From Page to Screen Part One

It is always very interesting when one of your favorite books makes it onto the screen be it TV or movies. You always wonder if it will be portrayed the way you imagine it. Before the extensive use of CGI and computer effects it was never even attempted. Large scale epics were just way too costly. Only big budget movies could even attempt it.

But it is all different now. The Lord of the Rings being the most prominent example along with Jurassic Park. Computer generated CGI lets you have armies of orcs and elves and dwarves. Even a pissant little series like “Once Upon a Time” can really generate great special effects at a much reduced cost. So books that you never thought could be on the screen are suddenly viable. What is interesting is the ones that they choose and the ones that are successful.

The one that most people point to is George Rape Rape Martins “Game of Thrones.” It has become one of the most popular and talked about fantasy series of all time. Most of it is pretty true to the books. The problem for them is the Martin is famously lazy and can’t seem to produce more books for the series to produce for TV. They caught up to him pretty quickly.

I just bulled through!

Those of youse who have hung around with me on the interwebs know that I have long aspired to be a writer. I have noodled around and put up stuff. Series. Vignettes. Mostly on my old blog. Later some I brought over here. Or started new ones.

I have several books in production. Charley and Meyer about the Origins of the Mafia. A meditation on the Magnificent Seven set in the present day. A Joey Gallo memoir. An alternative history where Huey Long lived and became President. A western featuring Doc Holiday. Some science fiction and fantasy. A whole host of projects in various states of completion. Some ready to go. Some needing a lot of work.

I just get antsy. So I just bull ahead. Just the way I have done it all my life. Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes.

I took a bunch of my old Laura Bush stories from the blog and published them in book form today on Amazon. Now if Sixty the master proofreader glances at it he would go upside my head with a plank because there are an unbelievable number of  errors. Misspellings. Tense errors. Grammar. You name it. But you know what? I don't give a shit. Just the way I write posts. Just rip and write and who gives a shit. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.

I used this as a prototype in the midst of the million and one other things I have to do. I had to put it in pdf format and send it to a service. Create a  cover. Back and forth. Blah blah blah. Screw it. I just pulled the trigger and let the chips fall where they may. It is just the first time out. You always fumble around and don't find the sweet spot the first time out. If you know what I mean?

So it is on sale for the ridiculous price of ninety nine cents. If you put it on your Kindles I would be very appreciative. Especially if you put up a review. Tell you friends and most of all tell all the social justice warriors you know because I think it will appeal to them. They don't understand irony or misdirection but Communists buy sneakers too.

Thanks.

Writing Promt

You’ve been chosen as the last hope of humanity to avoid its total annihilation by a super intelligent AI who will talk to just one more human for an opportunity to change its mind. However, as you talk to it, you discover an awful truth.

Dinosaur thru customs

The Chemistry Of Storytelling

I was googling something -- maybe whether canned corn stores safely in perpetuity and where it belongs in the food pyramid -- and I ran across this diagram of how to write a dramatic story:

link to original

This immediately suggested to me what is known as a generic reaction coordinate in chemistry:

Both diagrams depict action moving left-to-right. Think of the "reactants" on the left side, lower figure as the "exposition" in the top diagram and the "products" as the "denouement."

In chemistry, the climax is known as the transition state. The transition state is the fleeting state where a reaction can go forward or reverse. I believe these notions are covered by the language in the Freytag Pyramid diagram.

Note also that the chemistry plot ends in a higher energy state. Reaction diagrams that end in a lower energy state are possible as well as those that start and finish at the same level. Is this possible in storytelling? Are there uphill stories as as well as downhill ones?

To Wit: A Challenge And Invitation

link to original

That's Mr. Sardonicus on the right, from William Castle's 1961 film, "Mr. Sardonicus." 

