Noiseless Chatter Archive

Fiction into Film has already gained some pretty awesome traction, due in large part to the official Vladimir Nabokov social profiles sharing my Lolita piece, and John Carpenter himself sharing my writeup on They Live . If you wonder why those have a few thousand likes and shares on Facebook while everything else I write maxes out at about four, there you go. So I’m feeling pretty good about the series, and I have a nice long list of things to cover on what I hope continues to be a monthly basis. But there’s one stubborn holdout: Blade Runner , Ridley Scott’s 1982 adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? This is why I’m asking, openly, if anyone out there would like to cover it. Blade Runner is an important film in general, and I believe firmly that a piece discussing the process of adaptation would make for a great read. It’s something I’d like to have. In fact, the series would feel incomplete without it; it’s a film that people keep sug...

  ALF Reviews: “Like an Old Time Movie” (season 3, episode 24) I think I first made this observation back in season one, and when I did I was just being a smartass. Here we are, though, ending season three, and it’s still held true: there can never be two good episodes of  ALF  in a row. We are coming off of a well-acted, well-scripted, well-observed story about toxic parents…watching ALF jack off to fantasies of being in a silent movie. It’s really awful. And while its placement after “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow” makes it seem worse than it really is, I assure you, it’s still fucking terrible. On the bright side, nothing happens in this dick-heap, so it should be really easy to write about. It opens with the family getting ready to go to a wedding. Hey, cool! Whose wedding? We never find out. How can the writers  still  avoid developing these people after three full years on the air? Well, maybe we can do some deductive reasoning to...

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. How do you ensure that your social satire is remembered and referenced for generations? You cast “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, and you let him shoot a shitload of aliens. …that’s how the original draft of this Fiction into Film began. In the time between that draft and this one, we lost Piper to a heart attack, and my advice is no longer valid. Social satires will be forever poorer for it. Casting a professional wrestler as a lead in your film is something that should probably be handled with caution. For every Andre the Giant in The Princess Bride there’s Hulk Hogan in Santa with Muscles . For every Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson there’s a Jesse “The Body” Ventura. Wrestlers act every time the...