Because it helps to have a goal

Using Dr. Horrible as a motivation tool was pretty crucial in getting the first draft of MITWA down so quickly. I think I need something similar to get the revisions done. I mean, I took a week off of work at the beginning of the month to get started, and I did fuss with it a bit, but mostly I slept 12 hours a day instead. (It's OK, I really needed it).

So. After re-watching seasons 1-3 of Lost, I think season 4 might make a nice reward. Easy to dole out in small segments, but they all join together with lots of cliffhanger endings so it should keep my driven. Of course season 4 is the season that was smited by the writer's strike, and it's possible the ending was trashed as badly as Heroes was. (I've been diligently steering clear of spoilers, which means I don't really have any idea of how well liked the season was by other fans, because with a show like Lost, any discourse is a spoiler).

Well, I'm going to give it a try. 14 episodes to be sprinkled over revising 24 chapters. I know I'm going to need to add 1 or 2 more chapters, so the math here is going to get confusing. Wish me luck!

Movies in January

Apparently I watched a lot of movies in January. Well, that’s my usual antidote to post-holiday burnout.

First up, the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading. Not as good as Fargo, but much more watchable than No Country For Old Men. Brad Pitt as the gym employee was fun, but George Clooney was the highlight for me (particularly the look he gives Tilda Swinton when he decides to take his big purple wedge and go; it was perfection).

Quin had a hankerin’ to see some westerns, a genre he’s not really familiar with. So for Christmas the boys and I loaded him up with western DVDs, mostly things I’ve already seen (namely, the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns – how had he never seen any of those?) I did get one that I had never seen before either: How The West Was Won. Apparently when this ran in theaters it was projected on three screens for a wrap-around effect, which I bet was really cool, particularly the scenes on the river or flying through the mountains. I didn’t like it quite as well as those spaghetti westerns but I liked the epic scope of the story. And seeing all the old stars when they were young, young, young was a treat.

The trailers for Wanted looked awesome, didn’t they? Sadly the movie was complete crap. Honestly, the depth of my disdain for this film can scarcely be measured. Partly it was the Mary Sue quality – the guy who works in a cubicle whose boss is a fat bitch and girlfriend is an unfaithful nag is secretly the son of an assassin and once he gets tapped for the family business he’s going to run around killing people and making out with Angelina Jolie. It felt like it was written in that cubicle. (Ironically, his boss has good reason to be a bitch – his work is pushed off to one side so he can spend all day Googling himself - and in his scenes with his girlfriend you wonder why she’s even still there since he couldn’t be more emotionally detached. Must be his rock-hard abs). I probably could have handled all that (maybe) if it weren’t for the nonsense about the tapestry woven with names in it by “Fate”. No one ever questions this; it’s just accepted that the names it spits out are people that have to be killed. No one questions the possibility that someone could cause these patterns to happen by programming or just fiddling with the machine. And in the end Morgan Freeman reveals that all of the agents were on the kill list by handing them paperwork – not even the pieces of tapestry (which he could easily fabricate if he wanted to, but never mind) and that’s proof enough for a massive murder/suicide. I will believe that bullets can travel in arcs, but I can’t buy people so incapable of asking completely obvious and necessary questions. And yeah, that was a spoiler there about how they all die in the end except the awesome MC, but believe me, you don’t want to see this movie. One last gripe: if you’re going to talk about God, talk about God, don’t rename it “Fate” but treat it the same way (to the extent of even saying “Kill them all and let Fate sort them out”). Fate doesn’t want things.

So OK, here’s a movie I was expecting to hate but really enjoyed: Mamma Mia, the musical of Abba songs. After Across the Universe I was reluctant to watch this one. I bought it but left it sitting on the bookshelf for quite some time until one night we were looking to kill some time before a west coast basketball game started and Quin had Aidan put it in. We ended up missing the first half of the game; this movie entranced all four of us. This movie isn’t an attempt to interpret the Abba canon; it’s basically an old-school Greek comedy about mixups and marriages that happens to use Abba songs in the telling (it even has a Greek chorus). And the cast clearly was having a lot of fun with it. I particularly liked Meryl Streep, who looks very good for her age in a natural, non-Hollywood botox etc. kind of way. You believe her as a woman who’s been running a hotel on her own for twenty years (actresses almost never look like they do the jobs they are meant to be performing; as much as I liked The Lake House, I did not buy Sandra Bullock as an overworked inner city doctor).

The Holiday was good as well; in the Nancy Meyer’s canon I’d rate this better than What Women Want although not as good as Something’s Gotta Give. I liked Eli Wallach’s character, the old screenwriter. Since seeing The Good, The Bad and the Ugly for the first time, Quin has been seeing Eli Wallach everywhere (he was the Ugly). He was also in How the West Was Won and kept popping up in movies Quin was surfing through on TV; just one of those journeyman actors you never really notice, until you do and then they’re everywhere.

TV on DVD: The Boondocks Season 2, even better than Season 1. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the comic strip that was simply the best drawn set of panels on the funny pages becomes one of the most gorgeously animated shows on TV. Honestly, the attention to detail on this show is sublime: the trees, the sunsets, the people’s faces. Plus, it’s funny as hell. I particularly like Katt William’s character, A Pimp Named Slickback, whom the family calls on for marriage counseling or to help Riley sort out his sexuality, because wouldn't those sort of things fall under his realm of expertise as a pimp? The songs are well done as well; I suspect the rappers that do voices also contribute there. The downside: this show will encourage a mode of speaking not considered appropriate to use in front of your children. Just sayin’.

The Complete BlackAdder we watched with the boys. In an attempt to work down my To Be Read pile I used my gift certificates on British comedy shows rather than books. Most of what I bought I’d already seen; Fawlty Towers and the complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but Blackadder I’d only ever seen bits and pieces of. The boys loved it, and it was a nice roundabout way of using what they’ve been learning in history (they got the context the stories were set in without having to have it explained, which was nice). My favorite episode is definitely the one with Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, although the scene where Blackadder is being tortured by an inquisitor who only speaks Spanish and the two have to converse in pantomime was brilliant.

Two Cinematic Titanics: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks. The first was originally an MST3K episode, but here it is again with all new jokes. I think this version is even funnier than their original take, but then again things just seem funnier when I enjoy them with my boys. Castle of Freaks was good as well; the boys were particularly taken with the boob blimp that floated into the screen to cover the film’s gratuitous T&A, always getting there just...in....time.

