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Wait, that's not true What a dipstick. Just remembered that the story - if not the style - of O Brother, Where Art Thou? closely follows Homer's The Odyssey. Homer is even credited as the co-writer..! (Well, at least that gives this thread a basis in literature.) Tobytook

Not sure how any review can be satisfactory if it's limited to "this is good, I watched it" or vice versa. There's got to be some explanation behind it. Otherwise I could just turn round and say Blade Runner is good because I liked it. There'd be no real reason for you to watch it, really...

You mean crisps, right? :) Shame about Ireland going out to Spain on penalties. An odd stastical fact: England have only ever been knocked out of the tournament by Argentina and Germany. (Doesn't bode well for us if we - and you - get through the quarter finals!). Tobytook

I've been having a look at several movie-related discussion sites, and none of them seem to get even halfway into the ideas that the Coen Bros really present - from "Hey, wow, I love these guys" to "God, why can't they make a decent movie?". There's not just not a single glimpse of what they're...

As far as magazines go, I tend to find myself siding with lies. When I was living in Japan, I used to have a subscription to top UK music mag, Q. It's a fairly mainstream affair, but it gets into the modern scene pretty well when necessary. If it hadn't been for Q then I wouldn't have got into...

Yes, but have they been commercially viable, as I metioned before. Don't forget that a film needs to make approximately three times its production cost just to break even. I don't deny the artistic value of a film like Election - personally, I thought it was great (as I did Ghost World -...

Do we grow wiser, or just older? It's interesting how film-makers approach the war genre these days, when you compare the "adventuresome" epics of the late '60s and and '70s to films like Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line which concentrate less on the action and more upon the...

Yeah, I like Amazon because it's cheap and I can just sit back and wait for the book I want. On the other hand, if I'm strolling through town and I come across a bookshop, I'm likely to wander in and see what's on the shelves. Book Clubs in general want some kind of commitment, although I...

Mark Twain Sam Clemens, who took his nom de plume from the depth soundings on the Mississippi River. (Nice cameo in an ST:TNG double episode, too!.) Just got through his Tales, Speeches, Essays and Sketches, published in the UK by Penguin, after about six years. Good chap, all round.

I've been thinking that one reason why some new members refrain from posting is that they may feel The Book Forum is a bit... well, insular. That said, I'd like to welcome the latest registered member - Gracewings - and put him/her slightly on the spot. There's no right or wrong answer...

I've started this kind of thread elsewhere on the Net, and it's usually yielded interesting results. So - what's a good soundtrack to read something by? This will mainly depend on what you're reading, of course. Many people will choose silence, but let's see what kind of responses we get...

I recently finished reading John Irving's The Fourth Hand (see this thread for details), and I'm getting through a novel by WG Sebald called The Emigrants. Sebald is a German national, writing in his native language, currently teaching at the UEA (Norwich, UK). His style has been described...

A terrible admission This is sad to admit, but the reason I first checked out any Brontë novel was because of the Kate Bush song Wuthering Heights. I remember hearing it the morning after a monumentally drunken party in Aberdeen, after the final performance of an AIDS-themed play that I was...

Short and... well, short That was a brief addition, loci. Does your e-handle refer to mathematical - and vicariously, literary - precision, or a metaphysical "right here, right now" point of view? (Or are you just mis-spelling the name of the Norse god of mischief? Or a clever mixture of...

Just looking through my copy of the book now. I read it in 1996, when it was first published in paperback in the UK, but I never considered it as a candidate for film adaptation. It was too... I don't know - clever, maybe? (That sounds horribly snobbish, doesn't it?) It is a very funny...

Not terribly literary - and very OT - but is anyone else interested in the World Cup this year? I tend to take a very disinterested approach to football generally, but I do get into the World Cup when it rolls around. This is less to do with the actual sport, and more to do with the fact...

Slight concern Don't take this the wrong way but (cue me putting across something in exactly the wrong way) do you register with discussion webites like this one simply to advertise your "services" (as it were), or do you intend to take an active part in conversation threads? Tobytook

Spawn, eh? What else were you into before you got out of the comics scene? Judging from your profile, you're pretty young, so you might have come to comics at a low point (creatively) in terms of the industry. I agree that it can be expensive if you get seriously involved, and there's a...

Yeah, I'd have to go along with that. She's certainly the critics' choice, too. One of the most outstanding things about her, for me, is that she isn't perfect. Unlike Austen's other famous creations, Elizabeth Bennet (Pride & Prejudice) and Elinor Dashwood (Sense & Sensibility), Emma...

Interesting. Good opening line ("Memory is a device..."). Anyway, I think the second part sort of scuppers the good opening line. Some things can be remembered despite not ever having happened. (Weird but true - think how many vivid images are locked in your memory that never really...