Tintin CanCan

When I was a kid, I used to read the comic-book adventures of Tintin, the boy journalist. I still have a lot of them.

Those were happy escapes, and still can be when the right mood is on.

I think that since the days of the old Buck Rogers, Superman and Tarzan serials, audiences have had a weird relationship with movies made from comics and novels that we typically read by flashlight under the covers. Those media allow us to go slowly, to build the action in our imagination.

Film adaptations zoom ahead, imagining for us, giving characters a voice of their own. To some degree, such films depend on being serialized: we live with those characters in the theater of the imagination, and they cannot be done justice in small doses.

Spielberg and Jackson's Tintin has a lot to recommend it as a film that respects the boy who reads by flashlight.

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Who Goes Darkly

A manifesto addressed to Steven Moffat, awful producer of Doctor Who and wonderful producer of Sherlock, from me and my daughter:

Less is more.

Making a t.v. series is not about the secret you know that the audience doesn't know.  It's about sharing the secrets, and the pleasure between you and the audience.  You have the amateur's delight in having a secret nobody knows.

By the time you get around to revealing your secrets on Doctor Who, you've imposed secret-exhaustion on your clientelle.

Pace yourself, man.  You're good at the miniseries (Sherlock) where you pace the revelations across the series.  But the whole freaking season?  Remember those of us who watch for pleasure each week and not for the Meaning of Life, The Universe, and Everything?  

Yes.  We are annoyed with you.