Noiseless Chatter Archive

When information about Red Dwarf XI started spilling out, it was “Give & Take” that intrigued me most. The plot sounded great. The images of the scary-looking medical robot were genuinely menacing. The clips were action-heavy and atmospheric. So “Give & Take” was always the one I was really looking forward to seeing. And now I’ve seen it, and it was okay. It wasn’t bad, and I’m not even disappointed that it didn’t match my specific expectations. It did something a bit different from what I expected, and that’s fine. In fact, I like a lot of what it tried to do. It’s just that I wasn’t especially thrilled by the actual execution. The plot does indeed focus around a deranged medical robot…for a short time, at least. We get a bit of buildup before the robot is revealed, and then he’s dealt with fairly quickly. The rest of the episode has to do with the fallout from the crew’s encounter with him…namely the fact that he snatched Lister’s kidneys. And it was ...

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. There’s an extra layer of scrutiny that gets applied to literary adaptations. In addition to the things we judge in all films — the script, the acting, the directing, the editing, etc. — we ask what a director did, or failed to do, with the source material. A film might be great and still be a poor adaptation, which leads to a kind of ancillary disappointment that a wholly original film wouldn’t have to worry about. And directors know this. How much they let it shape or inform their approach is up to them, but they know — and have always known — that fans of the original text will watch an adaptation with certain expectations in mind. I’m not saying that it is a director’s duty to mee...

“Twentica” seemed to be a pretty divisive episode. I don’t read other reviews until after I post my own, so I was pretty surprised to learn this. To me it was a clear return to form, and it measured up pretty well to the show’s glory years. I resisted the urge to nitpick because anything I could have pointed out would have paled in comparison to the much more important takeaway: this was an episode of Red Dwarf that I genuinely enjoyed. I’ll take a few dumb lines or sloppy edits any day if the overall product is strong enough. “Twentica” was strong enough. “Samsara,” bless its well-intentioned little heart, is not. I’ll say this right now: it wasn’t bad. It was also far better, and more enjoyable, and funnier, than the weaker episodes of series X. Should “Samsara” turn out to be one of the weaker episodes of XI, then that marks a kind of progress, and a welcome one. The concept behind “Samsara” is…well, it’s not bad, but it is a bit clunky. Whereas “Twentica” too...

Four years ago, I bitched endlessly about Red Dwarf X , but I’d like to think that I bitched with purpose. It’s not that the series was bad, exactly. It’s more that it was…instructively flawed. When something worked, it worked quite well. When something didn’t work, all the guts were spilling out of it and it was impossible to resist sifting through them to see what went wrong. Watching those episodes at times felt like performing an autopsy. You’re piecing together what little information you have to try to make sense of why the thing died in the first place. Series X wasn’t doomed to disappoint. The episodes had intriguing ideas . Classic Dwarf setups . Great opening stretches . Erm… decent lighting ? And two episodes were…actually kinda good. One of which felt like a genuine classic , and one of which took some time to explore its richest character . In my review of that latter episode, I wrote this: “The Beginning” might well represent the beginning of such ...

In a few days we’ll be playing Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse . Well, I say we, but really I’ll have to wait a bit as I’ll be out of the country for a few weeks. So it’s actually everyone but me, and I think you’re all jerks. Shin Megami Tensei IV is one of my favorite role playing games of all time. It may well be one of my favorite games of all time. It’s not perfect, but I never asked it to be. I bought it expecting a fun and hopefully engaging adventure. I ended up with one of the most unexpectedly profound narrative experiences gaming has given me. In spite of its actual flaws — a confusing map screen, unclear objectives, repetitive side quests — it’s a work of hideous beauty. It’s a dark, dismal meditation on free will, on identity, on the very concept of progress, both in the game and in reality. (The more advanced society, ironically, is the backward one.) It also has one of the all-time great gaming soundtracks, so even if you don’t want to think you...