Harry and Hermione (Harry Potter spoiler alert!)

When I was reading the Harry Potter books, although J. K. Rowling told a good yarn and plotted her stories well, the romance between Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley never seemed to me to be plausible. It seemed like the author was trying to avoid the obvious narrative device of the leading man and leading woman getting together at the end and was going for the slightly counter-intuitive relationship. It just did not work for me. Harry’s romance and marriage to what’s-her-name was also implausible as can be seen from the fact that I can’t even recall her name (or her face from the films) and remember anything about her except that she was Ron’s sister.
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Can the Noah story be made even worse?

When I wrote about the major Hollywood film Noah starring Russell Crowe as the arkmeister that is being released next month, I suggested that the filmmakers would have a tough time making Yahweh acceptable to the many religious people whom they need to buy tickets because there is no question that the story reveals him to be a monster. I said that I would be curious to see to what extent the filmmaker would go to sanitize Yahweh.
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How the VFX industry in the US is being destroyed

Since today is Oscar day, here is another post about films, albeit a downbeat one about the little noticed but important category of Visual Effects or VFX. I have written several times about the way that the special effects film industry in the US is being steadily destroyed. The reasons are fairly complicated but reader Gordon has sent me an excellent article by David Sirota that provides the clearest explanation for what’s going on.
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Seriously flawed artists: The case of Woody Allen

Nobody’s perfect. The fact that actors and writers and other artists may be personally flawed does not usually cause a problem with appreciating their work because we have learned to (mostly) separate the work of the artist from the person of the artist, so that praise for the artistic work does not mean we like or approve of the artist or the lives they lead. [Read more…]