Sardonic: Why isn't there a noun form like "sardony"? The word sardonic is curious too and relates back to the island of Sardinia and what those people ate -- things like sardines: link

I get confused keeping the different forms of humor straight. Here's a handy guide I pulled from the linkable OED of English Etymology; the definitions come from H.W. Fowler's The Dictionary Of Modern English Usage.  

device	HUMOR	WIT	SATIRE	SARCASM	INVECTIVE	IRONY	CYNICISM	SARDONIC
motive/aim	discovery	throwing light	amendment	inflicting pain	discredit	exclusiveness	self-justification	self-relief
province	human nature	words & ideas	morals & manners	faults & foibles	misconduct	statement of facts	morals	adversity
method/means	observation	surprise	accentuation	inversion	direct statement	mystification	exposure of nakedness	pessimism
audience	the sympathetic	the intelligent	the self-satisfied	victim & bystander	the public	an inner circle	the respectable	the self

That's a very cool table. I went looking for my copy of Fowler which I bought in college but haven't seen since I can remember. So I just went and bought a copy using Lem's portal. I want to discuss this topic (and that book) at a future date. If anybody else has the book or would like to buy it and follow along at a future date, please do.

What forms of humor do you employ in your writings and comments at Lem's Levity?

"Weird Al" Yankovic - Word Crimes

 

If you can't write in the proper way
If you don't know how to conjugate
Maybe you flunked that class
And maybe now you thought
That people mock you online

The New Yorker: How America Learned to Hear Itself Talk

"Twain earned local notoriety cranking out newspaper columns in Nevada and San Francisco (often for Harte, whom he had befriended), but in 1865 he had his nationwide breakthrough. “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” which Twain had heard improvised by a backwoods forty-niner during a prospecting trip, is a somewhat inexplicable comic anecdote about a man who gets cheated in a bet about his pet frog. But the point of the story is all in the telling. Twain assumes the voice of a grizzled, plausibly drunken old miner who buttonholes an unfortunate visitor and weaves his way through the shaggy-dog tale. Something about the story, Tarnoff writes, “spelled the beginning of the end of the old guard in American letters: the decline of a genteel elite that looked to Europe for its influences and the rise of a literature that drew its inspiration from more native sources.”...



"Twain’s innovation was to invert the expected form of narrative, so that unrefined idiomatic English—what Tarnoff repeatedly calls “living speech”—dominated the storyline rather than being slotted into the framework of distinguished prose like specimens in a Victorian hall of wonders. When Twain assumed the gentleman-scholar affect, it was as satire. (This is the strategy of his first book, “The Innocents Abroad,” which takes the perspective of bumbling middle Americans trying to appear sophisticated as they travel through pretentious Old Europe.) He was happiest when attempting a kind of inspired mimicry, touched with artful exaggeration, of the myriad voices in the American cacophony." (read more)

What blog is hot now: 'My Husband Stupid Record Collection'

"Where I listen to my husband's record collection, one record at a time, and tell you what I think."

I came across the blog "My Husband Stupid Record Collection" via Jesabel's Tracy Moore observation/diatribe (depending on your point of view) that, among other things, she, Tracy, finds it sexist? perhaps? that a woman outsider writing about music... I tell you what, why don't I just copy and paste what she is saying and let you figure out if she makes a good point or not.

A woman named Sarah O'Holla has a tumblr devoted to going through her husband's record collection, reviewing every single album to get to know more about it (and him). She's not a music critic; she's a librarian who waxes earnest/sarcastic about the records while her dude, husband Alex Goldman, who owns 1,500 LPs, offers context. I am not shocked that she's reviewing 1,500 records; I'm in awe that dudes aren't giving her a bunch of terrible shit for it. In fact, many are actually into it.

For the record (har), I, a woman, am way into it, premise-wise. It's cool to show an interest in things the person you love loves, and also, because records... 

But as someone who also wrote about music professionally while female, I can't help but notice the jaw-dropping difference in response to a woman who sits down to riff on music as an admitted outsider being greeted with an enthusiastic thumbs-up by dudes, VERSUS being a woman who sits down to riff on music as an insider and being greeted with a shit-fuck-ton of vitriol by dudes. The latter experience would be mine...

Here, I'm skipping over the part where Tracy cites some of the glowing? praise "My Husband Stupid Record Collection" is getting. NPR & Slate. (question mark after glowing because I'm guessing is glowing, I'm not reading it) Back to Tracy...

