HBO's Game of Thrones

Winter is coming.

And since Martin is writing the adaptation too, WILL HE EVER FINISH HIS FUCKING SERIES BEFORE HE DIES?

Don't worry, they'll just get Brandon Sanderson to finish it.

No, no he won't.

I WANT MORE MIDGET SEX ACTION!

And when George RR Martin dies, Vincent will come over and carry him to the underground...

No.

Just what Martin needs, another excuse to be late with the series. First it was football, then it was book signings and tours, then politics got him all worked up. And now this? We'll never see another book in the series. And after that aborted, boring last book that may just be a good thing.

Thank goodness Lynch's new Gentlemen Bastard book comes out next year. This is my plug to go pick up the Locke books by Lynch. These days I'd put them up against Martin any day.

Let's not forget there's a new book from the great R. Scott Bakker dropping in January.

And the aforementioned Brandon Sanderson has the wrap-up to his Mistborn trilogy out now and it's great.

Nice! My 2nd favorite after Erickson!

And I'll say this now: Verne Troyer as Tyrion Lannister! COME ON!

Only the pilot was greenlit. Apparently HBO is making about ten pilots for its next batch of shows, and may pick up around six of them. I don't think this will slow Martin down, it will just change what he does on his off-time. Writing 40 hours a week still leaves you with a lot of time to, you know, live.

Nooooooooooooooo. Come one, he's one of the better characters in the series and you want to gift Verne Troyer with this role?

I'd much rather they go the LOTR route and cast a shorter (capable and talented) actor and go forced perspective with his scenes.

I'm about 100 pages in and loving it. Hope to finish next week, when classes ease back down some.

Troyer for Tyrion? No love for Dinklage? Damn, if only Michael J. Anderson was younger.

This guy for Tyrion. And that's the only connection I want between this and Willow.

I was joking. I was actually of Dinklage, or any talented older midget.

Jesus. A Dance with Dragons....2010? 11? Why, George, why? Oh. A gigantic paycheck, and a perfect excuse to temporarily sidestep the crushing pressure of the expectations of millions. I understand. Oh, and Dinklage for Tyrion. Depardieu for Robert. Gabriel Byrne for Ned. Malkovich for-Wait, that's the Three Musketeers.

I tried reading the first book in the series when it was announced that David Benioff was involved and I couldn't do it. So fucking terrible. Just boring writing, not even funny bad writing like most of the fantasy novels people here shit themselves about.

I tend to give folks the benefit of the doubt in matters of taste, but you're just flat out wrong.

Dude, you missed out on the chance to make a lame Harry Potter joke? Fail.

Lots of people know who George RR Martin is. He's a much better writer than you'll ever be.

Does anyone know who Devin Faraci is outside of "oh he writes stuff for a movie website" and the internet? And no, Script Girl doesn't count.

I'm sorry, Fett, but you can fuck right off.

I don't agree with Devin about this. I'd pretty much given up on fantasy as a genre before a friend forced these books on me, so I love them with an added dimension of having made me believe swords and sorcery could still be worth a damn.

But nothing about that changes the fact that you're measuring Martin's dick against an internet journalist's. For what? There's not point that could possibly emerge from that fucking rubbish other than "oh, Martin is more famous than Faraci" which doesn't make the guy's criticism (if you even want to call it that) invalid. Dan Brown is practically a household name, but you don't defend the quality of his work by pointing out that he's more famous than someone who says he is the suck.

McDonald's is some awful, gut-twisting shit but a lot of fat idiots (and I mean a lot) love it. It's still awful, gut-twisting shit.

Instead of being preschool about it, try pointing out that the prologue of the first book is off-putting, slow, and perhaps even out of place. I thought that and gave up reading it for a few weeks before picking it up on the toilet one night, plowing through the beginning, and discovering how awesome it could be.

If you can't defend Martin's work without some tangential, irrelevant measurement of penis, don't try defending it at all.

And might I add: This shit is perfect for HBO. Or HBO is perfect for this shit. I hope it gets picked up.

If HBO can do for the fantasy genre what they did for the western with Deadwood, this could be groundbreaking... and shocking for alot of people whose only exposure to fantasy in Jackson's LOTR, or Harry Potter.

This thing oozes with potential...

Can't wait for this but there's no way this thing goes past a season or two. If Rome couldn't make it due to being expensive I just don't see how this can do better. Also I'm pretty sure that even if it was successful the series would be lucky to hit season 6 before catching up with Martin's slow ass writing style and the 7th season would be delayed indefinitely.

Well said, Xion.

Indeed. Wasn't it clear that Fett was Baba?

There's only one way to be sure: Ahem, Dawn of the Dead (2004) was clearly superior to Romero's original. In fact, Romero's over-reliance on the shambling, slow zombie, when combined with his ham-fisted commentary on American consumerism, makes Dawn of the Dead (1978) a terrible piece of filmmaking not worth the celluloid that was wasted on the project.


... anything?

Oh so this guy's been around before? What an idiot.

The only idiots here are the ones who keep thinking I'm someone else. Ignorance is bliss I guess.

Back on topic: If HBO does pick this up for a full season. It will easily be more expensive than ROME and that will doom it before it starts.

Wouldn't making the pilot involve the construction of pretty big sets and wouldn't that make it a slightly idiotic idea not to make it a full season, considering Martin's involvement and the built-in audience?

And, wouldn't this be, essentially, a medieval Rome for a while? There's barely any "fantasy" in the first book, isn't there?

