I'm pathologically behind on these things. If only I could bear to stop watching movies long enough to catch up on blogging...
First up: Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I got this one for my birthday. Pretty much confirmed my belief that I love Paul Rudd in absolutely everything. Fuck the lemons.
Heroes Season 2 started out promising and then fell apart. It would be interesting to see how this season would have turned out if there hadn't been a writers strike halfway through it. They had some cool plots going, but they suffered greatly from trying to wrap them all up far too quickly.
The Santa Clause 1, 2, 3. I thought these got better as they went. Mostly because movies that advocate that believing in Santa Claus without evidence is somehow noble just bug me. They are usually accompanied by the flipside: that despite anything you've personally witnessed Santa doesn't actually exist. Again the disregard for looking at the evidence and making your own conclusion despite what anyone else might be telling you. Well, the first movie was pretty much about that (how creepy to tell the kid you've already brought with you to the North Pole that there's no such thing as Santa Claus) but the second two weren't and so they fared better with me. Plus I just like Martin Short. (Most aggravating for me: The Polar Express. A kid who can board a magic train to the North Pole and take roller coaster rides through immense toy shops and then while surrounded by legions of dancing elves still have to reach deep within himself for Belief before he can see Santa Claus because the other evidence just isn't enough... that's just deeply pathological. Plus, the animation is creepy).
Fred Claus was one of those frustrating movies that just didn't quite work for me. It was well cast and had some clever ideas (I particularly liked the support group for guys with more famous brothers), but it didn't quite come off. I suppose in such cases one blames the director...
Two old Christmas films I saw for the first time this year: White Christmas and Holiday Inn, both starring Bing Crosby although he only does blackface in one of them (ugh). Of course I love a musical, and Bing's voice. Quin and I did our own little compare and contrast between these old school musicals and Bollywood. If these were Bollywood movies, Bing would sing but someone younger and with more discrete ears would have picturized it. The dance numbers in the Bollywood version would have involved a lot more people, but there is something to be said for just two terrific dancers apparently nailing it all in one take (I didn't see any cuts in Fred's number in Holiday Inn).
Which is why I love a world where everything doesn't have to be done just one way, frankly. I couldn't really say which I like better, it depends on my mood, and I certainly couldn't trot out critical assessments to declare one or the other "better".
One Spanish film, something I saw posted on Tor.com and had to check out myself: The Spirit of the Beehive. This reminded me a lot of My Neighbor Totoro, with two sisters who share an imaginary friend, although they each have a different relationship with it. The Spirit of the Beehive had more of an air of menace to it, as if all of childhood was spent just one misstep away from a tragic accident. A beautiful film with some wonderful performances from the two little girls; if you like slow moving European films, this is an excellent one.
Bollywood in brief: Majhdhaar and Veergati were both early Salman Khan films. Majhdhaar started out well, a love triangle between three childhood friends, but I thought the ending was both depressing and a cheat. As much as I hate the falsely happy ending, the falsely depressing ending is no improvement even if it seems arty. Veergati I scarcely remember now. It involved Salman Khan and a sword at some point; that was probably the highlight. He was supposed to be some sort of poker ace, but the game they were playing was not really poker. It involved five cards face down on the table and two players shoving all their money into the ante without looking at their cards or bluffing/calling bluffs or even taking turns. Then you turn your cards over and see who won. It's hard to imagine how anyone gets good at that sort of game.
Kahin Pyaar Na Ho Jaaye was another Salman Khan film. I was 20 minutes into it when I realized I was watching The Wedding Singer. It didn't translate at all. Living with your family is perfectly normal in India, so the main character living with his sister and her family doesn't have the same air of the pathetic as it did when Adam Sandler did it. And this version backed off from making anybody the bad guy, so the girl that jilted him at the altar had a really good reason, and the guy who's supposed to marry Rani/Drew Barrymore seems like a heel but then shapes up in the end. Thoroughly unsatisfying. But the songs were good.
Bollywood Hollywood is a Canadian film about Indian expats. It was charming and had a lot of fun references to Bollywood films, but I wished it had been longer.
Lastly was Soldier, with Preity Zinta and Bobby Deol. There were two good movies in here, one about a hitman avenging his father and the other about a guy goofy in love with a girl. I liked both of those movies, and Deol managed to be both menacing as an assasin and adorable as the wooer of Preity. Sadly the two movies didn't really mesh together and the switching in tone was jarring. The ending was long and bloody and wrapped up the revenge story well enough but completely dropped the happy story. But, you know, the songs were good.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Another short story sale!