Two Mira Nair films: Salaam Bombay, in Hindi but not remotely a Bollywood film. I’ve been digging into the slums of Mumbai for novel research, mostly online things (like this or even Google Earth). This movie is set there and is quite a heartbreaker. The last five minutes of just the boy alone, how you can see what he is thinking as it passes over his face, is genius. How she got such a performance out of such a young actor I can’t imagine. An excellent film. Vanity Fair I enjoyed as well; gorgeously shot with a nice little nautch girl number near the end (choreographed by Farah Khan, but then you already knew I adored her work). You know I didn’t think I liked Reese Witherspoon, but after this and the Johnny Cash biopic I might have to reevaluate that assessment.

I recently picked up a Bruce Lee box set on DVD. I had them on video but I haven’t had a working VCR in years so they were really just paperweights. The set included Game of Death II, which I didn’t even know existed. Game of Death was always a really lame movie with a terrific ending (the bits that actually had Bruce Lee, natch, but just the idea of fighting you way up a pagoda is very cool). A sequel is pure exploitation of the Lee name, but honestly I found it more watchable than the first. The story was better (particularly after they killed off the actor that was supposed to be Bruce Lee; their technique of working in his reaction shots from other movies was far from seamless). Not a great film, but no where near as bad as it could have been. Plus the movie clips from Bruce when he was 6 were cute.

And I’ll admit I only picked up Nomad: The Warrior because it had Jason Scott Lee in it. That man just doesn’t get enough work. I can argue that Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story is more of a Bruce Lee movie than anything that actually had Bruce Lee in it, if you want to listen to me wax rhapsodic on the philosophy of kung fu, but you probably don’t. At any rate, I fell in love with Jason Scott Lee when he played an Inuit in Map of the Human Heart, a very fine film. Nomad isn’t exactly great, there were story problems I longed to fix because with just a few nudges this could have been great. It was very interesting, though; set in Kazakhstan, a country I know next to nothing about but is absolutely gorgeous. The costumes and cinematography were so lush, it’s a shame they didn’t bring the same attention to detail to the script.

Wrapping up with Bollywood: Yaadon Ki Baaraat and Haathi Mere Saathi are both early Salim-Javed films. Yaadon had a very young (8ish?) Aamir Khan in it. Thankfully he grew into those ears. I liked the music in this one, sort of surf guitar/spaghetti western/girls in go-go boots mash-up I could see Quentin Tarantino really digging. The story was good (three brothers are separated as children when gangsters kill their parents and eventually find each other as adults with very different lives), but could have used a stronger sense of structure; it kept wandering a bit and I think it would have worked better rotating through the three brothers more rather than sticking with one at a time (I kept wondering what the other two were up to). Haathi Mere Saathi was the first Salim-Javed collaboration, a story of a boy who is saved by a herd of elephants who then become his lifelong companions. I think this is a story that would actually work better as a novel. The story of a man wandering penniless, followed around by his four elephant companions, is quite charming, but a lot of things in it were quite disturbing specifically because you knew it was really being done. I mean like having an elephant grab a tiger by the tail with his trunk and bash him on the ground repeatedly. And if that’s not disturbing enough for you: a baby is allowed to crawl face-first into a pool of water. Sure the elephant pulled him right back out again, but still. How horrifying for that baby.

Bichhoo was one that Quin’s coworker had specifically recommended that he watch. It soon became clear why: it was a remake of The Professional/Leon, one of Quin’s favorite movies. It starred Bobby Deol, who balances the hitman plot/goofy love back story here as handily as he did in Soldier, and had a dance number with Malaika Arora (which is really all Quin needs in a Bollywood movie anyway). Rani Mukerji had the Natalie Portman part, which was odd. She’s clearly late 20s, but she acts like she’s a tweener; I’m not sure how old we were meant to see her as. The guy who took on the Gary Oldman part was fantastic, genuinely creepy. He was a big guy, though, and part of what made Gary Oldman so intimidating in The Professional (or anything else he plays a bad guy in, actually) is his lack of size. His personality overwhelms you. So, Bichhoo, an interesting albeit not successful experiment.

Which leaves only Jodhaa Akbar, the latest epic from Ashutosh Gowariker, who also wrote and directed Lagaan (that being the movie where I got my working title MITWA from). This is not quite as good as Lagaan, but is still just the sort of sweeping epic I tend to really go for. It’s the story of the Mughal emperor Akbar and his Hindu wife Jodhaa whom he allows to remain Hindu (not a popular decision with his Muslim family and advisors). There is some history here although the story itself is largely fictional; rather like Shakespeare used to do. Hrithik Roshan is wonderful; he communicates so much without words (watch the moment in the clip below when the people confer the title “Akbar” on him and he is so overwhelmed and grateful and humbled all at once. Wonderful.) Aishwarya Rai Bachchan is also good as the wife who is equally comfortable storming into the kitchen to make dinner for her husband herself (not an empress-like activity) or sparring with him with swords (again, not your usual empress way to spend the day).

The music for this one is by A.R. Rahman, who is up for a couple of Academy Awards this year for Slumdog Millionaires (a movie I long to see but will have to wait for the DVD). There is a song done by a troupe of Sufis that slowly evolves into spinning dervishs I quite liked, but this one has to be the highlight: the party the people of India throw for their emperor when he repeals a tax that targeted Hindus but not Muslims. They really like their emperor a lot (except the guy with the bow; he's clearly not a fan):

Books in January

Well, I didn't quite crack 100 books read last year. That's a goal I've had since forever but I've never quite pulled it off. My other goal, to bring my To Be Read pile down to a more respectable 20 or so is still far off; I'm at 231 at the moment. I tried to keep my Christmas and birthday book hauls smallish (and I see some sort of ebook in my near future; I'm running out of space for books here). In defense of my massive TBR stack: there are a lot of Sanskrit plays, Tacitus and Herodotus, and the like in there. It takes a special mood for me to tackle those. But this should probably be the year I take on Larry Niven.

