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Nonsense She Wrote

dissecting stories - badly

FamilyFilm & TV Reviews

No-spoiler review: Moana

written by Mell Magment

I’d been looking forward to seeing Moana.

I don’t know if that’s part of the problem.

I geared myself up for it. I watched The Rock’s (amazing) You’re Welcome song. (Many times, it’s very good.) I read up on the making of the film, the casting of all Polynesian actors, the research. I listened to You’re Welcome some more…

The fact is, I’m a huge Disney nerd; I still count Aladdin as my favourite film, hands down, and I own more Ursula-themed clothing than I feel comfortable admitting to. I was expecting to like this film.

I wanted to like this film.

And, on paper, there was no reason I wouldn’t: a story by Ron Clements and John Musker, the writers of Aladdin and Pirates of the Caribbean. Music by Lin-Manual Miranda, the genius behind the album I literally can’t stop listening to to the point that it’s becoming a real problem and affecting my shot, I’m not throwing away my shot, I’m not throwing away my… Ahem, sorry. I mean to say: Hamilton. A Disney princess (for all intents and purposes) who has big hips, small boobs, and no love interest. A strong female lead who gets to do a plucky adventure story instead of a romance. One of the Flights of the Concord. The Rock – singing!

It should have been a perfect film.

And maybe that’s on me.

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No-spoiler review: Moana was last modified: April 14th, 2024 by Mell Magment
Board GamesGame Reviews

Review: Arkham Horror the card game

written by Mell Magment

When I wrote that I love the stories of particularly in-depth board games in my bio, I’m pretty sure people thought I was joking.

Those people need to play more games.

Board games are incredible. My fiancé and I can’t get enough of them. In a metaphoric sense, anyway. In both a fiscal and a physical flat-to-board-game ratio sense, it’s not at all true.

Board games have evolved past Monopoly and Fifty Other Versions of Monopoly Why Is There So Much Monopoly Why?.

Now you have games where you can play co-operatively as Tibetan monks, working together to save a village from evil spirits. You can play as the cast of Battlestar Galactica, trying to work out who’s a human and who’s a cyclon as disaster after disaster hits you in the face. You can change a campaign board game every time you play it, ripping up cards and slathering the board in stickers as your team of (highly attractive) medics and scientists struggle to slow down the colourful disease cubes ravaging the world.

Nowadays, board games are made to compete with movies and video games rather than bubonic plague, the only big time-killer when Snakes and Ladders became popular. They’re not about rolling dice. They’re about strategy and quick-thinking and – yes – story-telling.

Arkham Horror is proof of that.

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Review: Arkham Horror the card game was last modified: April 14th, 2024 by Mell Magment
Book ReviewsThriller

Review: Rattle

written by Mell Magment

Fiona Cummins’ debut thriller, Rattle, is a mess.

A real world thriller with a supernatural horror genre identity crisis, Rattle – or, to give it its full title, according to Amazon, Rattle: a serial killer thriller that will hook you from the start (see: a mess) – is confused and confusing.

It works analogies to the point of abuse, it’s weirdly misogynistic (especially given it was written by a woman), and the muddled story it’s trying to tell falls down somewhere after its first ten descriptions of obscure medical conditions and never manages to scramble back to the same heights – rendering it a less fun read than 101 Bone Diseases That Could Kill You Tomorrow.

I’m not promising this review will be any better, of course. But I’m pretty confident it couldn’t be worse.

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Review: Rattle was last modified: April 14th, 2024 by Mell Magment
Game ReviewsVideo Games

Review: Jolly Rover

written by Mell Magment

I finished a point-and-click adventure game this week that I can’t get out of my head. Not in a good way – more like a bitter aftertaste you just can’t wash out.

I’ve written up some thoughts on the development blog for my choose-your-own-adventure game if you want to find out why Jolly Rover is worth your time. (It isn’t.)

Review: Jolly Rover was last modified: April 14th, 2024 by Mell Magment
Writing

Sickle and Reeves, Funeral Directors

written by Mell Magment

Reader’s Digest has run a fun little flash-fiction competition for the past few years, asking people to write a story exactly 100 words long – no more, no less.

