Yet Another Cycling Forum
Off Topic => The Pub => Arts and Entertainment => Topic started by: ian on 13 December, 2023, 10:07:32 pm
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I have stumbled into this with the opening scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHzcIBC50MU) to Blade as mentioned elsewhere.
For books, you have to try hard to beat All this happened, more or less.
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Well, I'm sure there are much worthier suggestions, but the first line sets the tone of what's going to come.
I rather like the opening line of Gavin Maxwell's 'Ring of Bright Water':
"I sit in a pitch-pine panelled kitchen-living room, with an otter asleep upon its back among the cushions on the sofa, forepaws in the air, and with the expression of tightly shut concentration that very small babies wear in sleep."
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Coincidentally, I saw a photograph of that otter (ie the one that GM had tamed, not the one in the film) earlier this evening.
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I was quite taken with the opening scene of Barbie: https://youtu.be/C-OuwvuUGsE
The rest of the film was pretty good too
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Contact (1997)
Even though the scale is all wrong.
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“It was the day my grandmother exploded”. Perfection.
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The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler - not a killer opening line, more a killer first page…
The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox's left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other.
There was a girl beside him. Her hair was a lovely shade of dark red and she had a distant smile on her lips and over her shoulders she had a blue mink that almost made the Rolls-Royce look like just another automobile. It didn't quite. Nothing can.
The attendant was the usual half-tough character in a white coat with the name of the restaurant stitched across the front of it in red. He was getting fed up.
"Look, mister," he said with an edge to his voice, "would you mind a whole lot pulling your leg into the car so I can kind of shut the door? Or should I open it all the way so you can fall out?"
The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back. It didn't bother him enough to give him the shakes. At The Dancers they get the sort of people that disillusion you about what a lot of golfing money can do for the personality.
Magnificent.
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Films wise…
The Matrix
Once Upon A Time In The West
Raiders of the Lost Ark
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"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."
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The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel
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The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel
Never mind that being primary blue since the late 90s, we're going to reach the "What's a channel?" stage soon.
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The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel
Never mind that being primary blue since the late 90s, we're going to reach the "What's a channel?" stage soon.
Oh, I was thinking Snow.
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The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel
Never mind that being primary blue since the late 90s, we're going to reach the "What's a channel?" stage soon.
Oh, I was thinking Snow.
Yes, I expect that's what the author had in mind, but as Kim points out, it's a tad outdated.
(And never mind "What's a channel?" more like "What's a television?")
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The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel
Never mind that being primary blue since the late 90s, we're going to reach the "What's a channel?" stage soon.
Oh, I was thinking Snow.
Yes, I expect that's what the author had in mind, but as Kim points out, it's a tad outdated.
(And never mind "What's a channel?" more like "What's a television?")
I think they were thinking dead, lifeless grey.
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IIRC my last CRT did a black screen when not tuned, i suppose I could fire it up since it's getting in the way after a mate wanted it for his collection of games consoles and then shit happened.
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The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel
Never mind that being primary blue since the late 90s, we're going to reach the "What's a channel?" stage soon.
Oh, I was thinking Snow.
Yes, I expect that's what the author had in mind, but as Kim points out, it's a tad outdated.
(And never mind "What's a channel?" more like "What's a television?")
I think they were thinking dead, lifeless grey.
I agree with MrCharly.
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(https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/maxresdefault.jpg)
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wins the internet ...
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Film - hard to see beyond Saving Private Ryan’s first 20 minutes.
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The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel
Never mind that being primary blue since the late 90s, we're going to reach the "What's a channel?" stage soon.
Oh, I was thinking Snow.
Yes, I expect that's what the author had in mind, but as Kim points out, it's a tad outdated.
(And never mind "What's a channel?" more like "What's a television?")
I think they were thinking dead, lifeless grey.
I agree with MrCharly.
The lack of consensus suggests it's a flawed metaphor. Or maybe it doesn't really matter and all interpretations are equally valid.
Either way, it feels like the kind of opening line they teach you to come up with on a creative writing course. It's certainly no "All this happened, more or less."
No idea what it is though, so will look it up...
<google>
Yeah... turns out I have read it and my reaction to that line pretty much tallies with how I recall feeling about the whole book at the time. Good ideas, good story, not great writing.
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"The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him."
Catch-22, but I'm sure you all knew that.