In the meantime, I'm still reading Sufi things for research. One of my characters is named Rabi'a, so it seemed about time I read an entire book just about her: Doorkeeper of the Heart: Versions of Rabi’a by Charles Upton, a collection of poetry that is attributed to her. Short but sweet. I also picked up The Alchemy of Happiness by al-Ghazzali, which I found more dogmatic and not particularly sufi. But the Conference of the Birds by Darid Ud-Din Attar was sublime. Still not sure how I'll use any of this in the novel, but it gives me some context for Omesh's father and by extension Omesh himself. Living in Space by G. Harry Stine is probably the last book on this subject I'll be tackling just now, mostly because it covered everything I've been searching for answers on (and also engagingly written; I recommend it if you're interested in that sort of thing).

I alternated reading all that with reading Hellboy; he makes a nice antidote to Too Much Research. With Strange Places, The Troll Witch and Others, and Darkness Calls, I'm pretty sure I'm all caught up on Hellboy in comics. But there are various spin-offs I can plunge into next.

And as one last non-genre read before I plunge into all that Niven I read two novels by Mark Bastable. I went to considerable effort to get these; they are out of print and I don't think were ever available in North America in the first place; I had them shipped from used book sellers in the UK. But they arrived just before I started all the Heinlein novels and got (criminally) set aside. The first, Icebox, was an engaging read, but Mischief just blew me away. There are a number of scenes that are written in just such a way that you believe one thing that turns out later not to be true. There were several points that I was certain something else had definitely happened and furiously whipped back through the pages to re-read a scene, only to find that it actually hadn't definitely happened at all. And it's not like these scenes felt in any way oblique on the first read; there was no clue that the narrator was being less than honest. (My husband found the process of me reading this book quite amusing; there was a lot of this paging back, always capped with a gleeful "oh, you bastard!" when I realized I had made another erroneous assumption).

Yep, those two novels were well worth the effort of acquiring them.

Movies in December

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.

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.

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).

Movies in November

It's been more than a month since I saw these movies, and I've been too busy to even make any notes. So here's what I remember of what I saw in November (posted a day before December ends - ugh!).

Sweeney Todd. I think I liked the idea of this better than the actual movie. It was a little unrelentingly dark for me. I did like the songs, though.

The Incredible Hulk. Now, I liked the Ang Lee Hulk movie, but that was a little more Ang Lee, and this is a little more Hulk (if you see what I mean). I liked the little nods to the TV show sprinkled throughout (like Lou Farigno's cameo). The slums of Rio were an awesome location to open the story in, and I loved the ways he cobbled together scraps to make his own scientific equipment (I wanted Omesh in my WIP to be able to do that sort of thing, but in order to write it you rather have to be able to come up with the ideas, and I can't). The deleted scenes were also interesting for how many were longer cuts of scenes from the movie. They cut down dialogue between two characters by removing a line or even half a line at a time without disturbing the rhythm of the scene. I was impressed; having cut down dialogue on a page I know it's a challenge not to lose the rhythm and flow, doing it from actor's performances where you want the reactions to still be appropriate must have been a real challenge. On the other hand, these dialogue scenes were long; I suspect they knew they were going to have to cut them and had a working idea of where they would make the cuts.

Get Smart and the overlapping direct-to-DVD Get Smart: Bruce and Lloyd. I never watched the TV show, so I came into this with no preconceptions. I don't know who wouldn't like it, though. The writing is sharp and funny, and the casting is spot on. I particularly liked how he wasn't completely inept; the first thing he tried usually failed comically, but then he'd turn around and do something that did work. Because there is a reason he's a secret agent.

Kung Fu Panda was also sharply written and well cast. Plus the animation, particularly the background shots, was beautifully rich. The special features have a segment with the Food Network's Alton Brown showing how authentic Chinese noodles were made that's quite cool. But then I always like Alton Brown; he's the geek of the cooking world, showing not just how but why something is prepared in a certain way, with lots of science thrown in.

Journey to the Center of the Earth. Would have been cool to see at the IMAX in 3D. The BluRay came with the 3D version and glasses, but it's the color kind of 3D, not the polarized kind, and that never looks as good. Still, it was a fun adventure/quest type of movie if not a great one. I'll be checking out the sequel when they go to Atlantis (and maybe make a point of getting to the IMAX for that one).

A movie I had been breathlessly awaiting: Hellboy 2. I wasn't disappointed. I had had the boys watch the first one just before this one came out on DVD and they were both instantly huge Hellboy fans. The wind-up army at the end was a particular highlight for Aidan.

One last movie we watched with the boys: Shrek the Halls. Clearly made for TV, with the pauses where the commercials go. All the original voice talent was there, and it was watchable if not particularly good. We have tons of Christmas videos the boys absolutely adore that I have to play when I'm busy doing something else, preferably out of audio range. This one they can watch when I'm in the room.

Quin and I watched the sci-fi movie Primer. This involves two guys who accidently build a time machine in their garage and then figure out all the ways they can exploit it without ever travelling more than a few hours into the past. It's a total mind bend of a film, and I've been told all of the science in it is plausible. It's a thinking sort of movie, though, not an emotional one; at the end of it I couldn't tell you the name of any of the characters, although I did eventually work out which of the two was married to the woman that sort of wandered in and out of some of the scenes. If they could have used all the science elements but had another sort of writer give it more human meaning I would have been thoroughly enthralled. But then again it was an independent film made by actual science guys.

Another one we watched without the boys: Tropic Thunder. It's so cool that Robert Downey Jr. is working again; he's absolutely brilliant. I'm a bit of a geek for listening to actors talk about the craft of acting, and how they bring characters to life (I like to mine it for ideas on how to bring the characters on my page to life), so I really enjoyed all of the actor jokes in this one. Lots of great cameos and plenty of jokes that were just so wrong.

Only two Hindi movies this month, both starring Aamir Khan. The first was called Mann and took place on a cruise ship. It wasn't until they reached Mumbai and he and the girl he had fallen in love with agreed to meet on Valentine's Day at the Gateway to India that I realized I was watching a remake of An Affair to Remember. Which I haven't actually seen, but I have seen this:




So I spent the rest of the movie all giggly.

Ghulam I already knew was a remake of On the Waterfront, but I haven't seen that movie either, although I've seen parts of it in Marlon Brando retrospective shows. This was Rani Mukherjee's first Bollywood movie, and for whatever reason they dubbed over her voice. Which was distracting; she has a very distinctive smoky-sexy kind of voice. It would be like a movie that had a young Kathleen Turner in it, but had someone like Victoria Jackson from SNL dub over her. But Alka Yagnik did her singing. I don't think I've seen a Rani movie that wasn't Alka Yagnik singing. Which created the weird situation where she only sounded like "herself" when she was singing.

