i even speak to you dear niall, because we seem so very opposed :)
i had to then explain that you were a very nice person regardless of whether we could ever find something to agree on!

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