Movies in July

First off was The Spiderwick Chronicles, which I of course watched with the boys. This movie was neither exceptionally bad nor exceptionally good. Although Aidan loves the books I suspect he's not really going to watch this movie again. There was one aspect of it that I was outstanding, though: Freddie Highmore, the kid who played Charlie in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory plays two roles here, both of the twin brothers. Not only does he portray two very different characters, he does it all acting against empty space (since he can't be in two places at once), and with an American accent. This boy is a child actor with real chops, and I expect to see cool stuff from him in the future.

If you look up "cool" in my dictionary, you'll see a picture of Jason Statham. Because he's the coolest. And if he's in a heist movie, you know we'll have to get it. Hence The Bank Job. Pretty standard rob-a-bank fare, although this is apparently based on a true story.

Next up are two oldies I picked up on Blu-Ray, both of which I know I've seen but it was so long ago it was like seeing them for the first time. The first was Bullitt, of which I only recalled the car chase. Because who could forget that? I actually found this movie pretty surprising. These days every cop movie involves a break-all-the-rules maverick cop, it was palpably weird watching a movie about a cop who does his job without breaking any rules at all. It was nearly torture at the end: how many times is he going to let the bad guy shoot at him before he shoots back? As many as it takes until he can get a clear shot, or until people are in danger. Because spraying the scene with random fire is not good police work. I kind of admire this film.

The second oldie was Patton, which Quin had never seen. My memories of it were thoroughly mixed with the other WWII film of my early childhood: The Big Red One. So many great lines in Patton, I kept poking Quin - surely you've heard that before! All he would admit to was "Rommel, you magnificent bastard. I've read your book!"

In the Bollywood arena, I watched a lot of Aamir Khan movies. Mangal Pandey: The Rising is a film about the first Indian war of independence, when they got the East India Company out (and England took over, a bit of a lateral move independence-wise). This movie doesn't touch too much on the actual war, more on the circumstances that led to the Indians finally saying enough is enough. The script was based on source material, which was interesting. If they didn't know the motivation someone had for something, they left it open-ended (did the Company make ammunition casings out of cow and pig fat because it was cheaper, or just to irritate their Hindu and Muslim soldiers? The movie hints at both). Not as good as Lagaan, but beautifully shot with the usual top-notch music from A.R. Rahman.

Dil Chahta Hai was almost exactly the opposite: from lush period film to quiet indy-type film about three friends who have just graduated from college and what they do next. This is the sort of movie that I would catch on an afternoon playing on cable and leave it on because I've never heard of it but it has so-and-so in it. Then I'd get sucked in by the story and there's a whole afternoon gone. (You know, if this were in English and on cable. And this was before I had kids, when I used to have afternoons with nothing to do but surf channels). The music fit the story, sort of Indian college rock.

The last movie, Fanaa, started out as something I was really going to love. Kajol is a blind girl from high up in the mountains of Kashmir who goes to Delhi with her dance group for a performance. She falls in love with their tour guide (Aamir Khan). It was wonderful, her parents were loving and supportive, not smothering, her friends were distinct characters. She and Aamir traded extemporaneous poetry with each other. As Quin headed out for his run that night I assured him this was going to be one of my favorites.

Then terrorists hijacked my movie. Nothing on the box anywhere said this was going to turn into a Jennifer Lopez "I have to kill my husband" kind of thriller, but that's just what happened. Aamir Khan blows up part of Delhi (killing Jolly Good Singh among others, and I had liked Jolly Good) then leaves. Kajol gets her sight back (gah) and has a son which she raises up in the mountains with her dad. Then Aamir is doing more terrorist stuff and ends up half-dead on her doorstep. She of course doesn't recognize him (and to be fair, his voice in the two different halves of the movie is very different, and it's been about ten years, and she only knew him for a few days. So that was believable.) So the rest of the movie she figures who he is, then who he really is, while he keeps accidently or on purpose killing people because he really wants to go straight or whatever, but he just has to finish this one last job first.

Now Dil Se was also about love and terrorism, but I think that worked better. At the point Shah Rukh Khan encounters the woman who is intending to be a suicide bomber, she hasn't really killed anyone yet. So there is hope of redemption to drive the story. But in Fanaa we already know that Aamir Khan has killed lots of people. If they had tried to wrestle a happy ending out of that, I would have really hated it. But that left only one ending, and no real tension to drive the story. It was an interesting performance from Aamir, bouncing from scary terrorist to almost boyish fear of his own father and grandfather. I think if they would have dug deeper into his psyche I would have found this movie more interesting. As it was... well, there is a reason I don't watch these "I have to kill my husband/ex-husband/crazy stalker boyfriend" movies. Blah.

Kaante was actually Quin's pick. Shikha's husband had recommended it to him as a good heist film. The first half is The Usual Suspects and the second half is Reservoir Dogs. Some aspects of this were pretty cool. "The usual suspects" has a different meaning when it's the LA cops rounding up every Indian everytime something gets stolen. And once you figure out who's playing which TUS character, it was fun guessing which RD character they'd end up being. There were flaws, though. Their plan involved robbing the bank where all the cops do their banking, so that none of them would get paid. They walk right past the FDIC sign in the bank window a couple of times but apparently didn't realize what it meant. Quin thought that giving Malaika Arora Khan dialogues was a bad sign (she plays one of the thieves' girlfriend). I thought she handled acting fine, I just couldn't believe she was pole-dancing.

Salaam Namaste had no pole-dancing, but it did have a lot of kissing on the mouth, a Bollywood rarity. Quin said it was just like the Hugh Grant movie Nine Months. I don't remember that film at all, but I would guess he's right. Still, I found this funny with sharp dialogue.

To wrap up the Hindi films: Judwaa, whose box said it had subtitles but alas, there were none. I did watch the whole thing. On the one hand, I was only catching about one word in five. On the other hand, this was a broad comedy so one word in five was enough to follow the story. Salman Khan plays twins who can control each other. If one swings a punch, the other does too. Like Amitabh Bacchan's ghost movie, this irked my fantasist side. It was horribly inconsistent as to when it happened, clearly it wasn't all the time, or who was the controller and who the controllee. I don't need to know why something happens (and sometimes it's better not to explain the why, see Groundhog's Day, a film that works mainly because we never know why he's living the same day over and over), but the "how" should have rules. Of course this was all about comedy, so perhaps I shouldn't be too hard on it. One brother pounding a glass of milk causes the other to pound a bottle of brandy and they're both drunk (and dancing): OK, that was funny.

Alas, none of the musical numbers this month really blew me away, so for my YouTube fix I'm going with the best film I saw, a Japanese movie called Shinobi: Heart Under Blade. It's Romeo and Juliet, if the warring families were both ninja clans. And yes, it rocks. We got this on BluRay and it was particularly gorgeous. Not just the scenery, which was gorgeous enough for ten films (ooh, the falling leaves. The snow! Large chunks looked like scenes out of Hiroshige prints). The texture popped so much, I just wanted to reach into the TV screen and touch their clothes. It felt like I almost could.

Now, I have a certain person who critiques my writing who always complains about all the talking my characters do when they are meant to be fighting. This movie is so not for him. Two ninjas meet in the woods and gab at each other for a good ten minutes, and when they finally come to blows it's all over in a matter of seconds. Which is my kind of fighting, actually. I always liked the story of the two samurai who meet on a bridge and stare each other down until the lesser samurai turns and walks away. The actual trading of blows was superfluous; they both already knew who would be the victor.