... but nobody loves to tell you all the fuck about music like a dude with a bunch of records, trust. So O'Holla may not have gotten direct shit, but in a way, she got shit for not getting shit if that makes sense. Because what O'Holla is doing fits really perfectly into a very traditional notion about how men impart knowledge to women, especially music. That is, we are cool with dudes teaching women things and we love when they are eager students. We are less cool when women are doing the knowledge-dropping with anything like authority. This is not her individual fault or anything for wanting to review some records, but the response is useful and emblematic.

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't that "how-men-impart-knowledge-to-women" what Althouse calls "mansplaining"? I haven't checked, hence, the cover of this post.

Jesabel

Cut-up Fold-in Paste-up Atempt

"The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to at least the Dadaists of the 1920s, but was popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs, and has since been used in a wide variety of contexts."

My plunge into poverty happened in an instant. I never saw it coming.

Imagine this was your job: you had to wake up every morning, read and watch what was going on in the world, and then, even if you didn’t actually feel this way — in fact, in spite of the fact that you didn’t feel this way—react with outrage about all of it.

There is nothing journalists and pundits love discussing more than each other, so predictably the launch of the “Explanatory Journalism” site Vox.com has been accompanied by a vapor trail of commentary, ranging from serious analysis of its news-delivery style, to discussions of staff diversity, to snark, envy, and mockery of Matt Yglesias’ hipster suit in the launch video.

Then again, there was no reason to feel particularly vulnerable. Two years ago, I was a political reporter at Politico, and I spent my days covering the back-and-forth of presidential politics. I had access to the White House because of my reporting beat, and I was a regular commentator on MSNBC. My career had been on an upward trajectory for 30 years, and at age 50 I still anticipated a long career.

Increasingly, this is the life of the blogger. Despite all the attention and traffic of Upworthy gets for being “positive” these days, outrage and indignation are and always will be pageview magnets. “Outrage porn,” as we’ve come to call it, checks all the boxes of compelling content—it’s high valence, it drives comments, it assuages the ego, projects guilt onto a scapegoat and looks good in your Facebook Feed.

There are indeed many interesting angles here, both serious and snarky. But maybe the most interesting of all is the trend of young and young-ish liberal journalists abandoning posts at legacy mainstream media institutions to go run their own sites. That trend is the reverse of the career pattern most of these journalists began with.

Sources making the cut - The Atlantic, Beta Beat and The Federalist

NYT Bookends: "What’s Become of the So-Called Literary Bad Boy?"

"Who was badder than the housebound, life-abstemious Emily Dickinson, kicking open the doors of perception with every poem?"

It’s the question every writer faces, every morning of his or her life: Am I Malcolm Gladwell today, or am I Arthur Rimbaud? Do I sit down with my pumpkin latte and start Googling, or do I fire a couple of shots into the ceiling and then stick my head in a bucket of absinthe? Which of these two courses will better serve my art, my agent, my agenda? Old hands are ready with the answer: If you want to stick around, kid, if you want to build your oeuvre, you’ve got to be — in the broadest sense — sober. You’ve got to keep it together. There’s no future in going off the rails. “You go in dutifully, slavishly, and you work,” commanded Norman Mailer, his head-buttings long behind him. “This injunction is wholly anti-romantic in spirit.” But his sternness communicates the strain, does it not, the effort required to suppress the other thing: the room-wrecker, the Shelley inside, the wild buddings of Dionysus.

This is where the literary bad boy lives today, at any rate — in the mind of the writer. He is a legend only, a creature of folk memory. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of traditionally chaotic real-life writers out there, right now, staying the course, crashing about and appalling their spouses; I imagine the ratio of Rimbauds to Gladwells has remained pretty much unchanged since the beginning of time. What’s changed, for us, is that the media is no longer interested. This year we also mark the centenaries of Dylan Thomas and John Berryman — two famous wild men, casualties of an era when poets seemed to have the life expectancy, roughly, of nose gunners. Thomas in particular, on his visits to the United States in the early 1950s, was a headline-making literary bad boy: feted and indulged, alcoholically ablaze, a kind of hedonistic scapegoat. And it killed him, of course.

