Another sale!

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

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

Movies in April

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





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

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

I So Identify With This

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

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

Books in April

Most of what I read in April were Larry Niven books. I finished off the Known Space novels with Juggler of Worlds, then proceeded on to Ringworld, The Ringworld Engineers, The Ringworld Throne and Ringworld's Children. The idea for Ringworld is, of course, quite cool, although I don't think he's even scratched the surface of the stories that could be told. I kind of wished he had designed it, then handed it off to another writer to tell stories in. For one thing, for something of such immense size, it seems awfully homogeneous. The different races of hominids just didn't feel as culturally different to me as I think they were meant to. And there isn't much there that isn't hominids. Given that the main activity of all these hominids is to have sex with each other (since they are too genetically different from each other to produce offspring, this is Ringworld birth control), you can kind of guess why there are no sheep.

The other aspect I think he really fumbled was Teela and her "luck". I like the concept of luck, and especially how the Norse dealt with it as "hamingja", where it was a heriditary sort of luck (and related to why the sons of heroes tend to also be heroes in the sagas). But the Ringworld books spend a tremendous amount of time waffling on whether or not Teela was lucky (and it didn't feel like character waffling so much as writer waffling; I suspect Niven didn't even know and was hoping it would become clear as he wrote, only it didn't. To be honest, as a writer I've totally been there. Although I tend to take care of that sort of wishy-washiness in subsequent drafts). He also doesn't make any clear distinction between "luck" and "fate", which I think of as two entirely unrelated concepts. Partly this is just me growing up on comic books where characters like the Scarlet Witch and Longshot were lucky in the sense that they manipulated probabilities moment by moment. Which is what luck would be to me, a moment by moment, the coin keeps flipping heads sort of thing. Fate is something else entirely, bigger than a moment by moment thing.

Basically the idea that Teela's "luck" compelled her to fall in love with Louis Wu to bring her to Ringworld because that's where she was fated to be is just loathsome. Fate putting you on a ship, fine. Fate compelling you to "follow your heart" because you're a chic - ick.

There was a last minute bit of waffling that got interesting - when Louis Wu postulated quite Richard Dawkins Selfish Gene-like that Teela wasn't lucky, it was her genes that were lucky, and that luck only served to lead Teela to have more offspring/replicate more of her lucky genes. But then you realize she only ever had the one kid, and she could have had more on Earth or on one of the other Known Space planets without ever having to "follow her heart" to Ringworld at all that it all sort of falls apart again. I wished he'd thought it through first, wrote it second. It could have been a cool character.

Which is not to say I didn't enjoy the books. Protectors and puppeteers are both cool things. And there was the moment at the end of Ringworld when Teela left Louis Wu for the the Seeker, who in my head was totally the Groosalugg:

Which I totally mentioned lots of times when I was reading these novels, and Quin nodded along as if he understood. Yes, she got her Groosalugg. Yes, that would have been cool for her. Well, I've been rewatching Angel episodes when I'm doing other stuff lately and got to the first Groo episode and pointed it out at one point when Quin was in my office, "Look, it's Groo!"

"Who?"

Yeah, totally just nodding along when I talk.

Sadly, Teela didn't get to live happily ever after with her Groosalugg. But then neither did Cordelia.

The only non-Niven book I read in April was Do Your Ears Pop in Space by space shuttle astronaut R. Mike Mullane. A fun book with lots of interesting info about what it's really like up there in orbit. It didn't add much in the sense of novel research, but I was particularly engrossed with all the details about the Challenger disaster. I remember that day well (I think it's the JFK assasination for my generation; we all know where we were that day). I was home sick from school, and so was my step-dad. He came in to wake me up so I could watch the news reports on the TV. This book really gets into what went wrong, did the crew know something was wrong, could it have been prevented, etc. This came out before the Columbia disaster so there isn't a similar discussion on that mission, which would have been interesting. If you're at all interested in space, this is a highly recommended read.

