Quote:
Originally posted by Captain
No one ever made me read Goodbye, Mr. Chips, which up until now I thought was just a mediocre movie, but I have to agree on Billy Budd. And Melville is otherwise a big old favorite. Did he just need some cash or something?
But the most annoying was undoubtedly when the teachers decided to make great literature more accessible by showing us really bad PBS movies of great books.
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BB is written in that strange passive voice they must've used at the time. The hanging scene, where Melville tries to get all classy on our asses by refusing to describe the physical drop, sucks. You don't lead someoby along for 20 chapters and then give them a clouded, barely discernible "money shot" at the plot's climax. It needed to say, simply "Billy dropped, and his neck snapped, and his body moved not a centimeter save the subtle shifting caused by the waves." Melville stretches that simple fucking point for 8000 words, and tops it with some absurd shit about Billy "rising like a rose in the sun" or some other such silly shit. It reminds me of the end of Contact... "The Aliens look like her dead father? All that shit so she could get ssome cheapass near death experience? Fuuuuuck Sagan."
