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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