The Forbidden Kingdom

So instead of a date night we made it family movie night. Which was a bit of a risk; we usually prescreen PG13 films before letting the boys watch them. Some PG13 like the Will Smith movie Legend I would have put more in the R category (lots of scary images, but I think it's the scene where he has to kill his own dog that would have bothered my eldest the most). Then there are films like this, which I would have called a PG. Bloodless kung fu violence, it's like a live action Avatar (coming soon...)

I went into it expecting some good fights but a lame story. I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, it's about a white boy that gets a magic staff that takes him back in time so he can return it to the Monkey King. But they never go with any fish out of water jokes, or things are so weird in China I just don't know how to behave! jokes, which I appreciate.

Clearly Jet Li had some screenplay input. From DVD commentaries on his other films I've gotten a sense of how he thinks kung fu should be portrayed, and this movie had a very Jet Li feel to it. Jackie Chan and Jet Li both teach the boy from Boston kung fu (which takes so long he grows a ponytail; nice touch). Jackie Chan tells him how learning kung fu makes a musician a better musician, and a butcher a better butcher. Jet Li tells him kung fu is like water - it doesn't fight, it moves around its opponent and wears it down.

The girl with them has her own story line which was very good, and ended exactly as it should (I'm refraning from spoilers, can you tell?).

Plus the boys really liked it, which is always good. Jet Li plays both the stern monk and the Monkey King, who is a total giggling spaz. Fairly early on the Monkey King insults the Jade Warlord and the two fight, the Monkey King playing tricks and generally amusing himself throughout the kung fu match. Oliver leans over to me to whisper, "The Monkey King is so cool!"

I did miss a chunk in the middle of the movie when some chunk of lint got stuck under my contact lens and by the time I got to the restroom to get it out the lens was completely shredded. So I had to watch the rest of the movie like it was a Monet painting, and apparently I missed the funniest scene in the whole movie. The boys couldn't stop giggling long enough to give a coherent account of just what had happened out in the desert. Oh well, I'll see it when it comes out on DVD (about a dozen times...)

Movies in March

Those of you who know me from Backspace will recognize this Joss Whedon quote from my signature line:

"The two things that matter the most to me: emotional resonance and rocket launchers. Party of Five, a brilliant show, and often made me cry uncontrollably, suffered ultimately from a lack of rocket launchers."

I love that quote (although in my case I would say it would be emotional resonance and kung fu fights), but until last month I had never actually seen a single episode of Party of Five. I watched season one on DVD. A good show, if often painful to watch (poor Charlie; it sucks to be him).

I only saw two movies in English. The first was the latest from the Coen Brothers, No Country for Old Men. I liked the level of detail they bring to every aspect of the set, to every nuance of character. It's a very well-made film. Still, in the end I didn't like it very much. There were a lot of nice moments (Tommy Lee Jones describing his dream of his father in the last scene is a particular favorite), but I guess it was just too relentlessly hopeless. I don't mind violence in films, but violence in an atmosphere of complete despair really is too much for me. So: nicely made but I won't be watching it again. If the Coens follow their usual pattern their next venture will be a comedy. (I also watched The Hudsucker Proxy for the nth time, but this time with my boys so they can understand where the phrase "You know, for kids" comes from. I'm not saying they here that a lot around here or anything...)

I also watched I am Legend. Cool premise, and again a wonderfully shot film. But. The DVD comes with two endings and I didn't like either of them. Given a choice I thought the alternate ending was the better of the two, but still. I have this problem a lot with speculative films (more so than books even when the films in question are based on books - I shall have to meditate on the caue of that) - a story that is written to pose a question always crumbles for me in the end because the ending will try to answer the original question, which is better left unanswered, as no answer can satisfy without making the question seem much more black and white than it was when it was posed. Perhaps that's why I don't have this trouble with books - filmmakers shy away from open endings, but books have no problem ending on an ambiguous note. I don't know, I'll have to think on that more.

The last four were Bollywood, and three were quite good. Heyy Babyy (and as I keep telling Quin, that spelling isn't a Hindi convention, it's a nod to hip-hop) is something I've had the soundtrack to since it came out in theaters in India, so I already knew I liked the music. But it's meant to be a remake of Three Men and a Baby, and I wasn't wildly thrilled to see it. Still, I figured at least the music bits would be worthwhile, so I picked it up with low expectations. Well, the film takes care of the bits it wanted from Three Men and a Baby in the first 40 minutes, then spends the next 2+ hours telling another, more interesting story. I was very pleasantly surprised.

On a linguistically frustrating note, I mentioned I've had this music forever, and I had printed out the lyrics in Hindi. I do this with most of these films, but I never really know what the songs are about until I see the movie and the English subtitles. My favorite song from this film is called "Mast Kalander". Now "mast" I knew already; it comes up in many songs and means a sort of intoxicating, passionate joy. "Kalander" I didn't have a clue on. So when I finally watched the film I eagerly awaited this translation.

Apparently "mast kalander" means "mast kalander". This translation was later confirmed by Quin's coworker from Delhi. It just means, well, mast kalander. I suppose it's a bit like trying to translate something like "Dance this Mess Around"; you can't do it without breaking it.

