Angels & Demons

[Dust Bunnies]

There will be a movie based off of one of Dan Brown's books named Angels & Demons. It will star Tom Hanks, the Vatican is boycotting it. :)

It is about the Illuminati and they have to go under the Vatican. Saw a commercial for it during the NCAA (College Basketball).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_&_Demons_(film)

Comments?

[Bitter Ashes]

Ooh! I loved the book! It was the first Dan Brown book I ever read. I loved it and ended up scouring charity shops until I had them all.
I'm glad Tom Hanks is doing it. I feel he is an excellent actor and will certainly do the part justice.
Can you tell I'm excitied? :D

[Dust Bunnies]

Yes, Alex Jones is excited too. :P

Was the book that good?

[Invincible Summer]

Ooh! I loved the book! It was the first Dan Brown book I ever read. I loved it and ended up scouring charity shops until I had them all.
I'm glad Tom Hanks is doing it. I feel he is an excellent actor and will certainly do the part justice.
Can you tell I'm excitied? :D

A lot of people slag Dan Brown for being a bad writer, and I can understand how his pastiche of random pseudo-historical facts can be viewed as "not real writing," but I get so engrossed into his books anyway and I'll most likely see the movie.

[Bitter Ashes]

A lot of people slag Dan Brown for being a bad writer, and I can understand how his pastiche of random pseudo-historical facts can be viewed as "not real writing," but I get so engrossed into his books anyway and I'll most likely see the movie.
I can read even the lousiest plot so long as it's written well.
A good writer can make the most mundane, or silly, easy to read. I think it's down to the way they actualy construct thier sentances with punctuation and grammer and a vocabulary that the reader can warm to. Read Douglas Adams if you dont believe me. In one of his books he writes for 3 or 4 pages about one of his characters running about 20 feet to bowl a cricket ball in the tiniest detail and it's great! 3-4 pages takes me about 6-8 minutes to read. Can you imagine watching an ultra-slow-motion cricket pitch on TV, or at the cinema, for a whole 6-8 minutes and it bieng intresting? Me neither. I think it goes to show how good a writer he is if he can pull that off. Maybe he was just showing off. lol
It's for the same reasons that I can love reading The Hobbit more than Return of the King, because although the plot of Return of the King is a lot better, I felt it wasnt written as well and it was actualy painful at times to read more than one or two pages in a single sitting. A good book is one where you can plough through half of the book before you realise that you've been sat in the same place for half the day. Dan Brown did that for me and I've missed more than a few train stops because of him! lol
As a personal note to Dan Brown though, it would have saved himself a lot of grief if, he'd done what everyone else does and just put his foreword as "Based on real life" rather than "Everything in this book is true".

[Holden Caulfield]

A lot of people slag Dan Brown for being a bad writer, and I can understand how his pastiche of random pseudo-historical facts can be viewed as "not real writing," but I get so engrossed into his books anyway and I'll most likely see the movie.

all his books have the same plot, with the same characters, but with the names changed,
he passes off bullshit as fact,
idiots think its all true.

that said i enjoyed reading them, until i had finished when i just felt dirty for reading such shit

[ZeroNowhere]

As a personal note to Dan Brown though, it would have saved himself a lot of grief if, he'd done what everyone else does and just put his foreword as "Based on real life" rather than "Everything in this book is true".
Um, that was done to sell more copies, and most probably worked.

[Invincible Summer]

I can read even the lousiest plot so long as it's written well.
A good writer can make the most mundane, or silly, easy to read. I think it's down to the way they actualy construct thier sentances with punctuation and grammer and a vocabulary that the reader can warm to. Read Douglas Adams if you dont believe me. In one of his books he writes for 3 or 4 pages about one of his characters running about 20 feet to bowl a cricket ball in the tiniest detail and it's great! 3-4 pages takes me about 6-8 minutes to read. Can you imagine watching an ultra-slow-motion cricket pitch on TV, or at the cinema, for a whole 6-8 minutes and it bieng intresting? Me neither. I think it goes to show how good a writer he is if he can pull that off. Maybe he was just showing off. lol
It's for the same reasons that I can love reading The Hobbit more than Return of the King, because although the plot of Return of the King is a lot better, I felt it wasnt written as well and it was actualy painful at times to read more than one or two pages in a single sitting. A good book is one where you can plough through half of the book before you realise that you've been sat in the same place for half the day. Dan Brown did that for me and I've missed more than a few train stops because of him! lol
As a personal note to Dan Brown though, it would have saved himself a lot of grief if, he'd done what everyone else does and just put his foreword as "Based on real life" rather than "Everything in this book is true".

1) Douglas Adams is brilliant! I remember reading the Hitchhiker's Guide in first year English and having a blast.
2) I can't read Tolkien... it's too damn boring! I mean, it's definitely epic, but after reading a few chapters, I'm like "What the fuck is happening? Are they STILL talking about Tom Bombadil? Jesus fuck!" and put it down.

