A thread in which we discuss stories – literary, dramatic, whatever – that do not summarize well.
Please note that I don’t mean stories whose summaries sound stupid because the story itself is stupid; rather, stories you judge to be of high quality despite the impossibility of describing it adequately in a sentence.
Anyone? Bueller?
I always hate the part where I have to tell someone that Watership Down is about rabbits. You can see the sudden loss of interest. But it’s a wonderful, wonderful book!
Also, I never found any better way to describe Quantum Leap than to simply recite: Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Doctor Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator - and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Al, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear. And so Doctor Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that his next leap… will be the leap home… Hey, where are you going?!
When I worked in movie theaters people frequently asked me “What is it about?”
Some of the titles that I remember being tough to explain, (that I think are great movies)
Field of Dreams
The Shawshank Redemption
The Wizard of Oz
Fearless
The Time Traveler’s Wife sounds like bad sci-fi, but it’s really very touching and good.
Book, not movie. I never saw the movie but it looked insulting.
People didn’t know what The Wizard of Oz was about? American people?
Field of Dreams I don’t quite get, but I agree that Shawshank is best recommended by saying “Look, just watch it. If I try to explain it in under half an hour, you’ll get the wrong impression no matter what I say.”
Trying to explain Doctor Who to my mother.
“It’s about this alien called The Doctor-”
“Why is he called The Doctor? Is he actually a doctor, or is he a professor?”
“No, he’s just called that. It’s like his name, though not really. He’s a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. And he has a human companion and they travel through space and time and have to confront aliens in historical settings and on other planets.”
It sounds pretty horrendously stupid, really.
Also, I just imagined trying to explain the plot of Mrs. Dalloway to someone. “So there’s this woman and she’s preparing for a party, and it’s all the things she thinks about during the day.” Yeah. Oh, or one of my favorite books of all time, Breakfast of Champions! “A billionaire goes on a murderous rampage because of what he read in a science fiction story.” Even my absolute favorite book of all time, Good Omens. “So it’s the Apocalypse, and the story centers around an angel and a demon who are actually quite good friends and who don’t want to have to fight each other in the war between Heaven and Hell. Oh and the demon has accidentally switched the Antichrist with another kid, so he’s being raised as a normal kid in a small town in England until he starts to realize that he actually has powers beyond belief because he’s the son of Satan.” “…You’re sure this is a comedy?”
I tried explaining what Revolutionary Road was about to my mother and I made it sound terrible.
“Well it’s about this couple, and they want to move to Paris, and… they argue a lot… and there’s a lot of silence…”
Sounds BOR-ing, even though the movie is really good.
Explaining Rent (one of my favourite musicals/films) is hard too.
“Well it’s about all these people living in New York City… and half of them have HIV… and there isn’t really a strong plot it’s more just about what happens to them over a year… and they sing a lot.”
Sounds AW-ful.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer - it’s about a girl in highschool who has been chosen to fight vampires. The description is true, but doesn’t do it any justice at all.
For popcorn! Any minute now they’re gonna announce the movie where Sam leaps home for keeps!
It’s hard to do any Joss Whedon show (like Firefly, Dollhouse, or the aforementioned Buffy) justice by describing the premise because the genius of these shows is dialogue, characterization, and individual moments that defy cliches and surprise the viewer.
I liked the book for the reasons you mention. To my surprise, I liked the movie just as much. Something about it connected to a sentimental squishy part of me. Go figure.
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Funny, I was thinking of starting a thread like this myself. The nefarious Skald no doubt stole the idea from my head using some sort of mind-reading device.
My personal #1 example is the (out of print) fantasy novel Gossamer Axe, by Gael Baudino. When I have reason to refer to this I usually say it’s about a traditionally trained Celtic harpist who takes up the electric guitar and forms an all-female rock band. Even THAT sounds pretty ridiculous, but the stuff I’m leaving out sounds a lot worse.
Like the part about how the heroine is traditionally trained because she was trained in traditional times – she’s actually a pre-Christian Celt who’s traveled through time to the present day. She’s hoping to rescue her lover who’s been held captive by the elves for hundreds of years. I forgot to mention she’s a lesbian. A time-traveling Celtic lesbian rock musician. Who can do magic using music. Oh, and this book was published in 1990 (just before the grunge explosion) so the band is actually a hair metal band and most of the references to contemporary music are also about hair metal.
All of this sounds ridiculously awful, but it is IMHO a pretty good urban fantasy. It has a feminist and gay-friendly bent and had some “message” subplots, but overall doesn’t feel too preachy. It does very much romanticize the Celts, but it’s hardly a unique offender in that area. The author is also obviously enthusiastic about rock music and I liked the music-based magic system. I do feel kind of bad for her that she wasn’t writing this book in a different time, though. Not only was hair metal on its way out as a genre, but the genre and especially the associated “look” (there are a number of references to spandex and hairspray in the book), has since been considered a huge joke in a way that most other dated genres are not.
There is no such thing as mind-reading. Human consciousness is an emergent quality of human neurobiology, not a mystical phenomenon; and the density of the human braincase prevents monitoring neural EM frequencies with any degree of accuracy.
I use nanites lodged in your corpus callosum, thank you very much. BRAIN-reading, not mind-reading. And before you complain they’re perfectly safe. Unlike the old models, which leeched energy body from the subjects’ body and caused all that accidental death, these are powered by matter-antimmater matter. Nothing bad will happen as long as you don’t jostle yourself by bungee-jumping or square dancing or anything like that.
Well, that explains these headaches I’ve been having. And that mysterious blackout when I was in Geneva earlier this summer…
No, that was somebody else entirely. Fricking meddling Aquaman. Why, if if it weren’t for him and the rest of the goddamn Superfriends I’d have control of the you-know-what by now, and I wouldn’t have had to replace the nanites in your head.
Taking off the silly hat: my all-time favorite short story is Valerie Martin’s “The Freeze.” Technically, it’s about nothing more than a woman in early middle-age who, depressed over a romantic rejection, does not notice a cat dying outside until it’s too late to do anything about it.
I thought it was heartbreakingly beautiful when I read it 20 years back. I re-read it recently and found that I had understated the case.
Cowboys in Space.
No no; SMARTASS cowboys in space.
With a hooker.
And a psycho-lady.
And Jayne. Who’s a boy.
And Vera, who’s a gun.
Did I mention the cunning hat?
The first two I thought of were The Wire and A Confederacy of Dunces.
Star Wars: Well there’s this farm boy who is in love with his sister, and want’s to kill his father and… hey wait don’t leave.
Moby Dick. A one-legged guy attacks a whale and dies.
World War Z
It’s about zombies…a lot of them…like, a war with the zombies.