NIF

someone's sideblog.

[antlered-vixen]

I am so tired of short-attention-span, trim-the-fat culture. All writing advice these days is for how to write like Chuck Palahniuk. "Cut 'think', cut 'feel', cut 'wonder' - only action, only pushing forward, show and move and move and move." What if I could emulate this style, and still don't want to? What if I want to write like Henry James, with three paragraphs of introspective musings between each dialogue line? The music advice is, "make it shortform, make it Tik-Tok compatible, make it punchy, hit the refrain as soon as possible." What if I want that 10-minute prog rock piece? What if I want that symphony? What if I want it slow and luxurious and lazy? Movies. Series. Poetry. Bodies. Everything is "trimmed trimmed trimmed trimmed, stripped bare, you have three seconds to win me over, make it airport chic." I don't want to win you over, then, I guess. I want the fat left it. I want the pleasure and the indolence and the indulgence. Fuck this art-advice that's always "your art needs Ozempic."

[nifwatch]

I mean... yes and no, in the worst way? As far as I can tell both series and movies are stretched out to fit the streaming format demands, but all the pleasure and indolence and indulgence has been replaced with ”flashback to 5 minutes ago in case you were on your phone or something”, so we just get one very slim plot explained to us three times, until all entertainment is very expensive filler no one actually enjoys.

[rainbow-bear]

A king has no sons, no daughters, and no queen. For this reason he must decide who will take the throne after he dies. To do this he decides that he will give all of the children of the kingdom a single seed. Whichever child has the largest, most beautiful plant will earn the throne; this being a metaphor for the kingdom. At the end of the contest all of the children came to the palace with their enormous and beautiful plants in hand. After he looks at all of the children’s pots, he finally decides that the little girl with an empty pot will be the next Queen. Why did he choose this little girl over all of the other children with their beautiful plants.

[ademigodgirl]

The seeds were all dead (burned, fake, etc.).  The other kids cheated and got different seeds and planted them.  The little girl didn’t cheat and was not able to grow anything because the seed was dead.  She was the only one who didn’t cheat.

[lizthefangirl]

damn

[zorascreation]

Nothing like original fairy tales! 

[roachpatrol]

i get the moral it’s trying to convey but that king is an idiot and the kingdom’s doomed. you don’t appoint an honest kid who will forthrightly admit a failure like that to leadership of a country, you put that kid in charge of like… the army, or something. the department of agriculture. 

i’d send out dead seeds, then appoint the kid with the biggest and most beautiful plant anyway. ideally the same kind of plant as the dead seeds were from. and ideally a kid with a really good pokerface. that kid knows:

a) how to perceive failure early (a well developed second plant means they knew how soon the first seeds should sprout and didn’t fuck around when they didn’t) 

b) how to fix the situation (a second plant of the same species means they got someone to help them identify the seeds and plant more, or are observant enough to do it themselves)

c) how to get the best people for a job in to do it (kids aren’t great gardeners. a beautiful science project probably means mom did all the work— just what you want from a child ruler and their regent)

all around, that kid (or their mom) is the kind of devious results-oriented bald-faced liar you want to go toe-to-toe with the lords of your country and the rulers of your neighbors. not a little kid who admits defeat so early and in a situation with such high stakes. ‘whoops i didn’t grow a plant’ sounds a lot less sweet when you phrase it like ‘i give up on ruling my country’. 

you know, i think i’d also send agents out to encourage the kids to destroy each other’s plants. let’s see who’s good at seige warfare, too.

[incorrectdiscworldquotes]

Did Lord Vetinari write that post?

[ispyspookymansion]

yes carrie killed over 400 people ok. thats bad i know. but have you considered that i feel really bad for her :(

[d0gb0yy]

carrie deserved to kill 400 ppl as a treat

[breya-etherium-shaper]

[madseance]

That's because he didn't write, nor intend to write, a horrible terrible disturbed woman beyond redemption. The genesis of Carrie (told in its entirety in the 1999 edition's introduction that you can read here, and in King's memoir On Writing), was this: sometime in high school, King read an article in Life magazine about supposed poltergeist activity in a home, which seemed to be associated with the teenage girl who lived there. The article included the hypothesis that poltergeist activity is, in some way, tapped into or manifested by girls at that critical and tumultuous age.