(I generally watch these movies on Wednesday nights when the boys are out at the community center, and when they come home Aidan always wants to watch the musical numbers. "Mast Kalander" has a cameo from Shah Rukh Khan, and Quin was absolutely mortified at how both of the boys perked up when he appeared. Apparently we're all getting too into these things, so he says. Then I played the title song, and when Malaika Arora Khan came on screen he shut right up. Malaika is the one who did the dance on top of the train in Dil Se. He always shuts up when she's on screen).

I also picked up Shah Rukh Khan's first film appearance: Deewana. I don't think this one really stands the test of time except for those like me who like to study actors and how they change over time. Khan as a very distinctive style, and apparently he had it in full force right from the get-go. But he's not even in the first half of the movie. I would say this is for SRK completists only.

1942: A Love Story I had gotten from one of the Post-It note recommendations. How geeked was I to see that Sanjay Leela Bhansali cowrote it and directed the musical numbers (with Farah Khan as choreographer, natch). This one is well worth seeing, a good story with some excellent songs. I wonder if Bhansali picked the music as well as directed the musical parts; it has his style of not going for pop songs, and also has a song about the sound of the rain that reminds me of other scatting, playing with sounds songs like "Dhole Baje" and "Chalak Chalak". Also, his last movie Saawariya contained images from all of his previous films; I can now account for the umbrella the main character carries; it comes from 1942: A Love Story.

Another thing from 1942: A Love Story popped up in the last movie I watched in March, a movie that immediately jumped into my top five favorites: Main Hoon Na. I've praised Farah Khan's choreography, how she works with large groups so well and finds ways for the dance to reveal nuances of the characters, so that the musical numbers are an inherent part of the story and not just some strange aside as they are in so many of these films (especially when they are all filmed in the Alps for no clear reason, as if the characters hie off to Europe to sing at each other than get right back to their hometowns to carry on with things.) So it probably shouldn't come as a surpise that the first movie she directed would have awesome dance numbers. But the rest of the movie, which she wrote and directed, is all good. I got the same feeling I had the first time I watched Jaan-e-Mann, that someone went inside my skull and took all my favorite things and whipped them together into a movie just for me. How else to explain a movie that is equal parts Dirty Dancing, Grease, Clueless, 21 Jump Street, The Matrix, and anything from John Woo, and it takes all those parts to tell a story about Indian-Pakistan relations and about family (and of course is also a love story or two)? How many of us can there be who dig on all those things? (Here's another layer: the editor of this film was a certain Shirish Kunder, who later went on to direct Jaan-e-Mann. So my feeling of similarity between the two was perhaps not so coincidental).

Plot in a nutshell: SRK plays a soldier who works under his father as security for a general who is in the process of releasing a number of Pakistani prisoners who have been in prison for decades - farmers who wandered over the border in search of water and the like. Raghavan is a terrorist who opposes any gestures towards Pakistan and his attempt to assasinate the general lead to the death of SRK's father. The general fears the terrorist will target his daughter next, the daughter who has stopped speaking to him and refuses to leave college to go into protection. So SRK is sent to college undercover as a really old student so he can protect her from the terrorist, and while he is there he can attempt to find the half-brother whom he's never met, who is also a student. College in Hindi films is a lot like high school here; they have proms and Valentine's Day dances and having a 40-year-old guy in class is regarded as odd (certainly not my college experience; older students were few but not exactly rare).

The general's daughter is best friends with SRK's brother, only because he doesn't really notice her as a girl. She was an only child, and her current hatred of her father stems from never being the son he wanted. Her attempts to be more boyish for his sake are not serving her well. And I really felt her pain when she finds she only appeals to uber-geeks and older men (of course SRK isn't following her around because he's into her, but she doesn't know that). Yes, she eventually gets a make-over, but 1) SRK gets one first (although his sweater vest and button-down shirts made him such an adorable nerd) and 2) she decides that the total girl look is way too much work and if that's what it takes to keep her guy, she'd rather be with the uber-geek.

Farah Khan rocks.

(And the 1942 connection? Well, SRK crushes hard on his chemistry teacher to the point where the man who only knows army songs at the beginning of the movie finds that every time he tries to speak to her the words become lyrics, then the men with guitars and violins hop up behind him and he's singing "Ek Ladki Ko Dekkha" from 1942, to his great embarrassment, and he can't stop).

Yeah, I loved this movie.

But to pick just one musical number to share? How about the first song, shot as one long take with scores of dancers (or more correctly faked to look like one long take with computer editing, but still impressive). How abou the closing number, which serves as the credits? What other film lets you see not just the actors with their names, but the art crew, the sound guys, the hair stylist?

No, it's got to be "Tumese Milke Dilka Jo Haal", just after the general's daughter gets her make-over, and the violins now play for SRK's brother (and you get a little peak at the first of many appearances of John Woo's birds):

Books in March

There were five of them and they were all Heinlein (I've since finished him off. Still don't really know who I'm going to plunge into next, so I'm just grabbing some random things that have been sitting around for a while. But that's next month's book report...)

