MOVIE: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990)

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Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are DeadYear: 1990Rating: PGLength: 117 minutes / 1.95 hours While there are plenty of perfectly fine adaptations of William Shakespeare plays, I can appreciate the ones that take a different approach than just recreating the source material. Whether it’s making it into a musical like West Side Story (1961) did to Romeo and Juliet or shifting the setting to feudal Japan like Throne of Blood (1957) did to Macbeth, these plays are deep enough to allow for creative interpretations. Case in point is Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adjacent adaptation of Hamlet. Most people know the events of Hamlet but few consider what these characters are doing when not in the presence of the main character. This movie tries to remedy this by following Rosencrantz (Gary Oldman) and Guildenstern (Tim Roth) as they discuss a variety of intellectual concepts—most of which might just come off as absurdist humor. Covering such ideas as probability, gravity, and logic, these...
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BOOK: Working with Difficult People (1990)

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Working with Difficult People Year: 1990 Author: Amy Cooper Hakim and Muriel Solomon Length: 475 minutes / 7.92 hours Occasionally, I come across a book that doesn’t really work as an audiobook. Working with Difficult People is certainly a must-have for any working-class bookshelf. Still, it was difficult to follow the thread of different difficult personalities when it was being read aloud. Sure, there were useful descriptions of the types of people you’ll encounter in the workforce, but there were at least a few of them where I wanted to slow down and read through those archetypes again to better understand the people who irk me in life. Of course, going in, I was hoping I could read this book and understand how to handle people who I find difficult to work with. Instead, I kept listening to these people's descriptions and finding individuals who nearly matched them in my life. This was my main qualm with the book: people are more complex than a single...
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BOOK: Good Omens (1990)

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Good Omens Year: 1990 Author: Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman Length: 753 minutes / 12.55 hours Perhaps I’m in the minority here, but I only thought Good Omens was just OK. You’d think that the combination of two of the best British writers would create an incredible story, but I felt it was mostly disjointed, un-climatic, and full of that British humor that tends to be more random than based in actual jokes. Granted, most books by Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman that I’ve read have been hit or miss, depending on how peculiarly random the subject might be. Sure, there are elements of a great story here; it just felt distracted from its main purpose half of the time. The core of Good Omens is split into two parts: following the actual Antichrist who is unaware of his theological significance/role in the end of the world and the journey of an angel and a demon who happened to lose said Antichrist. This idea's strength is enough...
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BOOK: Creating Characters (1990)

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Creating Characters: How to Build Story People Year: 1990 Author: Dwight V. Swain Length: 195 pages Writing advice is generally pretty timeless. Fundamentally, little changes between the classics written hundreds of years ago and the classics written today. Sure, there might be some new way to go about creating plots, or there might be a scientific breakthrough that tweaks a setting or two, but the one thing that remains constant throughout is characters. Complex characters have always been interesting, even if it can be a challenge to create them for a story. This is where Creating Characters: How to Build Story People comes in to help. While there is plenty of great advice in this book, I did find that it to be somewhat dated in a few spots. We’re now almost 30 years after this book was initially written, so the author's advice for writers working on radio plays might work for someone doing podcasts, but not much else. Similarly, there are tons of great examples...
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