Then came rock ‘n’ roll, youth, pop, big changes in the apparatus of fame. Now the literary bad boys had guitars: Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, John Lennon. They plugged directly into the emergent nervous system of the culture. How was Theodore Roethke going to compete with Jim Morrison? (Poetically, even — I’ll take Morrison chanting “Ride the snake/ To the lake” over Roethke’s “I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils.” But that’s a discussion for another day.) There was some overlap: Hunter S. Thompson performed the writer-as-rock-star to great effect, and Mailer himself, in middle age, held his own in what he called “a new electronic landscape of celebrity.” But the mass mind had moved on. READ MORE 

The Love Saga Continues....

[Guest Post From Trooper York - this installment is a continuation-in-part from here]

Julia wasted most of the day reading “Television Without Pity” and posting snarky nasty comments on the “Honey Boo Boo” thread. Anything to stick a finger in the eye of these rubes. After a short nap and an even shorter grooming session, Julia left her hotel room and went down to the lobby. She went to the concierge to ask how to find this “Long Branch” so she could check out the band and more importantly to question some of the locals. Julia found that her questioning always went better with alcohol. Maybe she could wrap this up tonight and get back to Williamsburg in time to read the Sunday Times alone in her room. With her cat George Sand.

The desk clerk was busy on her computer and looked up with a bright smile until she saw it was Julia. She wondered why she so often had that effect on service people. She didn’t understand that it was because she was an unreconstructed bitch on wheels and treated service people as what she saw them to be. Servants. Theoretically she supported these hard working people. In reality she tipped like a black person. Or a German. So they only gave her the minimum courtesy that any customer might be due.

“Do you know how to get to the 'Long Branch' saloon” she asked brusquely. She often felt that if she was rough and gruff she got better results from the “lower classes.” In fact it just meant that she always got spit in her latte but what she didn’t know wouldn’t burst her bubble.

“Really. You are going to the 'Long Branch'” well okey dokey.” The clerk looked amused. “Just drive down Main St and turn on Jefferson. Go about a mile until you see a down at the heels honkey tonk with a bunch of beat up old trucks and American cars. There’s a Buffalo head over the door and a neon sign with three letters out. That’s it.”
“Delightful.” Julia shuddered. She walked away without saying thank you. That was her style. Entitled. She left gratitude and humility to those less gifted. She did not have a PhD in Woman’s Studies so that she could be nice to desk clerks.

Julia got into her hideous rental car and drove down Main St. It was bustling with people and commerce even at this hour. The boom times from the energy explosion in North Dakota had brought a lot of money to so many undeserving types. They were prospering from the rape of the land. Like their ancestors who stole this land from the Native Americans. She had to expose them. She had to find the truth of their evil. This story must be told.

A Love Story In Progress

[A Guest Post From Trooper York]

Julia sat in the diner sipping her tea and looking at the plate of eggs that the harried waitress had set before her. They looked greasy and hurried. Much like the rest of the patrons of the diner.

Why had she agreed to come to his horrible place to research an article for “The Huffington Post?” She had to leave her comfortable studio apartment that she paid five thousand a month for in Williamsburg Brooklyn to come to this cold winter landscape of North Dakota. She had to leave behind so much. Her books. Her supportive friends. Her organic food market. Her cat. Oh God her cat. She missed her so much.

The little bell at the top of the door jingled and a man walked into the diner. He was tall and lean. Wearing jeans and a down parka with a yellow hard hat. He must be an oil worker. The type of person she was supposed to talk to in order to get a good article. He walked up to the counter and sat down. He put his hat and gloves on the counter and opened his coat.

“Hi Jack” said the waitress as she set a cup in front of him and filled it with steaming hot coffee from a battered glass pot. “Any luck last night?”

“Yeah Flo I was pretty lucky. But you know me. When I drill I always strike a gusher. I push and push and push my tool down the shaft until I make something happen. That’s what I do.” “Ha you’re a kidder” laughed Flo as she flushed red. “The usual?” “Sure.”

Woody Allen's 'Manhattan': "New York was his town and it always would be"

On today's New York Times (Online), Woody Allen Speaks Out, the film maker answers Mia's daughter Dylan, allegation of sexual misconduct. Here is one paragraph.

