![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Oct. 8th, 2005 04:18 pmAfter having the DVD for years, I finally got around to watching Being John Malkovich. Charlie Kaufman is a messed up guy.
Also, read Dilvish, the Damned by Roger Zelazny, continuing through his oeuvre. It's an interesting set of short stories about the same character, somewhere between a continuous story and a bundle of vignettes, written over an eighteen-year period. Not all of the stories were written in chronological order, but by and large they were. The early stories have a pleasantly simplistic adventure style to them, which gradually gives way to a more verbose, philosophical style. The next in the set is really The Changing Land, verbose enough that it's a novel. The conceptual development hangs together fairly well, and the change in style over the course of the book is interesting, but we don't really get any development of the main characters. I find this a bit irksome, particularly as our hero is frequently bailed out by his powerful and flawless sidekick. If the latter's seemingly interesting story had been developed more, he might not have seemed like such a constant deus ex machina. I enjoyed the book throughout, but I think the later parts were rather weaker. I'm coming to the conclusion that Zelazny's work basically went from good to mediocre around 1977.
Also, read Dilvish, the Damned by Roger Zelazny, continuing through his oeuvre. It's an interesting set of short stories about the same character, somewhere between a continuous story and a bundle of vignettes, written over an eighteen-year period. Not all of the stories were written in chronological order, but by and large they were. The early stories have a pleasantly simplistic adventure style to them, which gradually gives way to a more verbose, philosophical style. The next in the set is really The Changing Land, verbose enough that it's a novel. The conceptual development hangs together fairly well, and the change in style over the course of the book is interesting, but we don't really get any development of the main characters. I find this a bit irksome, particularly as our hero is frequently bailed out by his powerful and flawless sidekick. If the latter's seemingly interesting story had been developed more, he might not have seemed like such a constant deus ex machina. I enjoyed the book throughout, but I think the later parts were rather weaker. I'm coming to the conclusion that Zelazny's work basically went from good to mediocre around 1977.