(And as much as I liked this film, Quin was in raptures. This is his favorite since Marie Antionette. Although perhaps he would thank me for not mentioning that again...)

So here's the trailer (in English, this movie comes subtitled and dubbed both) for Shinobi. Highly, highly recommend.

Books in July

Still crunching away at the WIP, so this will be pretty brief.

First up: Midnight Never Come by Marie Brennan. I liked her previous novels, Doppleganger and Warrior and Witch. This novel is very different, more alternate history less sword and sorcery. The writing is gorgeous, and the story is steeped in Elizabethan history. One gets the sense that when a chase is on through London, one could go to London and recreate it exactly, that every street and turning is exactly right. The idea that there were two queens, and that Queen Elizabeth's fate was tied to this other, darker queen is a cool one, and is handled well. If you like faerie stories, definitely check this out.

Catching up on some more of the Christmas books, I plunged into Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu. I've read some of her short fiction before, and last year I checked Zahrah the Windseeker out of the library, read the first third and added it to my must buy list (you know, the list I keep going through the year so I know what to get with my gift cards in December). Cool concept, with the plant-based technology, although the writing was a touch too exclamation pointy for me. The Shadow Speaker goes deeper, darker, and is written with a defter hand. Zahrah was a fun read, but The Shadow Speaker was much cooler.

Having whetted my appetite for YA, I dove into Diana Wynne Jones next. I started with Eight Days of Luke, about a boy who accidently frees Loki from his prison. It was about the Norse gods, which are my favorite pantheon, so of course I loved it. (It also features a boy whose parents have died and he lives with his relatives who don't treat him particularly well, always trying to get him to stay at school over the holidays, and dressing him in much-too-big cast-offs. Sound familiar? Only this book was written in 1975...)

The other Jones I had on hand were all the books in the Chrestomanci series (individually: Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, Conrad’s Fate, Witch Week, The Magicians of Caprona, Mixed Magic and The Pinhoe Egg). All very cool. Jones writes magic really well: it has a framework and rules, but there are different styles and a lot of individuality between magic-users. And it's a series that gets more interesting as it goes, which is always a good thing.

At that point I needed something less engrossing, something I could read on the treadmill but wouldn't feel compelled to give up writing time to finish. So I finally caved to my husband's pestering and plunged into Edgar Rice Burroughs. I read the first three: A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars and The Warlord of Mars. Very cool settings and creatures, I can' believe no one has made a film of this yet (although nearly everyone cool in Hollywood has been just about to try it. I believe Pixar has the hot potato at the moment). It did make me appreciate that my first experience with pulps was Star Wars, though. I mean, John Carter is very much like Farnham with his lifeboat rules; Dejah Thoris may be a princess but she is going to do exactly what he tells her to do without asking any questions. And she meekly agrees. Can you imagine someone trying to pull that act on Princess Leia?

OK, off to eat my very cold lunch now...

A very disjointed post, written in 30 second snatches while the boy does math...

I saw The Mummy 3 last night. What a fun movie! This one has a new director: Rob Cohen, who always makes good popcorn. The use of ancient China was much more reverent than the use of Egypt was in the first two movies. Serious Egyptology would have been misplaced in a popcorn movie, I know, but an Egyptian magician whose magic is the plagues of a Hebrew god? It still makes me grit my teeth, and I liked that movie. There isn't more than a touch of Taoist alchemy in this movie, but at least what's there jives with what I've read. But I think it'd have to, or you wouldn't have Jet Li in your movie.

Plus there are yeti, and Shangra-La. And a three-headed dragon, and Michelle Yeoh, and Russell Wong. (Man, Russell Wong just isn't in enough stuff. I know I'm not the only one who remembers Vanishing Son.)

Originally The Mummy was supposed to be my trade-off with my husband, where we each take a night out alone to watch a movie, but I invited the whole family along for my night out, because popcorn is best when it's shared. Quin went out Friday to see the new Batman movie. I'll happily wait for the DVD on that one, partly because I think I'll find it too upsetting to watch right now, but mostly because I think it will be the sort of mind-twist movie where I spend days stewing about it after, which wouldn't be good when I'm supposed to be stewing on my own story just now.

And stewing I am; I woke up in the middle of the night early, early Sunday morning, suddenly realizing why chapter four didn't work. Then I couldn't get back to sleep until I fixed it, and then I was too keyed up to get back to sleep (so I blogged in the middle of the night; haven't done that before).

School and work week, so the goal is lower. 500 words a day should be doable, I hope. And that should have me at the end of chapter 8 by Friday, which of course means Dr. Horrible.

It was about this time last summer...

...when I first saw the trailer for Marigold. My response was pretty much mah. I finally got the DVD and watched it this weekend.

First off, this is a movie made with much love, which I greatly appreciated. Apparently the director, Willard Carroll, caught the movie Chori Chori Chupke Chupke while vacationing in India and was sucked in by the first song, "Number 1 Punjabi". He subsequently ordered Bollywood DVDs by the boxload until he'd seen over 150 movies, including everything Salman Khan had ever done. He relates all this in the bonus features, and my husband found it quite amusing, as it's pretty much what happened to me. Substitute Andaz Apna Apna for CCCC, and I've not quite hit the century mark yet and have only seen about 2/3 of Salman's movies. But yeah, Willard and I share a love.

It's also not the fish-out-of-water story I feared. No "whacky" encounters with strange customs or weird food. Again, much appreciated.

It's also not really what the marketing claims it is, which is an east meets west, Hollywood girl meets Bollywood guy. Sure, that's what's going on superficially, but there is even a scene in the movie that pretty clearly spells out that she's just Marigold, not Every American Girl, and he's just Prem, not Every Indian Boy. It's a smaller but more interesting story than the marketers would have you believe.

I don't think it was a rousing success; I'd have to put in the category of films that try for something interesting but don't quite follow through (for comparison, I also put Stranger Than Fiction and Feeling Minnesota in this category). It's really the story of how an overgrown adolescent learns to set aside childish things and be a grown-up. And despite the marketing spin, it's not all of Bollywood that does this for her, it's just one guy who makes her feel safe enough to let up on her defense mechanisms. These two characters and how they draw each other out was really very well written.

It was an interesting story, particularly when her semi-fiance enters the picture and is neither a villainous jerk nor some dope you know she'd never end up with (like the flute player in Serendipity - was it ever remotely believable that Kate Beckinsale would marry that guy?).

Still, flawed. Too many characters appear all at the end of the film, and it all feels rushed (which is one way in which it was not a real Bollywood movie, not even two hours long???). Plus Prem's parents go through a drastic change in motivation that really needed a lot more set-up to feel real. And I would have made Marigold's arc a bit less neat. She pretty effectively stops being a bitch; if I had been writing it, it would have been a much tougher transition for her, and at the point when the Big Secret is revealed, I would have had her really fight not to lose all the grace and self-control she's just learned to have.

Still, it was far better than I had expected.

This Week's Progress

Just a hair under this week's goal:



This is coming out a tad longer than expected. I'm a third of the way through 60,000 words, but not quite a third of the way through my outline. This is not a bad thing, the 60,000 is just a guess after all, and once I go through it all and tighten up the prose it will shorten up by about 10%. Still, it does mean that I should probably gauge my progress by chapters written rather than by word count for the purpose of doling out my rewards. My outline is for 24 chapters, so when I've finished chapter 8, I'll get my first Dr. Horrible installment. I've just finished chapter 7, but the pace slows down from here as I head into three weeks of both work and school. It could be a week or more before I earn my first reward.