I naïvely thought the accusation would be dismissed out of hand because of course, I hadn’t molested Dylan and any rational person would see the ploy for what it was. Common sense would prevail. After all, I was a 56-year-old man who had never before (or after) been accused of child molestation. I had been going out with Mia for 12 years and never in that time did she ever suggest to me anything resembling misconduct. Now, suddenly, when I had driven up to her house in Connecticut one afternoon to visit the kids for a few hours, when I would be on my raging adversary’s home turf, with half a dozen people present, when I was in the blissful early stages of a happy new relationship with the woman I’d go on to marry — that I would pick this moment in time to embark on a career as a child molester should seem to the most skeptical mind highly unlikely. The sheer illogic of such a crazy scenario seemed to me dispositive.

Is it fair to wander how many drafts did he go thru before striking the tone he wanted?
Is the essence of writing indistinguishable from whether we categorize it as fact or fiction?
And finally, why do think Woody chose "champing" instead of "chomping", do we read anything into that?

"The district attorney was champing at the bit to prosecute a celebrity case...

Orwell On Speech

Rabel linked to a piece by Jason Lee Steorts called "Steyn On Speech:"

I admire Mark Steyn’s gallantry in defending freedom of speech and thought, but his weekend column is less than illuminating. It seems to have been 200 percent felt and half thought. Sorting through and categorizing the jumble of quite different examples that provoked Mark’s dudgeon was nonetheless a useful exercise. Here are my undoubtedly boring conclusions. 

When it comes to the legal restriction of speech, or the legal coercion of dissenters, I’ll storm the barricade with Mark. It amazes me that any soi-disant free people tolerate that sort of thing. 

The use of speech to criticize other speech is something else, and the distinction between state coercion and cultural coercion is one that Mark typically doesn’t acknowledge, to the detriment of his arguments. That distinction can get pretty blurry in our present legal arrangements, but in principle the people have every right to make pariahs of whom they will, and to slug it out among themselves, so to speak, when they disagree. 

Still, Mark has a point, and we should ask ourselves what sort of culture we’d like to live in. The readiness to ostracize those who offend our sensibilities is stifling and unhealthy. Except in very extreme cases, we should criticize speech rather than condemn speakers. This is also prudent. Martyrs are popular; better to make an argument. 

On the other hand, I can’t agree with Mark that anything of value is lost when derogatory epithets go out of bounds in polite society. They tend to be bad even for humor, substituting stereotype and cliché for originality. People who used them in different times need not be regarded as monstrous, nor must the canon be censored; we could instead feel good about having awoken to a greater civility and make generous allowances for human fallibility. 

By way of criticizing speech, I’ll say that I found the derogatory language in this column, and especially the slur in its borrowed concluding joke, both puerile in its own right and disappointing coming from a writer of such talent.

I boldfaced the Anglo-Saxon (A-S) nouns and underlined the A-S verbs to emphasize why I think this is a particularly poor piece of writing. Out of the whole piece, only the most vague terms come from Anglo-Saxon: freedom, speech, thought, time, slur, blurry; only two verbs, "slug" and "storm" are Anglo-Saxon, and "storm the barricade" is terribly worn metaphor.

George Orwell wrote in his wellspring of wisdom, Politics And The English Language:

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

"The Wellcome Trust 2013 winning entry: where did syphilis come from?"

"Did Columbus bring the disease back with him from the New World, or was it in Europe all along? Katherine Wright, winner of the Wellcome Trust science writing prize 2013, investigates"

Here are some excerpts

In the 1490s, a gruesome new disease exploded across Europe. It moved with terrifying speed. Within five years of the first reported cases, among the mercenary army hired by Charles VIII of France to conquer Naples, it was all over the continent and reaching into north Africa.

As its many names attest, contemporaries of the first spread of syphilis did not know where this disease had come from. Was it indeed the fault of the French? Was it God's punishment on earthly sinners?

Another school of thought, less xenophobic and less religious, soon gained traction. Columbus's historic voyage to the New World was in 1492. The Italian soldiers were noticing angry chancres on their genitals by 1494. What if Columbus had brought the disease back to Europe with him as an unwelcome stowaway aboard the Pinta or the Niña?

