Movies In August

I went to an actual movie theater in August! The whole family went to see Ponyo. I would say it was completely enchanting, animated with such a loving attention to detail, with warm-hearted characters and beautiful storytelling. But I could just say "it's the new Miyazaki film" and if you know Miyazaki, the rest is redundant. It's not my favorite of his, but that still makes it superior to most of the rest of what's out there. I can't wait for it to come out on DVD so I can watch it again.

TV on DVD this month: two more seasons of Two and a Half Men. Still funny, still no real character growth here. Comfort TV, I guess. It's not really a show to watch all the episodes back to back. But it is just amusing enough to have running in the background while you balance the checkbook or make dinner.

Battlestar Galactica 4.5 I found disappointing. On the one hand, each individual character finished off their arc nicely. but it never resolved any of the issues that were the themes of the show. Instead of learning to live together, they basically hit the big REBOOT button and started all over again. Lame. Plus I hate Adam and Eve stories, even if they are mitochondrial Eve. (And I'm totally not buying that all the survivors who couldn't agree on anything for five years all agreed to forgo civilization in favor of the short life spans and high infant mortality and lack of higher culture that goes with deciding to blend with the neanderthals).

Of course Dollhouse was better. I'm not sure about that last episode; postapocalyptic stories are nearly as over done as Adam and Eve. But it's Joss Whedon, I'm willing to withhold judgement until I see what he does with it.

Cinematic Titanic: The Blood of the Vampires. Filipinos pretending to be 19th century Mexican hacienda owners? Other Filipinos in blackface pretending to be the servants? How could that ever be cheesy?

In brief, movies I didn't like at all: Revolution Road. I kept hearing Spike's voice in my head: "And by the way, I would be insanely happy if I heard bugger all about sodding France." Boondock Saints. Because life would be so much better if we got rid of the police and court system and just killed all the bad guys ourselves. There's never any mystery who they are, and innocent bystanders would never get hurt. Sounds like a plan. Fast & Furious (Reloaded) has none of the cheesy goodness of the second F&F movie, and is not fresh and new like the third. It's not exactly a rehashing of the first one either, though. The characters have evolved. It wasn't bad, just completely superfluous. Expelled, where Ben Stein insists that teaching evolution will make us all Nazis. Quin wanted to watch this one. I found it silly and depressing.

The Wrong Guy was nice low-key comedy from Dave Foley. He plays a fellow who thinks he's been mistaken for his boss's murderer and goes on the lam, when in fact no one actually thinks he did it. He falls in with Jennifer Tilly, a narcoleptic, and her father Joe Flaherty, who owns an S&L in a farm town where he's bullied by the local farmer who runs the town, buying up businesses so he can turn them into more fields. Not hardhitting comedy by any means, but I enjoyed it more than I expected to.

An even bigger surprise was how much the whole family is loving the Marx Brothers movies. In August we watched Duck Soup, Animal Crackers and Horse Feathers, three of the early films from when there were still a foursome. I'm actually crushing on Harpo Marx a bit.

OK, finishing off as always with Bollywood. I saw two Salman Khan films, one old and one new. The new was Yuvvraaj, which had elements of Rain Man, Shine, etc. with Anil Kapoor from Slumdog Millionaire playing a man with some sort of autism-type thing who inherits all of his father's money. The other two brothers, Salman and Zayed Khan, at first attempt to find a way to get the money from him but of course grow to love him as a brother in the end. But music is what eventually brings them together, particularly Salman and Anil with Katerina Kaif as the cello player that is the bridge between them. I've never been particularly impressed with Kaif; she's a model turned actress who started out having her dialogue dubbed over by better actresses. She does her own lines now and she's not sounding too bad here. But in particular I was impressed with her ability to pretend to play the cello. In most Bollywood movies, the instrument playing makes Robert Palmer's backup band look like masters of the craft. But Katerina Kaif manages to look like she's seen a cello before, and knows where the high and low notes are and how to move between them. Of course I don't actually play the cello, but she looked pretty good to me. And she is gorgeous.

Chal Mere Bhai was an older Salman Khan movie, and it's a total bromance with Sanjay Dutt. Sure, the story is about two brothers in a love triangle with Karishma Kapoor, who is cute as a button as always. But really, this movie is all about Khan and Dutt being affectionate with each other. It was one of the first cultural differences Quin and I found when we started watching Bollywood movies with Andaz Apna Apna and Sholay. Are these two guys supposed to be gay? I later found that gay characters in Bollywood films are done so broadly there is never any question. Think Hollywood Montrose in the movie Mannequin. The men in Bollywood movies are just much more comfortable being physical with each other than Hollywood men are (hobbits aside).

Sometimes it's not just a matter of tickle fights in bed or getting up on each other's shoulders, though. Point in fact: Zayed Khan's beret and neckerchief:

Honestly, I love this song. All of the music in Yuvvraaj is fantastic (by Oscar winner AR Rahman), which in a movie about the power of music to connect people is a good thing.

Books in August

Is September the month from hell much? Or is it just me who's crazy busy?

At any rate - books. In August it was three nonfic and four fic books read. The nonfic books were all in the aetheist/freethinker vein.

Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. Well. I largely agreed with him in content, but not in tone. Those reading this on Blogspot are familiar with the quote that I've put in my banner:

Every time somebody opens their mouth they have an opportunity to do one of two things—connect or divide. Some people inherently divide, and some people inherently connect. Connecting is the most important thing, and actually an easy thing to do. I try to make a connection with someone every time I talk to them, because a connection can be made. People can be treated with respect. I'm shocked that there are so many people that live to divide. - Joss Whedon

Even more to the point, or at least my point is this clip of Joss talking about cultural humanism, which really gets to the core of what I feel, that the enemy of humanism isn't faith:



I fared better with Raising Freethinkers by Dale McGowan. I enjoyed his earlier collection of essays from various people, Parenting Beyond Belief. This is sort of a practical guide on that subject, with lots of books and weblinks for further exploration. And he gets a huge thank you from me for putting secular homeschooling in the spotlight for a moment. We're in the minority, but we do exist!

Your Religion is False by Joel Grus is perhaps even more divisive than Sam Harris, but it's just so damn funny. Grus is an equal opportunity offender. Richard Dawkins often point out that atheists only don't believe in one more god than most folks; Grus runs with that premise, with chapters on all of the religions we don't believe in and why, including the flying spaghetti monster.