And some years before that, King had gone to school with a couple of girls he pseudonymously calls Tina and Sandra, who were bullied and shunned by the other kids—Tina for wearing the same clothes every day, Sandra for her epilepsy and extremely religious mother, but both really for having some undefinable Other quality that kids pick up on like blood in the water. Both of them were dead by the time King began writing Carrie: Tina by suicide, Sandra from her epilepsy.

Carrie was what King imagined might have happened if that explanation of poltergeist activity were correct, and if Tina and Sandra had been able to tap into such an energy. He started writing the story a few years after getting married (his wife Tabitha is also a writer), but abandoned the idea a few pages in; the raw, merciless adolescent cruelty the story called for was too much to deal with, and what did he know about teenage girls, anyway? But Tabitha dug the pages out of the trash and read them, and convinced him it was a story that needed telling.

Carrie is a story which, perhaps like poltergeist activity, could only happen to a girl on the brink of womanhood, when every emotion and sensation is excruciatingly vivid and nothing makes sense anymore and every single occurrence in your life is the most important thing that will ever happen to you. It's about being horribly powerful and vulnerable at the same time, and alienated from your own body. It's about the visceral, starved animal fear and rage of being a teenage girl, and it goes to show what an arcane and powerful craft creative writing is that a man could manage to capture that without having experienced it firsthand.

"Sometimes—quite often, in fact—I wish that Tina and Sandy were alive to read it," King says in the 1999 introduction to Carrie. "Or their daughters."

[headspace-hotel]

Yeah, if you read the man's own words she was clearly intended to be sympathetic and human

[madlori]

"That's because he didn't write, nor intend to write, a horrible terrible disturbed woman beyond redemption."

I'm sorry, but King absolutely intended to write a horrible, terrible disturbed woman beyond redemption, and he did so, brilliantly.

But it wasn't Carrie, it was her mother.

[nifwatch]

Would just like to point out that Steven King's Carrie and ND Stevenson's Nimona (the comic book, not the animated movie) deal with the same themes. Nowadays, retroactively, Nimona is also about trans issues, but at the time it was published for the first time, Stevenson was not yet aware of that. So he wrote a book about teenage rage and not fitting in and, in a crucial difference form the animated movie, burning the world down.

[mckitterick]

V.E. Schwab's advice for creating memorable characters - works for both protagonists and villains

source post: X

[dduane]

This is really good advice.

It also ties neatly into the simplest version of the formula for getting people emotionally engaged with your characters: or how to build the moment in which your character starts moving from their initial state to the state in which they'll start changing their own lives.

First, you figure out the one important thing the character believes that they're wrong about. There's usually a core misperception that they haven't examined. Once they're forced to engage with it, it'll start to change everything about their perception of the world they're inhabiting and/or the people in it.

Then, as V.E. says, you identify the character's great desire and their great fear: the thing that character wants more than anything, and the thing or situation that terrifies them, and that they'll go to any lengths to avoid.

And having identified these two objects or situations, you build a situation in which the two forces will be in close, direct opposition to one another... then drop the character down in between them, and squeeze. Those two opposing forces become the jaws of a vise... and you crank the vise more and more tightly closed until the character has no choice but to acknowledge those opposing forces, and start (even in a small way) to deal with the pressure being exerted and push their way through.

This does not have to be, initially, a great climactic moment. In fact, it works better if it's not. It's more effective if your character has a brief low-intensity brush with these conditions-in-conflict early on. That way, when your big resolution scene comes along about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way along through the story arc, you'll have set up a resonance between that earlier hint or intimation of what's to come, and the really big blowoff. Your readers will recognize the resonance—the throb of tension between the two occurrences, like the vibration of a plucked string—and will find satisfaction both in the true resolution having been partially telegraphed earlier, and in how it's now being experienced and resolved in full.

