[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

And I care what Salman Rushdie thinks? I'll take Umberto Eco and raise you a Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Jackson directs better than Rushdie writes, and Tolkien is better than either. I'd post that on a Salman Rushdie forum...if I could find one that was active (one I found had no posts and the other's link was dead). Get back to me in 50 years on Rushdie -- this Tolkien forum will likely still be around, although we may not.

Heh. Rushdie is just a publicity seeker. I'd even venture to say that he wrote The Satanic Verses knowing full well that it would attract a furore (maybe he didn't expect an actual fatwa though) and boost his sales figures. Literary fiction is not always decent fiction (and Rushdie's most certainly isn't - having sampled two of his works and almost dying of tedium).

And I quote my current favourite columnist:

Originally Posted by Charlie Brooker in yesterday's Guardian

The other irony is that while people lie about having read highbrow novels in order to impress each other, a massive percentage of highbrow novels aren't worth reading anyway because the authors are too busy trying to impress the reader (who, we now know, probably hasn't bothered turning up). That's why so many contemporary novels seem to largely consist of a thinly veiled version of the author discussing politics and art and quantum theory over a carefully selected bottle of wine with the devastatingly beautiful mixed-race wife of an impotent international statesman and/or gangster (delete where applicable) before whisking her off to a swish hotel room to.....*snip*

Heh. He could almost be talking about Rushdie!

I thought Wall-E was the best picture I saw this year. I was rather irritated it didn't get a best picture nomination, and also 'In Bruges', another great film that was ignored.

I've just seen In Bruges, on Sky, and it was superb, and I'd never even heard about it until davem said he wanted to watch it (and he missed it in the end ). Just goes to show that hype counts in what people 'think' is actually decent. This year's best film is already out though - Watchmen. It's about 1,000 billion times better than RotK.