As far as the writing itself goes, well, Neil Gaiman said it best when he was working on American Gods:

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...

And to think I do this for fun.

A very good week!

My goal for this week was 10,000. So, here's were I'm at:



Yea me! I've got a reward system in effect. My reward: I get to watch Dr. Horrible's Singalong blog. Cause, you know, Joss Whedon and Neil Patrick Harris is something I just have to see. Since I expect this novel to be 60,000 words, and Dr. Horrible is a three act thing, every 20,000 words I get to watch one act of Dr. Horrible. So if I make 20,000 next Friday (which is my goal), I'll get to watch act one. I already have it all downloaded from iTunes and everything.

Of course it's going to take the whole month of August before I get to watch act two...

The writing is going pretty well in terms of quality as well as quantity, I think. Some writers do what's called a SFD (Shitty First Draft). I am not such a writer. I can't leave a "insert something funny here" note in a chaper and move on. I just can't. This isn't last-draft polished to perfection, but it's about 80% what I want it to be.

I have three POVs characters in this one, and they rotate chapters. Omesh's chapters are the most clearly outlined, as he drives the plot more than the others. Rabiya I've found pretty much writes her chapters herself. She's a little... strong-willed. But Takashi is the tough one so far. I know him, but I'm not yet feeling him (if that's not to writery, wishy-washy for you). At this point it's his nemesis that is the more full-dimensional character, which is a problem, but as I've said, this is only 80% there. It's easier to work out some of these issues after you've typed THE END.

In unrelated matters, my movie posts are hands-down my most popular hit-generators. Speaking to movie fans: I have the perfect blog for you. It's called The Wilhelm Scream. If we're playing the Kevin Bacon game: Kumail Ali went to college with a guy named Fred that used to work with the guy I'm married to. So Kumail doesn't know me from Adam, frankly. But his blog is the bomb, and we share a least favorite genre.

Let's see how this goes

This week I have school but no work, and next week I have work but no school (this is as close as I get to actual time off unless I'm leaving town, in which case I'm not writing). I polished off my outline over the weekend and I'm ready to start from word 0 today. My goal is to write at least 10,000 words this week and 10,000 more next week to give myself a nice headstart before August, when I'm back to working and schooling both. So here's my handy little progress meter:



And I'll be updating it on Friday.

In the meantime, a little music. I already posted the song that inspired me to use MITWA as a working title, but any word meaning dear friend or beloved is going to come up in lots of songs. Here's my second favorite, "Yeh Mausam Ka Jadoo Hai, Mitwa" from the movie Hum Aapke Hain Kaun. I can't embed it here, perhaps because the movie producers are the ones who put it up on Youtube (so it's probably legal - cool! You think the resolution would be better when it's official, though). Link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=EMOEjA6UMsQ. This was the first thing I saw Madhuri Dixit in, and about my fifth or sixth Salman Khan movie. One of my favorites to let run in the background when I'm doing other stuff, the songs are all so singable.

OK, first school and then MITWA. Wish me luck!

Movies in June

By language seems the easiest way to sort this. Let's start with English...

First up: Inside Man. When I first got the soundtrack to Dil Se, the song Chaiya Chaiya (the one with Malaika Arora on the train in the movie) sounded vaguely familiar. Which was odd, this was only Bollywood movie #10 or 12 for me, where would I have heard this Hindi song before? Finally in the car much, much later I heard it remixed with an added rap bit on one of my husband's mix CDs that he had gotten from a coworker. Turns out this remix was used as the opening of a Spike Lee movie, which my husband promptly insisted I pick up for him (he really likes this song, and not just on account of Malaika). Inside Man is a pretty well done heist film (Quin's favorite kind of movie) with Denzel Washington and Clive Owen. It was a fun watch, but like most heist films it didn't leave me with any great desire to watch it again.

The other English movie was a family film night for us: National Treasure 2. I suppose it must be a guilty pleasure; I feel a bit sheepish admitting I really liked this. It is a much better film version of Tomb Raider than the Tomb Raider movies, for one, and the interactions between the characters are just plain fun. Clearly there is going to be a National Treasure 3.

Chinese: Warriors of Heaven and Earth. I got this on Blu-Ray, and it is a gorgeous film with some stunning canyons and deserts (it takes place on the Silk Road, where China ends and Afghanistan begins, although this is set in the past). Alas, I found this a bit of a disappointment. The fights weren't particularly good, the characters didn't do it for me, and the plot just sort of plodded along. Still, pretty to look at. And I haven't watch a movie in Mandarin in a while; I love the sound of that language.

I saw my first Pakistani film in June as well. Most Pakistani films come from the film studios of Lahore, so they are called "Lollywood" (similarly India actually has several different film industries. Bollywood from Bombai/Mumbai is the biggest, but there is also Tollywood which are in Telegu, Kollywood which are in Tamil, and others without the cute names. India has some 21 official languages, after all). The movie I saw, Khuda Kay Liye, is actually an independent film, so I haven't seen an actual Lollywood movie yet. The official language of Pakistan is Urdu, which when spoken is pretty much Hindi (there was only one character I had a hard time understanding, and he was probably putting a lot more Arabic words in his speech, given that he was meant to be an Islamic fundamentalist, but that's just a guess). The film centers around two brothers who are aspiring musicians and their cousin in London. One brother falls under the influence of said fundamentalist and leaves music entirely to join the Taliban, the other has the misfortune of being in the US studying music on 09/11 and is arrested under suspicion of being a terrorist. The cousin's father panics when she is about to marry a white boy and lures her to Pakistan only to leave her in a remote village over the border into Afghanistan where she is forced to marry her Taliban cousin.

So yeah, it was a bit of a heartbreaker of a film. Very well done, though. It reminded me a bit of American History X, another film dealing with how one charismatic talker can lead a whole bunch of young men astray simply because they don't have the life experience to realise the talker is spouting absolute nonsense. And when the Taliban boy listens to the scholar called to testify during the court case at the end of the film and realizes how wrong everything he had been lead to believe really was... Oh yeah, heartbreaker.

OK, Bollywood. Khullam Khulla Pyaar Karen stars Preity Zinta and Govinda. I picked it up for 99 cents. 'Nuff said.

Insan had the same plot as last month's Garv - Hindu cop versus Muslim terrorists, but was much better done. The line between good guys and bad guys is not so clear here, with a lot of people clearly floundering and trying to find their direction. The guy who played the terrorist I've never seen in anything before, but there was something so haunted in his eyes you just know he had seen terrible things (he had disappeared during a riot and his family had been waiting for years for news of whether he was alive or dead). Not that anyone accepts that as an excuse, even his own brother (Akshay Kumar), a rickshaw driver who is not trying to be a hero he's just trying to do the right thing. In Hollywood, he would be played by Bruce Willis.

I Proud to be Indian didn't really work for me. I liked the idea of skin heads versus Indians, both having some claim to the "Aryan" name. But the main character's back story was only ever hinted at, never explained, and his motivations were not particularly clear.

Two more Salim-Javed films, both starring Amitabh Bacchan: Zanjeer and Deewaar. Zanjeer had some very colorful characters. Amit falls in with a red-headed Muslim named Sher Khan (king of the lions, hence the mane-like hair and beard) and a tough-talking girl who sharpens knives, who in the end shows that she's just as proficient at throwing them. Even Quin liked that one. The second, Deewaar, was about two brothers, one who becomes a cop and the other becomes a gangster, and their mother is stuck between them. Both very well written, and worth a see (although they were made in the 70s and look it. Actually that's kind of a plus for me...)

