Noiseless Chatter Archive

Fiction into Film is a series devoted to page-to-screen adaptations. The process of translating prose to the visual medium is a tricky and only intermittently successful one, but even the fumbles provide a great platform for understanding stories, and why they affect us the way they do. It’s mandatory in any discussion of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s masterpiece to mention that the film’s very trailer asked, “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita ?” The implication was an obvious one; Nabokov’s original novel was incredibly popular, and its cultural reputation preceded it. Its reputation helped to sell the book, but not to engender any kind of understanding. As far as anyone knew, Lolita was a filthy book. Just god-awful, stomach churning stuff. It was page after page of vivid depravity, a blast of societal rot so potent that merely walking past a copy of it was enough to damn your soul for all eternity. “How did they…?” was a question th...

Just a quick update. A reader asked me if there’s anything I could do about an ad he keeps getting on this site. It’s a video, he says, that autoplays and he can’t find a way to shut it off. The answer is yes, I can do something about it. However it’s a bit more complicated than it might seem. On this page there should be two ads. I don’t intend to add more — I think that’s plenty — but I don’t determine their content. The ads are served by Google, and are specific to your own browsing history. Obviously this doesn’t imply that you’re getting obnoxious ads because you’re searching for obnoxious things; it just means that if you search for, say, computer repair, you’ll get ads related (however tangentially) to computer repair, and some of those might be obnoxious. The reason I bring this up is as follows: your browsing history is different from mine. So if you contact me about an ad in which a CGI dog screams profanities at you and your children, the odds are very g...

  ALF Reviews: “Baby Love” (season 3, episode 16) Well, I had an extra week to think up something interesting to say about “Baby Love,” and I’ll warn you right up front that I’ve probably failed. Bad episodes of  ALF  are a common occurrence, but usually they’re slapped together nonsense (“Strangers in the Night,” “We Are Family”), batshit nonsense (“A Little Bit of Soap,” “Hail to the Chief”), or solid ideas that nevertheless are reduced to nonsense (“Wild Thing,” “Hide Away”). But, every so often, you get one that’s just…there. It’s an episode. It happens. And then it’s over. And that’s “Baby Love.” It opens with Willie and Kate discussing baby names. He proposes Cameron for a boy, or Melissa for a girl, because he’s a big fan of both  Full House  and  Clarissa Explains it All. The screen grab above says everything about the relationship between these soon-to-be parents of three. Even when she’s heavy with his oily seed, Willie sits apart from his wife, r...