Back from vacation...

...and already back in the grind of school. I don't go back to work until Friday night, but I have a ton of stuff to catch up on before then. So this is just a short post to say we had a blast while missing the blizzard of the season. Both the boys have been devoting all their free time to building Lego versions of everything they saw at Disney World last week.

On the writing front, I have not one but two stories being held for further consideration for the Paper Blossoms, Sharpened Steel anthology, so wish me luck!

In the meantime, here is my favorite pic from last week:

I'll be gone for a week...

...visiting some warmer climes. In the mean time, check out what I did. Of course it's just quarter-finalist under a new name, and I already have seven of those. But still, cool.

The Laconic Character

So I recently watched all of Band of Brothers with Quin for the second time. I don't watch a lot of war movies, and the ones I do watch I seldom watch twice - too upsetting. I can't imagine willing experiencing the storming of the beach at Normandy in Saving Private Ryan ever again, for example. But this TV series is so character-focused with a relatively low disturbing images count it's not an uncomfortable re-watch. Plus with so many characters it's hard to absorb everything the first go around. So I agreed we could tackle all ten episodes together on the nights I don't work (and in return he owes me five nights of Hindi films, which means I can watch five movies from beginning to end all in a blow rather than in 45-minute treadmill chunks).

My favorite episode is "Bastogne". Yes, yes, snow and cold. I love snow in film. (Have you ever noticed how few movies are set in winter? Especially if it's not integral to the plot. I imagine it's a continuity nightmare, working with snow.) But the snow isn't the main reason I like this episode the best. The story here revolves around "Doc" Rowe, who is my favorite kind of character - a laconic one. He spends a lot of time sitting and thinking, and when he does speak he is direct and to the point, and you know what he's saying doesn't even touch the surface of what he was just thinking.

Actors complain about laconic characters; they are hard to play. When you don't have any lines, you disappear into the background (like "Doc" Rowe does in the other nine episodes. You'll see him - sometimes he even speaks - but you don't really notice him). Seth Green had this problem with Oz, the laconic werewolf on Buffy. I suppose as an actor there are only so many ways you can listen intently to the other actors talking before you crave a good monologue. Still, there is a power to the laconic character. One of my favorite Buffy scenes is from season three, when the mayor has Willow but Buffy has the box, and the other characters are all arguing about whether to continue with the spell to destroy the box or to trade the box to get Willow back. And Oz gets up from where he was sitting quietly on the steps, crosses the room without really being noticed, and smashes the spell cauldron against the wall. And then still takes a nice long pause before he speaks. Buffy could have done the exact same thing, but Buffy makes attention-grabbing gestures all the time. It would not have meant the same thing.

Perhaps I have sympathy for actors trying to play a laconic character because I've been struggling so much with the writing of my own. I'm speaking here of my Inuit hunter, Uvlugiaq, in my novel Tao of Troth. He wasn't meant to be a laconic character. I originally intended him to be warm and big-hearted, a Miyazaki character like Tombo in Kiki's Delivery Service or Pazu in Castle in the Sky. That's what I had written him up as in my notes and outline, anyway. But when it came to actually writing the prose, his personality wasn't that at all. When he was alone with Thordis, he let her do most of the talking, and when the two of them were with Snorri he didn't speak at all. Somewhere around chapter six I gave up on trying to force him to speak and just let him be laconic.

This is one of the biggest challenges I'm looking at in the rewrite, keeping him from disappearing for huge chunks of the book. The debate I'm having now is whether to give him a few chapters to tell from his POV. I've been trying a few out, just to see how they work. I'm not sure it does; the power of the laconic character is in not knowing exactly what they're thinking. In this aspect acting is easier. An actor can say a lot with a look or a gesture that doesn't call undo attention on itself. In writing it's very tricky to simultaneously describe something but not call attention to it. Movies can have a few things going on at once; heck, even comic books can have a few things going on at once in the same panel. But prose is always one word at a time.

