Hacker Cinema
Winter's Tale
2014 · Film · 118 min
Directed by Akiva Goldsman
A burglar falls for an heiress as she dies in his arms. When he learns that he has the gift of reincarnation, he sets out to save her.
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1 comment on Hacker News
Yup. The early collected tales often violate a lot of what we'd today understand to be basic "rules" of storytelling, for example maybe somebody gets given a magical item, they're told it can be used three times - in any modern story we known we will see it used three times in the story, maybe the last time is a twist, but a reader or audience knows that's how this works - but in one of these tales it'll sometimes just get used twice because that's all the story needed.
Chekhov's Gun is another rule, in these early tales maybe our hero is given a magic whistle, big deal is made of the whistle, there's a ceremony for it, and then he fights a dragon, and... he slays the dragon with a sword. What is the whistle for? Nothing, it's just a magic whistle, the real world is untidy like that. If you wrote a Hollywood movie which did that, reviewers would be appalled.
These rules create a straitjacket that I think needs to be resisted more often, and so I'm glad to see that the stories targeting small children (e.g. "The Tiger Who Came To Tea") don't obey them as strictly, and that's why my favourite comic book issue is "Winter's Tale", Gaiman's telling of the story of how Winter Moran (Miracleman's daughter) went far away and came back. Gaiman chooses to tell this as a kid's picture book in a story-within-a-story because in this mode it needn't obey normal adult rules - Winter meets various ludicrously powerful people across the galaxy, they all seem perfectly delighted and assist her. Adults would suspect that maybe the galactic slaver traders and arms dealers aren't entirely aligned with Winter's preferences, but in a kids book that never comes up. Winter says "Everything" already belongs to her and the arms dealers just say OK, then this is already yours. Just like that. There is no big fight scene (back on Earth a climactic fight is happening, but it's not shown at all), there are no verbal or physical clashes, she just meets people around the universe who are all very agreeable and then she comes home.