All right, so namely it was The Number of the Beast, Friday, Job: A Comedy of Justice, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and To Sail Beyond the Sunset. I liked them all save Friday, which didn't really do it for me. From a writing stand point, it seemed to start out telling one story and ended telling another, which left me wondering how the first story ended, and what exactly was the point of the second one? Truthfully, the book never would have recovered from the early scene where our heroine gets gang-raped and one of the guys kinda turns her on (I had almost decided I could let that go when the guy in question turned up again. Blech.).

But the other four I liked. The world as myth was a cool idea, and the mixing of characters from all over the Heinlein universe was fun. I particularly enjoyed The Number of the Beast, when Hilda locked Lazarus Long in the bathroom (an act long overdue). And then there was this exchange, when the four characters realize they are traveling to fictional universes that all of them had read:

“Did Heinlein get his name in the hat?”
“Four votes, split. Two for his ‘Future History’ and two for ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’. So I left him out.”
“I didn’t vote for ‘Stranger’ and I’ll refrain from embarrassing anyone by asking who did. My God, the things some writers will do for money!”

(And I recently read that Heinlein wrote Glory Road in 28 days. Which explains a lot. I would have to do some serious debating to pick my favorite Heinlein, but on the subject of my least favorite there is no doubt that is the one.)

RIP Mr. Eko

As it turns out, goldfish aren't good for frogs:



We have two left who are still swimming about, but one is moving pretty sluggish. I don't think the odds are good. They'll probably all be dead before our preying mantis egg sac hatches.

Here's a nicer pic: my boys working together on a puzzle book without bickering. A rare, rare moment:

Looks like I need another date night...

Yes, the foreign world seen through the eyes of a white person is in my top ten lamest plots for movies (I would much rather see China through Chinese eyes, and so on). This is very much that. But it's also a movie where someone learns kung fu; like boy-meets-girl, I never get sick of that.

Best of all: Jet Li vs. Jackie Chan. Dude, I'm so there.

Man!

Worked a bunch of overtime. Didn't even quite get that nice pay check in my hands before I had cause to spend it. Our oldest cat almost cacked last week. Many expensive little adjustments later he is doing much better (even bathing himself; he hasn't done that in months!). But he will be on thyroid medicine for the rest of his days and the vet recommended he only eat soft food (so he has to be separated from the others when he eats, because they have no qualms about knocking an old man aside and taking his tasty gravy-soaked meal).

I spent every spare minute I could find last week polishing up an old piece so I could have something to send to Writers of the Future by the 03/31 deadline. Then Monday came with lots and lots of sticky wet snow. I waited for my husband to get home from work with the car then tore off to the post office. But too late; I missed the last pick up of the night and my entry will have a 4/01 postmark. *sigh*. Well at least I have a nicely polished story already in for next quarter.

I have half-finished book and movie posts for March I'll be getting to soon, plus another about homeschooling and Heinlein. So hopefully that means you'll be hearing from me a bit more in April than in the last few months. Hopefully.

On an unrelated note, apparently African frogs don't like goldfish. Or more correctly, they like them a touch too much. (File under things which weren't my idea. My husband thought the tank would stay cleaner with goldfish in it. I was dubious, more animals would surely mean more mess not less, but since the first fish looked like this the morning after we put him in the tank, and the second fish got it on day 2, we'll never know...)

Which reminds me, I never did get that video clip online*

Trying to break into the world of writing can be a drag. You will be rejected a lot. Even if you are good, if your piece isn't quite right for the publication, you will be rejected. It comes with a territory and you either grow a tough skin or stop submitting (sadly I've known a few good writers we have taken the second option).

The one thing I always say to myself when I file away yet another "I really liked this, but..." rejection: at least I'm not an actor. I didn't have to actually be there when the editor read it, and I didn't have to endure a face-to-face rejection. Because it's the same thing: you could be good but just not quite right for the part, but rejection always stings. Man, actors have a tough fight.

So I'm really pleased that an old friend of mine who went to Hong Kong to pursue his acting dream is getting his first little taste of success:





The sound guy with the boom mic and the earphones on is my old kung fu compatriot Pete Wong. Being in a commercial is like the short story sale of the acting world, it let's you take the "aspiring" off your self-descriptor. Hooray for Pete!

*The final diagnosis was the PC was just too slow to handle the video; it was glitchy when I got it to work at all. But it occurs to me this shiny new laptop of mine has a DVD burner. Might be worth investigating how that will work. Then I could show you some sweet kung fu...

Movies in February

Only eight this month, and none in English.

I watched two in Spanish: Volver from Pedro Almodóvar (so from Spain) and Ladrón Que Roba a Ladrón (quite honestly, I'm not sure if this is a Mexican film or an American one filmed in Spanish. At any rate, the action takes place in LA.). Back when I used to work at a movie theater, my boss was a huge Pedro Almodóvar fan. So for 20 years I've been intending to see a Pedro Almodóvar film but never quite got around to it. This was my first. I was mostly impressed by how low-key it was. Some pretty intense things happen, but these women all take it as a matter of course and just move on. If anyone felt any really strong emotions, it was in the past. It was also one of those movies that starts at some arbitrary point and rambles on then stops at some other arbitrary point. I'm a structure enthusiast - how stories are put together is nearly always more interesting to me than what the story actually is. And lack of structure is itself a form of structure, to be sure. Mostly I found this movie not too terribly moving, and given the subject matter of incest, rape and murder, it really ought to have been. But I'll have to dig up one of Pedro's older, more praised works before I write him off. (Sometime in the next 20 years I'll get to that. At the very least, I have to try one of the ones Antonio Banderas is in, yeah?).