Warrior Wisewoman 2 reviewed in Publishers Weekly

The Warrior Wisewoman 2 anthology will be out June 1. This is the one that contains my short story "Gardens of Wind", a sort of boy meets girl story on airships. I wrote it partly because I wanted to write about airships, partly because I wasn't done exploring the idea of uxorilocal marriages (my other two stories with uxorilocal marriages are my two Japanese ones, the two stories of mine that get the nicest rejection letters but still haven't found a home), and partly as an exercise in writing laconic characters (for those that remember, I was musing this over last February). Although the MC in this one, Akeli, goes a bit beyond laconic. She was fun to write, and the setting is one I'd love to revisit someday. Because airships are inherently cool. Just as Hayao Miyazaki.

There is no page up for the anthology yet at Amazon.com, but I do have a link to the cover (I like it, sort of classical Grecoroman and futuristic at once), and a review at Publishers Weekly (you have to scroll down about halfway, past the mystery and into the sci-fi/fantasy releases).

Learning How To Read

Of all the various parts of homeschooling, the most challenging for me with both boys has been teaching them how to read. It's pretty fundamental, you don't want to screw it up. Both of my boys are now beautiful readers, but at the time they were starting out it was frustrating for me. You see, I can remember learning math, I can remember the tricks I learned that helped me do things in math, but I don't remember learning how to read. As far back as my brain can reach, I always just knew to do it. So I felt pretty useless most of the time with nothing more helpful to offer than "sound it out". Both of them used the same technique that wasn't giving them particularly good results: look at the beginning of the word and the end of the word and guess the rest. Particularly with big words they would do this guessing method.

.

(For those that get all geeky on curricula like I do and what to know what books I used, for Aidan it was Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, although we washed out at about lesson 50. We switched to Phonics Pathways and just read a lot of easy readers from the library, which wildly vary in usability (I particularly hate the ones that actually encourage a kid who's learning how to read to guess at words by looking at the pictures. Ugh.). For Oliver I used The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading, which I liked quite a bit. If it has a fault it's been too thorough. It covers enough material to make an 8-year-old's head explode. We still used Phonics Pathways because it's such a nice lead-in the spelling. OK, schoolie geek moment over).

.

It's hard to recreate the learning how to read experience. I have over my lifetime learned a few other alphabets, but they always can in context of learning a whole other language. The challenge of that really outweighs the challenge of sounding out the words. That, and most languages are a lot more phonetic than English, so you really can just sound them out and get it right on the first try.

About 18 months ago, I started learning Hindi and with it the Devanagari writing system. Which is really elegant and easy to learn. As I said, once you know what the letters are you can just sound it out:

.

मुझे आइस क्रीम पसन्द है

.

But I was learning the language at the same time as the letters so I could sound it out, but I still had to look everything up. It was hard to gauge there how my brain was processing just the reading. Fast forward to just after Christmas time. I have a shiny new Teach Yourself Urdu book. Urdu is the language of Pakistan and is nearly identical to Hindi. There are more Persians words and fewer Sanskrit ones, but the main difference is that Urdu isn't written in Devanagari, it's written in a modified Arabic script. And it's so beautiful you can see why they use it for decoration:

.

مجھےآس کريم پسند ہے

.

(It's looks prettier written than typed. And not in my writing; my penmanship in any language is severely challenged).

.

This was a new experience for me, learning how to read a language in which I already had a working vocabulary of about 2500 words (everything in a beginner's book like this one plus some extra). I had the chance now to observe my own skills at learning how to read. And do you know what I caught myself doing?

.

Looking at the beginnings of words and looking at the ends of words and guessing what comes between. *Sigh* My guessing was better than theirs, surely, but only because I'm dealing with a much smaller pool of potential guesses. Although it would help their technique if they would only guess words that actually made sense with the sentence they're reading.

.

(Both the sentences above say "I like ice cream." Which, aside from being true, I picked because it was sentences like this that always tickled me when I was in the early, carefully sound out each character phase. It says "mujhe ais kreem pasand hai". Imagine sounding it out: "ai-s kr-ee-m, oh hey, that says ice cream!" Don't you just love loan words?)

Movies in March

Being cash-strapped I've taken to checking out DVDs from the library, which always involves a wait and they don't have a particularly good way of browsing. You pretty much have to know what you want and see if they've got it. Still, free.

I got The Footlight Parade just to see the synchronized swimming number. I was surprised to see James Cagney in it; I associate him so much with gangster roles that I wasn't expecting to find him in a musical. He and the actress who played his secretary had a nice rapport, and I enjoyed this movie (although the synochronized swimming segment did inspire a bit of cattiness, pointing out who wasn't where she was supposed to be).

His Girl Friday was fun as well. This movie I've heard praised all over for its sharp dialogue, and it has that in spades.

Gandhi we watched together as family, sort of. Oliver conked out 20 minutes in and slept for the last 2 hours of movie (I blame the layer cake. We don't eat much sugar around these parts, and when we do it knocks us all out). I'd never seen this movie before (although I've seen a couple of movies about Bhaghat Singh). I was surprised by how much Aidan enjoyed it, but it really made an impression on him. It's been a bit more than a month since we watched it and he's still talking about things Gandhi said and did.

Freaky Friday we caught on TV, the remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsey Lohan. I'd never seen the original although I read a book version once in middle school. This was another one that Aidan really liked. I thought the two actresses did a terrific job of being each other. It's kind of a shame that these days Lindsey Lohan is mostly famous for being famous; she had the chops to go another way, I think.

Flyboys was a movie the rest of the family had already watched before but for some reason thought that I would want to see it (actually, I think that reason might be named James Franco). I'm not saying this movie is predictable, but I did amuse my boys by accurately guessing every plot twist and often paraphrasing the actual dialogue before it was spoken. I think it was the point where Franco's character and another guy crashlanded and I foresaw waking up in a whorehouse, meeting a girl he liked, and having that girl turn out not to be a whore because heroes don't fall for whores that really put it over the top. Apparently the planes aren't particularly accurate either, although that's more my husband's realm of expertise rather than mine. There is clearly a good movie to be made about these pillots, a Band of Brothers type movie about what it was really like. This isn't it. (Although it's hard to truly hate a movie where someone kamikazes a German Zeppelin).

I had a few things on preorder from Amazon.com that came this month as well. Baz Luhrmann's Australia I thoroughly enjoyed. After reading the description on the back of the box I was worried, it sounded like it would be kinda hokey, but it was just so perfect. And the kid playing the lead role of the half-aborigine orphan had such a wonderfully expressive face. Plus, Hugh Jackman. Can't go wrong with Hugh Jackman.

Quantum of Solace was just as awesome as I had been told.

BSG Season 4.0, being the first half of the fourth season. I'm starting to get a bad feeling for where all this is going. And as much as I dutifully avoid spoilers for this show and Lost, I've caught the phrase "deus ex machina" a few too many times in blogs about how the season wrapped up. I can see where a religion focused on total forgiveness (and in particular the you, like Kevin Bacon in Murder in the First, were just a tool/weapon defense) would appeal to Gaius Baltar. And I always love how he starts out conning others and inevitably ends up believing his own con (his character is the core of the show for me). But I don't see how this religion is going to appeal to the thousands of other survivors. I don't see how it's going to provide the sort of meaning they would be looking for, to put what happened to them in context. I wished it had been thought through just a little bit more.

Lastly I'll mention Sita Sings the Blues, a truly wonderful piece of filmmaking. It's a shame that legal snafus kept this out of theaters (and out of award consideration), but on the plus side, we can all see it for free on the internet. (It's here). I love the story. It's just my sort of thing, someone in the present finding deep personal meaning in a very old story, in this case the Ramayan. And I love the different animations she uses for the different aspects of the story, the squigglevision for the present day, the Mughal-style paintings from the Ramayan reenactments, the Betty Boop style for the depression-era songs. But my favorite are the shadow puppets who represent her three friends trying to remember the details of the story with much debating and correcting. The boys liked this one too, well enough to ask to see it again.

So this month's video segment is from Sita Sings the Blues. I loved the "Agni Pariksha (Sita's Fire)" segment the best but can't find a clip of just that bit on YouTube. (It is here, but you have to skip up to 7:20 to see it). In the meantime, here is the opening. I love how all the Hindu imagery is used without any explanation. It's fascinating even if you don't know quite what it all means:

My most popular post EVAH

Is this one: http://macleod424.blogspot.com/2006/12/for-fans-of-avatar-last-airbender-only.html. It gets multiple hits every day from Google Images. Which is kind of funny. A few of them even click around and look at some other posts. So welcome, fans of Avatar, or just fans of Uncle Iroh.

Now I'm off to have some tea, and then it's back to the novel revisions. Hoping to be done before May (*fingers crossed*).

Books in March

Mostly Niven this month, namely: Protector, Tales of Known Space, The Shape of Space, The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton, The Patchwork Girl, Flatlander, and Fleet of Worlds. A few of these were story collections that had some overlap (Flatlander, for instance, contains all the stories from Long ARM plus the novella The Patchwork Girl plus one extra, very minor Gil Hamilton story). I like Niven less the more I read. The ideas are cool but the characters completely fail to engage me. Too many women with stripper names (Feather, Taffy, Teela, ugh). Both the Kzin and the Puppeteers are races where only the males are sentient - what's up with that? I'm hoping as I go that there's an explanation for that amazing coincidence, because otherwise it's just plain hateful.

Mostly I'm grumpy because Jo Walton at Tor.com is re-reading all of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan books and she's giving me an itch to do the same. I think I'll make that my reward for persevering with my goal to read all Niven.

I also read two more books on slums (novel research). Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World is by Robert Neuwirth, who spent months living in the squatter communities of Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi and Istanbul. This book was very interesting and an eye-opener. For one, he advocates calling them squatter communities and not slums, and I can see his point. Many of these places don't really deserve the term "slum" for one, but on the other hand thinking of them as squatters puts them in an historical context (and Neuwirth does, with stories of how the US was shaped by squatters). Highly recommend this one.

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis was also completely engrossing but deeply upsetting, both for its descriptions of what life is like in these places but also for how little hope there is for change (he details exactly how every prior effort to fix things has mostly benefited the wrong people and made life worse for those they were meant to help). A good book, but not a particularly empowering one.

He's been purified in the waters of Lake Minnetonka...

... and now he's cleaning up on Jeopardy! Fred Beukema, that is, he of the yearly Beukemixes which we all adore around these parts. He's won two games already and is playing game 3 today. (Since 4:30 is perhaps the most inconvenient time of day for me to sit in front of the TV I've finally had occasion to use the recording capacity of my PC. I grossly overestimated the amount of TV I care to record anymore when I bought the thing. At any rate, it works pretty slick.)

Fred put a lot of work into preparing to be on the show (he documents it pretty thoroughly on his blog), and as Quin has mentioned mmmph times, Fred was always his chief competitor at the Isaac Asimov superquiz when they worked together. This is very much his sort of thing. It's fun to watch someone you know, especially when he's doing so phenomenally well (in both of the first two games Fred went into Final Jeopardy with a score more than double the second place contestant's, so he couldn't lose unless he deliberately bet a huge amount on the FJ question. And as you can tell from the Daily Doubles, Fred is a conservative better). It seemed like the perfect opportunity to bet $Texas and answer "Suck it Trebek", but they probably screen for that sort of behaviour before they let you on the show.

So congrats to Fred! I'd say good luck in game 3, but since it was a done deal weeks ago that would either involve some sort of time machine or some very careful verb conjugations (future perfect tense, maybe?)