And then it was back at the Niven. I read an omnibus of The Magic Goes Away, The Magic Returns, and More Magic. A novella and two short story collections from various writers all set in the same world where magic is going out of the world and it's resetting itself to become the world as we now know it. It's a cool premise. I don't often like fantasy written by sci-fi writers, but these stories I enjoyed. My favorites were "Manaspell" by Dean Ing and "Talisman" by Larry Niven and Dian Girand.

Burning City and Burning Tower by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle are set in the same world. Burning City I liked up until I looked it up on Wikipedia and discovered it's meant to be an allegory about LA riots. Gah, I hate allegory. But I didn't catch the allegorical elements until after the fact, so it can be safely ignored. It's not like LA is the only place where people went batshit crazy and went after their neighbors under indefensible pretexts (I'm looking at you, Partition). Read in that universal sense, I like it. Read as a commentary on just one event, not so much.

Also some of the fantasy elements weren't thought through. If you're going to set a story in ancient CA, make it feel like CA, not like Europe. I was happier when I was wondering what the redwoods were doing in the Mediterranean. Also, there's a moment when a character wonders when someone is going to "turn off" the ocean. Where did he form this concept? And elsewhere someone's drawing is described as "cartoonish". They have cartoons in this world?

Back in the world of sci-fi: The Legacy of Heorot by Niven, Pournelle and Steven Barnes is all kinds of awesome. How has no one ever made this into a movie? Plus there were women here who felt real and complicated and genuine, particularly Carolyn whom no one likes and is sent off on a suicide mission with a bunch of horses and to everyone's shock survives. I liked her immensely. Perhaps just because she was unpopular.

Movies in July

Well, as it's nearly September my memory is already rusting on some of these...

Started out the month by borrowing a few movies: Aparajito (The Unvanquished) is Satyajit Ray's sequel to Pather Panchali. I love this story; poor Apu is having a very tough life indeed. Sadly this is a trilogy and I can't find the third movie anywhere.

The Golden Fortress is apparently meant to be a children's movie, or so we were told and we watched it with the boys, who were bored out of their minds. Well, it is in Bengali with subtitles with lots and lots of talking. There was a character who turns up near the middle who is a writer of adventure stories (and speaks Hindi; it was exciting for me to all of the sudden understand what someone was saying). He was amusing.

Rang Birangi is another farce where a wife thinks her husband is cheating on her, only he isn't. I've seen this plot done a couple of times in Bollywood and this isn't the best, although there were some jokes specifically about the movie industry and its relative morality which were pretty funny.

Oliver read The Man in the Iron Mask (well, a children's version of it) for history, so I picked up the movie from the library to see how it compared. This one stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Gérard Depardieu, John Malkovich, Gabriel Byrne and Jeremy Irons among others. It is not very much like the book at all. Not a great film, but the aging musketeers are fun, particularly Depardieu's Porthos.

Sticking with the Dumas vein, we also watched The Count of Monte Cristo with James Caviezel and Guy Pearce. This was quite good, beautifully shot with gorgeous costumes and some well executed sword play.

Quin wanted to see The Searchers, the John Ford epic starring John Wayne. Again, gorgeously shot and you can totally see why filmmakers like George Lucas reference it. A bit problematical in the story department, though. While it was nice that in the end John Wayne didn't kill her niece to put her out of her misery or for the sake of their family's honor or whyever exactly he felt that she had to die after living among the Comanches, there was nothing leading up to this complete turnabout in his motivation. It's a rather major change of heart; it would be nice to see what caused it.

One more gorgeously shot movie this month: Jean Renoir's The River, a story about an English family living on the banks of the Ganges. The colors are dreamy. The scene where everyone is napping, the younger children entwined together, is wonderful. Most interesting was the interview with Martin Scorsese that was a bonus feature on the DVD, talking about what it was like to see this movie as a young boy. That man has an infectious enthusiasm, and I love to hear him talk about movies.

I'm a voracious reader of blogs about books and movies, and a lot of what I read and watch I heard first from someone else's blog. The problem is I don't always remember afterwards where I first heard of something. Such is the case with Once, an independent film about a young singer/songwriter in Ireland who befriends a piano-playing woman from Eastern Europe. It's awkward and genuine, and the music in it is amazing. He reminds me a bit of Cat Stevens, perhaps more like a stripped-down Coldplay. This was a cool little nugget of goodness to find, I just wish I remembered who recommended it in the first place.

I watched two more seasons of Two and a Half Men. The writing and acting are sharp. My love of it is only hampered by my deep need for a sense of progression. This is very much comfort TV, where no one really changes no matter how often they seem to get close to it. I guess some folks like that. Me, I'm looking forward to season 4 of How I Met Your Mother.

While Aidan was at camp, Oliver was home alone with me. I had made the decision not to try to get any writing done that week even though we weren't doing school. Oliver was having a tough enough time not having a brother around; Mom couldn't abandon him for the world inside her head too. So it's perhaps ironic that in the middle of that week we watched Coraline, a movie about an only child whose parents are both writers hard at work on separate computers and tuning her out. I didn't like this as well as the book, but it is a visual treat and Oliver enjoyed it (and later Aidan as well).

Do you know what deeply disappointed me? Knowing. I love Alex Proyas, but I think the time has come to admit that he just doesn't have another Dark City in him. Knowing is wonderfully directed; visually cool and the suspenseful scenes had me squirming (he knows when to hold a shot, as opposed to most "more fast cuts the better" directors). But the story sucked ass. It made absolutely no sense. Why didn't the aliens just take the kids they liked and run, why bother with all the math clues? Are there really so many parents still around who don't like having honest conversations with their children? So much could have been simpled up with a single dialogue between Nick Cage and his son. And the movie presents this dichotomy: everything is predetermined or everything is totally, inexplicably random. And Nick Cage's character is supposed to be a foremost thinker in cosmology, but he still believes in this false dichotomy. He speaks of "random" the way creationists do, not the way a scientist does.

Which should have tipped me off, but when the movie ends and the two kids are Adam and Eve I was still deeply pissed off. Lame.

And yeah, that was a spoiler. But you know what? You don't want to see this movie. Trust me. See Dark City instead; now there's a fine bit of filmmaking.

Another Warrior Wisewoman 2 review

I'm sure I'll have that July movie post up before September. Won't be done revising by then, but on the upside what revising I've done feels really good to me. Of course there's the old caveat from Neil Gaiman which is never far from my mind:

"Feb 13th -- wrote some stuff. It was crap...”

"Feb 14th -- wrote some brilliant stuff. This is going to be such a good novel. Honest it is...”