(Mr Larrington's opening from the Crow Road wins the pithy category. Mr Banks clearly likes a winning formula:
"I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped")
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I can't say Gibson ever floated my boat, I find the entire cyberpunk genre where it rains all the time a bit dull. Horses for courses (though I'd still heartily recommend Michael Marshall Smith's first couple of books in the genre, especially Spares and Only Forward which are far better). But yeah, that's the sort of line that a good teacher would tell you to write and then delete, because it sounds clever but doesn't deliver anything useful. Also, ironically for a novel set in the future, it pitches it back into the past. If you snag on metaphor and simile, it's not done well, it's trying too hard. I did read an interview with him once where he explained the opening, and it's actually quite thoughtful, but I think ultimately it doesn't convey what he had in mind.
All this happened, more or less is perfect because it sets out everything and brings you in, in so few words. Of course, novels were shorter back then, Orwell had to do with it was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Melville got call me Ishmael.
Some other classic starts:
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
Marley was dead, to begin with.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
They don't always have to be short.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
And I always loved this one
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.
Certainly for movies, The Matrix, more so if you went in with no clue as to what it was about.
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First lines that draw you in, this has to be one of the best:
The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling.
As for films, I watched a crap film the other day that had a fairly good opening sequence. I looked up reviews on imdb later and spotted this gem:
"The best thing about this movie is the opening credits. Listen to the brilliant cover of Placebo's Running Up That Hill then go watch something else" :facepalm:
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"Amongst the people I have met, one of those who stand out most vividly in my memory is a certain Mr Ramsay MacDonald. He was chief engineer: and a distant cousin, he said, of Mr Ramsay J. MacDonald, the statesman. He resembled his 'cousin' very closely indeed, in face and moustaches; and it astonished me at first to see what appeared to be my Prime Minister, in a suit of overalls, crawling out of a piece of dismantled machinery with an air of real authority and knowledge and decision. "
'In Hazard', Richard Hughes 1938
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As for films, I watched a crap film the other day that had a fairly good opening sequence. I looked up reviews on imdb later and spotted this gem:
"The best thing about this movie is the opening credits. Listen to the brilliant cover of Placebo's Running Up That Hill then go watch something else" :facepalm:
Which reminds me that Baby Driver also deserves a you-can-stop-after-the-opening-credits award for good starts.
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Likewise Game of Thrones
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All this happened, more or less is perfect because it sets out everything and brings you in, in so few words.
Vonnegut doesn’t mess about, does he. Straight to the point.
Another Vonnegut gem of an opening line:
“A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.”
-God Bless You, Mr Rosewater
See also:
“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”
- The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford
Jane Austen’s “It is a truth universally acknowledged…” is a different kind of opener. It’s brilliant because a) it’s funny, and b) it tells you what the whole story is going to be right from the off.
But I prefer openings like that passage from The Long Goodbye mentioned earlier - not a pithy one-liner but packs a whole lot of background into one short scene, none of it obviously expository.
Another favourite:
“On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.”
- Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban
So much to unpack in just those few lines.
Certainly for movies, The Matrix, more so if you went in with no clue as to what it was about.
Oh yes - first time I saw it, I knew practically nothing about it and the opening scene left me breathless.
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"In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry”
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As for films, I watched a crap film the other day that had a fairly good opening sequence. I looked up reviews on imdb later and spotted this gem:
"The best thing about this movie is the opening credits. Listen to the brilliant cover of Placebo's Running Up That Hill then go watch something else" :facepalm:
Which reminds me that Baby Driver also deserves a you-can-stop-after-the-opening-credits award for good starts.
oh, oops, forgot to mention that the "brilliant cover" was the one from 20 odd years earlier by Kate Bush.
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As for films, I watched a crap film the other day that had a fairly good opening sequence. I looked up reviews on imdb later and spotted this gem:
"The best thing about this movie is the opening credits. Listen to the brilliant cover of Placebo's Running Up That Hill then go watch something else" :facepalm:
Which reminds me that Baby Driver also deserves a you-can-stop-after-the-opening-credits award for good starts.
oh, oops, forgot to mention that the "brilliant cover" was the one from 20 odd years earlier by Kate Bush.
I thought that might have been a typo, rather than an xkcd://202 (https://xkcd.com/202/) situation. Placebo's cover of Running Up That Hill *is* rather good.
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Loving that xkcd
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Well, I'm sure there are much worthier suggestions, but the first line sets the tone of what's going to come.
I rather like the opening line of Gavin Maxwell's 'Ring of Bright Water':
"I sit in a pitch-pine panelled kitchen-living room, with an otter asleep upon its back among the cushions on the sofa, forepaws in the air, and with the expression of tightly shut concentration that very small babies wear in sleep."
These photos by Gavin Maxwell of a sleeping otter appeared in the Illustrated London News on Friday 17 November 1961
(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53435793954_44135d38d3_z.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/2ppWpSj)
(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53435827384_0e22a22ce6_z.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/2ppWzNG)
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The people criticizing Gibson because he 'wasn't looking towards the future' are completely forgetting when the books were written.