Bhootnath stars a much older Amitabh Bacchan as a ghost who befriends a boy. As a fantasist this movie disappointed me; there were no clear rules for what the ghost could or could not do, what he could touch or not, who could see him or not. It was frustrating. Also, this was one I borrowed from Shikha. She gets her movies from her grocer, whom I believe wears an eyepatch and maybe has a peg leg. I'm just saying, the movies I get from her always have quirky subtitles. In this one when the boy's father confronts the son of the ghost who went away to America to study and never came back and tells him he should "make prays", the man says "In America we don't make prays, but even we still find peach." I puzzled that one out for a while. Is peach a metaphor? Was he saying preach? (In America we don't pray but we get preached at a lot, perhaps). Actually he meant "find peace", as it became clear later. Not a great film, but the only one I've seen where Amitabh Bacchan raps. Oh yes, he raps.

Last film, best film. I mentioned a while back how much I loved Farah Khan's Main Hoon Na. Her second film, Om Shanti Om, came out on Blu-Ray (finally!), and I'm still in raptures. Again, this is so much just my kind of thing. Shah Rukh Khan is Om, a junior artist in 1970s Bollywood (which means he is an actor employed by the studio to be in the background of scenes, never a hero). He is completely in love with Shanti, a huge star (he talks to her billboard that looms over his neighborhood). Alas, she is already secretly married to a producer who kills her when she becomes pregnant. Om tries and fails to save her and dies himself, reborn as the son of his acting idol. Growing up in the lap of luxury has made him into quite a jerk, but his memories start coming back and he hatches a plan to make sure the producer who got away with murder is outed.

This is probably not the best entry into the world of Bollywood, as it's very referential to other films (although there were only a few things I knew I was missing, and in the big Deewangi number which featured some 30 stars of Bollywood past and present there were only 4 or 5 I didn't recognize). Still I loved Om's message, that life really is like a Bollywood movie, and if it doesn't seem like you're getting a happy ending, that just means your film isn't over yet.

This month's song clip is from Om Shanti Om. This is another one where I had the soundtrack for a year now, awaiting the subtitles to know what I'm singing along with. Aidan likes this song in particular, and I tried to parse out what the title meant but it didn't make any sense. "dard" means pain, and "disco" is self-explanatory. What on earth could "Dard-e-Disco" mean?

I pretty much had it, actually. Young spoiled Om is supposed to be playing a scene which is complicated by the fact that his character is blind, deaf, in a wheelchair and has no hands. How to show his anguish at his beloved's wedding to another? (Tough call, and when he finally realizes what's in the script he never bothered to read, Om says, "What the fish?" What the fish, indeed.) Om decides what's needed to convey this anguish is an item song, a dream sequence so he can dance, only the heroine (played by the producer's girlfriend) is not hot enough for this number, better get 10 or so item girls. But what sort of music to show the emotion? A trance number? A rock song? No, it has to be disco. Dard-e-disco.

It all makes sense now...

Books in June

I only read three books in June, but two were monstrous door stops so that skews things a bit.

The first was Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I've been meaning to read this one for a while, at the very least to put Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors into context. I really got swept up into it, but it also messed with me quite a bit. It's a very disturbing book. The end of my edition has a series of quotes from other authors, and I found Robert Louis Stevenson summed it up pretty nicely for me:

Many find it dull: Henry James could not finish it: all I can say is, it nearly finished me. It was like having an illness. James did not care for it because the character of Raskolnikoff was not objective; and at that I divined a great gulf between us, and, on further reflection, the existence of a certain impotence in many minds of today, which prevents them from living in a book or a character, and keeps them standing afar off, spectators of a puppet show. To such I suppose the book may seem empty in the centre; to the others it is a room, a house of life, into which they themselves enter, and are tortured and purified. - Robert Louis Stevenson

I actually enjoyed it more than the second book I read last month, Dostoevsky's considered masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov. That one I read more as an outsider observing. I liked the way it was structured, it seemed a sort of precursor to James Joyce's Ulysses in some ways. But it didn't consume me the way Crime and Punishment did. Also, when I reached the not-ending, I was as baffled and disappointed as the girls who sat behind me in the theater for The Fellowship of the Ring. What sort of ending is that? Apparently Dostoevsky had planned a trilogy he hadn't lived to write, so we only get a single volume. Since just that book is the size of all of The Lord of the Rings, I admire his ambition.

The last book I read in June was lighter fare: Passage by Lois McMaster Bujold. This is the third book in her Sharing Knife series. I found the first two books a little underwhelming (engaging enough, but no where near the level of her other work), but in this book things start to get interesting as her characters begin to explore the mechanics of how their magic works. I like a book where magic is just another sort of science with rules to be discovered and applied. The setting on a river boat on a fantasy version of the Mississippi I liked as well. This series is looking up for me, I'll be interested to see where she takes this next.

In non-book-related news, my grocery delivery service just went out of business. They had been making a lot of little adjustments in the last few months to compensate for the rising costs of food and fuel, but they've given up. This is a bit of a blow to me; I don't actually have time in the week to go to the grocery store. Honestly, none. What used to take ten minutes on the computer on Tuesday and ten minutes putting food away on Wednesday is now going to involve at least an hour at a time I'm neither working or homeschooling. Which means it has to come out of my writing time. We're going to make it a family activity, partly so that the boys can be involved in it and get a sense of what things cost and how we make food decisions, but mostly because it's a huge drag going out to stores and I'm not doing it on my own.

I hate shopping in stores in general. I had to get clothes for all of us for one of last week's parties so we went to Kohls. Now I love Kohls.com. I can search just for three-quarter sleeve tunic cotton shirts, and that's all I see on the screen, and I can pick what I want in five minutes. I spent nearly an hour walking in circles before I found anything remotely like what I was looking for among racks and racks of not-what-I-was-looking-for. Man, I hate shopping.

OK, rant done. I have to finish cleaning my house so I can get back to the outline. I think I figured something out while I was half-asleep this morning that will resolve something that was nagging at the back of my mind...

Some Cool Stuff I've Seen

I had a few days off of work before the Fourth, and aside from going to parties where I either knew no one or knew everyone but they were fundamentalists and I feared to open my mouth unless something horrifically pagan should just come flying out of it, I did do some cool stuff. Like take the boys to the beach. Although either the water level is really low this year or they moved the ropes in at Medicine Lake; even Oliver couldn't get in deeper than his hips, so I didn't bother trying to swim. I did bring a notebook with me and got a bit of writing done

(Mostly outlining. My original stab at MITWA ran aground. Someday I'll admit I'm not a pantser and stop trying to just plunge in and find my way. I carried that same notebook around all week, except to the parties. Because not even I am that socially retarded. Outlining has got me excited about the story again, which is good news. I hope to be at the point where I can start writing from word 0 again soon.)

We also took the boys to see the Star Wars exhibit at the Science Museum, which was cool. Now the previous museum exhibit I had seen for Star Wars was at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and focused on the folklore and mythological roots of Star Wars. Star Wars succeeds much better at being folklore than science fiction, and that prior exhibit was a better one, but that was when my firstborn was a wee babe and the second not yet a thought, so they never saw it (although I bought a stack of books at the MIA bookstore about Star Wars and myth, which they've paged through a million times).

