Posts Tagged ‘order’

As a reader, I feel that film adaptations of novels can be good but are often inferior to the written works for two reasons. First, given the film’s shorter length, the novel must be condensed and so we lose much of the story. Second, characters are not as well developed because we do not have access to their inner thoughts and motivations as we do in written works. Nevertheless, when movies use their visual and audio capabilities to good effect, they can possess an artistic power greater than that of the written word. A Haunting in Venice, the third of Kenneth Branagh’s adaptations of Agatha Christie’s famous detective Hercule Poirot, is an example of a film being superior to the novel. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night four of us met to discuss the first chapter of G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. The discussion ranged freely from anarchy, chaos and order in the arts to Chesterton’s use of colors and atmosphere, and the possible importance of the dream or nightmare motif to the novel. However, those topics, important and fascinating as they may be, are not what I want to write about here. Rather, the evening revealed something crucial about human nature. Read the rest of this entry »