Ladrón Que Roba a Ladrón I liked better. It's very indy: limited locations with the focus on witty dialogue. It's a heist movie with a bit of a message about not screwing over your own people. My husband watched this one with me, being a sucker for a heist movie. It was good, although perhaps not multiple-viewings good.



Next up is my first movie from Thailand: Citizen Dog. Aidan was studying Thailand for geography when I saw this review up at Andrew Wheeler's blog and thought it would be cool to check it out. The boys and I watched it while Quin was out of town and we all enjoyed it, even Oliver who has to really focus to keep up with subtitles (although at not quite 7, reading any subtitles is pretty cool, I think). He particularly enjoyed the teddy bear that smokes, drinks and swears like a sailor. Although like Wheeler says, you gotta like the quirky to get into this movie at all; it is exceedingly quirky.

The other five movies are all in Hindi (natch). My method of picking out which movies to buy at Eros is pretty arbitrary. Quin brings home a few Post-Its a month with recommendations from his coworker. If I find a director I like (Sanjay Leela Bhansali or Karan Johar, for instance), I get all their stuff. But mostly I'm stuck picking by actor. I've learned not to read the backs of the boxes; they summarize the whole film including the ending, which I'd rather not know ahead of time. Sometimes I've seen a few of the musical numbers already on You Tube (although frequently they are clips where some fan has taken that dance number and set it to music from a different film, so that can be confusing for neophytes like me).

In the category of things with cool dancing that turned out to be songs from other movies when I saw them on YouTube: Josh (not a boy's name; in Hindi every O is a long O) with Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai. It is sort of a Hindi West Side Story with a Christian gang and a Hindu gang duking it out on the streets of Goa. The dancing was of course top notch (Farah Khan was the choreographer, and I always love her stuff. She creates dances that reveal something about the characters. She also choreographs large groups really well and shows a lot of influences like Egyptian bellydance and western musicals old and new. I haven't yet found a list online of things she's done to specifically buy things she's done, but when I see her name in the credits it's always a good sign). I also learned a bit about the history of Goa in this film which cleared up a lot of things I had been wondering from seeing other films (apparently the Portuguese controlled Goa until 1961, far later than I had thought anyone had controlled parts of India). It was a decent movie, although I could see why the videos on YouTube are all set to music from other films', the music here was pretty unspectacular.

Next up was a Shah Rukh Khan/Salman Khan double header: Karan Arjun. It's the story of two brothers who are murdered. Their mother goes to the temple of Kali Ma and prays to the dark mother to let her sons be reborn to avenge (themselves or her? which ever). This is a much better depiction of Kali Ma than The Temple of Doom, but perhaps this is an unfair comparison. Her temple was a really cool set, with a waterfall behind the many-armed statue and bells hanging all around. This movie did quite a few things I liked: the prayers to Kali Ma were always accompanied by mom's blood (which satisfied the fantasist in me that magic comes at a price, although Wikipedia characterizes this as a religious film, so perhaps I ought not to call that fantasy). Salman Khan's character is realistically reluctant to accept the idea that he is the reborn son of this old woman (he's not disbelieving in reincarnation, just the idea of reincarnation on demand). There is a really cool interpretative dance bit in the temple of Kali Ma that was very reminiscent of those old Hercules movies. Not that I would recommend this movie to anyone, it is in fact rather cheesy. Car tires squealing on dirt roads and Salman Khan throwing a telephone pole like it's a javelin cheesy (I like cheese myself, but most folks don't. Like my husband, who stared at me through the very little chunk of this movie he actually watched with me).

Har Dil Jo Pyar Karega... stars Salman Khan, Rani Mukerjee, and Preity Zinta, all of whom I like generally but when they get together here and in Chori Chori Chupke Chupke, the results are only so-so. This movie starts out being about a guy who moves from Goa to Mumbai to make it as a singer. Then he rescues a girl from being run over by a train and is mistakenly taken to be her fiance by the people at the hospital. Rani is in a coma so she can't clear it up, and her family instantly bond with him so he's reluctant to admit he's never actually met her before. Then things get complicated when he falls for the coma girl's best friend. Yes, as a matter of fact, that does sound a lot like While You Were Sleeping. I actually don't mind that Bollywood puts out their own versions of Hollywood movies. Yes, it's a lot like they are thumbing their noses at our copyright laws, but it's not like if they paid for the rights of the story that would be money that would ever find its way to the writers' pockets. Plus I'm just a sucker for different tellings of the same story. That said, this one wasn't particularly interesting. Which is odd; I've long told my husband that WYWS is only a few musical numbers short of being a Bollywood movie. The idea that these two people fall in love and decide to do nothing about it because it would be upsetting to other people is the very bedrock of Bollywood plotting (and the anti-Bollywood movie would therefore be Troy, where Paris and Helen hooking up is worth thousands of innocent lives because dammit, she's hot! or something). But for whatever reason this story just didn't make the translation well. The tone was all over the map, and some of the actors' performances were just weird, going for funny when the scene called for something quieter, that kind of thing. I blame the director.