This exhibit had props from all six movies plus little video segments with the special effects guys talking about how they designed the ships, etc. plus some more peripherally related segments about city design (tying in to Coruscant) or exploring the Arctic and Antarctic (Hoth, natch). Even cooler were the experiment stations where the boys got to try to build a mag-lev train and get it to work in increasingly more complex ways (loosely connected to Landspeeders), or to try to build robots that could stand on its own legs on flat ground or a slope, or build and program a more complex robot to navigate mazes. We spent a couple of hours there; it was very cool (although the more peripheral it was to Star Wars the more interesting I found it. Perhaps this is because at this point there is not much I don't already know about those movies).

Also Natalie Portman is teeny tiny. They had one of her costumes up on display and I'm quite certain I could fit her in my pocket. Samuel L. Jackson is pretty tall, though.

The other cool thing we did with the boys was take them to see the new Pixar movie WALL-E. Pixar doesn't make bad films (they are second only to Hayao Miyazaki in my book), so if this one wasn't as good as THE INCREDIBLES, it's still better than most other animated films. I particularly liked the robot EVE; she was a grumpy bitch blasting away at things which annoyed her and then quietly fuming. You don't get much of that in movie love interests, you know?

So anyway, June book and movie posts still to come, but this writing thing has me pleasantly distracted (so much nicer than being distracted by day job overtime, let me tell you).

After a week of parties, I think I'm in touch with this emotion:

Cordelia (at her party): Hi! Are you having fun?
Angel: Sure. This is, ah...
Cordelia: Your idea of hell?
Angel: Actually, in hell you tend to know a lot of the people.

I think I've finished my spouse-placating social activities for the rest of the year. My next week off is going to be just about writing, I swear...

Movies in May

This month I saw 4 movies in English, two on cable, one a borrowed DVD, and one I desperately wished I hadn't paid for.

The borrowed DVD was Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash biopic. I remember seeing Johnny and June perform together on countless music shows on TV as a kid. It made an impression on my young mind, the way he looked at her as if he didn't just love her, he really looked up to her. So I find this movie very interesting since I hadn't known all that much about his life. I found it very well done, although the scenes where he talked about his older brother who had died so young messed with me a bit, as Joaquin Phoenix also lost his older brother. I don't know how actors do it; I wouldn't want to relive those sorts of feelings over and over again before an audience and share it with the world. (For similar reasons, I think it's going to be a few years before I'll be ready to watch Batman: the Dark Knight. I don't separate fact from fiction so terribly well).

The first one I caught on cable was the very interesting but ultimately flawed Stranger Than Fiction. It's a brilliant idea, well acted, and very good for the first two-thirds. I particularly loved Dustin Hoffman as the literature professor who helps Will Ferrell figure out just what sort of novel he is trapped in (he can hear the writer, Emma Thompson, narrating his actions). This movie could have easily made it into my all-time fave list if it had only stuck the landing. Alas (SPOILER ALERT) for the ending to work the death of Will Ferrell's character needed to feel like the only possible conclusion to all the action up to that point, as if it had a deep and significant meaning, the sort of grand death that wins writing awards (since Emma is supposed to be just that sort of writer), but it didn't. It felt totally random and meaningless. So when she changes the ending there is no sense that she has found a deeper meaning. Instead you just get the sense the the screenwriters think that stories that end with death suck and no one should ever write them.

The second movie I saw on cable worked even less well for me, but since it was Adam Sandler's Click perhaps you won't be surprised. I only watched it because it had both Christopher Walkin and Sean Astin in a tiny, tiny Speedo. Mostly I kept wondering how if he had to work seven days a week late into the night just to afford to get new bikes for his kids his wife could justify not only not working even a part-time job while her kids were at school, but going to the gym every day with her friend (do you have any idea how much a gym membership costs, even the Y? There's your bike money right there). She just nagged Adam Sandler for putting on weight himself and never helping her out when she inflicts incredibly complex children's parties on herself (God forbid a bunch of kids should amuse themselves without having every minute of their evening filled with structured activities). Yeah, this one rubbed me wrong in a couple of places (Ooh! Here's another - double standard with how he talks to his son and his daughter about sex. No, I don't find the "I'm going to lock my daughter up until she's 30" sort of attitude endearing). Still, Christopher Walkin is the bomb.

The one I regret: Highlander: The Source. I know, skipping the theater release to head straight to a Sci-Fi Channel premiere is never a good sign. And I hated that animated Highlander: The Search for Vengeance movie. Still, Methos was in it. I wanted so badly for it to just be watchable. The best thing about this movie are the wonderful One Star reviews at Amazon.com (because Amazon doesn't let you give zero stars). Sharp and funny, and written by people with respect for Highlander and Highlander fans. I think the next time I have a hankering to revisit the world of Highlander I'll dig up some fan fiction online. Mathematically, it would have to be better than this film.

In the Bollywood category: Ek Aur Ek Gyarah was a caper film starring Govinda and Sanjay Dutt. Shika says that when she was in school in Delhi the boys used to cut school when new Govinda movies came out. Knowing his target audience was teenage boys helps to explain this movie. Still, I liked the title track.

Dil Ne Jise Apna Kahaa is the second Hindi film I've seen that involved a heart transplantee getting up and running and dancing around ridiculously soon after surgery. Salman Khan's wife (a doctor played by Preity Zinta) dies and leaves her heart to one of her patients (apparently they have no organ donor program in India and given the reaction to her not having all her parts at her funeral I think there is a religious conotation I didn't quite catch). The recipient's name was confidential, so when the girl in question starts working at Salman's office he can't figure out why he's attracted to her. This was a pretty likeable film (although the plot sounds vaguely like a Hollywood movie I never saw). It's filled with some familiar faces, all of whom get scenes which are amusing on their own but don't really move the story forward. (And apparently Ramen is the food of the lonely guy in every culture).

Garv reminded me a lot of the movie about Kashmir I watched last month. Both feature Arbaz Khan as the only Muslim you can trust, although this one tried harder to make the point that not every Muslim is either a terrorist or Arbaz Khan. It had some nice speeches to that effect, anyway. But it was too much of a Steven Seagal type of film to be taken seriously (good thing; the ending would have been brutal if played as a serious drama). Now I've seen many Bollywood films with questionable medical practices, this one shows the same freehand with police procedures. I mean, Salman Khan gets understandably frustrated with the bureaucracy that keeps letting the criminals he works so hard to catch go on technicalities, so he decides that arrest warrants could be read as "dead or alive" and goes in shooting (very Steven Seagal, yeah?). The unbelievable part? The government actually backs him. (Except the human rights types who protest, but all turn out to be on the bankroll of the big don who's trying to take over Mumbai from Dubai). Still, the scene where Salman Khan tries to pass off the first drug dealer he killed as self-defense was pretty funny. "Self-defense? You broke 17 bones in his body and shot him six times." (Did I mention the Steven Seagal?).

Tere Nam was even more violent, only without having the actual story to go with it. I think the writer looked at Romeo and Juliet and decided he could make a more depressing ending. Salman Khan has a really strange haircut, I think to cover the prosthetic they need for the one scene where gangsters ram his skull repeatedly into the front of a train. Not something I needed to see. (They won't show actors kissing on the lips, but bashed in skulls I get to see in far too graphic detail).