Oh yeah, and this movie had a motorcycle gang with leather jackets which declared them the "Jon Bon Jovis". I think that was meant to make them seem tough...

I'll finish up with the TV on DVD I watch in November: Seasons 3 and 4 of X-Files. I wished this show had more consistency in the storylines and character arcs. The episode where Mulder uncovers the possibility that his sister was abducted by a child molester and not by aliens would have been a wonderfully dramatic way to twist his head... if it hadn't come after so many episodes of seeing clones of his sister either all grown up or still a child. The child molester theory doesn't really explain the cloning that's beyond human science, now does it? Similarly, Scully becoming convinced that the government conspiracy and cover up is actually about unethical medical research and not aliens would have been a lot more believable if she hadn't seen so many things that didn't fit that theory. Scientists find theories that match all the evidence; they don't pick a theory and then shoehorn in the evidence, blithely disregarding the evidence that just can't fit. Or at least good scientists don't.

Still, there were highlights: "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" is my favorite episode and not likely to be topped. Peter Boyle guest starred as a man who could see exactly how you would die; he was a life insurance salesman. Of course Peter Boyle is always good. "War of the Copraphages" was interestingly structured, with Mulder off on his own investigating killer metallic bugs and calling Scully on the telephone to run theories past her for her to quickly debunk. There was good interplay between the two of them even though they were never in the same room. "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" was another episode that had an unusual structure, really a Rashoman-type story about Air Force pilots pretending to be aliens in a small town.

Another one of which I am inordinately fond is "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man". The man can rule the word from behind the scenes, even to the point of rigging the Superbowl, but he can't get his novel published to save his life. A heartbreaking tale. "Kaddish" was cool for having a golem in it. "Small Potatoes" was another off-beat episode, with a man who can look like anyone else (but isn't very bright) taking Mulder's place, doing his job (although he can't spell Federal Bureau of Investigation) and trying to score with Scully. David Duchovny was particularly good in this one; he and the actor who played the face-changing guy clearly spent some time together working on the facial expressions that tipped off that Mulder wasn't Mulder. And lastly I'll mention "Demons", where Mulder wakes up in a hotel room covered with blood and can't remember anything that's happened for the last two days.

It seems like I remembered more than I thought. Of course Wikipedia plot summaries always help...

Some post-holiday musings

Christmas was pretty good around these parts. Not as much work as I expected, and I didn't get a terrible head cold until the day after Christmas, so that's good.

Aidan is very easy to shop for; he is always talking about what he wants to buy next and how much it costs as he pores over the Lego catalogs or browses Lego.com. Oliver, on the other hand, is tough because he never says anything. So we missed getting him his Red Ryder present-to-end-all-presents this year (some sort of Bionicle vehicle thingie. I can get into the Star Wars Legos, and the Indiana Jones Legos, and the "honestly, nothing to do with the Pirates of the Caribbean" pirate Legos, but Bionicles I just don't get). Luckily, when he pooled his gift money and the allowance he had saved up, he had enough to get it himself on the boys' annual day after Christmas trip to the Mall of America. (Not me, I stayed home with my head cold and work).

But when they got to the Lego store it initially appeared as if his dream set wasn't there. He looked and looked and just as he was about to give up (he tells me), these two people moved away and there it was, waiting for him. It was, he said, a Christmas miracle.

Quin was puzzled; this isn't a phrase that's heard around this house. Which of our many Christmas movies talk about Christmas miracles? Sadly, I knew at once what he was talking about. It may be the sheepish grin he gave me, but I knew just where he'd heard that phrase. I did the little dance to be sure and Oliver cracked up. Yes, this is where my littlest learned about the wonder of holiday miracles:




On an unrelated note, today we got a box of homegrown lemons in the mail. Aidan was looking on mostly to be sure there were no oranges in there; he hates oranges for some reason. I think it's the pulp. So Quin said, "You know what you do when life hands you lemons?" And having recently watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall I laughed. But Aidan said, "Make a lot of lemon juice, I guess."

Because you only get lemonade when life hands you lemons and sugar.

After numerous near misses, at last a sale

I've had a series of "we really like this, but it's not quite for us" rejections over the last few weeks, but at last I get a sale, and on a story that's been trying to find a home for quite some time. Aoife's Kiss has just bought "Full Circle" for their December 2009 issue. Backspacers will remember this as a former contest entry; it's the one with the dog in zero gravity. And the sudden appearance of a doll which made no sense. I have, of course, fixed that, or rather undid the edits that eliminated all reference to the doll before its plot turning use in the climax. I do that sort of thing a lot when I edit myself. You think you mention something too many times and surely once is enough, then you forget which once you were intending to leave in there and inadvertently take them all out. Which is why I rely on my critique group; they tell me when I'm making no sense. (I tend to garden that way as well. I'm an overly enthusiastic weeder).

This story also has squatters try to live in derelict spaceships and abandoned space stations, a setting I've since used again in my current WIP Mitwa. So it's particularly cool that this one sold; I hope it bodes well for Mitwa.

Books in November

I finished off my reading for Aidan's history program for this year with the last two books. The American Revolution by Bruce Blevin, Jr. is nonfiction rather than a novelization, basically a very thorough outline of events. I was particularly intrigued by one brief aside, that our first democractic processes got a bit bogged down in the beginning because while everyone understood about the voting process itself, it was the process after the voting, when you have to abide by the decision even if it isn't how you personally voted, that a lot of people hadn't really thought through. That is the tricky part, isn't it?

The second book was The Captain’s Dog by Roland Smith, a story of the Lewis and Clark expedition told from the point of view of Lewis' dog. I found it interesting but all too brief (I doubt very much Aidan will have the same impression). So I followed it up with a massive tome I've had for some time without cracking it open: Sacajawea by Anna Lee Waldo. It took most of November to read this book (and it's a bit awkward to hold while on the treadmill), but it was clearly thoroughly researched and I loved all of the little details of life in the various tribes Sacajawea met or lived among during her lifetime. I also ended up with a killer craving for beef jerky and corn.

(Fiction often makes me hungry. Partly I think that's walking on the treadmill while I read. Mostly I think I'm just very influenced by descriptions of food. The entire time I was reading the Heinlein catalog I was craving pancakes; I think everything he ever wrote has at least one scene of someone eating pancakes in it. Now I find when I eat pancakes I crave a Heinlein story...)