(The title of this post makes sense if you watch his Hometown Howdie, but that link will only work for a few days).

Why on Earth did this song just pop into my head today?

Perhaps it's because I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of Quantum of Solace. Who knows?

Damn Paul McCartney and his catchy tunes; I'm going to be singing this for the rest of the week...



I wonder if this movie holds up? I remember liking it at the time, but maybe there's a reason I've never caught it on cable. Then again, they played Summer Rental with John Candy a dozen times last month, and that wasn't exactly laugh-a-minute.

Well, back to singing while I work...

Movies in February

Not much movie watching in February. This is largely because 1) I really was too sick to bother and 2) getting a new furnace, AC and water heater all at a blow took quite a bite out of my cash flow. (Wait, is that a mixed metaphor? Blow, bite, flow... maybe). So I'm relying on rewatching all faves plus perusing what's available at the library. But February was when I polished off my Christmas/birthday haul. So...

First up: Vicky Cristina Barcelona. My husband is a big fan of both Woody Allen and Scarlett Johansson, so he thoroughly enjoyed this. I suspect it was a movie only made because Woody wanted to see Scarlett and Penelope Cruz kissing... As with most of Woody's work, I wished he'd spent more time on it. It's an intriguing idea that feels only half thought through. And it shares a complaint I have with a lot of his work; in the end, his characters have changed not a whit due to everything that's been going on over the last 90 minutes. Which gets frustrating. But he writes such good scenes, particularly here the scenes where Penelope is ranting in mile-a-minute Spanish while Javier Bardem tries to simultaneously calm her down and apologise to the non-Spanish-speaking Scarlett (at one point messing it all up and apologising to Scarlett in Spanish). I'd say Penelope earned her Oscar, it really was a great part, but the movie as a whole felt rather slight.

My only other English (mostly) language film was Mississippi Masala, one of Mira Nair's earlier films. It's about an Indian family from Uganda who is living in a hotel in Mississippi, and more specifically about the daughter who breaks away from her family to be with Denzel Washington (who wouldn't?). I loved the look of the film; it felt like a sweltering hot Southern summer, which is nice when it's actually the last dregs of a Minnesota winter.

I watched the last two movies in my Bollywood stash as well: Aryan and The Jewel Thief. Aryan I was a bit nervous about; the cover with Sohail Khan as a boxer made me expect lots of bloody fist fighting a la I Proud to be Indian, but it's actually the story of two young people who both have to adjust when they get pregnant and then married. The songs weren't great, but the movie was heartfelt and I enjoyed it. The Jewel Thief is old school Bollywood (it's from 1967). I like these old films, and this one is very early Bond, very 60s. I don't believe this is a Bollywood retelling of any Hollywood film; certainly the plot twists all came as a complete surprise. Great story, but really fun for the look of the thing. (Honestly, there are enough of these sorts of films I'm surprised there isn't a Bollywood Austin Powers to really revel in it.)

TV on DVD: I watched seaons 1 and 2 of Torchwood, which I also enjoyed immensely, although Quin not so much. I don't think it was the rampant bisexuality that bothered him; it was the "Dr. Whooey quality" that he kept griping about. I found some of the plots a bit Buffyesque (or Angelesque), but when they actually put James Marters on the show, I can totally forgive that. Cause he's awesome.

Lastly is Full Metal Alchemist. I actually only watched Season 1 in February, but having since watched Season 2 plus the film The Conqueror of Shamballa I'll deal with them all together. I loved this show. I loved the worldbuilding, the rules of alchemy and how they were used or how they were worked around; I loved the vast cast of characters (this show has surely spawned mountains of fanfic and slashfic). The animation has that lovely attention to detail that good anime always has. My only disappointment is that it was just a bit too intense, too violent to share this with my boys. Which is a pity; the show focuses on two brothers who squabble and fight like real brothers but still really rely on each other. The bond between them is the bedrock of the show. But alas, there were too many things that would be upsetting for a few years yet. And it's not something that can be edited around; the things that happen are integral to the plot, or are disturbing for psychological more than gory reasons. So it's violent, but not gratuitously violent. I would highly, highly recommend checking it out for teens and up, though.