So it's tricky and for me involves a lot of writing which I'll never actually use in the novel. It reminds me of a page in my Art of Dragonlance book, where on one side is the finished painting but the other side is filled with sketches of all the different ways the artist approached how one person's hand could look - opened, closed, fingers like this, fingers like that. I'm sketching hands, basically.

But it's nice to be writing again after nearly three months without it. And when I finally hit on the perfect sketch and incorporate into the final painting, it will all be so worthwhile.

Movies in January - a post days in the making

So January was a bumper crop of movies around here. I watch a lot of movies, but 21 in a month is a bit more than the usual. Mostly this is because movies I got for my birthday and for Christmas (and at the Eros Entertainment after-Thanksgiving sale) waited until January before I had time to watch them. I'll break them down into categories:

Movies we watched with the boys: The boys watched the Bollywood movies Dhoom and Dhoom 2 with me some time ago, and even Oliver liked them. You don't have to be able to read subtitles to follow a movie that is mostly motorcycle stunts, exploding barrels of petrol, and some songs. As with many Bollywood movies, the Dhoom movies steal from Hollywood movies, in this case a mix of the Fast and Furious movies, and the relationship between Robert de Niro and Al Pacino in the movie Heat. Heat would be far too intense for the boys, but the Fast and Furious movies are all fast cars and little plot, so I picked them all up with one of our many Christmas gift cards. I had seen the first one before, so that doesn't count as a January movie. I had heard in the second movie, 2 Fast 2 Furious, the gay subtext is just text. About the scene where the two main characters meet and start wrestling around in the dirt I decided that was a pretty fair assessment. It's the weakest of the three, but still a worthy popcorn flick. (I find it ironic; it seems John Singleton broke into films with Boyz in the Hood so he could make big popcorn flicks like this and Shaft; usually it's the other way around, the popcorn guy that longs to be taken seriously).

The third one, Tokyo Drift was surprisingly good. I've seen drifting on sports channels and found it pretty pointless when it's done on a race track. When the characters in this movie use it to take hairpin turns up a mountain, it all makes sense. Plus looks like fun. This has no real continuity with the first two films, which is fine. The main character in this one (Lucas Black, from the old TV show "American Gothic" (I'm the only one that watched that, aren't I? Gary Cole as Satan? It was the bomb! And was cancelled halfway through season 1, like most everything else I like on TV)(OK, he was also the kid in Sling Blade, if you've seen that) actually has an arc. That's right, he undergoes change from the beginning to the end of the movie. It was a refreshing change from the first two movies, in which the cars were really the main characters. All it lacked was a mechanic singing to the scary girl while he fixes her car in the rain to be just as cool as Dhoom:



We also saw Rush Hour 3, another end of a triology which is far stronger than the second film was. I was expecting to be mildly amused, but this was a lot more fun than I thought it would be. Chris Tucker does a new take on "who's on first?", Jackie Chan relies more on his comedy than his kung fu (which is good; he's getting to old for that do-your-own-stunts thing, and he's got wonderful comic timing).

Lastly we watched both of The Transporter movies. These star Jason Statham, who will always be referred to as Turkish around these Snatch-loving parts. Again, these are total popcorn movies but a lot of fun. The first one had better driving, but the fight scenes in the second were better than the first (particularly the bit with a fire hose). These movies require a huge suspension of disbelief; frankly, those are my favorite kind. OK, next category:

Movies I watched with my husband: These are largely things he picks (in a nutshell, he prefers not to suspend his disbelief). Ocean's Thirteen I think I mentioned in an earlier blog. Another third in a series which is much, much better than entry #2. These movies succeed in reverse proportion to how much Julia Roberts they contain; she's not in this one at all. I did miss Catherine Zeta Jones, who wasn't in it either; her I like in everything I've seen her in.

3:10 to Yuma, yet another movie that kills off Alan Tudyk. I don't generally care much for westerns, mostly because I prefer kung fu and sword fights to gun fights (although I did like The Quick and the Dead, which also had Russel Crowe).