"Feb 15th -- No, it's crap...”

or alternatively:

“(Writing American Gods) was a bit like wrestling a bear. Some days I was on top. Most days, the bear was on top.”

And I'm on top of the bear at the moment, even if things are going oh so slowly.

At any rate, a new review for WARRIOR WISEWOMAN 2 is up at The Fix. Here's what Ziv Wities has to say about my contribution:

Kate MacLeod give us “Gardens of Wind,” which this reviewer considers one of the standouts of the anthology. Our protagonist Akeli is being pressured to choose a new mate, to a background of war, scarce resources, and life aboard enormous airships. Though the pressure is cruel, there is harsh necessity behind it, starting off the story with immediate tension. As the story flows its course, Akeli finds her solution, which is as sudden and surprising as it is satisfying. Very well done.

Which is where having a critique group really pays off. Because my first ending? Nowhere near as good as my post-critique ending.

Books in July

Well, I started the month with Niven and Pournelle's Footfall. Like Lucifer's Hammer, I found it overlong with characters I didn't much care about. The aliens, however, were seriously cool. Still, after that I had to take a Niven break.

So I plunged into some nonfic I've had lying around for a while now. Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber was a very engaging read. It's about the history of textiles from the advent of string to the Industrial Revolusion, but it also has a lot to say about archaeology and how it's done. I found it interesting on both levels.

A Stranger to History by Aatish Taseer is a memoir by the son of a Pakistani father and an Indian mother who was raised in India by his mother. It's about his journey through Islamic lands starting in Turkey and ending finally in Pakistan, trying to discover what it means to be a "cultural Muslim". It's wonderfully written, explores countries I would love to visit someday but probably never will, and brings to life the people who live there and what they think and feel about their own countries. I got my copy from the UK, though; I'm not sure if this had a US release or not.

How To Win a Cosmic War by Reza Aslan is also about Islam, and about how democracy and personal freedom are good things. Between these two books, I got to thinking about cargo cults, and about how any theocracy can only ever be a large scale cargo cult. You can't know what goes on in someone else's mind, you can't force them to have faith. But you can force them to show outward signs of faith. Which is as effective as making a radio out of coconuts. But then I've always thought secular, pluralist societies were the way to go. Still, these are both books well worth reading.

Back to fiction and YA at that: Unwound by Neal Shusterman had a completely unbelievable premise: that pro-life and pro-choice people would agree to a middle ground of carrying every pregnancy to term, but having the option of scrapping them for parts when they become teenagers (unwinding). Everything that follows on that is well thought out, and the story is fast paced and engaging. I might have liked it more, but I just never bought the premise.

Back to Niven and Pournelle, but in a good way. The Mote in God's Eye I really liked. Niven always does cool aliens, and the moties are top notch. This is worldbuilding at its best, I think, an entire society where all the parts fit so perfectly. The sequel, The Gripping Hand, I liked less well. In terms of plot it followed well from the other, but in The Mote in God's Eye I had quite liked the character of Kevin Renner. He reminded me of Hughes in Full Metal Alchemist; the man content to stay in the background and make sure the right people were in the right places and did the jobs they were meant to do. Plus he was sarcastic/funny. Unfortunately in The Gripping Hand he became just any other Niven main character and I missed my Hughes.

OK, back to writing my own terrible, terrible book. I have it on good authority that when you hate the sound of your own words, it means you're nearly done. Ye gods I hope that's true!

"Oil Fire" is up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies

You can read it here. I love this magazine; there are a lot of fantastic stories - adventure fantasy but with all sorts of settings. So far I've particularly enjoyed Marie Brennan's "Kingspeaker", K.C. Shaw's "Sand-Skin Man" and Saladin Ahmed's "Where Virtue Lives". My story is in some very fine company.

Here is what I had to say about this story on my website:

"Oil Fire" is a nice example of how ideas mutate over time. After reading Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories I was inspired to write something old school sword and sorcery, something similarly buddy-flick (dare I say bromance?) but with two women roaming the world and getting in and out of trouble. It would be nice to write something light and fun, I thought, pulpy but smart. But first I needed back stories...

This was intended to be the origin story for one of my two women, but things began to change in the writing. First of all, she refused to be the POV character, shifting that job to her close friend instead. More than that, the story itself kept taking turns I wasn't expecting but were so much the right ones I had to go with it. I think it's easier to buy two itinerant men wandering the world, but I feel a woman in this time period wandering the world would need a really compelling reason. The one I found for Enanatuma turned out to be quite dark. I've since written her companion Prithvi's origin story, and her reason for being out on her own is if anything darker still.

So my goal of being light and fun got lost along the way (I'm hoping it still reads as pulpy but smart). But I have since had a third character begin whispering her own tale to me, something that plays well off the other two. There's hope yet.

On the Importance of Naming: I actually don't know the meanings of the names in this story. They are all Sumerian, mostly names of kings and queens. I try to avoid using deity names since they come with a lot of baggage (when Prithvi's story gets published you'll hear me gripe about how that wasn't possible in her case - stay tuned).

Fantasist Enterprises: Specials 10 for $100.00 Deal

One of my first sales was to Fantasist Enterprises, for the FANTASTICAL VISIONS V anthology. Volume IV just came out so I'm up next. In the meantime, they're having a sale on all their books. Check it out!

Fantasist Enterprises: Specials 10 for $100.00 Deal

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Movies in June

Kind of a lot this month. When the public library is your movie source, it's feast or famine, I guess. Most notably, a lot of these movies are things I've been meaning to see for a long, long time.

First up, the movie version of The Fountainhead. Quin just recently finished reading the novel and wanted to see this. I warned him I'd heard that it sucked. I had heard correctly. Which is strange, as Ayn Rand did the adaptation herself. Apparently she's in love with her character's long speeches to the expense of storytelling. That isn't true of the novel, but when cutting her story down to a Hollywood runtime, that seems to be what she did. Pity. There's got to be a watchable movie that could be made from this source material; I'm surprised no one's tried again.

A movie based on something I haven't read by F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I liked it at the time, but a month later it hasn't really stayed with me the way most David Fincher movies do. In fact, I also saw Zodiac for the first time this month and enjoyed that more. Fincher is the master of making you think you've seen some horrible thing you haven't seen. (Like Gwyneth's head in the box in Seven, you have a visceral response to something he didn't even show on film). Zodiac left me with the impression that computers in general and networked ones in particular are a great boon to police work.

I also saw 12 Angry Men for the first time ever, although I've seen so many other references to it I pretty much knew the whole story already. I found it completely engrossing despite that.

