Given a piece of music written for just intonation, clearly you could derive another piece by replacing all factors of 3 with factors of 5 and vice versa (or pick some other pair of primes). Sometimes the result might even be good.

In Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner (1997), Joe, for a genius, is a bit stupid. Maybe he hasn’t watched enough movies.

Jimmy tells Joe to “bring the Process” to their meeting in the park. Joe never mentioned that word to Jimmy. Though Joe is already suspicious of Jimmy, he does not notice. (Well, maybe he’s too angry to notice.)

The fake FBI agents tell Joe that Jimmy is working a classic Spanish Prisoner scam, though Jimmy has done almost nothing to set up such a story. If he says the “princess” is in trouble, will Joe hand over the Process to help her? Hardly. So why doesn’t Joe remark that it doesn’t fit?

When the police ask for something with Jimmy’s fingerprints, the plot requires Joe to take a day or so to remember the switched book.

Susan is the obvious suspect for the theft of Joe’s knife; this does not occur to Joe.

Tailsteak writes:

All comics have to have a setting. Very often, almost all of that setting can be implied, especially if the comic is set in the quote-unquote “real world”. If you’re using magic or hypertechnology to drive your plots, however, it’s important to define how that magic or that hypertechnology works.

Much as some of us would like it to be important, no, it isn’t. Think of fairy tales; think of Tolkien, who never expounded a theory of magic and probably never thought of needing one. The scientific approach to magic was, I think, invented by such writers as Fletcher Pratt and Randall Garrett; it is the novel feature of their works.

This week I watched two movies that coincidentally opened in the same week in 2012. Neither delighted me.

In Looper, the terrible threat to be averted is a gangster bent on — gasp — wiping out a group of retired killers. I should care? The targets aren’t even interesting: they’re not so much hitmen, which would suggest some need for cleverness in their métier, as overpaid slaughterhouse workers.
In the end, why does Joe’s “change” (it’s a time travel story) erase Sara’s death but not Cid’s wound?

Seven Psychopaths is self-consciously ironic, “transgressive” and self-referential; nothing here that hasn’t been done better.

I recently read the uncut Stranger in a Strange Land (having read the shorter version long long ago, probably before puberty). It contains the phrase “she’s as female as a cat in heat,” which also appears in the same author’s later Time Enough for Love; in each case it appears to be intended as a compliment.

Now that I know a bit about cat sexuality, I think: what, she’s ruled by her gonads even more than a 17yo boy, and miserable until she gets a rather unpleasant chore done?

In Watch on the Rhine (1943; screenplay by Dashiell Hammett from a play by Lillian Hellman) the penniless Count remarks,

Blecher, we do not like each other.

The Nazi to whom he hopes to sell information replies,

But that will not stand in the way of our doing business.

To link such a sentiment to fascism implies a remarkable kind of snobbery.

An argument is offered that New Zealand is the wrong place to film Tolkien’s works:

One of Tolkien’s great accomplishments was making Middle-earth seem vividly old. Wherever the reader looks, ruins and crumbling statues poke through the lichen. […]

To do justice to Tolkien—to capture the essence of Middle-earth—a filmmaker needs to convey that sensibility. And the problem with New Zealand is that it is decidedly young—both geologically and as a place inhabited by people. […]

The criticism of tone is valid, but on the other hand: our world is, by definition, older than Bilbo’s; Tolkien had no grasp of geology anyway; Eriador has been depopulated (why?) for a thousand years by Bilbo’s time, and Rhovanion always was relatively empty.