The episode has lots of great visual gags. There is a blink-and-you-miss-it salute to a Far Side Cartoon (The Real Reason Dinosaurs Went Extinct) and plenty of great gags at the Springfield Book festival. I also had to pause and rewind the show to be sure to catch the titles of Homer’s sister-in-law’s fantasy-laden bookshelf, which includes both Lev Grossman’s The Magician King and Maile Meloy’s The Apothecary.

I recently read the trilogy to see what the hub-bub was all about.  I’ll have a review sooner or later, but the short version is – I thought the series was excellent.  Unlike some, my world would not have ended if the movie didn’t get it exactly right.  Based on what’s shown here, it looks like the filmmakers nailed it.  This is good news.  I’ll be seeing this on the big screen with a few million teenagers.

A quick review of TV drama of recent vintage, suggests we may be in the midst of a golden age of televised story telling.The Wire has been compared to Dickens; The Sopranos were compared to Shakespeare.  David Simon’s Treme is celebrated “for showing how artists make art, and what it actually means to make a living from creative work.”  Mad Men, Six Feet Under – the list goes on.

A recent surprise for me has been the dramatization of George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy novel series A Song of Ice Fire, Game of Thrones. I have not read any of the novels in the series and have had my viewer’s expectations  upended week after week.  Last week’s episode, Baelor, took such a dramatic turn that it prompted a discussion between my wife and I titled What Happens when Every Accepted Fantasy Story-Telling Trope is Thrown out the Window.   This piece in Grantland nicely sums it up:

Because that’s what a generation of underbaked trilogies had taught us fantasy was all about, right? The good guys winning?…When [giant spoiler] in the final moments of last night’s shocking episode, a lot of our television preconceptions dropped with it.

But back to Rushdie.  Does his involvement in television signal yet another round of “death of the novel” conversations/blog posts?  Probably.  Story telling seems to be doing just fine though.

 
We come from the land of the ice and snow…

This is all a roundabout excuse to link to this article by Maureen Dowd on Ayn Rand.

For another clip from the same show, check out Liz’s encounter with Aaron Sorkin.

In other YA news, I also stumbled across this hilarious video review of Frank Portman’s King Dork by the “Lazy-Ass Librarian.” (Thanks, Kathleen!)  This begs the question – where, oh where is our King Dork movie?

Check out this clip, too:  What are “angel headed hipsters?”

As a reader who is against censorship, I thought the judge’s ruling at the end was especially moving.  The movie distills it down to its best bits, but the Internet is always open if you want to read the entire decision.