I wouldn't say I was dying to see Wild Wild West, but after watching Kevin Smith lay into it in one of his life shows, how could I resist? Yes, there's a giant spider at the end and the whole thing is summer tent pole movie cheesy, but I found it surprisingly fun. Perhaps it's just me being overly generous; there are so few remotely steam punky films out there. Coming in with low expectations helps as well.

Speaking of Kevin Smith, we finished off the DVDs of his live shows with Sold Out: A Threevening with Kevin Smith, which he did in New Jersey. Lots of fun stories from his childhood.

The boys saw the Adam Sandler movie Bedtime Stories some time ago and have been insisting that I watch it. It was OK. Lucy Lawless and Guy Pierce looked like they were having fun. They also saw the Peter Jackson King Kong without me when we first got it on DVD and I never got around to watching it until now. I loved it, gorgeously shot with compelling characters and the giant ape was so wonderfully emotive (thanks to Andy Serkis). This might be another one where it helps to come in with lower expectations, or at least not post-LOTR, Peter Jackson is the king of the world expectations.

Quin and I caught Superbad on cable. I'm a Michael Cera fan, and Seth Rogan had the most perfect cop mustache. Still, glad I didn't pay for this one either.

The Pink Panther 2 was a letdown. We had enjoyed the first one, but this one had replaced Kevin Kline with John Cleese. Not that I don't like John Cleese, but swapping out parts of the cast is never a good sign. Strangely, the mystery story line I thought was very well done and was genuinely interesting, it was the jokes that fell flat. And since this was meant to be a comedy, that's a problem. (If you've seen Aishwarya Rai Bacchan in Doom 2 you'll immediately suspect how the plot is going to turn out, but it's still well-played).

One last item in the "should have seen it years ago" category: Roots, the miniseries. Aidan has been studying the Civil War for history, so this seemed like a nice supplement to that. It's fun to watch now; it's a little encapsulation of which TV stars were hot in the late 70s. The boys both liked it as well; I think Oliver felt a particular kinship to Kunta Kinte. They share a fierce rebellious streak.

The library let me down when I went searching for Satyajit Ray films. They only had Pather Panchali and The Chess Players. I liked them both, although they are very different films. Pather Panchali is the first of three films about a boy in Calcutta named Apu, although this one really focuses on his older sister, a free spirit trapped in poverty. The parents were interesting as well; the father is incapable of worrying about anything, leaving the poor mother to struggle in all sorts of ways to keep her children fed. She was also a bit socially isolated; her body language whenever a neighbor woman would come by to talk to her was fantastic (as someone who also finds friendly chitchat a bit aggressive, I really felt for her). It's a beautifully shot film as well. So is The Chess Players, with an equally engaging cast of characters. The story centers on two men who are always playing chess, to the dismay of one ignored wife and the pleasure of another, elsewhere-occupied wife. While they are busy playing chess, their king is losing his kingdom to the British. I think that's my favorite scene, when the king refuses to sign the documents, but instead takes the crown from his head and hands it over. He's so overwhelmed with emotion, and the gesture is such a symbolic one, and yet the British officers are practically squirming in their discomfort (I'm not saying they're emotionally repressed, but...)

The last film to turn up under Satyajit Ray's name was one where he only provided the music, a Merchant-Ivory film called Shakespeare Wallah. Like Bombay Talkie it's a train wreck of selfish people in relationships. If that's your sort of thing, this is a nice example of it. But I don't care much for films where I want to slap all the characters.

Last of all, a TV on DVD, season 1 of Two and a Half Men, a show my brother has been recommending to me since it first aired. I could tell you how much I liked it, but the real proof is in the fact that my husband, who despises sit coms, keeps finding ways to be doing things in the room when I'm watching this. If you ask him what he thinks he'll just disparage the use of laugh track, but even so he's always there. I'm just saying.

"On Desperate Seas" is up at A Fly in Amber

...and they've made it their featured piece of fiction for the July issue. Woot! I'm very pleased. If you've never poked around my website, I have a page with little bits of info about the stories I've published: where I got the ideas, or what the names mean, that sort of thing. For instance, here's what I have to say on this piece:

This was a story I had originally intended to submit to Fantasist Enterprises for their Sails and Sorcery anthology. Sadly I missed the deadline (by a couple of months, no less), but that is the reason for the nautical setting. I've always been interested in Arctic and Antarctic explorations, I had just finished Tao of Troth and wasn't done writing about the Inuit, and I had a hankering to try something that invoked a little Poe. Hence the title, although I was specifically thinking of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket; the careful reader will spot what I borrowed in most respectful homage (or, if you will, outright stole). I had a kernel of an idea that involved a sailor's wife with half a heart, but the story didn't really pull together until a random clicking through Wikipedia turned up this little phrase: "Eventually, more ships and men were lost looking for Franklin than in the expedition itself." and it all pulled together. In an almost unsellable way; this was liked by a lot of places where it just didn't quite fit.

This story is also famous for giving me nightmares while writing it. Some months after I had finished it I saw the NOVA special about the Franklin Expedition; it didn't come close to matching the horror that was going on when I "lived" through it.

On the Importance of Naming: Edgar should be obvious, Penelope is a simple mythological reference, and Jane's name is meant to be the most unassuming name possible, and yet a strong-sounding one. Teddy's Inuit name Tetqataq means "flying before the wind", a lovely name for an Inuit sailor, but also the name of one of the men who came across some of the last of the Franklin men pulling a boat across the ice, trying to walk south to the Back River.

And the title, of course, is a line from Poe's "To Helen". Which in my head will always be read by Tom Hanks.

Books in June

So it seems like my pattern with Niven is an alterating one between like it/hate it. This month Lucifer's Hammer fell in the "hate it" category. For me, the character I found the most interesting and sympathetic was the comet that smashed into the Earth. Poor comet. The people I mostly didn't care about one way or the other. Tim Hamner and Eileen had an interesting dyamic between them, but there wasn't enough of them to carry me through this too-long novel. (And I could gripe about the women, or the assertion that women's lib ended five minutes after the comet hit, but given that the majority of the black people who survived formed a pseudo-religious cannabilistic group leads me to believe the women got off easy).

Oath of Fealty I really liked, though. The idea of a self-contained city as one giant building is an interesting one, although I wished it had been explored more. I can see the appeal of living in a community where every one is carefully chosen and there is no riff-raff, but what happens in a few generations when some of the descendants become the riff-raff themselves? Will they be booted over the objections of their relatives? Perhaps someday we'll have a sequel to this one; that could be a good read.

