Economy

I've found enough time recently to be able to spend a fair amount of it with the book. When I'm there I've been holding it up to the light side by side with something written by better hands and imagined by a better mind. It's hard not to be disappointed when you compare the thing that you have made with the summits of science fiction. I have not written Tiger! Tiger! (The stars my destination), but I have written something else.

This is an unproductive pattern of thought in which to be stuck. I am trying to take something away from the time I spend in this place though. Tiger! Tiger! does something in terms of pure economy of story telling that impressed me when I first read it. It is lean and it is wild. If it were an animal you would look upon it's near skeletal deformation and twisted light bleeding hide and might be mistaken in thinking that it was incapable of surviving the harshness of even the mildest of winters, but year in and year out it would be there again in the spring. Alfred Bester wrote something that is voracious and unnatural and once I became familiar with it I began to question the ability of some of those other creatures around me that had begun to appear obese and domesticated by comparison.

When I read my own book I hope that it might have this same sense of economy. That I too might find the majority of the excess discarded when the book is complete. That is what I aim for, but as I mentioned earlier I have written something else.

The Dark Knight Rises

It's long. It feels long. It's a little over ten minutes longer than The Dark Knight, but it feels so much longer than that. I wouldn't say I got bored while watching it, but there are some pacing choices I had the time to question while watching the movie and a noticeable amount of superfluous dialogue and belaboured setup/payoffs draw the film out unnecessarily.

An explanation for the length of the film is that it loosely adapts a seventy issue story arc into a single film. SEVENTY! That seems like a mistake right there. To their credit there are a great many things from the source material that the Nolans elected not to include, but at times it does feel as though they could've gone further. There is still a lot of padding.

I'd recommend it if you're heading out anyway, but I'm not on board with the acclaim it has been receiving. The most exciting thing about this film is that the next addition to the Batman franchise will be something entirely new.

Unless they make another origin story.