I thought the movies summed up the most important bits and did the books justice for the most part.

Strange thing is, Tolkien makes me feel the same way as when I read academic sociological journals.


all his books have the same plot, with the same characters, but with the names changed,
he passes off bullshit as fact,
idiots think its all true.

that said i enjoyed reading them, until i had finished when i just felt dirty for reading such shit

Yeah, they're a blast to read, but afterwards you're like "So... that enriched my life by 0%"

[Random Precision]

Agree with Holden. As for Tolkein, not only is he boring as fuck, but a dyed in the wool reactionary as well:


China: Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is undoubtedly the most influential fantasy book ever written. It is the paradigm for the kind of cod-epic, conservative secondary world fantasies discussed above. Obviously there were writers before Tolkien who were very influential--Robert E Howard's Conan books, for example, were written in the 1930s and they're hardly politically radical either--but Tolkien brought various elements to fantasy that made him central. More than previous writers he constructed an elaborate history, geography, linguistics, mythology, etc for his invented world, and fitted his narrative into that. Of course world creation had gone on before--Howard's Hyboria, Fritz Leiber's Nehwon, Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique--but Tolkien saw the building of an internally consistent secondary world as central to the project of what he called 'fairy' and what we would now call fantasy.

The sometimes obsessive focus on the secondary world is typical of post-1960s fantasy. It's easy to mock, but I think it can be a very interesting kind of project. It often involves great creativity and inventiveness, and it's a very powerful way for effecting the particularly strong kind of suspension of disbelief that fantasy involves. That's why fantasy fans are often so neurotic about the maintenance of consistency--authors who lose track of their own world and contradict themselves can't get away with it. (It's what I think of as 'geek critique': 'In book two of the Elfmoon Quintilogy you said the Redfang mountains were two days ride north of the city, but in book four it takes Bronmor three days to get there...')

Tolkien's worldview was resolutely rural, petty bourgeois, conservative, anti-modernist, misanthropically Christian and anti-intellectual. That comes across very strongly in his fiction and his non-fiction. Michael Moorcock has written brilliantly on this in his book Wizardry and Wild Romance (1987):

The little hills and woods of that Surrey of the mind, the Shire [where the protagonist 'hobbits' live], are 'safe' but the wild landscapes everywhere beyond the Shire are 'dangerous'... Lord of the Rings is a pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle class... If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron [the 'evil' dark lord] and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the mob--mindless football supporters throwing their beer bottles over the fence--the worst aspect of modern urban society represented as the whole by the a fearful, backward-yearning class.
In opposing what he called the Robot Age, Tolkien counterposes it with a past that of course never existed. He has no systematic opposition to modernity--just a terrified wittering about 'better days'. He opposes chaos with moderation, which is why his 'revolt' against modernity is in fact just a grumbling quiescence.

For Tolkien, the function of his fantasy fiction is 'consolation'. If you read his essay 'On Fairy Tales' you find that, for him, central to fantasy is 'the consolation of the happy ending'. He pretends that such a happy ending is something that occurs 'miraculously', 'never to be counted on to recur'. But that pretence of contingency is idiotic, in that immediately previously he claims that 'all complete fairy stories must have it [the happy ending]. It is its highest function.' In other words, far from 'never being counted to recur', the writer and reader know that to qualify as fantasy, a 'consolatory' happy ending will recur in every story, and you have a theory of fantasy in which 'consolation' is a matter of policy. It's no surprise that this kind of fantasy is conservative. Tolkien's essay is as close as it gets to most modern fantasy's charter, and he's defined fantasy as literature which mollycoddles the reader rather than challenging them.

In Tolkien, the reader is intended to be consoled by the idea that systemic problems come from outside agitators, and that decent people happy with the way things were will win in the end. This is fantasy as literary comfort food. Unfortunately, a lot of Tolkien's heirs--who may not share his politics at all--have taken on many tropes that embed a lot of those notions in their fantasy.

http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj88/newsinger.htm

[Holden Caulfield]

Agree with Holden. As for Tolkein, not only is he boring as fuck, but a dyed in the wool reactionary as well:LotR is one of the few book to film conversions where the film is better, LotR bores the shit out of me.
the Hobbit is better,

Harry Potter is where its at for good trashy fiction tho:thumbup1:

[gorillafuck]

I liked that book a lot, I'll definitely see it.

[LOLseph Stalin]

Ooh! I loved the book! It was the first Dan Brown book I ever read. I loved it and ended up scouring charity shops until I had them all.
I'm glad Tom Hanks is doing it. I feel he is an excellent actor and will certainly do the part justice.
Can you tell I'm excitied? http://www.revleft.com/vb/angels-demons-p1395949/revleft/smilies/biggrin.gif


Great book. It helped that i've read The Da Vinci Code first before Angel & Demons because it kinda gave me a background of some of the things to expect. I actually thought Angels & Demons was the better of the two. However, the Da Vinci code movie didn't really do the book justice although I liked Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon.