Deltora Quest , Or maybe Frog and Toad would be better and deltora quest in a year if he's having some trouble

Deltora quest is a fantasy kingdom adventure story with some simple riddles and puzzles, not super popular in America but every kid that reads deltora quest gets hooked on them

I don't really see how this applies to the usefulness of film critics.

To me at least, there are the movies I like. It is my assumption that there is more that groups these movies than just me liking them. I look to knowledgeable critics to define the elements that unite movies I like; which are, with good odds, movie elements that I like, and then to those critics to find new/other movies that I have not seen but have those elements and presumably I would enjoy.

popular opinion/general audiences typically can't define why they like what they like. Someone saying "I liked Top Gun because it's cool" tells me nothing about if it'd be a movie I'm likely to enjoy and then spend my time watching.

But I don't read film critics that call people stupid for not liking the movies they consider good so maybe that's the disconnect between this post and I. Youtube reaction bait incendiary critics are trying to get engagement more than they're trying to consider movies

I'm guessing you never really got into the rhythm/mantra state of the book. It's an incredible accomplishment the way it crafts that meditative sensation. I'm guessing you would not like the film Jeanne Dielman ahaha, I think they both kinda tackle the same thing and in a similar way

For sure,

Twin Peaks, Breaking Bad, Succession, The Sopranos makes for a good TV all time immemorial combo

chatgpt writing and the like is very surface level. It typically has correct grammar but there's only as much thought put in as there is by a relatively new writer. You can definitely find middle schoolers writing at the level it outputs, and probably quite a few middle schoolers already past it.

It just doesn't seem to be able to understand how to combine ideas or rely on ideas from prior paragraphs/sections to forward a thesis. I also think most of the automated outputs I've seen have poor word choice and not much attention to the actual flow, language, etc. even when it's trained on language from writers who excel at that.

I wonder if even the pulpiest of books, for undiscerning audiences, could be suitably replicated by ai writing. Like I think even people with low standards for books currently have much higher standards than what it puts out. Maybe in a decade or something those writers may feel some pressure but I kind of doubt it

breaking bad season 1 wasn't slow or boring, and big action or conflict aren't necessarily interesting

people ask because they don't want to gamble their time on whether a show will improve or not. A lot of the time the first episode of a show will serve as a synecdoche for the whole thing, so if it's bad or mediocre it makes me assume that the whole thing is bad or mediocre in a similar manner. Episodic media should still be good on an episode to episode basis.

Good/bad will mean different things to different people, but what they experience is what they will use to make a decision, if theyre asking others then theyre just trying to make a more informed decision influenced by people who have already invested time into a show.

Lately I've felt like mediocre shows are putting the meat of their stories into the beginning and end of seasons, with middle episodes serving as just meandering diversions that don't really serve to forward any thesis/concepts. I would like to avoid these shows in the future so I'll look to reviews I trust

I think Mean Girls is a masterpiece of the New Sincerity Movement (Post-post modern). The way it uses irony to burn down flawed, Hughesque, perceptions of teenage existence and high school, and then builds a sincere vision at the end fulfills the thesis in an inspired way.

Not to mention it's a comedy where nearly every joke elicits a laugh, and where setups service multiple punchlines, and punchlines serve as setups for future jokes.

and typically film lags behind literary movements, so I think Mean Girls is also quite ahead of its time which is why i's still so enjoyable to watch today

But temple of doom is bad

All of Damien Chazelle's movies are about the suffering artist, how to be a "real" artist you have to be willing to sacrifice everything. I'm kind of tired of his movies because of it

the peak of my non-fiction read was in college, and now I read technical manuals (for work so I don't really keep this in the same space of my brain as "reading") and occasionally biographies but vastly more fiction

I'm way better at appreciating the art of fiction than non-fiction so it interests me more

it's a fun hypothetical/possibility, are you alright?

If he and his daughter are writing and have creative control then I dont really care what the title is

A Memory Called Empire was the last book I finished in one sitting

maybe he wants to make a movie his kids can watch, great sleuthing I would love this to be true

I felt like the movie was torn between making a Land of the Lost movie and making a funny satirical one, like at times it was more satirical but it didn't keep up the pace of jokes and got bogged down in the land of the lost material

It could have been a lot funnier, as it is it's just kind of a novelty

The Sweetest Things I think fails both Bechdel and reverse Bechdel test which is quite the accomplishment

if that's like just rando users of goodreads or something vs verified reviewers it kind of makes sense, there's no bar for quality for use of the platform. At least statements like those you quoted make it pretty easy to disregard useless reviews

“fiction should be void of the authors voice/opinion”

that's a baffling statement and if I saw that in a review I would just stop reading that review and make a mental note never to read a review by that person again

"isn't it likely that any such writing would elicit the same feelings regardless of how the words were organized?"

is this your experience with reading? Because it is as far opposite of mine as conceivable

the author organized the words into that order so even if you take away something that they never could have expected or aimed for I think you still need to give some credit where it's due.

Words organized in a different order wouldn't have caused you to feel or think about that revelation

I think it's about how there are kind of epochs of humanity, like the difference between most animals and humans seems massive right, so then look forward and try to imagine what that next epoch would be like where our current state is an animal compared to the next? So the reflection in the first section looks at humans when we were similar to animals and then a key innovation that helped us progress, tools.

then we jump ahead and while it's the future it's clear that we're looking at the same humans as ourselves. We see Hal and Hal is kind of an alternative, just as if another set of animals had won in the reflection section.

Then we jump to the next thing, the next big progression.

Inherent Vice is fun for this because the main character is sorting through the smoky mystery just as much as the audience, and you feel like you uncover the truth with him

based on the Pynchon book.

But yeah my partner and I love doing this, or trying to figure out the thought process behind a scene, like why were decisions made to construct a scene the way it was, how it feeds into the thesis of the movie

I think all of Nick Harkaway's books are excellent, character focused sci-fi