Phir Milenge was really Philadelphia, but this time it's a woman who has HIV and is fired. She gets it from Salman Khan, who got it from a white girl in New York. Because he didn't listen to Johnny Lever in Jab Pyaar Kisise Hota Hai when he told them that all white girls are riddled with venereal disease. I did like Abhishek Bachchan as Denzel Washington, but this film had a decided lack of Antonio Banderas (clearly after getting HIV the only time she had sex, this woman has sworn off men and is just going to hang with her little sister). I did like the music. There was no real dancing in this film, so the music is more guitar-oriented pop.

The last film didn't work for me either, damn it. Aaja Nachle stars Madhuri Dixit, whom I love in everything. I'm not alone in that, actually. In the movie Kabul Express, two Indian journalists touring post US invasion Afghanistan are taken hostage by a Pakistani soldier who had been sent by his government to work for the Taliban, but since Pakistan had told the US they had never done such a thing he needs to get back across the border before he's killed. (A very good film. Not a musical, but an interesting non-US perspective of Afghanistan). At any rate, the two Indians catch the Pakistani singing along with their filmi and are surprised he knows it, as Bollywood films are banned in Pakistan. But pirated videos are everywhere (and Pakistan has since lifted the ban), and the soldier tells them the films are so popular Pakistan would gladly relenquish all claims on Kashmir if only they could have Madhuri Dixit. But the Indians sigh, alas she has married and gone away to America.

Which is true, she lives in Colorado. But she went back to India during her son's summer break from school to make a film. And she is wonderful in it, and still a dazzlingly expressive dancer. Sadly the story doesn't work. She plays a woman who lives in NYC but goes back to her hometown in India to save the theater where she used to dance from being torn down to make a shopping mall. So she organizes a show using the townspeople themselves to show them just how important dance is to the community. Now I'm all about the importance of doing things over buying things. I like the idea of pursuing an art for its own rewards, of acting or dancing for your friends and neighbors and not necessarily needing to hie off to Hollywood or Mumbai to do it.

Sadly the most amazing part of the film is the part that just doesn't work: the show. They do a 30-minute number based on the Leila-Majnu story (or as Eric Clapton would spell it, Layla). This show is very cool, but it's not remotely believable as a production put on by people who had never acted, sung or danced until Madhuri blew into town to get them all motivated. And the sets and costumes are beautiful, but who made them - heck, who paid for the materials?

The movie let a lot of plot lines just drop at the end, it was a frustrating "but what about..?" experience. My dream job? Script doctor. I hate when what should have been a pretty good film falls down because of lazy writing, and it would usually take such little tweaks to fix it. Alas, I'll just have to stick to doctoring my own stories.

Still, bad film or not, Madhuri is a terrific dancer. And she gets to wear the best clothes (this outfit is second after the dark burgundy she wore for the "Chalak Chalak" number in Devdas in my book):

Hooray for KG and Sam!

I was hoping they would win on Sunday, as it was the only game I actually got to watch, but it's cooler winning on your home court. I do keep my other office computer on ESPN.com so I can glance at the score from time to time; the outcome of this match was never in question (and I was kinda hoping they'd beat the Lakers by 50, but 40 is still humiliating enough.

I timed my break with the last few minutes of the game so I could see when they won, and my husband gave me a hard time because yes indeed I had tears in my eyes when Kevin was too overcome to talk to the reporter. Especially with the tough game he had on Sunday, he went out there last night and earned this win. And that grin on Sam Cassell's face was priceless. (My husband gets irritated by the sports commentators always calling Sam an "old man", as they are nearly the same age. But as I pointed out, it's all relative. If Sam were a senator, they'd be calling him a young punk).

I'm glad the Celtics won it. Having followed them in addition to (and near the end of the season, instead of) the T-wolves, I've become a real Paul Pierce and Ray Allen fan. And they have so many good bench players as well. Frankly, Kobe and his background boys got beat by a team.

Books in May

May was a YA month for me. There is a lot of terrific YA spec-fic out there, and I've been trying to catch up on it all (a huge chunk of my Christmas and birthday book stack is YA. Here it is five months later and I've scarcely made a dent...)

At any rate, the first thing I read was Ninth Grade Slays by Backspacer Heather Brewer. You know when a new character comes into town and he's a vampire slayer named Joss that this book is right up my alley. A fast-paced fun read, and if you're even remotely into vampires you're going to love all of the little references to other vampire stories that sneak in.




I've been hearing that Scott Westerfield is the bomb for some time now, so I picked up all four books - Uglies, Pretties, Specials, Extras - at Christmas. I admit I approached them with a bit of trepidation. I had also heard that Philip Pullman was the bomb and while I appreciated his work on an analytical level, I never really emotionally engaged with it the way others (namely, my husband) did. I was afraid this would also be the case here, but considering I blew through all four books in a week (and the real testament: stayed on the treadmill past the three mile mark just so I could finish one more chapter) you could say these really clicked with me. A lot of cool ideas, and some of the things I was longing for him to explore deeper when reading the first book were just the things he got into in the later books. Highly recommend. (Also, I really wish I had a hoverboard).

The next one actually got me into a bit of trouble: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, a story of hackers who run afoul of Homeland Security. If you're into sci-fi at all you've already heard this book talked to death (my assessment: they're right, it's brilliant). My trouble? Well, somewhere in the middle bit of the book the MC is talking about how he built his own laptop, and how it was tougher than building your own PC, which any rube can do. Now I've been using the same PC in my office since about 1997, and it was far from state-of-the-art then. Now it just barely lets me check e-mail and listen to music at the same time, and if I try to run my flashcard program on it I can actually hear it screaming (because in order to run the flashcard program I also have to run another program that lets me type in Devangari, and that poor little processor just can't take it).

My brilliant idea: why don't I just buy a new processor and motherboard? I have tons of hard drive memory (which I installed myself), and I don't need a new DVD player or power supply since I swapped those out fairly recently. If I can add my own hard drives and swap out my own power supplies, how much harder could installing a motherboard be? And it would be so much cheaper than buying a new PC.

Yes, I really should have known better. The motherboard wouldn't physically fit in my chassis, so I had to buy a bigger one. Then I realized my video card wasn't compatible with the new motherboard either, so that was another chunk of change, and we were venturing out of the range of money I had set aside for computer purchases (and into the realm of eating more Ramen noodles). When I finally had all the pieces I needed put together and pushed the On button, the little light came on but nothing happened. So I had Quin take the thing to work and have his IT guy take a look at it.

(I'm told that conversation went something like this: "My wife built this PC but she can't get it to turn on."
"Your wife built a PC? Is she a dork?"
"Totally. You'd like her.")

But he couldn't see anything wrong so in the end we had to take it to the Geek Squad and pay to have it fixed. What did they do? I have no idea. They were very recalcitrant when I attempted to find out what I had done wrong. I felt like Indiana Jones at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark when he realized the only answer he was going to get was "Top men." No matter what I asked, they would only admit to "there were multiple issues with the way the processor was installed". And installing the processor seemed like the easy part.

I got the PC back with lots of little pieces busted off my new chassis, and it would power up but still didn't actually boot up. My storage hard drive had been fried and for some reason which makes no sense at all to me they had switched the setting on my master drive to slave. I spent a few days tearing my hair out over BIOS screens and in the end had to re-partition the hard drive and re-install Windows (losing everything, but that was backed up before hand because, evidence to the contrary, I'm not a total idiot). And you can add the cost of a new hard drive for storage to the bill.

So I had no PC in my office for a month and spent twice as much as I had expected, but it was still cheaper than buying new and I have a wicked fast PC now than can do more things at once than I'd ever need it to do.