Dragon Wars. Oh, what to say about Dragon Wars? First off, Korea is a big hole in my film section. I have exactly one Korean film - Il Mare (later remade in America as The Lake House, but the original is very different), but it doesn't have the original Korean soundtrack. I can pick from Cantonese dubbing with English subtitles or Mandarin dubbing with English subtitles. Now Dragon Wars is an American film, but it's by a Korean director and the first part of the movie (the part I liked) was set in the past in Korea. Then the movie jumps to present day LA, follows a guy (who is supposed to be a TV new reporter but is as scruffy looking as the lead singer of All American Rejects) as he looks for Sarah Connor (I think that was her name. It was certainly her role here). Then dragons fight the army, tanks and helecopters versus balls of fire. It failed to even be a good, bad movie for me (it was no Hawk the Slayer). It did set off one of those horrible laughing jags I get where I just can't stop laughing no matter how annoyed my husband gets. Probably not what the director was going for. If the whole thing had been set in Korea with Korean actors I would have liked it better, although another pass at the script to give the characters, oh I don't know, motivation wouldn't have been amiss.

Ghost in the Shell 2. We saw the first one I guess 12 years ago in theaters and had never realized there was a sequel. This is a lot like the first one, very talky and surreal. The animation is gorgeous in places; particularly the montages of city life, the parade in southeast Asia (where they are and where they go is left vague, I think on purpose). Unfortunately the director likes to go gory, with spurts of blood and exposed spines when gun fights break out. Otherwise I'd like this a lot better. I'll probably watch it again anyway; there is a time loop sequence in the middle I particularly would like to watch again and pay attention to certain details I wasn't looking for the first time through.

The next one was my pick: War with Jet Li and Jason Statham. They were both in The One which I found fun but stupid (it's supposed to be sci-fi, but has some glaring logic errors which threw even me out of the story). This one is bleak, violent, with a way too high guns to kung fu ratio. I was disappointed. The one highlight was a scene with the Yakuza, when I nudged my husband. "Hey, that guy back there standing against the wall - isn't that Kane Kosugi from Ninja Warrior? Look quick - aw, Jet Li killed him." (It was Kane Kosugi, one of my favorite Ninja Warriors. So yes, the extra casting was the high point of this film).

The last movie we watched together was also my pick, and I think he only agreed because we had nothing else that wasn't in Hindi and there was nothing on TV; he was not enthusiastic. It was Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. I thought it was very well done; the colors are fantastic, I like the way she used the new romantics music of the 80s. Kristen Dunst was good, but it was Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVI that I really liked. So I liked this movie, but my husband? He didn't like it. He loved it. Won't stop talking about it. Which is a shame since he feels it's not very manly to tell his coworkers and/or brothers how much he loved a movie about Marie Antoinette. He's been overcompensating since: I've had to rewatch Ronin and the entire run of Band of Brothers with him since so he can get his man card back.

Movies I watched on my own: I gave up a chunk of treadmill time to catch up on movies rather than read, and I also had a few days laid up with a head cold that spent I laying around watching films whenever I wasn't working (unless I physically can't sit up in a chair I don't call in sick. I telecommute; it's not like I have to be lucid enough to drive a car or have to worry about infecting coworkers. Plus calling in sick would necessitate calling up coworkers and talking them into working overtime to cover my shift. I save that for bad cases of food poisoning).

So, most of these are not in English, largely why I end up watching them alone. I watched two films which were foreign versions of old European plays. Aru Kengo No Shogai is the Japanese version of Cyrano deBergerac starring Toshiro Mifune. I saw it on the Kung Fu Channel, which plays half kung fu movies and half Toshiro Mifune movies. This was a very faithful retelling; they pretty much translated every line and performed it in Japanese. There were still minor adjustments; the theater in the opening scene is a very different experience in Japan than France, for instance. The one big change they made was puzzling: his nose wasn't absurdly long; it was wide with very red nostrils. I'm not sure why, perhaps the long nose would be considered obscene (but it's supposed to, frankly), perhaps flaring red nostrils means something in Japan that I don't know. Aside from that... well, Toshiro Mifune is always cool. (Apparently he was the original choice for Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid. Now that would have been a very different movie. Ralph Machio's character would have been pissing his pants).