This approach also allows you to set up more minor resonances between the realization of the conflict and its final resolution. These can serve to bind the structure of the work more closely together: to make it look (and be) less like a series of loosely strung-together plot events, and more like a unified whole, in which ripples of story business flow backwards and forwards, interpenetrating and influencing one another, and hinting at the big one to come.

But none of this can happen until the paired and opposing what-do-they-most-desire, what-do-they-most-fear axes have been defined. So that's a subject it's smart to spend some while thinking about (and for all your characters, not just the major ones), to be sure you're getting it right.

It's not unusual to get the wrong answers, or merely superficial ones, while you're still working out what's actually going on with the characters. So take your time. Eventually you'll find a set of answers that feel unquestionably right... and you can then nail those down in your notes and get on with making the kind of "good trouble" for your characters that will see them made complete.

[kumeko]

Oh Billy, you look so small right there…

[mcstack]

Superman’s sheer anger over Billy Batson’s situation is a sight to behold. Batman and Robin get away with it because he knows it’s the world’s best internship and that Bruce is willing to put out all the stops to protect him. But Billy? He doesn’t have anyone looking out for him. And that pisses off Superman more than anything.

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

Seriously, Clark’s face here

He is ready to kick the ass of whoever put this boy in this situation SO HARD

[rael-rider]

Next page he really lets the Wizard Shazam have it.

[nerdgerhl]

Shit, son. I might have to buy this book for those last two panels alone.

[catbountry]

When Superman is written well he is an amazing goddamned character.

[incognitomoustache]

these few pages are some of my favourite in comic book history. So good. For anyone wondering what the next few pages look like, here you go:

This is a bigger deal than some of you might think, because Superman is one of the heroes in the DC Universe who keeps his secret identity pretty damn secret, because as probably the most powerful and influential person on earth, a lot of people do not wish him well - and would jump at the chance to hold people dear to him as leverage.

Yet, he trusts this poor, scared little kid. To comfort him, and entrust him with his biggest secret - just as Billy did for him.

Superman is just really important, ok?

[fipindustries]

this for people to truly understand superman

[dduane]

I will never get tired of reblogging this. This is the Superman who means something to *me*.

[nifwatch]

Seriously, I don't understand why Batman gets a pass. I mean, I do understand from the POW of a child reading the comics, yey, I could help Batman. But if we're pretending its real? Good lord. No. Especially not considering how the whole experience affects those kids mental health. ”But they would have fought crime anyway!” listen, man, kids want to save the world, and we help them do that IN. A. SAFE. WAY. ”But that kid was really good at jumping from buildings!” - I don't care. get them a NON-dangerous hobby, it's your duty as a guardian.

Because otherwise... sorry, bro, the only problem is that the superman kid is poor and therefore something is clearly wrooong, we can't let them, like, play superhero, unless a billionare adopts them, then it would be fiiine.

[nifwatch]

Ok, so I finished Wake Up Dead Man

...and argh. I mean. It's better than Glass Onion, I'll give them that.

The plot is incredibly convoluted, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Yes, there are a lot of characters and we don't really need all of them, but fiiine. I was going to say they make the world seem more real, then I remembered the writer and his fake-castle which served no purpose, so no, actually they don't.

The one thing I genuinely liked was the main character, the young priest. The actor did a great job, even if some of the script choices were... cartoonisly bad.

Benoit Blanc was fine. I don't particularly like him, don't particularly dislike him, good quality quirky detective. Better than whatever sacrilege that English dude is doing to the Poirot franchise.

I appreciate that at least they tried to explain why people need religion (it's therapy). Not such a great job in explaining why, in order to access said therapy, you kinda have to turn a blind eye to all the things Benoit lists in his speech. How does the nice priest feel about the tricky bits of Catholicism (the tricky ones, not the ones that have easy, political correct answers).