The ironic bit is that Little Brother set me off on this path of aspiring to techy-hood. Somewhere around the second or third purchase of PC equipment from Amazon.com I tripped up my check card's security system. In the book, you're a terrorist until you prove you're not. In my world, I was a thief until I proved I wasn't. I got a very humiliating phone call in which I had to verify all the purchases I'd been making (and resist the urge to explain them, and it was a powerful urge. "And the charge for 18.95 to the Science Fiction Book Club?" "Well, the new Lois McMaster Bujold just came out... I mean, yes, that was me."). The irony was all the suspicious purchases were things I ordered online and shipped to my house. Not that the check card people knew that, but still. If someone steals your credit card but doesn't spend more than you have and ships it all to your house, that's a considerate thief.

So anyway, I wrapped up the month with a little non-YA, and something I've read about half of before: Notes from The Underground, The Double, and Other Stories (White Nights, The Meek One, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (Dostoevsky). The movie Saawariya is a retelling of White Nights, which I first read in college and after seeing the movie in theaters wanted to read again, only to discover I didn't have the book anymore. Which is why I don't loan out books; I have no idea who walked off with that one. So I picked up a new copy as part of my Christmas haul. But I think I'll reserve specific comments for next month. So far June has been nothing but Dostoevsky, so I'll just discuss them all at once.

Blah.

Maybe it's all the Dostoevsky. Maybe it's the computer that is still in pieces that refuse to work together. But mostly I think it's the unremitting gloom:

And that's the next ten days, pretty much like the last ten days. I love snow and ice, but rain gives me the blues in the worst way. I'm so never moving to Seattle.

It's a shame Tropic of Thunder doesn't come out until August. I think Ben Stiller doing a Viet Nam war movie within a movie would be just the thing to bring me out of the funk. I mean, Robert Downey Jr. as an Australian actor playing a black American soldier? Brilliance, man. I always really liked him, it's cool to see him doing stuff again. And he was totally robbed of the Oscar in 1992 for Chaplin. He and Denzel both. Actually, I thought all the actors up that year turned in better performances than Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, but perhaps that's just me...

So, we had some hail on Saturday

It was thick as snow on the ground, and the whole neighborhood smelled of wounded trees. Both of our cars got dinged up, not to mention the house (the insurance guys will be looking it all over later this week).

Thick as snow:


Rather freakin' huge:

And did quite a number on the leaves in our whole neighborhood (and a few trees lost whole limbs). Then everything started steaming:

By the time I got home it was sunset, and when I went out back to survey the damage to my garden (*sob*) it was very foggy. (Quin took these pictures shortly after the hail stopped, when it was just a touch foggy. I should have taken some pictures of my own, the light was really cool when I was walking back there).

So I'll have to go back to the garden store and buy more plants. My tomatoes and peppers are a wash, although some of the more expensive perennials I had just put in the ground seem like they might make it.

The hostas got pulped pretty good, and it looks like my rosemary plant jumped straight out of its pot:

Movies in April

The coolest thing I watched in April technically wasn't a movie, it was season 3 of Battlestar Galactica. TV on DVD is worse than potato chips, you can never watch just one episode. This may just well be the best Sci-Fi TV show ever - well written, excellent special effects, not afraid of having a continuous story line with characters who grow and change. (Firefly is still my favorite, though. I can only imagine what it would have gone on to do in its third season. Sigh.). Gaius Baltar is my favorite character; the man just can't catch a break. The downside of catching TV on DVD: I have to wait a year to see what happens next. This is particularly tricky if one wants to avoid spoilers. This isn't always possible: Quin and I both revealed after the episode where Starbuck dies that we already knew that was coming (and had each kept it secret from the other quite unnecessarily as it turned out). And with so many NBA play-off games airing in ABC, I have to cover my eyes and sing real loud every time a commercial for Lost comes on, because just seeing what actors are still there is a spoiler in itself.

I also saw Live Free and Die Hard, which I liked. I like all the Die Hard movies and this was a worthy addition to the franchise. Kevin Smith had a cool little part (although it took me half the film to finally figure out that the kid with McCain was familar because he's the Mac in the Mac vs. PC commercials).

I'm still working my way through a stack of Bollywood films. Duplicate was an early effort from Karan Johar, before he started directing. The movies he writes and directs are all terrific, really intricate character studies that stand apart from the rest of Bollywood. So Duplicate was a bit of a disappointment. It steals lines and scenes from Dirty Harry and Desperado, and I swear I've seen the same plot in a Jackie Chan film (although I may be mashing two together in my head. But didn't Jackie play a chef who had an evil twin who was a gangster?). It was a fun enough film, and Shahrukh Khan and Juhi Chalwa are cute together. Still, it wasn't remotely a Karan Johar type of film.

Kal Ho Naa Ho was. This is another one he wrote but didn't direct, but it's more recent and might as well have a Karan Johar trademark stamp on it. Very much a "you'll laugh, you'll cry" type of film. This is the third thing I've seen Saif Ali Khan in (he did the most brilliant Iago in the Hindi Othello, Omkara) and I'm quickly becoming a fan.

Maa Tujhhe Salaam. This one was in the 99 cent section at Eros (I'm a sucker for a movie that's less than a dollar). Quin wanted to watch this one, on account of Malaika Arora being in it (for one dance). It stars her husband Arbaaz Khan (Salman's younger brother. Moviemaking in Mumbai is very much a family affair). His first scene he is barechested, tying his hair back with a headband, looking for all the world like Charlie Sheen in Hot Shots 2 (I loved Hot Shots 2). Gradually I realized this movie was reaching for the same source - Rambo (it became clear when Arbaaz whipped out his impressive hero knife). The movie concerns the fight for Kashmir, a fight with three sides (those who want Kashmir to be part of India, those who want it to be part of Pakistan, and those who want it to be its own country). I think the filmmakers were intending a Band of Brothers type salute to the Indian soldiers freezing on the frontlines, but alas it was not quite that. It was more like Rambo, fun enough but not terribly deep. (And Malaika's dance was a hit around here. So were the ones Tabu was in. In general, I think my husband enjoyed this one more than me. Not as a movie, though, just as a vehicle for songs).

Jab Pyar Kisise Hota Hai and Yeh Hai Jalwa: For diehard Salman Khan fans only. 'Nuff said.

I mentioned Bollywood is a family business. Salman Khan is a second generation guy himself; his father was a screenwriter. His most successful films were when he wrote as half of the Salim-Javed duo. I've already seen two of their films: Sholay (their most popular film, and it really is very cool. It's sort of India's answer to Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven. I'd highly recommend it) and Don (which I picked up when I couldn't grok the plot of the remake. It turns out everything that made no sense in the remake was something changed from the original. Yes, the original was very low-budget, very 70s, but at least it made sense. Plus Roma in the original kicks ass. She's clearly stunt-doubled by a short man, but it's the thought that counts. Roma in the remake disappears from the climatic fight entirely).

Being one who likes to track the careers of writers more than actors, I've been frustrated by the lack of prominent screenwriters in Bollywood. Salim-Javed are one of the few who actually had a track record (and were coincidentally key players in getting the screenwriters names put on the movie posters). They worked decades ago, so their films are dated, but the stories are all good. Trishul was a bit frustrating; the subtitles started out fine, but as the movie progressed they started disappearing for a few lines of dialogue, then coming back, then disappearing again. The last half hour of the film had no subtitles at all. Which was frustrating. I've been learning a little Hindi (1771 words right now, according to my flashcard program). I could catch enough to follow the story, but all the nuance was gone. And the scene where Amitabh Bacchan talks about what life as an unwed mother was like for his Mom - well, that was probably all about the nuance. I can't really say, all I know was he was talking about his Mom. Shame, really; it seemed like a good film.