While I was working my way through Sacajawea, two more books arrived, both by John Scalzi: Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded and Agent to the Stars. Hate Mail is a collection of posts from his blog, many of which I'd already read but some predated me. Laugh out loud funny in several places, even the ones I'd read before. Agent to the Stars was his first novel, something he wrote just to see if he could write an entire novel. It combines sci-fi with Hollywood, so you know I'm there. It's also funny and full of heart (the character of the blonde ex-cheerleader turned actress could have easily slid into a caricature, but she remains wonderfully and genuinely human, if not the brightest bulb on the tree). As a reader I loved it; as a writer it made me green with envy. Nobody's first novel should be this good. Of course I wrote my first novel when I was 16, so perhaps it's an unfair comparison...

The Boys' New Favorite Song

We got our copy of Beukemix 2008, and after just two days the boys have a clear favorite: MIA's "Paper Planes". Because who doesn't like a little Sri Lankan reggae/hip hop, er, thing? (There must be a special name for this. Everything has a special name these days). It's the chorus of sound effects that sells it for them:

And to think not so long ago they would beg me to stop singing her earlier song, "Bucky Done Gun". London, quieten down! I need to make a sound...

Speaking of gettin crackin', the holiday season is always a time of work, work, work and no time for writing or blogging, but I'm still hoping to get at least books and movies posted at some point. Due to circumstances far outside of my range of control, this is going to be a particularly brutal year, though. Still, beats being unemployed by a long shot.

Movies in October

I don't really write these monster posts all at a blow, you know. Not that much blogging time these days. I start them at the beginning of the month and add the titles as I watch/read the movie/book in question. I don't usually try to come up with a response right after I've seen something, though. I need time for things to soak in (which is why I'm glad my critique group is an online one. I'm not sure how I'd function in a group where I was expected to respond to something someone just read to me. I'm a slow ponderer. Which is partly why my critiques for the group are so pathologically late, and why these long posts come out weeks after the month ended. That and, you know, working too much).

Well, so anyway, here's trying to pull together a bunch of random notes to myself into some sort of coherent thoughts on what I watched in October. Which was quite a lot, actually; after the big push to finish off the first draft of MITWA I fried my brain and had to vegetate for a few weeks. TV on DVD is just what the doctor ordered. First up: How I Met Your Mother, Season 3. This show still hasn't let me down. I love the intricate way something barely seen in one episode becomes important later, the way a scene that played one way when you first saw it becomes a completely different experience when more context is added later. And the season ending was killer, and exactly where I was hoping they were going to go. The bummer is waiting a year for Season 4 to come out.

The other TV show I watched was X-Files, Season 2. I'm enjoying these, but I'm glad we're borrowing them because I don't think I would be rewatching these a lot. It's rather frustrating; it comes close to being something really good and then backs off. The character arcs aren't very well thought through; Scully believing or not believing in Mulder's theories is wildly inconsistent (people do vacillate, of course, but this isn't handled in a believable way). This comes up more as we progress; I think I'll save the real kvetching for next month.

Some favorite season 2 eps: "Irresistible", set in the backwater of Minneapolis where people never lock their doors at night and dead hookers in the backs of alleys are just unheard of. A mythical land, I think (and it looks a lot like Vancouver. That's our little running joke; the show is set all over the US but always filmed in Vancouver). "Fresh Bones" with Mr. Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) playing a Haitian refugee. I'd totally listen to him read the phone book; I love his voice. "Død Kalm" stood out as the second time Scully and Mulder were rescued by the Deus ex Machina rather than getting themselves out of their own bad situation (in season one they were totally coccooned by the spider things and should have died but apparently the haz-mat team got there just in time. Here they should have died of old age from whatever was in the water but they were rescued by I think the navy just in time). But my favorite ep was "Humbug", set in a town full of carnies. Vincent Schiavelli plays a man with the body of his partially absorbed twin protruding from his chest. There are midgets and lobster boys and Enigma, that guy covered with puzzle tattoos. I loved the moment at the end, when the guy who does the stunt magic is complaining to Scully that in the modern age of medicine there will be no more freaks. There won't even be slight deviations from the norm. No, in the future everyone is going to look like that guy, pointing across the trailer park to Mulder, who's too far away to hear them but for whatever reason he's striking a pose:

Made me giggle.

OK, I already exalted the virtues of Cinematic Titanic's The Doomsday Machine. We also watched their first offering: The Oozing Skull (the old "man at the end of his life has his brain put into a younger body but you know that never quite works out the way they thought it would" story) and their third: The Wasp Woman (a Roger Corman film. Need I say more?). I'm glad they're making these films; they fill the void I've had in my life since MST3K went off the air. And the direct to video is actually a plus for me: I don't think I could keep up with a once a week TV show these days, but sporadic releases suit me just fine.

OK, films in English: Ray, about the life of Ray Charles. I kind of wished I'd watched this before I saw Dewy Cox, as that led to a lot of unintentional giggling. A well done film, and Jamie Foxx is perfect as Ray. Don't watch the version with the added footage incorporated in, though. They didn't bring their extra scenes up to the level of polish of the finished film (they aren't color timed or anything) and it made for a very jarring viewing.

Iron Man rocks. 'Nuff said.

Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. I went in with low expectations; I hadn't heard good things. I was still disappointed. At this point I think just about everybody does Indiana Jones better than Spielberg and Lucas. The Tomb Raider videogame? Totally more in the Indy spirit than this film (although not the Tomb Raider movies, of course). I even liked National Treasure more than this film. There is the problem that the entire plot offended me on a deep and profound level. Early man couldn't possibly have come up with irrigation and writing, aliens must have shown us how. (And did they come back later to explain quantum theory to us? Because we totally couldn't have come up with that on our own, could we?). Bah. And then we have the scene where they find artifacts from all the other cultures the aliens visited and were worshiped as gods. India, Egypt, Babylon. But there's nothing Judeochristian in that room, oh no; that god is the real deal. Oh, bite me.

I hated this movie. But don't take my word for it; Temple of Doom is my favorite Indy film. Clearly there is something deeply off about me.