Neuromancer was released in 1984. No WWW. No flatscreens. No mobile phones. Hackers, computer viruses, AI, counter-intrusion software; they didn't really exist. You did have phone phreakers, but that was about it. Internet pornography - could be said that he invented that, as well! He certainly conceived of augmented reality decades before such a thing was possible.
He invented cyberpunk, and I'd say he invented cybercool.
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Still a terrible writer though
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Gibson can only be considered the father of cyberpunk if you ignore what was happening in Japan in the two years before Neuromancer was published... :demon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_(manga)
Or if you ignore the New Wave of science fiction in the 1960s and into the 70s. Take Samuel R. Delany's 1968 novel Nova, for example:
Most humans have been outfitted with cybernetic control sockets in their wrists and at base of their spines. This allows them to control a range of devices and power tools, from vacuum cleaners to mining machines and right up to starships. It also allows people to be much more flexible in moving from career to career. Some reviewers have drawn a parallel between these sockets and the jacks that would later appear as a popular element in the cyberpunk genre. But unlike those jacks, which connect people with a virtual world that stands apart from the physical world, the sockets in this novel connect people to devices in the physical world, and allow the physical world to be sensed in different ways.
https://www.tor.com/2018/03/29/destruction-and-renewal-nova-by-samuel-r-delany/
Then there is Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, adapted for the big screen by Ridley Scott as Blade Runner. Released in 1982, I think you'd have to agree that said film played a big part in creating the cyberpunk asthetic.
Gibson isn't so much the father of cyberpunk as one of the obstetricians... :demon:
And personally, when it comes to 1980s cyberpunk, I am more of a fan of Hardwired, by Walter Jon Williams. Published in 1986, it's more melancholy and cynical work than Neuromancer, and some dare to argue that it is a superior work:
https://screenanarchy.com/2012/12/books-to-be-scene-walter-john-williams-hard-wired.html
<lights blue touch paper, walks away whistling 'Spanish Harlem'>
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Just stumbled back upon this thread, and on reading back through it I'm surprised this most famous of opening lines has not come up...
"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."
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It also had the bonus that everyone who hadn't attended a public school had to reach for a dictionary. Oh, one of those.
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Just stumbled back upon this thread, and on reading back through it I'm surprised this most famous of opening lines has not come up...
"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."
It’s a good opening line, sure, but feels a bit try-hard to me. Wilfully outrageous.
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Just stumbled back upon this thread, and on reading back through it I'm surprised this most famous of opening lines has not come up...
"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."
It’s a good opening line, sure, but feels a bit try-hard to me. Wilfully outrageous.
Of course it is - Earthly Powers was written by Burgess to be the first person POV of a retired novelist who's a bit of a hack.
That first sentence is deliberately balanced not only to provide a striking opening – but to give us the impression of a writer self-consciously striving for that effect.
Five short sentences after that first, the narrator of Earthly Powers lets us know that he “retired twelve years ago from the profession of novelist”. Then he says:
“Nevertheless you will be constrained to consider, if you know my work at all and take the trouble now to reread that first sentence, that I have lost none of my old cunning in the contrivance of what is known as an arresting opening.”
...
Burgess knows that no one will take Toomey’s writing too seriously – and as the writer behind the writer, he himself, will be taken very seriously. But few others could go so expertly over the top.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/mar/14/earthly-powers-anthony-burgess-reading-group
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Of course it is - Earthly Powers was written by Burgess to be the first person POV of a retired novelist who's a bit of a hack.
Ah! Well, my excuse for not picking up on that is that I’ve not read it.
Maybe I ought to. Sounds fun. And I did like A Clockwork Orange.
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"There was a group of children in the street, playing with a dog. As I watched, one of them started to eat it from the tail end"
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All the President's Men: https://youtu.be/ldMGOaMs4uw?si=jcNYJUbJbS6UqLJz&t=13
Stop Making Sense: https://vimeo.com/111929970
They're not the grand openings of a 2001, Apocalypse Now or Private Ryan but both, in their own way, equivalent to a well crafted opening page. Original, arresting and essential to what follows.
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All the President 's Men also has a fabulous character introduction of Ben Bradlee. I know, different thread.
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If you're having 'Stop Making Sense', I offer up 'Raging Bull':
https://youtu.be/3N4uXfnH2aA?si=G-x_FeaSv8lPDfd7
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The first two lines of the 'Space ritual' version of 'Sonic Attack'
In case of sonic attack on your district, follow these rules
If you are making love it is imperative to bring all bodies to orgasm simultaneously
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Pithy one-liners are all well and good but I don't think you can beat this for a proper bit of scene-setting:
LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time - as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.