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I read a few books for research (not even for a novel, just a short story; I've yet to sell enough short stories to earn back what I've spent researching them). Both are books by Pandit Rajmani Tugunait, who has a very readable style and an east-meets-west mentality that suits my purposes exactly. Sakti: The Power In Tantra is really a scholarly look at other texts; texts which I haven't read, as it happens, so I imagine a second, more informed read later in life will be more fruitful for me. More helpful was Tantra Unveiled, a nice overview of a topic much misunderstood in the west.

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Rounding off with one more work of fiction: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins grabbed me at word one and didn't let me go (even at the very cliffhangery end; luckily there's a sequel). This is set in future US where teenagers are chosen by lottery to compete in a Survivor-type game. I don't generally like first person, or present tense. The present tense didn't bother me much here, although I still find it too quirky for the most part. I do wonder if the suspense could have been upped with a multiple POV. When the book is in the first person, and the plot centers on a game where only the victor is still living at the end, you pretty much know who's going to win, present tense or not. Still, it's not the ending so much as how she reaches it that provides the suspense, and this novel had suspense in spades. Highly recommend this one.

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And now I'm off to storm the Bastille...

Rest in Peace, Michael Jackson

I don't have much to say about Michael Jackson that hasn't already been said a thousand times over today; my experience of him is pretty typical of a late-30s middle class American. "Thriller" was one of the first things I saw on MTV, and frankly "Scream" was one of the last (not being a REAL WORLD/ROAD RULES, etc. fan).

But as my husband will tell you I'm a blog-aholic, I read blogs from all over the world, and this morning I've been reading about how people in China are mourning Michael Jackson, people in Japan and Africa. Michael Jackson belonged to the world.

Read Amitabh Bachchan's blog about what it meant to be a Michael Jackson fan back in the day before the internet and You Tube, when the world was not so small as it is today, and music and videos from other parts of the world were harder to come by.

But in particular I like this collection of clips. Michael Jackson was a huge influence to kids all over the world - who didn't want to dance like Michael Jackson? Personally, I like the lawyer-trainee that does a dead-on Michael Jackson dance sequence, and then makes it Bhangra. That's taking a thing and making it your own.

For me the clip that best sums my feelings up is not available on You Tube. It's that sketch from Robot Chicken, when the strange Michael Jackson we've come to know is confronted by the Michael Jackson we all fell in love with back from the "Beat It" days, the original nose, original pigment Michael Jackson. And the strange one turns out to be an alien in space who kidnapped the real Michael so he could take his place. Then the two have a dance-off and the real Michael wins. If only that were true, and we could have our real Michael Jackson back.

Well, enough with the maudlin; I have fictional characters that need torturing now. Back to work.

EDITED TO ADD: The clip is available on the Adult Swim website here. Not the ending I remembered...

This and That

So I'm on Day 3 of my week off from work and school, pushing as hard as I can to finish the revisions on MITWA. I don't think I'll be done by the end of the week; having revisited my outline before starting my week off, I'm planning to completely rewrite a few chapters and add in six (SIX!) new ones to fill in some gaps or just delve deeper into things that got short shrift in the first draft. Still, progress is progress. My ultimate goal is to finish by the end of July, to prove to myself I can write and revise a novel in a year. That's the usual expection for novelists these days, a book a year, and if I can't do it I don't feel prepared for the next step, getting an agent and pursuing publication. I might give myself a little fudge factor, though. Oliver starts fourth grade math in October and compared to the earlier grades this frees up so much of my time I can expect my productivity to get back to my pre-Oliver in first grade level, or nearly so. I'm looking forward to it; these last three years have been really hard to soldier through.

On the topic of things already published: another review for Warrior Wisewoman 2 has turned up, this one from Nerinedorman. About my story she says:

Although Gardens of Wind by Kate McLeod is a delightful, love story in the face of adversity, I struggled to suspend my disbelief with regards to the science behind the floating cities. This is still a keeper, however. A thumbs up for Kate. She gave me the warm fuzzies with this tale.

It's a fair cop; the airships are believable but the floating villages are a bit harder to buy, I'll admit. I was assuming lots of hot air balloons and pretty much being at the mercy of the winds.

OK, one last thing before I get to work. File this one under awesome, awesome, AWESOME!!

Look, there's my name!

The Library Journal just reviewed Warrior Wisewoman 2 (it's here, a little more than halfway down the page). This one mentions me! Sure, as one of the "other contributors", but still - that's cool!

In which I state my lack of objection

All the cool kids are lambasting the casting of the Avatar movie these days. (For my part I'm irked at James Cameron for hogging the name "Avatar", so the movie will just be going by The Last Airbender). What I find most puzzling are the folks that expected Sokka and Katara to be played by Inuit actors. As drawn on the cartoon they both have blue eyes, and they don't have Inuit names (they both sound Japanese to me). I never thought the water benders were meant to be Inuit just because they live in snowy places. Why assume they are Inuit and not, say, Laplanders? I assumed they were meant to be Ainu. But with blue eyes.

To be honest, the idea that the different nations in the world of Avatar are supposed to represent different ethnic groups doesn't make any sense to me. We're talking about a world so small that Gran Gran can leave the Northern Water Tribe to live with the Southern Water Tribe to avoid an arranged marriage. That's moving from pole to pole, and it's not portrayed as any sort of epic journey (actually, they never explain how she did it. Did she have help, or did she paddle her own canoe to the other side of the world all on her lonesome?). How could distinct groups emerge in a world so small, so tightly connected and easily traveled through? The different regions have different clothing and lifestyles, but they all speak the same language. And I think if you stripped them down and removed any culture-specific hairstyling or tattooing you wouldn't be able to tell a Water Tribe person from an Earth Kingdom person.

They do all look Asian, though. I'll admit the casting of Aang gives me pause. But if I were M. Night casting any of these parts I would be looking for 1) someone who can act and 2) someone who can pull off the martial arts. You think it'd be just as easy to find an Asian boy who can do both as a white boy. But I'm not the type to scream "epic fail!"; I'll wait and see the film and judge.

What I am super-geeked about:

Dev Patel as Prince Zuko. Zuko was hands-down my favorite character on the show. He had the complicated arc, and boy did the writers make him suffer and fail before he finally succeeded. (And how sweet is the costuming? I'm already dying to see this movie and it's another year away!).

I'm also pleased with this piece of casting:

Shaun Toub as Uncle Iroh. My second favorite character (and apparently the Avatar character I am). I've liked Toub in everything else I've ever seen him in: Crash and Iron Man most prominently but also Lost, and apparently even Sliders (OK, I don't remember him in that one).