M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening I enjoyed. It's twist free. I like the way his characters are always ordinary people. Mark Walhberg here isn't some genius scientist fighting this strange menace, he's just a science teacher who knows how to listen to what other people are telling him and synthesize it using what he knows about the scientific method. He and John Leguizamo are both very genuine, very believable as teachers. This wasn't a great film, but it had a lot of heart, something I don't find in a lot of suspense films but are always in M. Night films.

Two Spanish films this month: El Orfanato, a horror story set in an orphanage. This was produced by Guillermo del Toro, so it's probably not a coincidence that it reminded me of him. It doesn't have del Toro's mindblowing visuals, but it's genuinely creepy. It had a very novely feel, something I like in a movie but seldom find, even in movies based on books. Of course that might be because I got to watch this movie all at once in a quiet house with no interruptions because my mother had taken the boys out for the day. A rare experience, watching a movie all the way through without stopping. A kind of like it.

The other Spanish film is one I've been meaning to watch forever, Abre Los Ojos. This was remade in English as Vanilla Sky. It reminds me a bit of the Korean film Il Mare and its English counterpart The Lake House. Both have a younger, grittier feel in the original, where the American version is more polished with older actors. There are pluses and minuses to both; I kind of like having two versions of the same story that are not quite the same.

Bollywood: Rangeela, the first movie to feature music by A.R. Rahman. It's about more real-feeling people than most Bollywood films; by which I mean they aren't rich and living in spacious sound stage-sized homes. The ending didn't work for me, though. I spent the entire movie shouting at Aamir Khan's character to get a job. First get a paying job, that's how you impress the girl.

It's possible I'm missing something in the romantic department.

Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam, an old black and white film. Gorgeously shot in that way that the best black and white is; the faces are just luminous. The story about a girl who marries into a rich family and then never sees her husband and wastes away from the neglect reminded me a lot Raise the Red Lantern.

When I was ordering films I was looking for what I thought were two different movies both called Mr. India, one by Salim-Javed and one starring Anil Kapoor. They turned out to be the same film, which left me with an extra Mr. India, an older back and white film. There is a running joke that Bollywood films have scripts written the night before the scenes are to be shot, but this is the first one I've seen that really felt that bad. Have you ever played the game where one person starts a story, then the next person tells the next bit, and you pass it around like that? Pretty much how they wrote this film. Still, there's a bit in the middle where Helen as a gangster's moll does a dance with daggers, and because she thinks her guys is messing around on her, she keeps throwing the daggers at him and his girlfriend. It was a great number, so I guess I got my $0.99 worth out of this one.

The Mr. India I was actually looking for, the one starring Anil Kapoor as a guy who has a wristband that makes him invisible and uses it to fight crime in Mumbai, was awesome. I love Amrish Puri. You may know him as Mola Ram in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (did I mention I have the doll?), but I've seen him in about a dozen Bollywood films now and he's always great. This role in Mr. India is probably his best, campiest super villian evah. After watching this film I kept saying his line "Mogambo khush hua" ("Mogambo is pleased"; being an evil overlord he talks about himself in the third person). Since then Quin has gotten one of those colds that give you the deep throaty voice for a few days and was saying at work that he sounded like Mola Ram, to which his Indian coworker replied, "Mogambo khush hua." It's like saying the name Arnold Schwarzenegger; someone has to say "I'll be back". It just goes.

So no musical numbers this month but a clip from Mr. India in all of its Austin Powers-y fabulousness. Watch for Captain Zorro with the eye patch and my favorite, the Indian in the wispy moustache playing the Chinese Professor Fu Manchu (although for total un-PC-ness, it pales in comparison to the guys in black face during the calypso number later in the film).

Books in October

The books I read in October fall into three categories: for pleasure, for school and for novel research. I think I'll start with the "for pleasure" category.

First up, Hotter Than Hell by Jackie Kessler. This is the third book in her Hell series. I've been enjoying her books so far, she takes such joy in the mythology of hell, her characters are fantastic, and each book comes generously sprinkled with laugh-out-loud lines. This series is fun and rich in fantasy. But this book? Totally blew the first two away. It had an ending I never saw coming and yet was absolutely perfect (my favorite kind of ending). All I can say is, wow. Well done, Jax!


The only other book I read for fun in October was someone I'm sure Jackie would approve of as a follow-up: Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. This book has already been roundly praised pretty much everywhere, so I'll just add a "they're right, you know". I like the Jungle Book format, not so much a novel as a series of connected stories covering the key moments as a boy grows up. I hope when they eventually make the movie version of this they go more for the Chuck Jones style of adaptation than the Disney. Disney's Jungle Book had great songs, but Jones' adaptation was in all other regards superior. It kept the episodic structure and dark overtones intact. And I'm not just saying that because I'd listen to Roddy McDowall narrate almost anything (although that's true too).

OK, I'm trying to polish off the novels that Aidan will be reading for history for the rest of the year, so I'm ahead of him and can help gauge how much time he's going to need to devote each. Our history curriculum is very reading intensive, perhaps a tad too much, but they pick such fine books. This month I read The Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell, about a young Native American woman who gets left behind when her tribe leaves their isolated island home, Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes about Boston in the early days of the American Revolution, and Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare about a boy left alone, waiting for his family to return, in a log house at the edge of civilization in Maine. Aidan will be writing some compare/contrast type thing for the Dolphin and Beaver books. These are all good reads if you like YA historical fiction.

On to the realm of novel research, which this month is all about Islam. Actually this will be in the novel sort of like a bay leaf is used in cooking; it will flavor other things but won't actually be served in the final dish (well, not much). My previous source for all things Islam moved to the United Arab Emirates a few years ago (after 9/11, sadly), so it's just me and a stack of books now. My friend considered himself a cultural Muslim; he had grown up in that world but as an aethist professor of philosophy wasn't really a part of it anymore (which makes me wonder how things are going for him in UAE).

Yahiya Emerick, who wrote two of the books I read this month, is the opposite of that; he converted to Islam as an adult. So it's pretty much the opposite perspective than I'm used to looking at Islam from. In some ways this is better, he looks more sharply at things which someone who grew up in that environment might take for granted. On the other hand, particularly in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Islam he would get pretty heavy handed with the "all other religions are clearly inferior" type of vibe. I had to set this book down and walk away from it quite a bit. Despite that, it did have a lot of useful information in it for me. I fared better with his Complete Idiot’s Guide to Rumi’s Meditations, mostly because I've already read several books on sufism and generally find the sufis more approachable to a pantheist like me. I should probably at some point just get a book of Rumi's poetry and drink from the source. The problem there is the strong temptation to learn Persian so I can read it in the original. That's likely to take a few years...

