Joel Morris Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Joel Morris

The fetishisation of improv, and winging it, always seems to spring from a mistrust of the writing process, of writers. The way Kubrick dismissed Arthur C Clarke’s excellent functional story for 2001. I mean, it wouldn’t be *worse* for having the actual writer’s ideas in it.

Joel Morris

@RobinKyne In Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs the Gen X coders in it start watching films on FFWD and I remember thinking “woaaah”.

Joel Morris

@loftinopanevino The piece says he didn't want to talk about his art, but his annotations to his personal Calvin and Hobbes anthology are amongst the best writing on comedy and comic craft ever printed. (Alongside Gary Larson's margin notes in The Prehistory of the Far Side.)

Joel Morris

Proposal: Matilda not just be the opening beat of a story where a bright young girl is unfairly overlooked by adults, repeated until the end where a Stephen King book turns up.

Joel Morris

@greg_jenner @Sonic_Screwup The simplest way to understand it is to watch a directors’ cut that ruins a loved film. It’s strange how much the mass culture understands that, say George Lucas tinkered and spoilt their childhood Star Wars, but doesn’t understand that film storytelling is iterative, fragile.

Joel Morris

@TheSimonEvans @rallen78 I will fight for any rewrites to be done by sympathetic professional writers, not internal teams. So though I’m sad that Michael Bond’s balanced “sticky bears is ninepence” is longer in Paddington’s first adventure, I know *why*. Changes for a modern audience aren’t bad per se.

Joel Morris

@rufusjones1 @caitlinmoran James Burke, Douglas Adams, Peter Buck. Oh, and Peter Davison’s version of Doctor Who seemed quite empoweringly nervous and soft. I hadn’t seen that as a male icon before. I liked that as a kid.

Out of stock

Joel Morris

Ooh! This is really great! Remember reviewing Quantum of Solace (the short story) when the film came out and being stunned by how Fleming questions Bond’s doomed, trapped retro-masculinity in his books. The films only do that twice really (in the films that divided audiences). https://t.co/lBrhua99Pb

Joel Morris

@darrellmaclaine Ha! The telly version is great. And it works because there’s no surprise. Just inevitability. Which is a great trick for horror. Like Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. If he was worried about women doing it better, that’s the shadow, I suppose.

Joel Morris

@ghosteggs @Nickiquote I haven’t seen the new Matilda but as I said about the Gene Wilder Wonka, I like the fixes that screenwriters have to do to make his stories satisfy as films, where they can’t get away with being fun bedtime snippets. The changes are very revealing.