But what I disliked the most was the same thing I disliked in Glass Onion. Yes, this is a ”leftist” movie, but I am a ”leftist” media consumer and I still would like to understand why the villains are appealing. in world. Cause in Glass Onion we got ”these are a bunch of uncultured, incompetent people, who weren't even rich to start with and somehow, without any merits of their own, became amazing tech bros”. And in Wake Up Dead Man we get ”this is a horrible priest who hates women to cartoonish degrees, grandson to a horrible priest who hated women to cartoonish degrees and SOMEHOW three women think he's aaaaamazing, can perform miracles and might come back to life”. Why. Show me the why. Show me the charisma. Show me the seductive speech. Show me one miracle that would have lured the disabled violinist to the parish. Show me the one thing than convinced Martha the man was worthy of her great big secret.

(Speaking of the disabled violinist... man, fuck this shit. ”She got her happy ending, by making art despite the horrible pain, blah blah daily bread”. FUCK THIS SO MUCH.)

I endured it, would not watch again.

[catchymemes]

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Okay. Say you ask a small child to draw you a house, and they come up with something like this:

For the purposes of this analogy the child is shit at colouring in, because I only wanted to give the general idea.

So, we can all agree that the child who draws a house probably isn't trying to communicate anything in particular other than “look at this cool house I drew”, right?

Cool.

So… Why is it seemingly in the middle of nowhere, when most children live in houses with neighbours?

Why is the main body a square and the roof a solid triangle when that doesn't look like any house that has ever been built anywhere?

Why does it have a wood-burning stove with smoke actively coming out of the chimney, even though the sun indicates warm weather?

Why is the sun smiling? Why is it yellow?

Answer: because the child has seen picture books, and films, and the drawings of other children, and has on some level absorbed that this is what a house is meant to look like.

Face to face, the child almost certainly wouldn't know where to begin communicating “yellow is a colour culturally associated with happiness and warmth, and two dots accompanied by a curved line symbolically represent a smiling human face, so I have combined these attributes with the sun to convey that it is a very warm and pleasant day”.

Or “historically most houses in my country used fire for heat and cooking, and even though this is no longer the case for the majority of households, most media portrayals of houses are inspired by other, older, media portrayals and therefore include the chimney. I have chosen to follow this trend.”

Or even, “I have poor motor control because of my age, and large, 2 dimensional shapes are easier to draw than anything involving detail and perspective”.

Yet this is all information that you can pick up from detailed study of the house drawing.

Ultimately, it's not about what the writer intended. That's what the whole death of the author thing means.

If you think of literature like as a conversation, then think of all the analysis stuff that your English teacher keeps trying to get you to look at as like body language. It's the stuff that the other person doesn't even necessarily mean to communicate, but that can tell you a hell of a lot about what they mean.

[nifwatch]

Started watching Wake up dead man.

A bit annoyed at the lack of subtlety in the beginning, but eh, these movies were never subtle. I don't know who dies yet, but please tell me it's an orient express situation where all the women take turns with a dagger, yes?

[marcelshorjian]

> THE JESTER

[nifwatch]

I was listening to The Reluctant Detective by Tom Fowel...

...and I made it to minute 8, don't think I'll make it to minute 9.

So far, the main character (I assumed he was 14, because he his parents put his ”private detective” add up, and they are paying him) seems to not want to be a detective, but also he's pleading with his parents why being a detective would work while spoon-feeding us exposition. But then he was a hacker in China, and now he has PTSD. Thankfully he's talking about it to what I assumed was his therapist, but NO, it's a journalist made out of tits.

Yeah. No.

[discardingimages]

the resurrection of the dead

book of hours, Bruges c. 1430-1445

Walters Art Museum, W.239, fol. 85v

[nifwatch]

Watching Blown Away on Netflix

...season 4. I mean, the other seasons had signs of this, but I feel like now they are fully embracing the kitsch with both arms. Conceptual art with great idea and technique? neeeh. Badly made bird holding a piece of trash? Such a profound idea, this is clearly about the environment, suuuch skill, I have neeeeveeer in my life seen trash! made! out! of! glass!!!!!