The relationship between Uncle Iroh and Zuko is just so wonderfully nuanced. Particularly in the third season, when Zuko desperately wants someone to just tell him what the right thing to do is, and Iroh says nothing, because Zuko needs to find those answers for himself. After Mako died they used the power of silence in a couple of scenes in really moving ways, even though the guy who took over the voice did it well. Just another cool layer to the show.

It's going to be tough to scale each season of this show to movie-length; I hope these two characters and their relationship doesn't suffer. They have some of my favorite scenes. Like this one:

Uncle Iroh: You're looking at the rare white dragon bush. Its leaves make a tea so delicious it's *heartbreaking!* That, or it's the white jade bush, which is poisonous.

Prince Zuko: We need food, not tea. I'm going fishing.

Uncle Iroh: Hmm... Delectable tea, or deadly poison?

(later)

Uncle Iroh: Zuko, remember that plant that I thought might be tea?

Prince Zuko: You didn't.

Uncle Iroh: I did... and it wasn't. When the rash spreads to my throat I will stop breathing. But look what I found! These are pakui berries, known to cure the poison of the white jade plant. That, or makaola berries that cause blindness.

Movies in May

Lots of things borrowed this month, from the library or from friends. July is looking to be the return of cash, but in the meantime I did see a bunch of things that didn't suck.

I wonder if Julia Sweeney regrets creating the Pat character? That was one that was funny in very small doses, and it was pretty much the only thing she got to do on SNL. Which is a shame, as she is genuinely funny. I've read a lot of essays and things she's written on aetheism, and parenting without religion, and I know she's done shows on those topics but all I could dig up from the library was God Said Ha!, her monologue about when her brother got sick and eventually died of lymphatic cancer, how her whole family moved into her cute little single-gal-who-likes-her-personal-space house and took it over for the sake of caring for her brother, and about how she got ovarian cancer at the same time. And somehow she finds humor in all that. It's funny and sad and thoughtful, and I really wish I could see more of her shows.

In a similar vein are Kevin Smith's Q & As, An Evening with Kevin Smith and An Evening with Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder. The man can tell a story. The man can, in fact, tell a hugely inappropriate story about his wife and make it incredibly funny and full of heart all at once. You can see why she would refrain from killing him for over-sharing. I liked the second Evening better, with disc 1 in Canada and disc 2 in England. The crowds there asked better questions, and the little segments out on the street of those towns looking for authentic Canadian cuisine or seeing if Jay's pick-up lines worked on English women were fun.

In the realm of things I did shell out cash for: Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Kevin Smith and Seth Rogan working together? It's all good. I wasn't overwhelmingly impressed with Clerks 2, so I went into this with muted expectations, but it's Smith at his best: funny and raunchy but so full of heart. It's really a romantic comedy, but not one with a "meet cute" and slapsticky misunderstandings. It's much realer than that. The struggle to pay the bills, the deeply shitty car that makes getting to work a job in itself (it is in fact the same car I had when my husband and I first moved in together; and the bit in the deleted scenes where he can't get the door open, and then later when he can't get it shut again - I laughed so hard it hurts. Been there, done that). I can't recall a single thing I've seen Elizabeth Banks in, but she's wonderful here; you believe her as the kind of girl who would be best friends with a guy like Zack. It's a movie about two friends who have known each other forever but are completely out of step with each other in the whole falling in love thing. So yeah I liked it a lot. Although those I'm a Mac/I'm a PC commercials have just gained another layer of amusement in my mind.

The Reader. Nope, didn't like. Wait, that doesn't quite encapsulate it. OK, I fucking hated this movie. How's that? I could give a whole long rant as to why, but this sums up most of my feelings pretty well, particularly the patently manipulative use of Kate Winslet nudity. Imagine if the film had been about an illiterate male Auschwitz guard who deflowered a fifteen-year-old German girl. I doubt the guard in question would be winning an Oscar (I'm picturing Harvey Keitel myself). But at least it wouldn't be a film that was using a naked body to engender sympathy. Or at least that's not the usual response to Harvey Keitel's penis.

(Mostly the movie pissed me off because it made no sense. She has no learning disability, we see this as she teaches herself to read while in prison by listening to Ralph Fiennes reading stories out loud, not an easy trick. But how did she manage to get through life without ever even picking up the word "the", the first word she teaches herself to read? At some point you'd work out that all the stores that sold bread had "Bakery" on them, every bottle of Coca-Cola says Coca-Cola. You have to be willfully not learning to avoid picking up any words at all. Which I suspect was meant to be a metaphor for the German people being willfully ignorant of what Hitler was up to. But as a metaphor it just doesn't work, because it trips up against literacy-not-as-a-metaphor too many times, and as I said it makes no sense. You don't have to know how to read to know that locking people inside a burning building is the wrong thing to do, and it doesn't matter who wrote the report, they all stood there and let it happen. It's possible the novel this is based on makes more sense, but the movie insulted me over and over again. I hate to see fine acting talent wasted, particularly the teenager who played the young Ralph Fiennes, but this movie sucked, sucked, sucked).

Looks like I went on a long rant anyway. Apologies.

OK, I checked out Gone Baby Gone, because who doesn't want to see how Ben Affleck handles directing? I liked this movie, Casey Affleck is terrific, as is the supporting cast. It handled disturbing subject with a delicate touch. This movie didn't make me feel emotionally manipulated. I hope Ben does more films, this one was good.

Gone Baby Gone was based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, so I thought I should check out another film based on one of his novels: Clint Easwood's Mystic River. Kind of a mistake. It's an excellent film, Clint Eastwood is very good at letting actors do their thing and not ruining their performances with an overly-exuberant musical score. All of the actors in this were chillingly good. But this movie upset me deeply, to the point where I actually considered shutting it off. Only I was afraid that the ending I made up in my head would be far worse than what I was about to see and I'd be better off just sticking with the movie. (Which is true, actually, I was so afraid for what Tim Robbins was going to confess there at the river bank that when he finally did tell all it was a relief).

A few days after seeing this movie I came across a quote from G.K. Chesterton on why we believe in fairy tales: “Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” Which I think is why movies or stories like this upset me so much. It says there are dragons, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about them.

