Interesting. I guess you must have really hated the LOTR movies then ;-)?

For me, if there's one complaint I have about Firefly it's that it still clings to the one-story-per-episode type format. Sure, there are longer background story arcs in there, but the main "adventure" is always just one episode long. I'd have preferred the approach they had with the old Doctor Who shows where you never really knew whether the story would end in half an hour or four weeks. Adds more suspense :-). To each his own.

Interesting. I guess you must have really hated the LOTR movies then

Precisely. The movies were unintelligible without the books, but even when key points were explained to me (since I had never read the books), I still thought the movies failed as movies.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

Hrmmm....

Because when Gandalf stood on the bridge in Moria and shouted "You...shall not...pass!!!" I knew to the quick that the Balrog wasn't going to make it.

When Treebeard sees the destruction near Isengard...they didn't need to cue the angry music, I could hear it in my head anyway.

When the Fellowship attacks the Black Gate to distract Sauron from the Ring, with no hope of surviving -- is there a more noble and courageous act than that?

I'm not trying to pick on you, but I would hazard a guess that you didn't need the book to figure those out. And oddly enough, reading the book didn't ruin the movie, but only made it better. I wanted to see my imagination come to life -- better yet, someone with a better imagination than mine. (Unlike Star Wars Episode III, where I knew what was going to happen, and never really cared how. OK, they lava was cool.)

I tend to lose interest in the scattershot series where nothing ever progresses. Sure, when I was a kid, I watched things like Gilligan's Island, but that's because I thought they were going to get rescued every time. When I realized that the show would be over, and there was no hope of ever getting rescued, it became only an exercise in storytelling.

Compare that to Sheherazade, that's somewhere in between. Because obviously the story never ends, but each story begins where the last one left off. (In an interesting way, as opposed to Gilligan, where nothing has changed, they're on the same island as last time, and in fact, you could miss 12 episodes and it would still make sense.)

And when the story finally ends, it's bittersweet, because it's over in your mind, and not just on screen. And Gilligan's still on that ****** island.

-QM
--
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

Elgon

the skill, seriousness and gravitas of Ang Lee's direction of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"

Would it be threadjacking to say that I hated that movie too? {grin}

For an example of a movie I liked, I really liked Batman Begins, even though I hated the two or three intermediate movies (every one except the first).

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

Oh no!

I loved that movie - I felt that if the magic realism hadn't been treated correctly, it would have been laughable. As it was, it dealt very well with not only the whole mastery of one's self, it also had moments of humour but also it didn't seem to preach.

I've not seen Batman Begins yet, so I can't comment. I quite enjoyed the first film, and bits of the others, but they lost the freshness and interest of the first one.

Elgon

It is better either to be silent, or to say things of more value than silence. Sooner throw a pearl at hazard than an idle or useless word; and do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in a few.

Pythagoras (582 BC - 507 BC)