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. This month’s piece was graciously provided by reader Viktor Tsankov . It is difficult to deny Blade Runner . A cult classic from the director of Alien that stars Han Solo/Indiana Jones in his prime, selected for preservation by the Library of Congress, one of the first cyberpunk works that arguably defined the aesthetic of the genre, consistently voted one of the best sci-fi films by critics and sci-fi fans alike, and influencer of works from the Battlestar Galactica re-imagining to the Ghost in the Shell films, Blade Runner is an aesthetic cultural touchstone that pales in comparison to the work it is based on and the works that came after it. Before going any further, I don’t want to g...

  ALF Reviews: “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s Willie’s Brother” (season 4, episode 7) What is an interloper? In terms of television, at least, an interloper is a character who is introduced to shake up the show’s existing dynamics, nearly always temporarily. (This is due to the nature of an interloper; if the interloper sticks around, the dynamics are no longer “shaken up”…they just change.) Introducing an interloper is one of the easiest things a writer can do to generate conflict. After all, we dislike it in real life when somebody wants to shoulder us out of our routines, so it’s easy to imagine how sitcom characters — routines personified — must feel when somebody saunters in and changes the rules, deliberately or not. That “deliberately or not” bit is important, as an interloper isn’t necessarily a villain, and a villain isn’t necessarily an interloper. Gargamel, for instance, isn’t an interloper, because his interactions with the Smurfs are part of that show’s established dynamic. He ...