Dulhan Hum Le Jayenge is largely forgettable as well. I like Salman Khan and Karisma Kapoor together, and parts of this story are quite funny. Karisma plays a girl who is basically a shut-in raised by three very demanding, very eccentric uncles. She runs away from home to take a tour of Switzerland and finds that the social skills she acquired to deal with her crazy uncles don't get her far in the real world. But when Karisma gets hassled by two drunken Swiss guys while she's dancing, Salman's character crosses the room and slaps her, then apologises to the two guys for making a scene. Then he bawls her out for acting like a European girl (she's wearing a suit of his since her luggage was stolen, so she's showing no skin at all, and her dancing was by no means suggestive). So she complains that he's not being a real Indian either, not defending her honor. So he goes back to the Swiss guys, smacks them both, then comes back to tell her "but this is still your fault". It was one of the most bizarre and creepy things I've seen. A few minutes later this brute of a woman slaps Salman's character hard enough to knock him out (not a punch, a slap. Right on the ear). Which made me feel a bit better, but the movie never really recovered for me. Plus the music wasn't all that great, which as my husband would tell you is generally the break point for me. I can put up with a lot in a movie if the music is good.

Last film Veer Zaara, which I had heard a lot of good things about. Too many good things, I fear, it didn't quite meet my inflated expectations. It's a Pakistani-Hindustani love story and it was well done, but it didn't hit it out of the ballpark the way I was expecting it to. Gorgeous cinematography, gorgeous clothes design, some nice cameos from Amitabh Bachchan, Kirron Kher and Anupam Kher. The old person make-up they used on Shah Rukh Khan and Preity Zinta for the end scenes was well done, but really too well done. He's been in prison for 22 years. I figure he was maybe 30 when he was arrested, and she about to be married couldn't be more than 22 or 23. So why do they both appear to be in their 70s when they meet again? I can see how prison would age a man, but what aged her? Perhaps being separated from your One True Love will do that to you.

Books read in February

“Sometimes we buy books because we think we’re buying the time to read them.” — Warren Zevon
(A quote I saw on Higgaion a few days ago and just had to swipe it because it's oh so true).

I only read three books in February. Three! Granted I was out of town for a week and when I got back I had a long to do list filled with things that take three times as long as I think they should take. Like taxes. And setting up a wireless network so the laptop and PS3 will stop whining about how isolated they feel, always being unconnected, don't I know they have updates to download?!?

So anyway, three books and all by Heinlein: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I Will Fear No Evil, and Time Enough For Love. Spanking-free; I actually enjoyed all three of these immensely. Which is not to say I never looked up from I Will Fear No Evil and ask my husband why he doesn't have a cute nickname for me like "Tits". Or ponder a future where women are all naked or nearly so, but still spend hours on their makeup and wear high heels. Which is an evil I will fear. It's the exact opposite of my fantasy, which is being Aishwarya Rai in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and wearing gorgeous clothes with the spinniest of skirts while always going barefoot (of course it seems in that movie that she never gets to leave her house, ever. I guess that would be a downside...)

It's easier to find things to say about books I don't like. And time is still short (I didn't quite take care of that to do list last week). I'm hoping to finish off the last few Heinlein novels in March so I can move on to other things. I'm feeling a strong craving for a little Opposite Of That. Opposite of Heinlein, hmm... Jane Austen, I'm thinking.

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.

It's so cold even I think this sucks...

Although we got to do the throw a pan of boiling water up in the air and watch it all freeze in a cloud of snow before it even hits the ground thing. Twice, because it was so cool to watch the first time.

I'm reminded of all the stories I've read of polar explorers freezing to death. You don't decide to stop trying to live, you stopping making the decision every second to keep going. It's about that cold out there now. Lucky for me I have a nice warm house to go back into.

On a different note, I have two end of month wrap-up posts I'm working on. I'll still be talking about what I've read (not much this month, my return from zombieland was not as complete as I had initially thought. Getting sick will do that to you. My ears still just ache all day long; very annoying). A day or two later I'll post all the movies I watched in January. Well, watched for the first time; I have some things I re-watch a lot. January was a bumper month for movies; we got a lot of gift cards and cash for Christmas which we used to buy a monster stack of movies, and I still had a ton of Hindi movies I bought from Eros just after Thanksgiving and never had a chance to watch until after New Year's. So that first movie post will be a doozy. But if there is anything I like to talk about more than books it's movies, and I've seen some cool things.

Updating this and that

If you're reading this from Myspace, perhaps you've already noticed my spiffy new layout with the red and the snowflakes. (I really like it, actually. I've been viewing my profile all day just to admire it.) The website is still a mountain of ugly. The text is very nice, I think; I wrote it myself. Then again I put the website together myself as well. It's abundantly clear I'm more of a text person than a visual person. As soon as I stumble across some extra cash, I'm totally paying someone to pretty up that website.

