I Read Books: Moving Pictures

Moving Pictures

A mysterious ruin in the Holy Wood lets loose some strange anachronistic ideas onto the Discworld. Terry Pratchett puts a non-fantasy idea into his fantastic world, alchemists inventing film, and various minor Ankh-Morpork characters getting seduced into the movie business.

The novel cycles through the terribleness of the movie business, compressing half a century of nonsense into a handful of weeks. The main actor character is a student wizard who has been carefully failing his exams in order to keep getting his bursary, but makes sure his score is high enough to not get thrown out. This sort of links with the staff of the Unseen University, given characters here for the first time, and they have the b-plot of seeing how this effects Ankh-Morpork and also discovering there is a threat to reality.

Having seen more classic movies than when I first read it (and even more clips of classic movies) there were more jokes for me to get. And even if I don’t get it, or even if I tire of just referencing old films humorously, well the plot moves quickly and there are some other jokes too.

Read This: Many funny film jokes, and some good bits about how fame and the film industry distort things
Don’t Read This: If constant references to old films annoys you