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Movies in Fifteen Minutes
Luckily, a publisher agreed and contacted her about a print version of the online format. The result is a dense 400 pages of fan-service satire covering the last ten years of movies. Films covered in the book include Jurassic Park, Braveheart, Independence Day, Titanic, The Matrix, Gladiator, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Spider-Man, Attack of the Clones, and the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. For those of you already saying "This book is crap, I thought Will Smith's performance in Independence Day was extremely moving", relax. While the book is satire, and the obvious flaws in the film's plot are laughed at, the author is a fan first and foremost. She treats even Jeff Goldblum's grumpy chaotician in Jurassic Park with the respect of someone who knows her audience very well. You can laugh at a film without hating it.
And laugh you will. M15M synopses are fast-paced tears through the boring bits, glossing over all that wordy tension building background stuff with a well placed "OMG" to get to the really good parts. From Gladiator:
"MAXIMUS: Forget this - I'm going home, where I have a wife and son.
LUCILLA: I'm be going to Rome, where I have a son and a dead husband.
[They exchange smouldering glances.]
MAXIMUS: So, have we established that we once had a thing, but we now both have children, the ultimate bittersweet evidence of us having done it with other people?
LUCILLA: Yeah, I think so.
MAXIMUS: Awesome. See you around."
Every movie is a self-contained world of straightforward dialogue that cuts to the bone of a scene while still evoking the spirit of the situation. The jokes are funny, to be sure, but the book is also well written. Comedy is hard, and ensuring the synopses were peppered with references to literature and film, emoting objects, and subtle fan poking while also making sure the movies made sense must have been a challenge. The bare bones of characters are usually established within a few pages by self-referential dialogue, and while you may have to suffer through an entire paragraph of actual exposition it's unlikely that will go on for long. From Philosopher's Stone:
"HAGRID: You ought not to meddle in these things!
HARRY: But we're the stars of the movie! That's what we do!
HAGRID: Well, you three can stop that right now! We've gotten along just fine without a plot so far, hain't we? Just lots of nice episodes about young Harry's adventures at wizard school! Don't see no reason why we've got to go introducing a plot now, of all things, so you just keep to yourselves and don't ask no questions about Nicholas Flemel, hear?"
Not content just to use obvious humor, there are several running gags and real-world intrusions throughout the book as well. The Third Age Limbo competition, for example, is well attended by several characters during the course of the book (Neo wins), and Padme's handmaiden Rose is seen at one point bargaining with George Lucas to be allowed into a certain leather skirt movie with a naked Brad Pitt. Cleolinda's understanding of pop culture on the whole is impressive, and despite the already stale nature of some of the movies in the book the humor she uses manages to have a sort of timeless quality to it. In ten years references to the movies themselves may no longer be common, but the book's humor manages to stand on its own. Brittany Spears, George W. Bush, and Martha Stewart are nowhere to be found within the pages of the book, ensuring that despite its pop culture roots it won't be incomprehensible after a few years on the shelf. From The Matrix:
"The Matrix: The Text AdventureM15M is the kind of book ideally suited to reading in spurts. It's not a great work of our time, and it doesn't pretend to be. This book is a read-before-bed treasure, a fine companion for a long plane ride, or a great reason to get yourself into the sun on a vacation beach. In the end, it is a dozen mostly self-contained novellas with familiar characters and snarky commentary on the often nonsensical decisions made in moviemaking. It's wittily written, with a fast cadence and intelligent voice. It's quite hard to convey comedic timing in print form, but M15M manages to live up to the best stand up acts with copious ellipses and enthusiastic asterisk. Movies in Fifteen Minutes is an Internet version of 'local girl does good', and the result is a testament to what you can do with some spare time and a sarcastic attitude. Even though it will be out in the states early next year, and you can read her online works for free, M15M is well worth the couple of pounds to have the book shipped across the pond.MORPHEUS: Go Down The Hall.
NEO: There's an office at the end of the hall!
MORPHEUS: Go There.
NEO: I am there.
MORPHEUS: Go In It.
NEO: Sorry, I don't understand that.
MORPHEUS: GO INTO THE OFFICE.
NEO: ...
MORPHEUS: OPEN THE DOOR AND GO INTO THE OFFICE.
NEO: Oh, okay.