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

hamlet dashboard simulator

😱 elsinore-confessions Follow

widowed queen gertrude is crazyyyyy fine

(submitted-via-anonymous)

364 notes

🏴‍☠️ tragical-prince-of-denmark

.

#personal #to be or not to be UGH that is the question #like is it nobler in the minds to suffering slings and arrows of outrageous fortune??? #or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them #:( #to die #to SLEEP #no more #and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to #tis a consummation DEVOUTLY to be wished #to die to sleep #to sleep perchance to dream?? #ay THERES the rub #for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil #that gives me pause tbh

2 notes

📚 horatio.the.truant

can we please stop fear mongering and spreading misinformation about what has been going on lately. take it from a wittenberg uni student: there is no such thing as ghosts, and there is not one roaming around elisnore castle. there are literally guards patrolling 24/7. if there were ghosts we would know.

📚 horatio.the.truant

hey guys! so turns out there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy

#actually shaking right now #what the fuck is going on

43,576 notes

👻 ghost.tracker Follow  

spotted last night, marcellus and myself, when yond same star that’s westward from the pole had made his course t’illume that part of heaven where it now burns. the bell was then beating one

(submitted-via-bernardo-the-guard-o)

200 notes

😊 average-dane-20 Follow

omg murder of gonzago is touring here this month!! i just got my tickets im SO excited

✉️ im-orsick-of-this

honestly don't get your hopes up about this production. i heard they're changing the whole story around and it's kind of a weird modern retelling :( sounds like it's gonna be a waste of time unfortunately

#i signed an nda at work so i cant really say how i know this #but trust me guys you do not want to be there when this happens

16,312 notes

😱 elsinore-confessions Follow

it's actually so fucked up that people are just on tumblr blogging about how hot they think the queen is. does no one care about the fact that she literally has a son who is probably really uncomfortable seeing these comments on his dash. is anyone thinking about him. does anyone care that he's probably having a really hard time right now

(submitted-via-anoynmous)

#one can literally smile and be a villain in denmark this place fucking sucks

4 notes

🏴‍☠️ tragical-prince-of-denmark

im actually going to kill my uncle

🏴‍☠️ tragical-prince-of-denmark

im not joking like im really going to do it

🏴‍☠️ tragical-prince-of-denmark

guys should i kill my uncle????

yes

no

Voting ended onSep 16, 2025

#FUCK what an ass am i #this is most brave #im literally the son of a dear father murdered #prompted to revenge by heaven and hell #and im out here like a whore unpacking my heart with words #fuck thisssss #hmm ive heard guilty creatures sitting at a play have by the cunning of the scene #been so struck to the soul that they just proclaim their malefactions #👀

10 notes

👴🏻 p0l0nius Follow

goodbye son @ laertes and good luck in paris! the wind sits in the shoulder of your sail and you are stayed for. i send my blessing with thee and these few precepts in thy memory Read more

1 notes

🤺 laertes

au revoir bitches ya boy is on his way to parissss

#FUCK this court #not really sure what is going on here but i am not sticking around to find out lmfao #also does anyone know if the ghost stuff everyone is reblogging is real

498 notes

🧪 not.king.claudius

stop reblogging that post about the king's wedding

okay buckle up because i have been seeing a LOT of people talk about how the timing of the king and queen's marriage after the late king's death was weird. but first of all, the picture that has been going around alleging that they used the same food from his funeral to furnish the wedding feast is NOT real and has been debunked multiple times by @ also-not-king-claudius. so please stop reblogging that. second, i've been seeing posts saying that the late king hamlet was way hotter than claudius (like hyperion to a satyr etc) which is honestly so disrespectful when claudius threw an awesome wedding feast that a lot of you all benefitted from and all king hamlet ever did was wage war on fortinbras. also gertrude and claudius were NOT having an affair before they got married. i dont even know how that rumor got started because there is absolutley no proof. it's incredibly irresponsible to spread rumors like that when they are so destructive and hurtful and i cant believe people never check their sources before reblogging. and btw @/elsinore-confessions is NOT a reliable source. sorry but i will be blocking anyone who reblogs posts claiming there was some kind of affair. anyway i dont know what i expected from this hellsite but tbh it was more than this :/

#claudius was literally just in equal scale weighing dole and delight #but of course thats controversial now #🙄

25,785 notes

🌼 opheliaaaaa

view from my walk this morning!