The last book I read I liked much better: No God But God by Reza Aslan. This is written by a man who spent his early childhood in Iran but moved to the US with his family when the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power (I knew kids in school in the same boat, at least during those times in my life when I was going to Minnesota schools. Tennessee doesn't attract many immigrants). This book covers all of the major historical periods of Islam, particularly dwelling on the culture from which it sprang. This I found very interesting; I like being able to put things into an historical and cultural context. Aslan also covers how the governments in Pakistan, Egypt, Saudia Arabia, and Iran formed, what they were intended to do, and how they've evolved since. I'd recommend this one for anyone interested in learning more about Islam (right up there with Karen Armstrong and John Esposito). It's informative, but it's also written with a strong sense of story (i.e. not dry reading). There are also extensive notes in the back with references to other books. Which just might be my downfall; I'm suddenly consumed with a hunger to learn more about the pagan Arabia that existed before Islam.

No, I'm never getting that To Be Read stack under 200, am I?

Oooh, it's snowing!

Time for the happy dance...




Or if you like it old school:



I think I like Linus' little dance the best.

A very big sale

Beneath Ceaseless Skies just bought my short story "Oil Fire". It's a new market so it doesn't qualify me for SFWA just yet, but they pay pro-rates and I'll have my story up there with the likes of Charles Coleman Finlay, Marie Brennan and K.D. Wentworth. How geeked am I? (Answer: very).

"Oil Fire" is one of my favorite things I've written and I'm very pleased it's found a home.

(Of course I'm also a bit geeked because some nice young men in a yellow truck delivered my groceries this morning. After three months of going out and getting them on my own it's so nice to have them brought to my door again, and just in time for winter. Which is apparently the response they've been getting from everyone, not just time-crunched writers).

Movies in September

October is nearly two-thirds over, so let's finish off September's posts. I spent most of September writing, so this is a short movie list this time.

I had high hopes for Crank, it looked like just my sort of Jason Statham fun ride. And I could see where this could be enjoyable; I wanted to enjoy it, but it just bugged me too much. It's the first movie I can recall seeing in a long time without at least one tough chick in it somewhere. Here all the women are strippers, hookers, or living works of naked art. Then there's the girlfriend, the very dumb girlfriend. She doesn't even have any "emotional intelligence", as her complete obliviousness to Statham's character's sense of urgency shows.

I suspect they are being ironic, but the movie comes with a "family friendly" cut, which removes all profanity (or so the box said, I didn't fire it up to see). In a movie filled with misogyny, violent mahem, and rampant drug use, profanity is the least of the things to shield young viewers from. I might even find that irony amusing if not for a similar misconnect with parenting values shown in the film, when the main character is raping his girlfriend in the middle of Chinatown, pinning her down and all that, but it's when he tears her shirt and her boob pops out that a nearby mother shields her son's eyes. Cause naked boobies, that's just wrong.

So this goes down as the first Statham movie to leave a bad taste in my mouth.

I did like The Love Guru. The character doesn't work nearly as well as Austin Powers, but he's amusing enough. I particularly liked the titles of his self-help books ("Stop Hurting Yourself, Stop Hurting Yourself, Why Are You Still Hurting Yourself?") Verne Troyer (who played Mini Me) gets a speaking part here, playing a hockey coach. He certaintly got the look spot on; his haircut is perfect. But I really loved Justin Timberlake in this as Jacque "the Cock", a French-Canadian goalie with a porn star moustache. Some of the funniest bits are in the deleted scenes, though. I particularly liked the longer take of Stink Mop, when the young Deepak Chopra wants to play but is told to sit with the young virgins practicing their kama sutra positions instead (his pout is perfect). Of course the very idea of a game like Stink Mop freaked out the boys more than a little.

Some of Quin's coworkers were appalled that he had never seen The X-Files, so they've been loaning us DVDs to rectify the situation. I was working bizarre hours when this show started and wasn't watching much TV, so I've never seen it either. We watched season 1 in September, and Quin was ready at several points to give up on it, but I and his coworkers insisted he stick it out. As it turns out (to his annoyance), we were making the same point, that back when this show started networks didn't like running storylines, they preferred a series to be a series of oners so viewers don't have to worry about following the story if they turn on episode 6 or 12 or whatever. Which is a detriment to viewers like us who like continuous story lines. I suspect the success of the "mythology" episodes of this show and shows like Buffy broke the ground for shows like Lost or Battlestar Galactica, which are really one long story. By the season finale of the first season, though, Quin was just as into it as I was and anxious to start season 2 (to be covered in my October post).

Moving on to India, I watched a Merchant Ivory film from 1970 called Bombay Talkie. It was in English, but featured a few Bollywood actors I recognized. The film centers around a writer who's just written a "Hollywood Wives" type book about Hollywood and has gone to Bollywood to look for inspiration for her second. She's the most irritating kind of writer, always looking for inspiration and never just putting words down on paper. She's also a pathological narcissist who spreads ruin and destruction everywhere she goes. So not a fun film, but definitely an interesting one. To be honest, I enjoyed the special features more than the movie; they did a short film about Helen, one of the most famous dancers of Bollywood item numbers. She talked about her work day and they compiled some of her more famous dance numbers. She must have done a hundred or more films, starting in the days of black and white films and working into Technicolor (she still works as an actress playing grandmothers these days).

So I only watched two films actually in Hindi, and they were both called Shakti. The first was older, starring Amitabh Bacchan as the Angry Young Man. His father is a cop, who loves his job more than his family, or so Amit has been given very good reason to believe when he's a young boy. He grows up to work for gangsters, which would naturally create conflicts. This was a Salim-Javed film, so the dialogue is sharp and the character motivations and the way they interact with each other is spot-on. It's not my favorite of their films, but it's still worth a see.

The other Shakti is more recent and seemed reminiscent of Not Without My Daughter. Karisma Kapoor lives and marries in Vancouver, but when her husband hears of troubles at home he takes her and his young son back to the home he had very good reason to leave. Unlike NWMD, the husband isn't the problem, it's his father who wants to keep his young grandson under his influence. When her husband is killed, grandpa wants to keep his only grandchild and raise him himself, so the rest of the story is a mother trying to get back to Canada with her son. There were definitely cultural references I wasn't getting; the family were Hindu but ate meat, which I'm guessing makes them of a warrior caste, but I'm not sure. And they had a deep Hatfield and McCoy grudge against the other family in their village which led to all the death and destruction.