I understand that like with Samurai Champloo and Cowboy Bebop, the associated manga tells an entirely different story with the same cast of characters (although unlike those two the FMA manga came first). I'll have to check that out when I have the cash. Also like those two, the music featured in the show is wonderful. Cowboy Bebop is far and away the best of the three for music (and it would be impossible to summarize just what that music is, it's so all over the map). Samurai Champloo was very hiphop inspired. FMA goes more for pure Jap pop, which I love, particularly this track, which sounds like a Japanese Go-Gos doing disco (love that bass line...)

Books in February

I only read six books in February, and three I'd already read before (although it was about ten years ago).

First up: Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta. A very interesting look at several different people's lives in Mumbai. I first heard about this book on a show on PBS (I keep catching this show about life in India but never catching the title, which tends to happen when you're not the one with the remote), and I also read a piece he had written about Mumbai after the attacks last November, so this book has been on my radar for a while. Mehta was born in Mumbai, grew up in New York, then moved back to Mumbai as an adult, so he has a split perspective; he's both a native and an outsider at the same time. Mumbai is a very interesting city: it's the size of New York City and LA together in terms of population and if you look at it on Google Earth it's very easy to spot the slums, where everything is packed in so tight together and stops mere feet from the train tracks. (My fascination with slums has a lot in common with my fascination with the life of the Inuit which I researched for my last novel; I'm amazed at how much they can do with so little, but also saddened, because no one should have to get by with so little). I found this book honest and unflinching about the good and the bad, but in the end I found it hopeful about the future. And it struck me as I read that many of the problems in Mumbai were reminding me very strongly of what I was reading just a few months ago about New York City at the time of Teddy Roosevelt. (Which reminds me, apparently I owe the movie Garv a huge apology. I found the police force shooting on sight gangsters they had been sent to arrest because they knew they would never be justly tried in the courts implausible, when it is in fact quite true.)

Light at the End of the World by Wade Davis is a collection of essays on different cultures around the world. Apparently these originally appeared as part of a collection of photographs, and I rather wished I had hunted that book down; I would love to see some of the things described here. It was a bit of a mind twist after reading a book about India to follow it up with a book where "Indian" means Native American, though.

The Sharing Knife: Horizon is the latest by Lois McMaster Bujold. It's the best of the series so far, and yes I said that about the last one as well. It's just the story keeps going deeper, and the canvas it's told on keeps getting wider. This, frankly, is why I love reading series. And I have no idea where she's going to take these characters next, but I bet it's somewhere I could never predict.

OK, I finished off the month with Larry Niven. I've read some of him before (as I mentioned, it was more than a decade ago). I couldn't really pick out which ones I had though, so for the sake of completeness I started with the oldest Known Space books, and the first three are all ones I'd read before: World of Ptavvs, A Gift from Earth and Neutron Star. World of Ptavvs would be my favorite of these three, if just for the moment when the real alien wakes up (if you've read the book, you know what I mean. That moment, just there, is awesome).

In all likelihood, March will be nothing but Larry Niven books. I hope you're prepared...

So, been sick...

... as those of you on Myspace or Facebook already know. Haven't been that sick in ages. It started as one thing and then became one or two others; that's all I'm gonna say. I had to get out of bed yesterday because our new furnace/air conditioner/water heater were all installed, but I wasn't exactly lucid; I kept conking out on the couch and the installers would have to wake me up to ask me questions or show me things. (One of them said to Oliver "Your mom sure is sleepy!" to which he said... nothing, because the boy won't talk to strangers unless he's trying to out-talk his brother). And when I went downstairs to look over the finished work, my very addled brain came up with "shiny" as my only comment. And I think they thought I was talking about the lustre when I'm pretty sure my brain was talking Firefly-speak. Heck, I was so out of it I probably was just finding it, you know, shiny.

