Noiseless Chatter Archive

Before I leave on vacation I like to post a little “Behave yourselves!” notice. Not that you don’t…it’s just that I won’t be around for a week to monitor posts, so try not to get angry at each other. If you do get mad at someone, track them down in real life and beat them up so we can keep Noiseless Chatter civil! Also, if you notice any spam while I’m gone, trust me; I’ll clean it up the moment I get back. Don’t respond to it, please, because that makes it more difficult to delete after the fact. So far, so similar-to-every-vacation-message-I’ve-ever-posted. But that changes here! Because I’m not going to apologize for the lack of content; I’ve got loads of stuff locked and loaded, so stick around and enjoy! That includes new ALF reviews and the conclusion to Trilogy of Terror on Halloween, with a look at The World’s End. It also includes Arts in Entertainment author spotlights, so check those out, and please pledge to make this series a reality and get copies of...

Over the next few days, we’ll be turning the spotlight over to the authors featured in the Arts in Entertainment series. This is your chance to meet them and get a sense of exactly why you’ll want to read their books. As of right now we are just over 25% funding, but we still have a ways to go! Every dollar helps make a great series a reality, so please support the Kickstarter today to help it come to life. Here’s Zachary Kaplan to tell you about his book on Synecdoche, New York , and to give you a taste of just how great a series this will be. What made you decide to pitch to this project? When I signed on to the project, I had no idea the path my life would take. Synecdoche, New York had always meant a lot to me. I’d always been a diehard fan of Charlie Kaufman’s work; his sense of humor and unique style seemed to meld a bleak, anxiety-prone outlook with a sense of pushing through the morass, of achieving a true, genuine happiness. When I saw Synecdoche for the firs...

Like its predecessor Shaun of the Dead , Hot Fuzz is a buddy comedy masquerading as a genre pastiche. But unlike Shaun of the Dead , it’s at times difficult to distinguish from the films that inspired it. Whereas that earlier film built an entirely independent narrative about its characters that just happened to unfold alongside a zombie apocalypse — and whereas The World’s End built an entirely independent narrative about its characters that just happened to unfold alongside a body-snatcher invasion — Hot Fuzz is actually what it seems to be. Overall, it’s not a pastiche; it’s a film that has jokes in it, but otherwise fits snugly into one well-defined genre. Which makes it feel like an outlier in the Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy. It’s not a cop film that keeps encroaching on a smaller, more personal film; it’s a cop film. In fact, it’s a cop film that keeps getting encroached upon by a slasher film, a whodunit, and a film about a murderous cult. Shaun of the Dead ...

Over the next few days, we’ll be turning the spotlight over to the authors featured in the Arts in Entertainment series. This is your chance to meet them and get a sense of exactly why you’ll want to read their books. As of right now we are still south of 25% funding, but we can make it! Every dollar helps make a great series a reality, so please support the Kickstarter today to help it come to life. Here’s Catie Osborn to tell you about her book on Titus Andronicus , and to give you a taste of just how great a series this will be. What made you decide to pitch to this project? My life is complicated. I’m not famous, except in some small corners of the internet. My areas of passion and expertise are skills and trades that generally stopped existing 400 years ago. I’m going to grad school for Shakespeare and I have a blacksmith shop in my barn. I’m weird. But I am also extraordinarily lucky. I found the thing I love: Shakespeare. The bummer about loving Shakespeare (a...

As I’m sure you’ve all seen in your Facebook feeds for months, today is the day Gordon Shumway travels through time. Right? I think that’s right. Anyway, star commenter, Perfect Strangers devotee , and all around great fella Casey Roberson contributed his artistic talents to bring an original time-traveling ALF adventure to life. And I hope you enjoy it. It’s everything I’m sure the actual comics were not! So please enjoy this special installment of ALF Reviews. I assure you it’s far better than anything I have to say about “Wanted: Dead or Alive.” …far, far better. (I encourage you to click the images below in order to see them in their full and deserving glory, and check out Casey’s slightly more respectable output here .) Without further ado: ALF TO THE FUTURE

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. Am I breaking the rules by covering a TV show? In a word: no, because I make the rules. But in a few slightly more respectful words: maybe, but I think it raises an interesting discussion. The mere fact that I’ve chosen to spotlight a segment of The Simpsons ‘ first Halloween special should tell you that I think it’s as worthy of consideration as anything else I’ve covered here. Then again, the mere fact that I feel the need to open with an explanation says something about the comparatively smaller merit we assign to television. Had The Raven — this version, this length, this exact cut — aired as a short film in theaters, there’d be no question. But instead it’s a segment of an epi...