Black Snake Moan I admit I only picked up because Justin Timberlake is in it. It's set in Memphis, with Samuel L. Jackson as a once-bluesman, now-farmer who finds Christina Ricci drugged out and beaten on the side of the road and takes her home to fix her up, in a lot of senses of that term. It was an interesting film, reminding me a bit of Lost in Translation in the depiction of an atypical relationship between an older man and a younger woman, although Lost for me is hampered like many Woody Allen films are, in that I can't really understand the problems of the idle rich who wander the world trying to find themselves, trying to figure out what useless skill is what they're meant to be doing. Must be tough, she said sarcastically (Alice aside; I liked how that ended with Mia Farrow deciding just not to be the idle rich anymore). Black Snake Moan is sort of the white trash version of that journey, the one where you don't actually go anywhere beyond the borders of your rural stomping grounds because you don't have the gas money. Plus Christina Ricci's character has real problems, the kind that don't have solutions just ways of dealing with them a bit at a time, as Justin's character eventually learns to accept. I liked this movie, there were some fantastic scenes like when Samuel L. Jackson plays his electric guitar during a storm that makes his electricity dim and threaten to go out. It was an eerie and cool effect. But it was a tough movie to get into in the beginning because the tone was so uneven. There were scenes in the beginning that I wasn't sure were meant to be played for laughs or not. (And Christina Ricci is naked here as much as Kate Winslet, but for reasons that actually matter to the story and her character, reasons that make her the opposite of sympathetic at first. The sympathy comes when she stops being physically naked.)

Namesake is the latest from Mira Nair, about a woman who marries, leaves Calcutta for the US and raises her family there, and about her son who's father named him Gogol and his long journey to understanding and owning his own name. Tabu played the mother, and I always love her. She has a gravitas that works well in this part. (She's also a gorgeous dancer, which she doesn't get to show off here, alas). Gogol is played by Kal Penn, whom I sincerely hope hasn't given up acting entirely to work for Barack Obama. He's got this whole smart/funny thing going on that I really like.

(Gogol is the name of a Russian writer, and I'm not going to say why Kal Penn's character is named that, but I will say that there was a point when I was 19 or 20 when Gogol's "The Overcoat" was my favorite story evah, but I had since forgotten about it until I saw this movie. Such is my fickle nature, obsessions come and go. But it was nice to revisit this one.)

Which leaves only my two Bollywood movies for the month. Golmall Returns was amusing when I watched it. I certainly remember laughing and enjoying it. But I can't really recall the plot now. Something about Kareena Kapoor watching too many soaps and suspecting her husband is having an affair, because that's what all the husbands on soaps do. Plus there was a little homage/joke with a prostitute pretending to be Rani's character from Saawariya, I remember that. Hmm. Guess the movie was just a bit of a time-pass.

More memorable was Chandni Chowk to China. Perhaps you remember I was looking forward to this one. Well, it didn't disappoint. It's everything I love about Bollywood, with Akshay Kumar and Deepika Padukone both being so fun and likeable. Plus it's everything I love about the funny sort of kung fu movies, like Shaolin Soccer or Kung Fu Hustle or even Kung Fu Panda. On top of that, it's a genuinely good story, with a main character who has a meaningful arc (his relationship with his deity even matures during the course of the film; how many times have you seen that?). Deepika plays her Indian self as well as her Chinese twin sister, and she pulls it off. There's the requisite band of kung fu henchmen, a long montage set to my new favorite martial arts song (just edging out "Mortal Kombat"), and a very clever fight scene that involves Akshay only thinking he's throwing the punches.

There are actually lots of clips with music and scenes from the movie at YouTube, but they are official from the film company and they won't let me embed the video. (But check out "Chak Lein De" in particular). So this month's video clip is an oldie, from the movie Bichoo. This one is like the siren's call, it lures men to my office. Or one man anyway. Of course he says he's just heading into the laundry room, or to get something from the closet, but I'm not fooled. I know it's really Malaika Arora in tiny skirts. Particularly when she goes "yeah!".

Books in May

Lots of nonfiction this month, mostly on account of research. And for a short story, not even a novel. Considering how much I get paid for short stories, compared to how much I spend on research books... While, I'm not in it for the money, am I? (I think I'm in it to justify the really cool books I use for "research").

At any rate, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization by Jonathan Mark Kenoyer is a great overview of Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa, etc. with lots of photographs of the artifacts. Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilization by Sir John Marshall is older, and reads like it. Many was the night I sat down to "do research" only to be woken up an hour later by some family member asking how the research was going. I've also been working a lot of extra hours, so I can't totally blame Sir John for that, and the book does have a lot of really cool fold-out maps of the buildings. In fact, this book was too massive to read in the bath, which is a large part of why it took so long to finish it (that and the naps).

The Great Partition: The making of India and Pakistan by Yasmin Khan wasn't intended to be research. After watching several movies that dealt with Partition and its fallout I was just curious to connect the dots I already knew. This is an excellent, informative book, an engaging if disturbing read. I was continually reminded of one of my favorite episodes of Angel, "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been", when a Thesulac demon is whispering to the inhabitants of a hotel, playing on their insecurities and feeding on their paranoia until the entire place erupts in violence and Angel is left swinging by his neck from the chandelier. In fantasy worlds, Angel can't die because he's a vampire and slaying the demon takes care of the problem. The real world is no where near that easy to deal with. Whispering paranoia demons are easier to understand than the real world, though, when people just get caught up in paranoia spirals. It's clear from this book that no one involved in the creation of Pakistan as a separate state had any inkling of how bloody a process it would become (and still is).

Blueberry Girl by Neil Gaiman was a nice antitode to that, a picture book of a poem he wrote for Tori Amos' daughter. It reminds me a bit of Rudyard Kipling's "If", filled with all the hope of a young life just starting. Gorgeous illustrations to boot (I even caught Aidan looking at this one on his own).



Two more Larry Niven books this month, both written with Jerry Pournell: Inferno and its sequel Escape from Hell. I enjoyed these, retellings of Dante that only occasionally rubbed me the wrong way (hard to avoid with a topic that by its nature is going to get preachy). I'm not sure how particularly the second one is going to age, some of the references are very current events (will any of us really remember Anna Nicole Smith in 20 years?)

OK, time to get back to teaching math...

It's out in the world!

Warrior Wisewoman 2 is on sale! You can get a copy at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, or at an indie bookstore near you. How geeked am I to see my name on an Amazon.com page? (Answer: very).

Another sale!

My story "On Desperate Seas" will be appearing in the next issue of the e-zine A Fly in Amber. I'm really pleased; this is one of my favorite things I've done, but being a fantasy story about one of the recovery attempts of the John Franklin Expedition, it's been tricky finding it a home. It's gotten some wonderful rejection letters from editors who loved the writing but just didn't think it fit in with their magazines (which was totally true, but it never hurts to throw things out there). Given that the writing of this story gave me actual nightmares (when you read it you'll probably guess why), I'm glad it's going to be out in the world soon.

