And just because I'm hanging out
Dec. 20th, 2007 09:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjFor fun: Wednesday, for work, I got to go on a "sharing best practices" tour of a major biotech company located in South San Francisco whose name starts with "G". There were 8 of us from the Big B (half from Berkeley, half from our new Emeryville site) so the guy organizing it ordered a shuttle van to take us over there. What we got was a stretch limo. Complete with mini-bar (but, alas, no potables other than soda). Nothing quite like pulling up to the security entrance of one of your competitors in a limo. There was, however, some good-natured joking about where our year-end bonuses were going. (Truth to tell, it was probably the same cost as a similarly-sized van.)
A brief review: Books 1 & 2 of The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher (No spoilers) Given that television tends to screw up most stories that it interprets to some degree, my default assumption is that if I like the tv adaptation of something, I'll probably like the original. And the tv series based on the supernatural mystery series The Dresden Files stood out as one of the better members of this tv season's inexplicable crop of supernatural adventure/mystery series. (I figure when a single season includes not one but two vampire-police-procedural series, then the word "inexplicable" can be brought into play.) Alas, in this case the books didn't infect me in quite the way the tv show did. The key difference seems to be in sub-genre emphasis. Butcher's novels blend the supernatural with a good old fashioned hard-boiled detective sensibility. The protagonist is a skilled magician (in the non-stage sense) but otherwise checks off all the hard-boiled tropes including regular fisticuffs, seedy living-on-the-financial-edge digs, romantic entanglements with a member of the press, and an overall pessimistic cast to life. It's a smooth and functional blend, but I'm just not that into the whole hard-boiled thing. The tv show had a somewhat different blend: more emphasis on the sense-of-wonder aspects of the supernatural (where the books have a more mechanistic feel), more Otherworldly Stuff less underworld stuff. The novels follow the standard theory that a hard-boiled protagonist must take three times as much physical punishment as any human being can function under, and will still come up swinging at the end. I tend to find this less believable than vampires and werewolves, somehow. So I probably won't be reading the rest of the series. A pity. And I'm not saying that the tv show was better than the novels -- they aren't badly written and they're actually quite nice representatives of the genre. It's just that the tv show better intersected with my own entertainment interests than the books did.
A brief review: Books 1 & 2 of The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher (No spoilers) Given that television tends to screw up most stories that it interprets to some degree, my default assumption is that if I like the tv adaptation of something, I'll probably like the original. And the tv series based on the supernatural mystery series The Dresden Files stood out as one of the better members of this tv season's inexplicable crop of supernatural adventure/mystery series. (I figure when a single season includes not one but two vampire-police-procedural series, then the word "inexplicable" can be brought into play.) Alas, in this case the books didn't infect me in quite the way the tv show did. The key difference seems to be in sub-genre emphasis. Butcher's novels blend the supernatural with a good old fashioned hard-boiled detective sensibility. The protagonist is a skilled magician (in the non-stage sense) but otherwise checks off all the hard-boiled tropes including regular fisticuffs, seedy living-on-the-financial-edge digs, romantic entanglements with a member of the press, and an overall pessimistic cast to life. It's a smooth and functional blend, but I'm just not that into the whole hard-boiled thing. The tv show had a somewhat different blend: more emphasis on the sense-of-wonder aspects of the supernatural (where the books have a more mechanistic feel), more Otherworldly Stuff less underworld stuff. The novels follow the standard theory that a hard-boiled protagonist must take three times as much physical punishment as any human being can function under, and will still come up swinging at the end. I tend to find this less believable than vampires and werewolves, somehow. So I probably won't be reading the rest of the series. A pity. And I'm not saying that the tv show was better than the novels -- they aren't badly written and they're actually quite nice representatives of the genre. It's just that the tv show better intersected with my own entertainment interests than the books did.
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Re: "hard-boiled" is a good description....
Date: 2007-12-22 02:09 pm (UTC)I've come to look seriously askance at written -- or even moreso, visual -- portrayals of unrealistic physical violence. When the cause/effect ceases to have any connection with the reader/observer's own experiences, then it strikes me as becoming near-meaningless as a dramatic tool. It's a more specialized version of "if I know the protagonist isn't going to get killed, where's the tension?"