Thank You Ridley Scott

Last evening (as I type), I alluded on IRC to the fact that I was going to watch Prometheus, Ridley Scott's latest opus. I was, I confess, somewhat trepidant, and expressed this in a way that led me to wonder: can one legitimately use the phrase "I expect to be disappointed"?

Certainly one can expect the movie to be bad; but if one's expectation turns out to be correct, can one truly claim to be disappointed?

It's also possible that one's expectations are confounded, and that the movie turns out to be great. Should one call this disappointement, inasmuch as one isn't as good a predictor of movie quality as one hoped?

It's with these conundra rattling around in my head that I headed of to the Savoy.

Two hours later, Ridley Scott had answered all my questions.

Yes, I could expect to be disappointed. Scott made sure that my casual sentence - one that could so easily be assumed to be illogical - was perfectly valid.

I wasn't expecting much. I got much, much less than I was expecting.

Friends: if you're going to see Prometheus, have no worries on this score. If you to are afraid of muttering phrases such as "expecting to be disappointed", you can rest assured that however bad you think this film is going to be, it's actually much, much worse. If you're expecting it to be vacuous nonsense masquerading as depth, then you'll be disappointed to find that there's also many a scene that makes no sense whatsoever. If you're expecting that too, you'll be disappointed by the thoroughly idiotic dialogue. And so on, ad infinitum.

So as you head off to the cinema, walk with your head held high and with the full knowledge that Ridley Scott has your back. He's gone out of his way to make a film that's so risible that you can wander into any cinema with your head held high and say in a loud, steady voice "I expect to be disappointed."

What a guy.

Hooray for Baen!

The guiding philosophy of this blog since its inception has been "if you can't say something mean, don't say anything at all." However, the odd nice comment does slip through, and this is one of those occasions.

Baen have long been a publisher who've recognised the power of the internet and, indeed, of letting people read their books for free. When they first started letting people download their stuff, they made the first volume of a bunch of series available on the assumption that if the reader was suitably impressed, the likelihood of purchasing subsequent volumes (and, indeed, those that were downloaded) would increase. They've since expanded their range of freebies, so we can infer that they were right in their assumptions (have a look at their rationale on their Free Library page).