I really loved Seeta Aur Geeta. Remember how I said that the original Roma kicked ass? This one has another great, strong woman. It's about twin sisters separated at birth. One grows up poor, a total tomboy running with the street boys. The other starts out rich, but when her parents die she ends up in a Cinderella situation, working as a maid for her evil aunt who keeps all the money that the parents left her. When Seeta runs away from her evil aunt (and her lecherous brother) the police pick up her twin Geeta by mistake, and Geeta terrorizes the whole evil family, while Seeta settles into life in the poor part of town, cooking and cleaning for people who actually appreciate her efforts. Cool to see a movie where two women rescue each other rather than leaving it to their love interests to do.

The last movie I saw in April was Shaan, Salim-Javed's answer to Bond. It's not about an Indian spy or anything (the two characters are two-bit hoods trying to make good after their older brother the cop is killed). But it has lots of Bond elements in it: the evil villain with the secret fortress on an island who kills his enemies in overly elaborate ways. Quin felt I enjoyed this one a tad too much. But you be the judge. Doesn't the evil villain, Shakaal:



Look a lot like sci-fi writer John Scalzi:

...or is it just me?

­There I am again!

I made the WOTF honorable mention category again this quarter. It's alphabetical, so scroll about halfway down to find me. The story in question is already in the next slush pile on its journey to publication.

Also, I've been very negligent in mentioning that the issue of Beyond Centauri with my story "Trifle" in it is now out in the world (and can be purchased in places like this). I really love the cover, and not just because it has my name on it.

Books in April

I finished off Heinlein in April with two collections: Expanded Universe and Off the Main Sequence. Expanded Universe is an apt title; it contains some non-SF Heinlein stories and tons of nonfiction pieces which I found very interesting. It was a nice way to wrap him up, to listen to him talk directly rather than through story. He occasionally comes off a bit curmudgeonly, particularly when he hits on the age-old "kids these days have it so easy" type arguments (although his piece on how to get a college degree without actually having to do any work or even learn anything was sharp and amusing). His story about going by the curtain to Cold War Russia was interesting as well. Off the Main Sequence largely collected stories I had already read, but I really appreciated the way this book was put together, with citations under the titles of where and when each story was orginally printed. I love that sort of information, but most anthologies either make you dig through the fine print on the copyright page to find it or leave it out entirely.


My Opposite of That ended up being Nick Hornby, largely because my brother handed me a stack of his novels and said "read these". Since I've already seen About a Boy and High Fidelity, he just loaned me the ones which haven't yet been made into movies. I liked the female protag in How to be Good (and parts of that book were almost painfully familiar), and his YA story of teenage pregnancy Slam was a good read. I like Hornby's way of avoiding the obvious mega-happy endings (although I think with Slam he could have gone a bit more bittersweet; it all worked out a shade to nicely in the end). But my fave of the three was far and away A Long Way Down, about four people who meet when they all go up to the roof of the same building on New Year's Eve intending to kill themselves. I understand a movie is already in the works ; it will be interesting to see how they cast it, and if they manage to get the tone right.


I also read the latest from Neil Gaiman, Odd and the Frost Giants, which took about half an afternoon. It reminded me of George RR Martin's The Ice Dragon which I read last year; ostensibly for children (younger than YA), but the language is too lush to miss just because it's for kids. (Actually my favorite Gaiman book is arguably The Wolves in the Walls, which is a picture book, so I read much younger than YA). I of course loved the use Norse gods. It was a nice way to spend an hour and change.

I also read a couple of sumo books, The Big Book of Sumo by Mina Hall and The Joy of Sumo by David Benjamin. Research for the WIP. If you're looking for a book on sumo as an art form, pick up Mina Hall's; if you are interested sumo purely as sport, go for Benjamin's. Both were full of useful information for my purposes.

The last book was another one I finished off in an afternoon, Bellydancing by Keti Sharif. Another of my too numerous interests. I was looking for a book that would help me differentiate which sorts of dances come from which regions originally, and this book does a beautitful job of that. Plus it also breaks down different dances by the four elements, so I can do my own Avatar: The Last Airbender at home where I control the elements through dance rather than kung fu. Cool!

Busy, busy, busy

We homeschool year-round, but the end of April/beginning of May is unofficially when we transition. Most of what we do just sort of plods on at its own pace, so grade levels are pretty meaningless. But this is the point when Aidan finishes one math book and starts the next (Oliver is about six months off, though; we ditched the last half of kindergarten and jumped right into first grade six months early). And this is when we finish up one year's worth of history and science and move on to the next. So we usually take a few weeks off here, or rather they do. I have a year's worth of planning to do.

There are lots of different ways of homeschooling, from completely boxed curricula like Calvert where you complete and mail in assignments to be graded (I looked into this early on but decided it was too constrictive for me. I have mentioned it to Quin as his best choice if something happens to me and he still wants to homeschool. He loves those sorts of conversations). Some parents practice unschooling, which has no curriculum at all (so not for me. You have to be willing at any time to take advantage of a teaching moment, to be spontaneous. I can't do that. Even if I didn't have to work for half the day I still wouldn't be able to unschool. I would find my own way to fill the day and then get irritated at being interrupted. It's a matter of temperament; I have to have a plan).

We mostly follow the suggestions in Well-Trained Mind. Mostly. Their history curriculum Story of the World we absolutely hated. Aidan was so, so bored, and although it was a global history like I wanted, I was displeased with the way certain culture's traditions were treated as myth where others were treated as history. So we ditched it. History Odyssey from Pandia Press works wonderfully for us, and the few times it references SOTW, we just skip over. Actually, the course is very reading and writing intensive, so we skip over things a lot or it would take us two years to cover a one year text book.

Science is more of a challenge. Not surprisingly, it's hard to find good science curricula for homeschoolers, particularly in biology. There are other homeschoolers like us who teach evolution, but we are definitely a minority. So the bulk of my prep time is made up of deciding just what we are going to do with science. This year for Oliver I'm trying a curriculum package for the first time, REAL Science from Pandia Press. I'm hoping it works out as well as HO, but we'll see. They don't have anything in Aidan's level, so he's getting the usual Mom grab bag of books and experiments (although he does the actual experiments with Dad when I'm working; he likes to do that sort of thing more than I do).

After much internal debate I decided to let Aidan stop Latin even though he hadn't yet finished book one of the two book set. It is, after all, very dry. I did talk him down from pursuing Hindi next. Although Quin and I both like the idea of learning along with our kids (like Professor Bernardo de la Paz did with his students in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), I'm not sure if a foreign language is the best subject for that, or if with my current work load (part-time in name only) would allow for it at this point. So we'll be learning Spanish, something I took in high school and college so I'm a bit more confident I can't ruin him too badly with it. Latin is good for reading, but tough to be conversational in. I think he's going to like Spanish a lot more. But again, I'm not widely enthused by the curricula I've found so far so he's getting the Mom grab bag of lessons (which is fun for me anyway).

All that starts on Monday. I've been doing a bit of writing, but not as much as I'd like. My days of getting 1000 words down before dinner time are in the past, I fear. I'm lucky if I squeeze in 500. Still, it's not a full stop, and I'm liking the way this new WIP is shaping up. It's coming along slowly but I don't think it sucks. So that's good.