Now I just have to finish the one I'm working on now...

Movies in April

May has been a busy month, both for work and school, and on top of that I've been trying to get a story written (not coming out to bad, either). But since May is nearly over, I think it's about time I finish off this "Movies in April" post.

First up: Slumdog Millionaire. Not remotely a Bollywood film (first clue: all the leads are Muslims. Don't think I've ever seen that in a Bollywood fillm). Not really a hard-hitting films about the slums, either (see Salaam Bombay for that). It is a good Danny Boyle film, though. I've loved his films since the first ten minutes of Shallow Grave. My "honeymoon" was an afternoon at the multiplex, and while I liked Seven Years and Tibet and The Devil's Advocate well enough, it was A Life Less Ordinary that I adored. I don't think Slumdog quite edges that out as my favorite Boyle film (although those honeymoon associations makes it tough for any film to topple it, I think). Loved the music, of course, loved the little Amitabh Bachchan scene (and how cool of Amitabh to play himself there). And I'm super-geeked that Dev Patel is going to be playing Zuko in the Avatar movie. He's so much cooler than Jesse McCartney.

I saw the George Clooney remake of Solaris as soon as it was out on DVD, and a few times since (most sci-fi movies are big on the explosions; quiet, character-driven films like this one are rare but I have a fondness for them). I finally dug up the original Russian version. It was interesting, but I think there was a lot of imagery I wasn't quite grokking, like if I were Russian I would know what the horse wandering around in the background meant. A lot of cool visuals, but I think the Clooney remake took the best of this, tightened it up, and made the female character more interesting and layered.

On the other hand, the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still blows, and that's coming from a die-hard Keanu Reeves fan. I could appreciate some of the choices they made (particularly making Klaatu a bit of a dick. It was jarring but in a good way). I don't think the director handled the material well at all, though, and how sick am I of environmental cautionary tales? (I wonder if my counterpart in the 50s was as sick of cold war cautionary tales? Probably not at this point; I'm pretty sure TDTESS was one of the first).

And now, a rare movie I saw in the theater! The Soloist, with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jamie Foxx. These are two actors I find awesome in just about anything, but I was worried. The trailers made this look like one of those Person Who Inspires Others To Truly Live types (and yeah, I've linked to that post before, but what can I say? Kumail Ali totally nailed it). I was extremely relieved to see it was much more complicated than that. I do wish the director hadn't used the "world is a harsh, ugly place" visual style where every skin blemish is up there 20 feet tall and all the colors are washed out. I guess it fit the story, but I've seen it used a lot lately and I'm not fond of it.

Thanks to the public library I finally saw North By Northwest. I've since discovered that all of the Hitchcock films have very long wait lists so I'm not the only one digging him lately. It would be senseless to praise this - it's already a classic, what more can I say? - but I suddenly have the hankering to see Mount Rushmore. I've never been, and it's only 8 or 9 hours away. (It also left me with the hankering to watch National Treasure 2 again. I would call that a guilty pleasure, but honestly I liked it better than the last Indy movie).

Speaking of George Clooney (a couple paragraphs back, but...), I saw Syriana for the first time too. Clooney in particular is very good in this. I think Team America ruined me for Matt Damon movies, though. I like him, I think he's a fine actor, but everytime I see him on screen I expect him to put his arms and yell "Matt Damon!"

The Man Who Knew Too Little was a Bill Murray movie I had never even heard of. He made it somewhere in the dead zone between Groundhog Day and Rushmore. It's not a great film, but Bill Murray is just so likeable that even a bad film can be fun (particularly when he's trying to dance like a Cossack).

Much funnier: The Venture Brothers, Season 3. I didn't find this to be quite as good as season 2, but that's setting the bar pretty high; this show is still consistently funnier than just about anything else on TV. But then a show that piles on reference after reference to things from my childhood (Atari, GI Joe, Voltron...), it's pretty much made exactly for me. It's a toss-up on my favorite season 3 line; it's either when the Monarch is trying to make a screen capture and says "oh shit, I made an umlaut", or it's when Doctor Venture is trying to relax in the tub but thinks the fight in the next room is his boys rough-housing and says "this is why Daddy has to drink to relax, boys".

I missed Baron Unterbeit, though. Well, there's always season 4.

Wrapping up with two Bollywood films, Gadar: Ek Prem Katha is a movie set in the Punjab before, during, and after Partition. I've been probably soaking up a bit too much on Partition, lately (as my critique group can tell you, that sort of thing leads to very dark stories). This isn't remotely an historical film; the main character is very Rambo-esque, although he kicks ass while wearing a sweater vest which I found quite endearing. The final chase back to India on the freight train was pretty cool too, and Amrish Puri was in it. He's the bomb in anything (even if his sudden reversal at the end of the film isn't remotely believable).

And lastly, Singh is Kinng, starring Akshay Kumar as a Sikh gangsta. Actually he's a farmer from Punjab named Happy who goes to Sidney, Australia to try to bring a wayward fellow villager named Lucky home and finds himself suddenly made the head of Lucky's gang, ruling the Australian underworld. At first it looks like the gangsta lifestyle will corrupt Happy, but in the end it's Happy who "corrupts" the other ganstas and at the end of the movie they are all really into helping their fellow man. No, not remotely believable, but this movie was just so likeable I went along for the ride.

I'm of course saying gansta and not ganster deliberately; at the point in the movie when Happy takes over the gang and starts livin' large, tell me you totally can't see Puff Daddy hanging with these guys:





The same song plays again over the credits, this time with Snoop Dogg in the mix. Seriously, the real Snoop Dogg did a Bollywood song and video (couldn't find a version that wasn't a little box in the corner when the credits rolled, though).

OK, back to revising my dark tale. At least I'm all caught up on last month now.

I So Identify With This

"Caring For Your Introvert". Luckily for me I have a husband who totally gets this. Most homeschooling moms need a regular Mom's Night Out (or generally Moms', as they do these things together). But around these parts it's Mom's Night In and the rest of the family leaves the house for a few hours so I can have peace and quiet, alone in my own space.

Right, back at it. I've taken a break from the WIP to write something short (more importantly something Else), but I need to finish it by tomorrow when it's my turn to post to my critique group. Shitty First Draft won't even begin to describe it but at this point just having something done will be a victory.