My short story "Gardens of Wind" will appear in the science fiction anthology WARRIOR WISEWOMAN 2 (here's a link to the Amazon.com page for the first book). I'm in danger of running out of short stories to submit. I will have to remedy that situation. You know, after I revise MITWA. In the mean time, I'm doing the happy dance.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Books in December
Do you know what makes perfect Christmastime reading? Serial killer novels. OK, maybe not really, but it was what I was reading for fiction through most of December. I started with The Dracula Dossier by James Reese, a book someone handed me and insisted was just my sort of thing. I wasn't sure at first - serial killers are not my usual sort of thing - but this is a story told from the POV of Bram Stoker about the Jack the Ripper killings. Having already read Alan Moore's From Hell plus all of his exhaustive notes, I'm pretty familiar with the details of Jack the Ripper, familiar enough to appreciate their use here anyway, and I particularly loved all of the other writers that appeared as characters (Oscar Wilde's mother was a particular favorite of mine).
The back of that book had a blurb from Caleb Carr, bringing to mind that I had bought two of his novels ages ago and they had been languishing in the depths of my To Be Read stacks for quite some time. So I dug them out and plunged into them next. I'm glad I did. Like The Dracula Dossier these are immersed in their historical setting (these both in New York City circa 1900) and intermixed historical figures with fictional characters. My favorite here was Teddy Roosevelt, trying to clean the corruption out of the police force before going to Washington to run the Navy. The killer in the first book The Alienist is a bit Jack the Ripper-y, but in the second book Angel of Darkness it's a woman who offs the children in her care, including her own. They were both interesting, set at the time that psychology and forensics were just starting to enter the world of police work (fingerprints were not yet trusted, nor ballistics, but people did believe if you photographed a victims eyes an image of the murder would appear on the film). Both of these books were engrossing; I highly recommend them both.
The remaining work of fiction I tackled this month was The Tales of Beedle the Bard by JK Rowling. I read it in just under two miles (yes, I was on the treadmill). The stories themselves are solid enough, but it's the notes (by Dumbledore) and the notes on the notes (by Rowling - am I wrong in my sense that this is the first time she's inserted herself into her own fiction?). She takes the opportunity to get a few digs in at those that don't think children should be exposed to stories about death and darkness, at those who try to remove books from libraries. A slight read, but an enjoyable one.
Most of my nonfiction reading was novel research. I'm gearing up to my week off at the beginning of February, which will be only enough time to get started on the revision of MITWA, not enough to complete it, but I'm hoping to get enough of a start on the thing to build a little momentum.
At any rate, the first book I was hoping would help me visualize Barnacle Town better. (Did I mention when I saw The Hulk how overwhelmed I was at the sight of the slums of Brazil, with the water collectors everywhere and Bruce's little inventive ways of making his own centrifuge and that? Exactly what I want to capture). I had to send to Germany for this, a photo book about the inventive uses the people of Thailand find for the things around them: Thailand: Same Same But Different by Thomas Kalak. A wonderful book, but I'm still feeling inadequate in the coming up with my own inventive things department.
The rest of my research was on space stations, since that's where the bulk of my action takes place. Space Stations: Base Camps to the Stars and Imagining Space:Achievements, Predictions, Possibilities 1950-2050, both by Roger D. Lanius, were good places to start, nice overviews with lots of pictures and lots of further reading suggestions. Home on the Moon and Space Station Science: Life in Free Fall by Marianne J. Dyson are both books written for kids, but kids books are wonderful for writing research; they always include those interesting details that really bring things to life (like how astronauts poop in zero G. Not sure how I could possibly use that, but it's a nice detail to know). Space Station: Policy, Planning, and Utilization and Space Stations and Space Platforms: Concepts, Design, Infrastructure and Uses are both NASA publications and dry, dry, dry. Lots of information, but since it's mostly from the time of Skylab it was only of peripheral use to me.
Living in Space by Giovanni Caprara was very cool: an overview of the US and USSR space programs from the point of view of an Italian science writer. Plus the book has lots of blueprints of the various spacecraft. Even more helpful for my purposes was High Frontiers by Gerald K. O’Neill, mostly because he describes the sort of massive space stations that I'm actually using as a setting (although Barnacle Town contains things like the ISS and Skylab, so the rest wasn't a complete waste of time either).