So no writing done on my week of school break, and most of this week's school was a wash as well. We kept up on math and that's about it. And my movie and book posts will be unusually short as well; I really was quite out of it the last half of February. When I wasn't just flat-out asleep I couldn't handle anything more complex than music DVDs. So it's cool that I have a ton of those. For instance, can you believe this concert was already a decade ago?

I would love to see an NSYNC reunion tour (with CD of new material as well, please). They put on such a show. And you know, they take their work seriously but never themselves, and there's something to be said for that.

And that's not just the fever hangover talking...

Congrats to A.R. Rahman

...for his Oscars for Best Score and Best Song. This is a long time coming, believe me. He's scored more than 50 films, starting in South India in Tamil and Telegu and reaching Bollywood with Rangeela (the title number "Rangeela Re" has a cute little rapping kid who's the son of Udit Narayan, playback singer for about half the movies in Bollywood. I expect to be hearing more from little Aditya in a year or two). He's done historical dramas like Lagaan (from which I got the working title for my WIP, "Mitwa"), Jodhaa Akbar, which I posted a clip from last month, and Mangel Pandey: The Rising (so many great songs; I'm picking "Main Vari Vari" because I love Rani's dancing on this one).

He's also done modern sounds with movies like Rang de Basanti ("Khalbali" being my fave) or Janne Tu Ya Janne Na ("Pappu Can't Dance", a song rumored to be about Salman Khan, although Aamir Khan says that's totally not true; Salman doesn't have an MBA...). He even did the music for the Mandarin/Japanese film Warriors of Heaven and Earth (gorgeous look, gorgeous sound, woefully deficient in the story department, as I've blogged before).

But my favorite A.R. Rahman piece is still the soundtrack for Dil Se. I've shown you Chaiyya Chaiyya before (with Malaika Arora Khan dancing on top of a train, not to be missed), but my favorite from that film is "Satrangi Re", I love the way it twists around itself. The Himalayas are beautiful as well, of course. This is totally where I'm building my writing cabin:



You know, that was the first Oscar ceremony I've seen that was just fun to watch all on its own. The tributes to animation, comedy, and romance and especially the musicals were all cool; getting Judd Apatow and Baz Luhrmann involved was a killer idea. The stage was so beautiful, with the lights and the crystal curtain, and the elements they changed in the back drop for each award. But I particularly liked how they ditched the clips for the acting categories in favor of having five nominees give little salutes. It was so much more personal. And of course Hugh Jackman is always the bomb: "I'm Wolverine!!"

I've been scooped!

I make up stories in my head all the time just to amuse myself (I know, weird thing for a writer to do). One of my favorites is completely useless to me really, but I've been exploring the back stories of all the characters in it, refining the world building and all that for a wu xia Bollywood mash-up for some time now. My two favorite things; how could I not try to put them together? But I haven't committed any of it to paper; I write novels, and I just don't know how I would write a Bollywood novel. Describe the musical numbers? So I haven't done much with it. It's just something for my brain to do on the days I run on the treadmill and can't read.

Then while watching a trailer show during halftime last night, I saw this:

Besides also being a kung fu Bollywood story, it's very different from the one in my head. I mean, mine is a space opera and the kung fu is more wu xia than this seems to be. So my story is safe. In the mean time, how geeked am I to see this? I've actually seen all of this director's previous work, and his last, Salaam-e-Ishq I've watched mmmmf times (no, totally not fessing up to a number. Let's just say a lot). Akshay Kumar is perfect for a comedy role like this one, and it even has Gordon Liu in it. Sadly it's already come and gone from my neighborhood multiplex that shows movies from India (in Hindi and Telegu and Tamil; it wasn't nearly so multicultural when I worked there). I'll have to wait for the DVD.

Another disturbing similarity to the world in my own head: The space station my novel Mitwa takes place on is Chandni 5...

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.