Noiseless Chatter Archive

  ALF Reviews: “Funeral For a Friend” (season 3, episode 21) Way back when I started this project (almost two years ago, for those keeping track of just how much of my life  ALF  has sucked away) I grabbed a list of episode titles from Wikipedia. That ended up serving as the base for my  main ALF page , with the titles linking to the reviews as they were written. In doing so I didn’t  deliberately  look at the plot summaries, but, of course, I saw some of them. One of those summaries was for this episode…and though I’ve had some pleasant surprises along the way, this is the one I kept looking forward to. See, I’m a sucker for “cute” stories. I don’t know why…maybe it just taps into my memories of childhood and I let my guard down. But ALF getting an ant farm, and being overcome with grief when he accidentally destroys it? I  like  that idea. It’s no more creative than the show’s storylines usually are, but it sounds like a nice idea for a breather...

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. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the film that originally piqued my interest in the process of adaptation. I first saw it in junior high. (This surprises me now, as there’s a good deal of profanity, some nudity, discussions of rape, and simulated masturbation, so we must have had a pretty inattentive substitute that day.) Toward the end of high school, I picked up the novel…and I was shocked by something the moment I started reading it: Chief Bromden was the narrator. This is an experiment I’ve enjoyed repeating over the years. Whenever I meet somebody who’s only seen the film, I casually mention that the book is narrated by the Chief. Every time, to some degree, I’m met with di...