... [S]cientists, anthropologists, and historians still disagree about the origin of syphilis. Did Columbus and his sailors really transport the bacterium back from the New World? Or was it just coincidental timing, that the first cases were recorded soon after the adventurers' triumphant return to the Old World? It seems increasingly likely that Columbus and his crew were responsible for transporting syphilis from the New World to the Old.

Of course, Treponema pallidum was not the only microbial passenger to hitch a ride across the Atlantic with Columbus. But most of the traffic was going the other way: smallpox, measles, and bubonic plague were only some of the Old World diseases which infiltrated the New World, swiftly decimating thousands of Native Americans. Syphilis was not the French disease, or the Polish disease. It was the disease – and the revenge – of the Americas.

The Guardian and The Observer

"In a French-ass restaurant/Hurry up with my damn croissants."

UPDATED: The letter penned to West was a parody, written by W. David Marx.

Regarding Croissants in "I am a God"
Association of French Bakers
900 Rue Vielle du Temple
Paris FRANCE
To Monsieur Kanye West:
Congratulations on the birth of your daughter, Nord! This is a truly auspicious time for you — and so it is with great sadness that we must lodge a formal complaint against the song "I am a God" from your new album Yeezus.

Our organization represents bakers across France, many of whom have taken great offense at this particular rhyming couplet:

In a French-ass restaurant
Hurry up with my damn croissants

Assuming you, as a man of means, dine exclusively at high-end restaurants and boulangeries during your voyages to Paris, it could not be possible that the delay of your "damn" croissants originated from slow service. And certainly, you are not a man to be satisfied with pre-made croissants from the baked goods case reheated and tossed out on a small platter. No — you had demanded your croissants freshly baked, to be delivered to your table straight out of the oven piping hot.

And it was with great joy you ordered croissants  — not crêpes or brioches — because only croissants can proudly claim that exquisite combination of flaky crust and a succulent center. The croissant is dignified — not vulgar like a piece of toast, simply popped into a mechanical device to be browned. No — the croissant is born of tender care and craftsmanship. Bakers must carefully layer the dough, paint on perfect proportions of butter, and then roll and fold this trembling croissant embryo with the precision of a Japanese origami master.

This process, as you can understand, takes much time. And we implore the patience of all those who order croissants. You may be familiar with the famous French expression, "A great croissant is worth waiting a lifetime for." We know you are a busy man, M. West, but we believe that your patience for croissants will always be rewarded.

We could easily let this water pass under the bridge, as they say, but we take your lyrics very seriously. From the other lines in the song, we have come to understand that you may in fact be a "God." Yet if this were the case — and we, of course, take you at your word — we wonder why you do not more frequently employ your omnipotence to change time and space to better suit your own personal whims. For us mere mortals, we must wait the time required for the croissant to come to perfect fruition, but as a deity, you can surely alter the bread's molecular structure faster than the speed of light, no? And with your omniscience, perhaps you have something to teach us about the perfect croissant. We await your guidance and insights.

We appreciate your continued patronage of French culture. (Your frequent references to menage perhaps speak an interest in the structure of the French household?) We hope from the deepest recesses of our hearts, however, that in the future you give croissants the time they need to fully mature before you partake. With that, we say, adieu. And our member Louis Malpass from Le Havre wants you to know that he loves "Black Skinhead."

Salutations cordiales

Bernard Aydelotte
Association of French Bakers



Story hooks vs. Explanations

"Hey, did you see what I did there?"

 I've just seen both Pacific Rim and The Wolverine. Both are popcorn movies and not meant to be particularly deep. Both had obvious and less obvious elements included in their construction. Some of those included details may have been meant to support other parts that ended up on the cutting room floor, but I'd like to think that sometimes an artist/writer/director/actor includes some detail on the sly because the story-word demands it, even if very few people will notice what they've done.

 I also think that including open hooks instead of set explanations makes for richer writing and better stories. People think more when you don't do all of their thinking for them or demand that their "take" is the same as you, the creator, intended.

 I don't intend to "spoil" either of the movies, but if you're worried about it you'd probably better not read the rest.