The other item of business was the picture of me that's on everything. You know, the one my mother hates. I have no good pictures of me anywhere, and having my husband take another one will probably net the same results as last time. So, having no other recourse, I did the camera-at-arm's-length thing. Not a particularly fun afternoon. I hate getting my picture taken; it seems I hate it more when I'm also the one taking the picture. I'm not sure if I got anything that's an improvement. So I'm putting it up to a vote.

Here is the best one from outside:

Which I kind of like. It's like I'm thinking about how incredibly tall I am, I can squash you like a bug. (Or something. It's been a long day.)

Here's the best one I tried taking inside:

Mostly I just look really pale.

I do have a good one that keeps turning up when I scrolling through My Pictures picking shots. Sadly it's not me, it's Malaika Arora Khan, just something left over from the desktop wallpaper wars (that when on so much longer than Gary Coleman and J. Lo, believe me). I probably can't use it, I suppose:

Suit up!

So, I don't watch much television. Avatar: The Last Airbender when it's a new episode. Good Eats, Mythbusters, or Ninja Warrior are all good for the occasional viewing when we're not doing something else in the rare evenings I don't work. The last few minutes of a Timberwolves game (I gave up on watching the whole game after Yao Ming and the Rockets stomped us so bad, it was like the teachers vs. students rugby match in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life).

I do, however, like TV on DVD. Because making time in my schedule for watching something on a weekly basis is too much of a commitment, but all the episodes at once I can fit in as I find the time (often not even whole episodes at a time; it becomes a bit like how I read a novel - especially when I watch DVDs on my laptop, carrying it from room to room as I do chores. Then it becomes a lot like how I read a novel).

Hence Lost. Although I liked Season Three so much I'm seriously considering recording and watching Season Four episodes as they play. They said they would play them all in order without breaks or reruns. More importantly, my husband got hooked on the show, and it's easier to find time to watch things that he will watch with me. For those familiar with the show: feel my pain. He started watching at about disc 2 of the third season, with the only real intent to inform me at every opportunity that Sayid was not as hot as I kept saying he was (this from the guy with a total man-crush on Mohinder from Heroes). Then he started paying attention to things and asking questions. A lot of questions. This is not a show that welcomes jumping in at the middle. Luckily there's the pause button to allow me to explain all the back story in loving detail.

Another show I've watched on DVD but never actually on TV is How I Met Your Mother, which actually reminds me a lot of Lost. They're like drama and sit-com siblings. They both have a story that is telling up to a definite end point (it's just all the middle bits the writers are making up as they go along), which lends itself to a certain level of structure not often found on TV. How I Met Your Mother also has a wonderful way with nonlinear storytelling (like the episode where Ted wakes up next to a strange woman and with a pineapple on his nightstand and spends the episode trying to reconstruct what happened after he drank all of those shots that led up to that waking up scene).

But honestly, for me the show is all about Barney, and the slow revealing of fresh aspects of his character. Lots of shows have had the character who embodies the Id, and they often have a moment or two where it's revealed that they have a deeper side - they secretly do something sentimental or compassionate, or they suddenly speak with great wisdom for no apparent reason then go back to being the Id. And I've already given away why I generally dislike these characters: "no apparent reason", other than the quick laugh. The thing about Barney is that everything is true to his character in a terrifically complex way.

Of course this is a sit-com, not Dostoevsky; we're grading on a curve here. But I do like Barney. The episode where he gets on The Price is Right is my favorite: funny and sweet and very Barney.

On another note, the boy was indeed sick and not faking. We all learned this when he shared it with the rest of us. Much apoligizing for doubting him ensued, along with the general lying around and groaning from the muscle and joint aches. We're all better now, but what a start to the new year. Plus, our oven broke. Sometime in November, actually; I've spent the last month or so convinced I was somehow messing up every third or fourth meal by not setting the oven correctly. I do dumb things when I'm living in a fog; it's not inconceivable that I could bump the temperature knob or shut it off completely and not remembering doing it. But I really should give myself more credit; no one makes the same stupid mistake over and over for a month. We needed a new stove anyway, the one we have now was the best we could afford when the last one broke, by which I mean it was the cheapest stove Sears offered. On Thursday Best Buy will be coming by with my brand new, just-a-shade-higher-than-the-median-price stove. Very exciting. I might be able to make a pepper tart that cooks on time with an oven that holds its temperature properly.

And this is where any thought of this blog having a unifying theme go out the window: a collection of pics of our cats, taking turns sitting on the box. It's meant to discourage clawing up our door frames, and with a fresh sprinkling of catnip they really do shred the thing, but mostly they just sit on it. Which apparently is very exciting; we always know where at least one of our cats are:

(Valentine)

(Molly)

(Spike)

Back from the Zombieland that was the month of December

Someday I'll have a job like my husband's, where they strongly urge you to take the week between Christmas and New Years off since no one else is working anyway there is no reason for you to be there. In the meantime, I'm still in the world of health care where the only day I had off was Christmas itself (because that would mean paying double time), a day spent in a stupor watching my boys assemble some freaking huge Lego sets. Like a cargo ship and a pier with a crane to load 'er up.