#nature #flowers #wildlife #aesthetic

1,657 notes

💁🏻‍♀️ concerned.danish.mom

hey guys. does anyone have tips on how to connect with your teenage son when he keeps accusing you of unchastity and incest :(

422 notes

🌹 rose.n.crantz Follow

yayyyy king claudius gave us free cruise tickets to england

⭐️ youre-looking-guildenstern Follow

it's actually been forever since we hung out with hamlet. this is gonna be so fun

⭐️ youre-looking-guildenstern Follow

does anyone know how to send a distress signal

74 notes

🌄 remembering-denmark-54 Follow

Today we remember Yorick, a former court jester of the late King Hamlet who passed away several years ago. He is now buried in the Elsinore Castle Graveyard, and is remembered as a fellow of most excellent fancy.

🏴‍☠️ tragical-prince-of-denmark

omg poor yorick :(( @ horatio.the.truant i knew him!!! a fellow of infinite jest

#he hath borne me on his back like a thousand times!! #and now how abhorred in my imagination it is! #my gorge straight up rises at it #here hung those lips that i kissed i know not how oft #where are ur gibes now? #gambols? #songs? #flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?

15 notes

🌼 opheliaaaaa

ummm ok hiiiiii <3

2 notes

👑 young.fortinbras Follow

anyone else been lowkey thinking about invading denmark lately

78 notes

😱 elsinore-confessions Follow

not to insult the crown prince or whatever but does anyone else think he seems like a fucking loser

(submitted-via-anonymous)

9,845 notes

[tainted-scholar]

Rewatching Treasure Planet (great movie, watch it) made realize something about the way that stories convey information to their audiences. There's been a lot of discussion on the overuse of plot twists and how many stories prioritise surprising their audience over telling decent stories. However, if you instead reveal the "twist" to the audience before it becomes known to the characters, you can build tension and stakes. Treasure Planet comes right out and tells you that Long John Silver is the main villain almost immediately after his introduction (And even before he's introduced we're warned about a cyborg, so you'd have to be pretty dense to not put 2 and 2 together and realize he's a bad guy). So when the audience watches him and Jim bond and grow closer, it builds tension for when Jim finds out and it highlights the tragedy of their friendship, because we all know it's not going to end well. Then, after the truth is revealed, stakes are created because we want the friendship between Jim and Silver to be repaired, because we know it was real, but we don't know if can be after what Silver's done. And all of this would have been lost if Silver's true nature had been a cheap plot twist. The tragedy would be completely overshadowed by the surprise and betrayal, and any investment in their relationship would have been built on the false impression that Silver was a good guy.

Another good example of this is Titanic. Even if you were somehow ignorant of the ship's sinking, the film makes sure you know that it sank with its framing device of Old Rose telling her story to people salvaging the Titanic's wreak. And Titanic's plot structure could only possibly work if you know the ship is going to sink. I'm not just talking about building tension, tragedy, and stakes for the characters like with the above example, I mean that if you didn't know that the Titanic was going down walking into the film, the abrupt shift from romance to suspense-disaster would be an increadibly tough pill to swallow. But it works because we expect it. You don't walk into a film called Titanic without expecting the damn boat to sink.

However, the sad thing about both of these examples, is that despite all the benefits that came from telling the audience these things ahead of time, I think the main reason the creators didn't make them plot twists was because they couldn't have. Treasure Island is the single most influential piece of pirate media out there, and you'd have to have been living under a rock for over a century to not know the Titanic sank. So, the writers had to work around the fact that these important turning points in the narratives were common knowledge, and they wound creating incredible stories as a consequence.