I wrapped up the month by reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. A book you have to read for yourself; don't let anyone else summarize it for you (that includes me). A very thought-provoking read, one which I mostly agreed with, but where I disagreed with him I did so strongly. I won't go into it; that sort of thing invites trolls who don't normally read this blog to swing back and pick fights, which is no fun for me. If you're going to read only one Dawkins book, this is the one (although you really ought to read more).
The back of that book had a blurb from Caleb Carr, bringing to mind that I had bought two of his novels ages ago and they had been languishing in the depths of my To Be Read stacks for quite some time. So I dug them out and plunged into them next. I'm glad I did. Like The Dracula Dossier these are immersed in their historical setting (these both in New York City circa 1900) and intermixed historical figures with fictional characters. My favorite here was Teddy Roosevelt, trying to clean the corruption out of the police force before going to Washington to run the Navy. The killer in the first book The Alienist is a bit Jack the Ripper-y, but in the second book Angel of Darkness it's a woman who offs the children in her care, including her own. They were both interesting, set at the time that psychology and forensics were just starting to enter the world of police work (fingerprints were not yet trusted, nor ballistics, but people did believe if you photographed a victims eyes an image of the murder would appear on the film). Both of these books were engrossing; I highly recommend them both.
The remaining work of fiction I tackled this month was The Tales of Beedle the Bard by JK Rowling. I read it in just under two miles (yes, I was on the treadmill). The stories themselves are solid enough, but it's the notes (by Dumbledore) and the notes on the notes (by Rowling - am I wrong in my sense that this is the first time she's inserted herself into her own fiction?). She takes the opportunity to get a few digs in at those that don't think children should be exposed to stories about death and darkness, at those who try to remove books from libraries. A slight read, but an enjoyable one.
Most of my nonfiction reading was novel research. I'm gearing up to my week off at the beginning of February, which will be only enough time to get started on the revision of MITWA, not enough to complete it, but I'm hoping to get enough of a start on the thing to build a little momentum.
At any rate, the first book I was hoping would help me visualize Barnacle Town better. (Did I mention when I saw The Hulk how overwhelmed I was at the sight of the slums of Brazil, with the water collectors everywhere and Bruce's little inventive ways of making his own centrifuge and that? Exactly what I want to capture). I had to send to Germany for this, a photo book about the inventive uses the people of Thailand find for the things around them: Thailand: Same Same But Different by Thomas Kalak. A wonderful book, but I'm still feeling inadequate in the coming up with my own inventive things department.
The rest of my research was on space stations, since that's where the bulk of my action takes place. Space Stations: Base Camps to the Stars and Imagining Space:Achievements, Predictions, Possibilities 1950-2050, both by Roger D. Lanius, were good places to start, nice overviews with lots of pictures and lots of further reading suggestions. Home on the Moon and Space Station Science: Life in Free Fall by Marianne J. Dyson are both books written for kids, but kids books are wonderful for writing research; they always include those interesting details that really bring things to life (like how astronauts poop in zero G. Not sure how I could possibly use that, but it's a nice detail to know). Space Station: Policy, Planning, and Utilization and Space Stations and Space Platforms: Concepts, Design, Infrastructure and Uses are both NASA publications and dry, dry, dry. Lots of information, but since it's mostly from the time of Skylab it was only of peripheral use to me.
Living in Space by Giovanni Caprara was very cool: an overview of the US and USSR space programs from the point of view of an Italian science writer. Plus the book has lots of blueprints of the various spacecraft. Even more helpful for my purposes was High Frontiers by Gerald K. O’Neill, mostly because he describes the sort of massive space stations that I'm actually using as a setting (although Barnacle Town contains things like the ISS and Skylab, so the rest wasn't a complete waste of time either).
I wrapped up the month by reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. A book you have to read for yourself; don't let anyone else summarize it for you (that includes me). A very thought-provoking read, one which I mostly agreed with, but where I disagreed with him I did so strongly. I won't go into it; that sort of thing invites trolls who don't normally read this blog to swing back and pick fights, which is no fun for me. If you're going to read only one Dawkins book, this is the one (although you really ought to read more).
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