This was my crack at it:

Sickle and Reeves, Funeral Directors, directed the best funerals in town. And ‘directed’ was truly the word.

They were spectacular affairs, talked about for months after. Susie Bairns had fireworks and a close-up magician. Rupert Tippley had a bouncy castle to keep the kids busy while the adults learned to make cocktails. Everyone said it was what he would’ve wanted. (After all, it was cirrhosis of the liver.)

But Sickle and Reeves’ last funeral, before the closed sign went up, ruined their streak. It was a dull thing, closed casket, and Reeves brought the mood down with all his sobbing.

Needless to say I did not make the shortlist. Who knew people didn’t like absurdist stories about funeral directors…?

Sickle and Reeves, Funeral Directors was last modified: February 27th, 2017 by Mell Magment
Book ReviewsThriller

Review: Dear Amy

written by Mell Magment

The breakaway success of Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train – and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl before it – seems to have sent publishers scrabbling through their slush piles, snatching up any story with a suitably dodgy narrator they can shove onto the bandwagon.

Just as Stephenie Meyer launched a thousand supernatural YA novels, just as E. L. James launched… whatever she launched, Hawkins has crammed the shelves full of unreliable narrators, women who don’t want to go into their shady pasts or tell us what they’re taking all that medication for.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. (It’s hard to argue you shouldn’t be publishing books people clearly want to read, after all.) Just because one author has hit success with a certain thought or theme or gimmick doesn’t mean another writer can’t riff off the idea to come up with something new and interesting.

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Review: Dear Amy was last modified: April 14th, 2024 by Mell Magment
Book ReviewsThriller

Review: The Woman in Cabin 10

written by Mell Magment

If you’ve ever read one of the hundreds of books and blogs and pieces of particularly literary graffiti on how to write a story, you’ll be familiar with this – overly familiar, to the point it’s a little uncomfortable: ‘write something that completely surprises your readers but also feels inevitable, like there’s no other satisfactory way things could have ended‘.

But for the amount of writers who proffer this advice, very few seem to prescribe to it – and no wonder. It’s hard. But Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Cabin 10 is a masterclass on getting this right.

A tightly told thriller and murder mystery, where half the mystery is working out if there was actually a murder, The Woman in Cabin 10 should be recommended reading for anyone trying to write mystery, suspense, or unreliable narrators.

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Review: The Woman in Cabin 10 was last modified: April 14th, 2024 by Mell Magment
Writing

Attack of the killer plot bunnies

written by Mell Magment

I’ve been really struggling, the past few weeks, with an idea that will not leave me alone.

It’s the Michael Myers of storylines: relentless, always springing up when you least expect it, and bearing a creepy resemblance to William Shatner (bloated and not acting right).

And, like Michael Myers, it just can’t be killed. Every time I think I’ve gotten it out of my life for good, it comes back – usually when I’m babysitting or listening to John Carpenter’s music – and the hell starts all over again.

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Attack of the killer plot bunnies was last modified: April 14th, 2024 by Mell Magment
Writing

By any other name…

written by Mell Magment

I often struggle with names.

Putting together an odd-sounding, Harry Potter-esque name for a comedic piece is simple enough (I’m still trying to write a story worthy enough to house ‘Hester Cuppleditch’), but whenever I write a more serious story, I want the names to: a) be more realistic than ‘Hester Cuppleditch’, and b) have some deeper meaning.

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By any other name… was last modified: April 14th, 2024 by Mell Magment
Book ReviewsFantasyYoung Adult

Review: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

written by Mell Magment

The name Ransom Riggs conjures to mind a grizzled man, undoubtedly in a fedora, who has dedicated his life to hunting down Nazis or, at a really artsy push, possibly Atlantis.

It doesn’t seem to lend itself to the cover of a book for Young Adults, adorned with a vintage photograph of a little girl and flourishes of flowery Victorian illustration.

But then that’s the nice thing about Riggs and his novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children: it isn’t quite what you’re expecting going in.

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Review: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was last modified: April 14th, 2024 by Mell Magment
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Recent posts

  • No-spoiler review: Moana
  • Review: Arkham Horror the card game
  • Review: Rattle
  • Review: Jolly Rover
  • Sickle and Reeves, Funeral Directors

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