MORPHEUS: God, I Hate Text RPGS."
From Jurassic Park:
"ELLIE: We have to reboot the system before we can call for help! Unfortunately, I'm just a botanist who can barely understand the concept of 'chaos' -
GRANT: And we've got a raptor at the door!
ELLIE: I'm coming to help you hold the door!
GRANT: But who will reboot the door locks? WHO, I ASK YOU??
LEX'S SHINING MOMENT: *arrives*
LEX: Hey! I can totally manoeuvre this system you call 'Unix', because I am a 'hacker'!"
You can purchase Movies in Fifteen Minutes from Amazon.co.uk. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Zonk: We've posted this before, right?
Taco: Umm, actuatlly, not yet.
Roland: I've got $15 that says you will!
Taco: We don't usually dupe book reviews, only NYT articles on cellphones.
Zonk: Yeah, even Netcraft confirms it.
Ackbar: It's a DUPE!
All: Hey, what's he doing here? It's not Fark, it's Slashdot! (Cliches for nerds. As if that matters.)
You may like the movies in 30 seconds done by Angry Alien. These are 30 second movie reenactments of popular movies done by bunnies. Quite entertaining.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
If you need your movies reduced to 15 minutes either you are working way too hard or you need your ADD medication increased!
I prefer 5 minutes. http://www.fiveminute.net/ I think this is the site with the really funny "5 minute Star Trek Voyager" write-ups. Has some movies too.
You've never met my relatives.
We have some scary types here at the Desperation compound. The weird, seedy web sites are some of the few things that keeps them settled and relatively under control.
Is there any new material in the book? or is it just a compilation of the posts from the livejournal?
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
Well, if you liked that, then I have to reccommend a related site, FiveMinute.Net. It is also a related parody site, where movies, Star Trek, Science Fiction, and all sorts of shows are compressed into a Five-Minute format, very much like the site mentioned in the news article. However, there's all sorts of extras, and it covers 100's of episodes, series, and movies!
FiveMinute.Net truly is hilarous, and has been around since June 2000. Check it out!
"Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write it should be hard to understand."
Like the Book-A-Minute, only fifteen times longer:
Book-a-Minute
My fave was always their '1-minute' summary of Gravity's Rainbow.
Gravity's Rainbow
By Thomas Pynchon
Ultra-Condensed by Glenn Davis
Thomas Pynchon
A screaming thing comes across the sky. It's a V-2 rocket carrying twelve thousand pounds of symbolism, and it's coming down on your poor, deluded, postmodern head.
THE END
Looks interesting, but I'm still waiting for The Filthy Critic's book to come out. Once you get past the foul language, shit references, allusions to Candy Bottoms porno flicks, and potshots at "Hollywood grassfuckers", he's actually a very sound critic.
Unfortunately only available in the U.K. and Australia as far as I can tell; not available in North America yet. From the website, the author says it will be soon.
They tried to do '15 Minutes' in 15 minutes, but it seemed like just a waste of time.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0179626/
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
The Editing Room has been around since 1997, and it rules. Some of the scripts are simply awesome and hilarious.
Cleolinda's understanding of pop culture on the whole is impressive
Whaaaaa...? Isn't that, like, an oxymoron? Someone's understanding of Ancient Greek authors can be impressive, Assyrian courtship rituals maybe, Vietnamese astrology, sure. Good Pennsylvanian wines, absolutely. But isn't pop culture by its very nature, not something which one may have an impressive grasp upon. Or something?
(By the way, the subject line is from a first season episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you didn't catch that, time to bone up on the Assyrian courtship rites...)
But isn't pop culture by its very nature, not something which one may have an impressive grasp upon.
No.
We swim in pop culture (by its very nature, yes) but that doesn't mean we necessarily understand it. People who do understand it -- which is a necessary part of being able to satirize it well -- can be quite impressive in their knowledge.
Anyway, ancient Greek authors weren't always "ancient," if you see what I mean. Sophocles was the pop culture of his day. I'd say that being able to understand the culture you actually live in takes just as much work as understanding one that's now frozen in time.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Nothing beats the Filthy Critic!
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
I remeber reading even shorter summaries, they were mostly just a few sentences or lines. Somehow the only one I memorized is from Titanic, it went something like
"Never let go"
#lets go.
Anybody knows what I'm talking about?