I want to see more of this style of writing in stories where the writers aren't forced to do it. We've clearly seen that you can tell some really damn good stories by giving information to the audience before the characters learn it, and I just wish more works would do that instead of trying to surprise people with shocking twists.

[skeleton-richard]

@the-golden-ghost !!!

[laropasucia]

This is also why most adaptations of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde don't follow the mystery plot structure of the original book, since everyone already knows they're the same person, no one will be surprised by that twist nowadays.

As a consequence, most adaptations of the story are told mainly from Jekyll's point of view, and the conflict between Jekyll and Hyde becomes the main story, which makes for really compelling drama!

[beleester]

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!” In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

--Alfred Hitchcock, on the difference between surprise and suspense.

[nifwatch]

Watching The Thursday Murder Club

20 minutes in, everything has been explained TWICE. And I don't think I like the script, or the what-s-it-called? cinematic composition? blocking? the way you put the people on the screen.

Prove me wrong, movie.

(come on, you have great actors, but the script, argh argh)

[nifwatch]

Oh, Noooo, will the veeeery rich old people keep their really nice flats in the palace, I mean the nursing home?

(wouldof helped if they were a tad more likeable. they are just.... lukewarm so far)

[nifwatch]

God help me. I am trying MY BEST not to second screen this, and the need to put it on x2 speed is soooo strong.

[nifwatch]

Good god WHAT A WASTE. I wonder if the book was good and the adaptation was bad. I have been bored to death.

a) could have easily been a 1h movie, with them over-explaining eveeerything.

b) could have easily been good, if... if... well, first of all it the characters weren't all so bland and inconsequent. ”Oh, mother, I never thought I'd ever see you happy after dad's death!” - said to the woman who was as happy as Larry to be in that (luxury) retirement home from the very beginning. Oh, sure, it would have been a lovely character arc if she had been depressed at first than found happiness, but nope.

c) if you would have given me the script for the first half, I could have written the second one myself. The subtle clues were hammered in with a sledgehammer. Behold, THE CHARACTER WITH A BAD MEMORY HAS A RECORDER ALWAYS ON.”My daughter IS A HEDGE FUND MANAGER.” ”I wonder why my best friend never told me about this murder case it was TUCKED AWAY LIKE SHE DID NOT WANT ME TO FIND IT”

d) So the whole tension point of the movie was... ”oh no, the evil land developer will throw all the VERY INCREDIBLY UNBELIEVABLY rich old people out on the streets” how will they, including the old lady whose daughter is a hedge fund manager with enough money to buy the place, manage. Yeah, I somehow feel they'll be fine either way- it's not that I don't like them, but come on, gimme something with actual stakes.

booo.

[nifwatch]

Watching The Thursday Murder Club

20 minutes in, everything has been explained TWICE. And I don't think I like the script, or the what-s-it-called? cinematic composition? blocking? the way you put the people on the screen.

Prove me wrong, movie.

(come on, you have great actors, but the script, argh argh)

[nifwatch]

Oh, Noooo, will the veeeery rich old people keep their really nice flats in the palace, I mean the nursing home?

(wouldof helped if they were a tad more likeable. they are just.... lukewarm so far)

[nifwatch]

God help me. I am trying MY BEST not to second screen this, and the need to put it on x2 speed is soooo strong.

[nifwatch]

Watching The Thursday Murder Club

20 minutes in, everything has been explained TWICE. And I don't think I like the script, or the what-s-it-called? cinematic composition? blocking? the way you put the people on the screen.

Prove me wrong, movie.

(come on, you have great actors, but the script, argh argh)

[nifwatch]

Oh, Noooo, will the veeeery rich old people keep their really nice flats in the palace, I mean the nursing home?

(wouldof helped if they were a tad more likeable. they are just.... lukewarm so far)