“When the fall is all there is…”
I get traffic from people searching for this quote almost daily. Aaron Sorkin paraphrased it twice–once on Sports Night, and again on The West Wing. I’ve used it before too, once in describing Harry’s role in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Sorkin’s paraphrase goes like this: “As if it matters how a man falls down. When the fall is all that’s left, it matters very much.”
The line comes from The Lion in Winter, as Prince Geoffrey and Prince Richard find themselves in the dungeon, believing they hear their father’s approach…
Richard: He’s here. He’ll get no satisfaction out of me. He isn’t going to see me beg.
Geoffrey: My you chivalric fool… as if the way one fell down mattered.
Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters.
And here it is in living color! (Unfortunately, the only YouTube video I found that displays this scene refuses to let me embed it–click the link and enjoy.)
Review: FlashForward – “No More Good Days” (Pilot)
Let’s get it out of the way: Lost changed things for television. Every year since its 2004 premiere, networks have tried to emulate its magic, with varying degrees of success. This year’s entry from ABC is FlashForward. It carries the same network logo, a pair of familiar faces, even a billboard advertising a certain ill-fated airline. But while FlashForward’s spin on the Lost paradigm captures its sense of oddity, it lacks the patience and sense to let the audience engage on its own.
We open on a man who wakes to find a disaster. Instead of a doctor, we learn he’s a federal agent. Instead of an island, we find him in Los Angeles. Instead of a plane crash, everything has crashed—cars, helicopters, you name it. It’s happened all over the world. For two minutes, everyone on the planet blacks out, and glimpses their lives six months in the future.
The pilot’s opening tease, including the brief flashback to fill us in on the jolting intro, suffers from narrative ADD. In nine minutes, we’re introduced to ten separate characters with five interconnected storylines. And that’s all before the “event” even takes place. Read the rest of this entry »
AMC announces Prisoner premiere date!
The Prisoner premieres Sunday, November 15, 2009. AMC “will air two episodes each night over three consecutive nights.”
See the nine-minute trailer here.
Can’t wait!
Red Shirts
Orson Scott Card on Star Trek and Captain Kirk:
Centering the series around a commanding officer was such a bad mistake that the show immediately corrected for the error by never, for one moment, having Kirk behave like a captain.
While a television show can get away with having a captain who acts like the leader of an exploratory team, the readers of prose science fiction have no tolerance for such nonsense.
(Card, Orson Scott. How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. The Writer’s Digest Genre Writing Series. Writer’s Digest Books: Cincinnati. 1990.)
And now, a word from John Locke (Lost 1.09 “All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues” — minor language warning):
Still no release date for The Prisoner
According to both AMC and IMDB, The Prisoner has no official release date. Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellan star in the remake of Patrick McGoohan’s cult classic.
AMC’s web site only mentions the November 2009 time frame, and IMDB hints that the mini-series will span six episodes. Other than that, details are scarce.
Producers have touted the new mini-series as a reimagining of the original, which has angered some purists. At the San Diego Comic-Con, the creative team seemed to express that Patrick McGoohan supported the project before his death.
The nine minute trailer unveiled at the Con suggests the reimagined tale broaches themes of identity, faith and belief, and concepts of freedom–all useful components in modern myth making.
If Battlestar Galactica is any indication, remakes and reimaginings can work, and sometimes even surpass the original.
In The Prisoner, “Number Six” (Jim Caviezel) finds himself trapped in an isolated environment known as “The Village,” whose inhabitants refer to themselves by number rather than name, under the control of the enigmatic “Number Two” (Ian McKellan).
You only think you’re free…
9/21/2009 – First snow of the season
Residents of Colorado Springs: According to KVOR, it’s snowing in Briargate.
Novelties
While film novelizations tend to sit in the realm of the literary gutter, a small handful have managed transcend the stigma. Most notably is Orson Scott Card’s, The Abyss. Lesser known, however, is Alan Dean Foster’s riff on the original Alien.
Finding a copy of either one of these is a challenge — novelizations on average will only see one printing before they wind up on a rack inside a used book store. But I spotted a copy of Alien sitting in the window of one this week.
I snagged it for a buck fifty.