So I'm still in the recovery phase. On the bright side, the health care holiday work load is still nothing compared to retail holiday work load.

I'm not even remotely going to try to catch up on two months' worth of news and books and such. I even abandoned my Heinlein marathon. Two words: Glory Road. Three more words: Pissed me off. It's one thing for a guy to threaten a woman with a spanking if she doesn't stop try to tell him very important information. It's quite another thing for this woman, the ruler of 20 galaxies or some such, to actually shut up and go all meek and "of course you're right". The fact that she had to have her ovaries harvested to stop her monthly cycle before she could become ruler, because clearly she would go nuts 3 days out of the month and be totally unprofressional, you know like all women do, am I right guys? That really pissed me off. But the part where one Heinlein woman tells another that a man who wants to sleep with you is paying you the most sincere compliment a man can pay a woman? That was just funny. So I took a break and read His Dark Materials instead, just so I could stop putting my hands over my ears and humming real loud to avoid spoilers, virtually impossible when there's a theatrical release involved. (I would highly recommend those books, except I'm pretty sure I'm the last person to read them, so that would be redundant).

We did finally figure out how many frogs we had in our tank when Spike shattered it on the floor 2 a.m. Christmas morning. The instructions that came with the tadpoles (you know, the ones that assured us we'd be lucky to see one make it all the way to adulthood) recommended not putting them in a tank with a filter, so they'd been living in a slimy green and orange cloud for weeks. People who came over were invited to nudge the rock they hid under and guess how many little critters were stirring up the murk.

As it turns out, we have six, five little ones and one big fella. (And we went to Petsmart and dropped a chunk of Christmas bonus on a tank with a filter and a pagoda, because clearly nothing is going to kill these frogs, not even a cat who took hours to come out of the laundry room ceiling, he was so freaked out by what he had done). I named the big guy Mr. Eko. Not Mr. Echo from the Young Ones bit, but Mr. Eko:

'Cause all I did in December was work and watch TV (that's pretty much my definition of zombie), namely Lost Season 3, which I got for my birthday.

Today was officially back to school day, but the elder fell mysteriously ill. Quin says it was because I laughed and showed them all this blog entry, but that couldn't possibly be it, could it? So he spent all day in bed and I just schooled the one. (Quin called it our soft opening, because after we were done with Lost we watched Ocean's 13). It was actually kind of nice; Oliver is transitioning from first grade to math to second grade and we decided to celebrate by having him start formally learning spelling. Which might not sound like a celebration to you, but then you don't desperately want to write but are self-conscious about your lack of spelling skills, do you?

Dinner beckons. But I promise to get back to an every-couple-days kind of schedule. And who knows? Maybe I'll even write some fiction...

Have you ever read a review so harsh, you just had to see the movie? Part 2

I had this feeling once before, when I read Roger Ebert's review for Lady in the Water (and when I eventually saw the movie in question I must admit that while everything Ebert said was true, I still I liked that movie).

Now I've just read Hal Duncan's take on the new Beowulf. Hal Duncan's very harsh take on Beowulf. How harsh? He invokes Hawk the Slayer. I was already planning to pick this one up the day it comes out on DVD, but now I'm really dying to see it. I'm not sure if in the end I'm going to be a fan, though. I mean, I liked The Thirteenth Warrior, which was the farthest thing from a loyal retelling of the story, but this one departs in some ways I don't think I'm going to like. Namely, the battle of all battles, Beowulf vs. Grendel's Mother, fought in her lair deep in the dark under water, with Beowulf beating her with her son's arm... apparently that's all gone, replaced by a sex scene. And here I thought Angelina Jolie in a no-holds-barred fight would be worth seeing. Angelina Jolie doing the sexy thing? Not so much.

And Hal Duncan brings up some interesting anatomical considerations. Follow the link and you'll see what I mean.

What, no basketball blog?

Well, so for the Timberwolves are 1-5; nothing to celebrate there. Mostly my problem is that all of the games so far have been on nights when I'm working or out and about, so the few minutes of game I've seen haven't yielded me any useful information as yet. I have to wait for a game I can actually watch to check out our new players and get a sense of how they play. Reading the stats doesn't tell me what I want to know; I'm too visceral for that, I guess. They're in the process of building up a new team from scratch, which should be exciting to watch even though we stand no chance of making it to the play-offs.

On the other hand, KG and the Celtics are 7-0. So my husband has pretty much decided he's following the Celtics this year. It's good for KG, and he deserves it, but there is something not particularly fun about total domination, you know?

Until they play Kobe. I can get behind total domination if it's Kobe they're crushing.

Ooh Ah!

Oh yes, I loved my movie. The bummer of seeing something in the theater as opposed to DVD is that the next day when the urge strikes to watch it all over again, I have to wait six months. *Sigh.* I'm on a DVD-buying moratorium until the WIP is done anyway.

