Weird Wednesday: Why Movie Dialogue is So Often Unintelligible

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https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/

I sympathize with most of what they’re talking about, but I disapprove of their attempt to throw Frank Herbert’s world-building under the bus for Dune Part 1’s dialogue issues. That’s really on the actors. The easiest characters for me to understand in terms of dialogue in that movie were Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac, some stage experience plus prior sci-fi experience plus voice-acting experience) and Chani (Zendaya, singing experience, by extension at least some stage experience, also some sci-fi experience). The hardest to understand were Paul (Timothee Chalamet, practitioner of the Meisner technique, which values improvisation, emotions and “authenticity” above wording), Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson, ESL speaker), and Stilgar (Javier Bardem, ESL speaker).

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Weird Wednesday: Why is It Furry?

Posted on Posted in Art, Cool Books, Weird Science, WritingLeave a comment

I generally like Moleskine notebooks. I don’t have any good reason for it. They feel right in the hand (do you know that bit in Princess Bride, the book, about a sword’s balance? Like that). The fancy limited editions make easier for me to keep tabs on where particular ideas might be: alot of the early concept work for Star Master is in the yellowish orange Gundam notebook, my initial reactions to seeing Orgoglio e Preguidizio for the first time are in the green and beige Oz notebook, but also some of them were later transcribed to the blue 007 notebook, which also houses an awful lot of fantasy mystery brainstorming, and so on. I’ve even found a velvet-covered one at a price I could live with. Even so, I find myself asking, why is there a furry moleskine? And why is it sold out?

Weird Wednesday: So, About NaNoWriMo…

Posted on Posted in Music, NaNoWriMo, Space Opera, WritingTagged Leave a comment

Right now, I’m still revising the sequel to Shadow Captain. So, basically, this is going to be more of a NaNoEdMo until I get that completed. If I somehow miraculously get done in the first half of November, I might try for an actual first-drafting project, in the NaNo tradition. I have occasionally managed full 50K words in two-ish weeks, but it’s been a long time. So, here’s a cover version of my NaNoWriMo theme song, because somehow this situation doesn’t seem to call for Jerry Reed.

Weird Wednesday: Poohs and Prejudice

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Okay, that might have been a overly click-baity way of talking about the fact that A. A. Milne (author of Winnie-the-Pooh), once adapted Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for the stage. The BBC broadcast a radio version in 1967, with Derek Jacobi voicing Darcy. Surviving copies of the play in book-form will set you back a few hundred dollars, but you can listen to the radio adaptation for free.