Omkara is a Hindi retelling of Othello, less faithful to the original that Aru Kengo No Shogai, but very well done and so well cast. I've only seen Saif Ali Khan in Hum Saath Saath Hain so far, where he plays the youngest brother who wakes up every morning to a singing alarm clock of a hippo in a hula hoop. I wasn't sure how he was going to pull off Iago (quite possibly my favorite of all Shakespeare parts. If I were an actor, I'd be killing to play Iago; let some other schmuck moan away as Hamlet). I was surprised; he was fairly dripping with venom. And Ajay Devgan was quietly menacing as Othello/Omkara. He is a half-caste here, not a Moor, and this is set in modern India with gang lords buying elections (a theme that comes up in quite a few Hindi movies). I love Shakespeare. I love Shakespeare films. But I really love films where Shakespeare's stories are retold in more interesting ways and not just faithful retellings in period costumes. Like Baz Luhrman's Romeo and Juliet, or the Hamlet with Ethan Hawke, or Ian McKellan's Richard III. This is one of those.

To round out the Hindi films: Bhaghan, with Amitabh Bachan. Meh. The story of a man who always gives his kids cash for whatever they need, retires with no money left and has to live with his kids, who only wanted his cash. It would have been more heartbreaking for me if I hadn't felt on some level that he deserved it. He should have spent more time with his kids and gave them less money they didn't really need just really wanted. Jeet, very melodramatic even for me. Gangster falls for girl and starts stalking her. Girl is freaked out, then kind of likes him, then tells her dad she wants to marry her stalking gangster and Dad has a heart attack so she marries Salman Khan, who really, really likes her (I think if she tried she could see the upside here). There is a lot more going on with gangsters and bloody fights and all. You can see how it's all going to end from a ways off. I would say this one is for Khan collectivists only (OK, that would be me).

Akhiyon Se Goli Maare is another movie about gangsters skewing elections. It's more of a farce though, and stars Govinda plus every journeyman actor in Mumbai. I don't know these guys' names, but every face I've seen in at least a dozen other movies. This is what they call a total time pass; fun enough the first time, but I'm not sure if I'll ever be inclined to watch it again. It was in the $0.99 section of the after-Thanksgiving sale; hard to pass that up. Bizarrely, it came packaged with another film (so two movies for $0.99) called Bawandar, the true story of a village woman who was gang raped by men of a higher caste who thought she was getting to uppity, organizing the women and speaking out against child marriages ("child" here doesn't mean a 12-year-old bride; it means 3 and 4-year-old bride. And widows who are 10 and never actually lived with their husbands). A disturbing film, albeit a good one, and a really odd choice of partner for the Govinda movie (they weren't just tossed in the box together in the warehouse in a "we've got too many of these" kind of way; they were packaged together in a "Transporter and Transporter 2" kind of way. Weird).

The last Hindi film I watched from my after-Thanksgiving batch was Mother India. Very old; two of the actors later became the parents of Sanjay Dutt (Munna-Bhai) if that tells you how old this is. I was expecting to find it hoaky but really enjoyed it. In a way it reminded me of the Zhang Yimou film To Live, it's just one disaster after another for this family. But the woman manages to struggle through it all to a great old age. I particularly liked her second son, the Irish one (he can't keep out of fights but dearly loves his ma).

In the "in English but set in India" category are Kama Sutra and Monsoon Wedding, both directed by Mira Nair. These are very different from Bollywood films. So far I've only seen two Bollywood films where the actors kissed each other (Rang de Basanti and Dhoom 2). Two out of 1, 2, 3... tons. Watch enough of those, and Kama Sutra looks very titillating indeed. It was a gorgeously made film, but I wished it had focused more on the relationship between the two women and not tried to be a love story. Monsoon Wedding I liked better. It's half in English and half in Hindi, switching between the two mid sentence quite a bit of the time.