Now, I knew I was going to like Saawariya, but I was somewhat surprised that Quin liked it too. I had spent all week dropping little warnings, about how it was all filmed on sets and was going to be highly stylized, like Moulin Rouge only more so, which I was pretty sure wasn't going to be his sort of thing. And it did in fact feel like a play performed on the world's largest set, a 3D set where the audience could follow the actors through all the little nooks and crannies. Saying a movie felt like a play is usually a criticism, implying that the movie was too static and claustrophobic; that's not the sense of being like a play I mean. It was more like every scene was visually composed like a painter would block out an image. The people in the background were standing "just so", if you see what I mean. And the colors really were fantastic. I've had the soundtrack for a while now, so it was cool to see just how they staged all those songs (and was pleased that Rani got to picturize my favorite).

The theater we saw it at was one of the last multiplexes built before they started building the stadium-seating super-multiplexes. It's kind of sad, it was only state of the art for about five minutes and then it lost all of its patronage to the huge new place built down the road. Perhaps I'm overly sentimental of this particular theater; it was the one Quin and I spent our "honeymoon" at. (We couldn't afford to go anywhere, and I was still on a probationary period as a new hire at work and could get no time off beyond the normal weekend, so we spent the day after our wedding watching back to back movies: A Life Less Ordinary, Seven Years in Tibet, and The Devil's Advocate). It's a dollar theater now, playing a bunch of films like Ratatouille that are already out on DVD but apparently someone still wants to pay for the old, scratched film experience.

They also have one screen set aside for Hindi movies, for which they charge full price. I had no idea, I thought this just happened to be a foreign film they were showing for prestige value or something. If the crowd there on Saturday night was any indication, this is probably where they make most of their dough. They even had made over part of the concession stand to sell samosas instead of popcorn (and if we'd known that, we would've saved room; they smelled so good).

We were also the only ones in the crowd who actually needed the subtitles. Which is a cool way to watch a foreign film, in a crowd for whom it's no so foreign. There is an upside to not waiting for the DVD. They'll be playing Aaja Nachle later this month, the new one with Madhuri Dixit in it. I've already been poking my husband. Babysitter again, yes? Since the babysitter in question enjoys building Lego sets and watching old episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender just as much as our boys do, it's really a win-win situation. Two movies in a month, that's positively decadent.

Brief update

Not nearly as much writing getting done as I had hoped. It's been a long week for work and school both (it's so much easier when they alternate getting stressful). On the upside, I'm still way geeked to go to the movies this weekend. One could almost say pathetically geeked. Simple pleasures, I guess.

At any rate: here's an Eddie Izzard bit about Star Wars, done with Legos. So you know it's going to be funny:

I'm going on a date this weekend!

Believe me that's exciting. It's a rare, rare thing when the stars align and we can get someone my very picky husband trusts who can come over for a few hours and watch a DVD and build Legos with our boys.

This one only happened because I'm still in owes for our tenth anniversary, which we spent in Duluth with both of our boys, one of my husband's brothers and one of his sister's boys, looking at ships in the harbor and visiting train and WWII museums. This hadn't been the original plan, and the husband has been in the doghouse for quite some time for derailing the original vaguely romantic plan in order to bring me along on a boys' weekend away. I'm only into trains if someone is dancing on them; and in fact I didn't go into that museum. I waited outside and read my Jasper Fforde novel. It was a gorgeous day, and the wind blowing off Lake Superior was marvelously pleasant; I enjoyed that couple of hours at any rate. I did go into the Richard Bong WWII Heritage Center (and it looked like we were the only folks there who didn't actually remember the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but it was a Friday morning). There was a little display there of things Richard Bong had had as a kid: his slide rule and his Boy Scout manual. It was very Heinleinesque, and I totally want a slide rule.

But I'm owed something resembling a romantic evening with just the two of us, so I'm making my husband go see a Hindi movie with me, Saawariya. It's the latest from one of my favorite filmmakers, Sanjay Leela Bhansali. It looks particularly Moulin Rouge-esque, with fantastic sets and twirling skirts and ooh! the colors! (For those of you who have strayed too near my house and have been pulled inside and forced to watch dance numbers, Bhansali is the director that did "Dhol Baaje"). It will all be too melodramatic for my husband's tastes, surely (although he seemed to like Devdas, so who knows?), and he's been forewarned that Salman Khan makes an appearance. It'll be a long day with working 8 hours, going to a 3 hour movie, then working another 2-3 hours, but I'm certain it will all be worth it.

On the writing front, I have my work cut out for me. The horrible weekend of working jumped me so early on Friday I didn't get any writing done that day either (I usually get at least half my usual writing time on Fridays, but it was zero this time), and I spent my "extra hour" on Sunday not sleeping or writing but working. There's nothing like sitting at a computer typing as fast as you can for ten or more hours to really kill any desire to sit in front of another computer typing, even if it's stories you desperately want to get out of your head (so I watched Spider-Man 3 with my boys instead. Kind of a "meh" after Spider-Man 2, frankly, but watchable enough I suppose. The Sandman was cool.)

Well, I'm off to do the teacher thing, so that I can hopefully have the time this afternoon to pound out a few thousand words. Wish me luck!