(The reader also finds this narrator's mind a bit less open than he thinks it is, which is part of Cole's subtle project in unreliable narration).
Measured narration and subtle factual embellishments make the fiction of the film seem probable: if Yi's hybrid, artificial world isn't today's reality, it could be tomorrow's.
Her opening narration suggests a subtle film that will surprise.
Though Solnit mobilizes decades of sociological research to support her argument, the chapters themselves move effortlessly through subtle philosophical readings and vivid narrations — such as the explosion, in 1917, of a munitions ship in Halifax, which threw six million pounds of material a thousand feet in the air, and killed fifteen hundred in "a shower of white-hot shrapnel".
The result, which is called, with characteristic concision, "The Garden," is standard-issue Wiseman cinéma vérité: clever juxtapositions forming a subtle commentary on American life, no narration necessary.
Ford is famously subtle, a devious master of unreliable narration, which is not something that TV versions, however good, can easily pull off.
Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, for instance, starts at the end of Vladimir Nabokov's novel, does away with the narration, and makes a subtle character very prominent.
And to the degree that I did the latter, it's very subtle; there's no voice-over narration, there's very little text.
"High," directed by Rob Ruggiero, isn't a particularly subtle or deep drama, despite some fancy narration about the conversion of St. Augustine and the mysterious ways of God in shaping human destinies.
He released a video on Wednesday, in which his narration says, in a not-so-subtle dig at the competition, that "history celebrates profiles in courage, not profiles in convenience".