I want to see how they go about creating a very large albino wolf with red eyes. CGI?

And, "You know nothing, Jon Snow."

One of the biggest reasons why Rome was so expensive was that it was shot in Italy, which is ridiculously expensive.

Apparently, this is going to be shot in Eastern Europe and possibly New Zealand, for the most part, which would could cut production costs in half.

And really, there aren't a lot of sets that need to be built from scratch. Shooting in castles would be enough for most sets. The Wall would obviously be a challenge, and Dany's stuff later on would be interesting. And of course the Dragons...but other than that its mostly just Middle Ages type stuff.

For the purposes of the pilot, they'll just be glorified puppies. Alaskian Huskies, perhaps?

No. You have to know your sled dogs.

Siberian Huskies: The typical image we have of sled dogs. Highly intelligent.

Alaskan Malamute: Similar to Siberians, yet larger, more massive and bulky. Average intelligence.

Alaskan Huskies: Mixed breed, mostly huskies mixed with greyhounds and others types of dogs to makes them faster.

To have large wolves, I'd go with Malamutes, or Malamutes/Siberian hybrids. I saw one of those who could kinda fit the description of Ghost, minus the red eyes.

I always pictured them as fast first, intelligent second, fighters third (hence my Alaskan Huskie idea), but I'll buy a Malamute/Huskie hybrid.

Alaskan huskies are thin and they lose the wolfish aspect. Unless you miraculously find the right mix.

Toby Jones for Tyrion.
I've said this ever since I saw him in Elisabeth (the Channel4 series with Hellen Mirren )

I'm all for adapting a story, but really, Tyrion is a midg. Toby Jones is just a short and ugly dude.

Dinklage is a veritable no-brainer, I would think. He's the kind of known and respected, yet inexpensive, character actor HBO uses (Gandolfini, Paxton, McShane, Hinds, Paquin, etc). The Dink could use some sort of high profile role as well, and the role could have been written specifically for him. It's the rest of the casting that should be interesting, particularly in regards to the age of the kids. The books are full of ten and eleven year olds killing and fucking.

It should be a no-brainer as well that the kids are gonna get aged a bit. I'd say 5 years each sounds reasonable.

I've been thinking about it, and remembering the story of the 2 novels I read. This series will probably not be very good.

I remember when I read it, I knew it was rumored to be an HBO series, so I recall how certain scenes could fit "HBOian" episode endings and all. But, thinking it clearly, say, Bran seeing the incest thing and all will probably feel extremely stupid when he doesn't remember it, because the reasons we buy that are because of all the dreams and thoughts. Also, if they age Bran, those scenes work even less.

Same with Tyrion, half of what was interesting about him was his thinking, without it, the scenes will be kinda laughable in that True Blood way. Unless they go Blowjob Monologue-style.

This works both ways, because I eventually chose not to keep reading for fear of the phrase "muss her hair" or other variations of it appearing another three million times. Other things, like court and Varys and all that could probably work quite amazingly.

Can RRMartin write screenplays? I don't know that much about him.

Well he can't really write novels.

Ooh, hope not. The only way this series works, in my thinking, is if they keep the general outline of the plot only and treat it more like Rome than Lord of the Rings. The genre setting should be the hook, but the writing and characters would have to maintain it. Which is also from the HBO playbook (Sopranos, Deadwood, Carnival, Rome, etc.)

Thing is, that's old HBO. I have no idea what, besides boobs, is the hook of True Blood and that's by Alan Ball and, even if you at some point wanted each character gruesomely murdered, 6FU had great characters.

And Spike Marshall, touché.

If they can't get Dinklage, the guy from In Bruges will be a very acceptable substitute.

True Blood, of which I couldn't even finish one episode, is very much in the sexy vampire romantic fiction genre. It's adapted from books that might as well have been Twilight, or Anita Blake, or what the fuck ever. Martin is just from a (slightly) different corner of Barnes and Noble.

True Blood, and I suppose John From Cincinnati, are very much genre shows, like HBO of old. They were just wildly deficient in the writing and/or acting departments, which was especially noticeable next to the stark brilliance of their early shows.

I bet Spike Marshall hasn't read Martin. This isn't a defense of the books per se, but fantasy novels are just a super easy punching bag. They're very simple to attack and difficult to defend, mostly with reason. Hell, I feel fairly comfortable saying Terry Goodkind writes shitty books, and have no first hand experience there. But Martin is a cut above, and even though I ultimately gave up on this series, I enjoyed it for a couple books.

The guy has TV experience with The Beauty and the Beast. The whole thing. So yeah, he can...

And yeah, Spike most likely didn't read any of his books at all. But that leaves me wondering: can anyone name a fantasy author better than Martin? I can name a few names, but the amount of shitty writers in the field in astonishing compared to good ones, like Martin.

That's the problem though -- the meandering nature of Feast for Crows and his seeming reluctance to finish the next book as well as his surliness about even being asked about it have really tainted my appreciation for the first three books.

I'd offer Brandon Sanderson on the strength of Elantris and his Mistborn trilogy. Thoroughly enjoyed every moment of those.

And if the follow up to The Name of the Wind delivers, expect to see Patrick Rothfuss added to the list.

Listen to this man. He speaks the truth.

Finished Hero of Ages last night. So refreshing to have a fantasy storyline END.

And, Rothfuss knocked it out of the park with his first one.