Only one Chinese movie: Curse of the Golden Flower, the third in Zhang Yimou's wu xia movies after Hero and The House of Flying Daggers. There actually isn't very much wu xia in this; it's more like Yimou's other films, what with the intrigue and family relationships. Which probably explains Gong Li's presence; she plays arrogance so well (she was the only thing I liked in the movie version of Memoirs of a Geisha). There is a cool scene at the end, a seige in the courtyard of the Forbidden City which was reminiscent of Kingdom of Heaven (only cooler with the wu xia touches).

Last film: The Devil's Backbone, in Spanish. I mentioned before how much I loved Hellboy. I found Pan's Labyrinth good but very, very dark (depressingly dark). This one, also by Guillermo del Toro, falls between the two. It's a ghost story set in 1939 Spain in a boys' orphanage. It's very well written and the imagery and in particular the way scenes are framed is beautiful. It reminded me a bit of The Sixth Sense in that the scariness was not reliant on gore, and that the story was the thing. Rare in horror films, that. This one I'd highly recommend.

Books in January

Let's start with books and hit the movies in a few days. This is by far the shorter list, as I only read 6 books and 3 of them were graphic novels (in my house they count as books).

First off, the graphic novels. They were all Hellboy. The Chained Coffin and Others, The Right Hand of Doom, and Conqueror Worm. In a turnabout of my usual order, I actually saw the Hellboy movie before I had read any of the comics. And I loved it; it's still one of my favorite comic adaptions. It has darkness and heart. The fact that I still prefer the movie to the comic is more of a sense of loyalty to my first exposure, I think. I'm geeked to see Hellboy 2 and am very, very geeked that Guillermo del Toro has been picked to direct The Hobbit plus sequel (or whatever that second film is supposed to be).

On to the three "proper" novels. The first, The Amber Spyglass was really mostly read in December. But I read the last 30 pages in January so it falls here. What actually happened in the end was the subject of a longlasting squabble around these parts. There is a certain scene written with a certain obliquity, and someone else in this house is convinced it's not at all oblique, that a certain thing definitely did happen. I'm of the sense that it is in fact intentionally oblique, but even so what he is certain happened most probably did not. Because it's just not terribly romantic when you're 12. That's probably a spoiler there; I'll leave it at that. I didn't emotionally engage in these books as much as others did. Very well written, but not having been raised in a hard core Christian environment, I just don't have the strong urge to rebel against its dogma that others do, I guess.

I also read The Android's Dream by John Scalzi, which I enjoyed immensely. I like his take on how politics and governments actually work. Provocative and humorous.

(In December I read The Sagan Diary, which is of novella-length but not really of story structure. It's more a series of ruminations of Jane Sagan, a character from the Old Man's War books. It's short - I read it in an afternoon - and probably not to everyone's taste; as I said, it's not properly a story. But I really liked it. Particularly the chapter on words, and the other on sex.)

The last book I read was my plunge back into Heinlein: Farnham's Freehold. I like the story and the ideas, but the story desperately needed a different POV. I would have loved to see a chapter told from his wife's POV to turn the rest of the story on its head (like the Molly Bloom chapter of Ulysses, say. You've been in Leopold's head all book, Molly provides an entirely new way of seeing him). As it is, we have only Farnham's way of seeing things. Barbara gets a few chapters, but she's such a Farnham yes-man she just made me more irritated. Of course this was also the problem I always had with Ayn Rand. The people with opposing view points are always idiots and the heroes never suffer from self-doubt. So I didn't really enjoy Farnham's Freehold, but it did provide me with a handy new nickname for my husband when he gets all bossy. And no one was spanked or threatened with spankings. Always a plus.