It was a heavy-handed film, but I found the grandfather, played by Nana Patekar, very compelling. Karisma Kapoor was very good in it as well. The dance number with Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai was cool and fun, but totally out of place. It's meant to be SRK's dream, but still. This sort of thing comes up in a few Bollywood films; a change of tone so abrupt it loses me. I can't see a woman burned alive and then laugh at slapstick comedy immediately after (as happened in Bhagam Bhag).

I didn't see any great item numbers this month, so my YouTube this month will be from my all-time fave: Jaan-e-Mann. This is totally what I'll be singing when I finally see New York. This is a Cyrano deBergerac story, with Salman Khan telling Akshay Kumar what to sing to Preity Zinta. Watch for the bit where Salman gets hung up in a pack of joggers and Akshay has to hum...

Books in September

I'm in no way finishing off this post as a way of procrastinating on cleaning my house. No way at all. Just so you know.

OK, I read six books that fall pretty nicely into three pairs.

The first pair is novel research, sort of. Having finished the first draft, I'm plowing through some books filled with information I'll never actually use. It's more about making sure I'm not getting anything subtle wrong rather than looking for more to include. At any rate, as a cluster of my characters are Hindus, and as most of what I've read on Hinduism I read nearly twenty years ago (I'm suddenly feeling very old...), I started with The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hinduism. I like this series of books, they are good places to start to get a general knowledge of something, and the list of further reading in the back offers lots of next steps. I'm not such a fan of the layout, with the sidebars and cartoon characters talking in boxes in the margins, or of the title. I'm not a complete idiot, thank you very much, and I don't need something broken up into teeny tiny bits to grasp the concepts. But I've read a few of these on some pretty diverse topics and they've all been exactly what I needed to get a general picture of some vast area of knowledge, so I guess they do the job. I followed that up with Hindu Scriptures, translated and edited by R.C. Zaehner, which condenses down the Vedas, Upanishads and Bhagavad-Gita into a reasonable size. Some of these I've read before, back in the day. I particularly liked this edition; Zaehner showed exactly where he made his edits and what was contained in the sections he removed. I liked that feature; most abridged texts don't bother to tell you what they took out. But when his notes would say "various mythological references removed" I was a bit bummed. I would have liked to have read those.

The second category of books: books by Robert Louis Stevenson. I had to read Kidnapped, as I've never read it before and Aidan is reading it for history. It's easier to correct his papers if I know the story. (This time instead of a book report summarizing the plot he wrote an essay exploring one of the book's themes, which he enjoyed. Not as much as playing Lego Game, of course; it's still school). After I read Kidnapped I decided to pick up Treasure Island. I remember starting this book many times as a kid but never getting through it. I'm not sure why, they read as fun adventure fiction to me now.

My last pair were new books read just for fun. Both are the latests installments in a series, but both work just fine as stand-alones. The first was Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi. Zoe's Tale is a retelling of The Last Colony from the point of view of Zoe, the teenaged daughter of the two main characters in The Last Colony. Sort of like Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Dead. It's a cool premise (I've always wanted to read the Neville Longbottom version of the same seven years at Hogwarts...), and Zoe is a terrific character, a smart and sarcastic teenager who felt absolutely real. This makes a nice companion piece to TLC and I enjoyed it.

The second was Sly Mongoose by Tobias Buckell. I loved the settings, the floating cities of a Venus-like planet, the claustrophobic feel of being trapped on a spaceship where things are quickly going to hell; it was very cool. Pepper is the main character in this one, and Pepper is always a great bad-ass character. I also liked the new character of Timas, a teenaged boy who has being doing some pretty extreme and heartbreaking things for the sake of his family. Now on the subject of zombies, I'm pretty neutral. I don't go out of my way to see zombie movies or whatever, but I don't avoid them either. I only mention because if you are into zombies, you're going to love this book. Buckell has an interesting twist on zombies here which I found intellectually engaging, but I don't have that visceral response that hard-core zombie fans have. To be fair to zombies, I don't really get the over-the-top way vampire lovers love their vampires either. I've read Ann Rice's early books a couple of times each, and I enjoy them (particularly the language), but I don't love them the way many of her fans do. I think I digressed somewhere in there... OK, to wrap up, Sly Mongoose, well-crafted story of people hanging on by their fingernails even before the zombies show up.

OK, I really must clean up around here before I drive into work for a meeting. I could make a fourth cat out of all the hair floating around here...

Still planning on finishing up those movie and book posts

I'll get to that before the end of October. Finished up some other projects, so that's good. In the mean time, the literal interpretation to a-ha's "Take on Me".


Pipe wrench fight!

Oh how I needed that...

We wrapped up school early today - sometimes that happens on Fridays - so the boys and I watched a movie together after lunch. We've been working our way through my vast (nearly complete) collection of MST3K episodes for a while now, but lately we've taken a side step to watch things I haven't seen before, namely Cinematic Titanic. It's from five of the MST3K writers (Joel, Mary Jo, Frank, Trace and Josh). The concept is the same; little silhouettes in the front rip bad movies. There are no robots this time and no outside of the theater bits, although they do pause the movie from time to time to digress.

Last week we watched The Oozing Skull, a mad scientist with a midget sidekick movie. But today we watched their second DVD, The Doomsay Machine. You know that thing where you laugh so hard you deprieve your brain of oxygen and start to get woozy? (Just me?) That's how funny the last ten minutes of this film are. Seriously. I finished watching the movie an hour ago and I'm still getting sporadic giggle fits.

Anyone else out there who needs a laugh as much as I did, go to CinematicTitanic.com and pick this thing up. You can even download it if you just can't wait.

Now if I can just stop tittering for five minutes, I can get some work down around here. You know, before I have to get to Work.

Not enough brain cells left for a pithy title

Working on the movie and book posts for last month. Working on something I hope will end with good news. Waiting on something else I also hope will end with good news. Mostly working on work though, which is not so much with the good news. You know what I need? I need to see that hypnotherapist from Office Space. Life would be so much easier if I just didn't care so much about my job...