I watched a couple movies this weekend instead of writing. One was better than I would have ever imagined it would be while the other I had high hopes for but in the end was disappointed, particularly given the amount of time I invested in it.

Anyway, the best of the two: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the new animated one. In fact, when the kids and I decided to watch it, I was fully expecting a live-action mixed with computer graphics film, sort of on par with the first TMNT movie back in the 90's (or was it late 80's?). I certainly wasn't expecting Incredibles-style full animation. I also had to put aside their pointless use of Mesoamerican elements, but on the whole, I rather enjoyed it and would actually consider buy it on DVD for the kids. The animation is really something to behold, even if the story isn't something to write home about, but the conflict between Raphael and Leonardo was well worth the watch. I was expecting horrible from this film, like the first one, but was pleasantly surprised.

The other film...well, I did know that this would never live up to my expectations, but I think films like Lord of the Rings have given us hope that epic works can be masterfully translated to the screen. But of course, not by TNT Originals. I rented The Mists of Avalon from Blockbuster last night. They had a pretty decent cast, but there was just no overlooking the laughably bad CGI and blue screen and styrofoam castles. Not that all the sets were really bad, because some were pretty decent, but I often found myself wishing Peter Jackson had bought the rights to do this and do it right. It was everything one can expect of a made-for-tv movie, though I really, really have to say that they should have cast someone else as Lancelot. Don't get me wrong, Michael Vartan is as darling as they come--I particularly liked him in Never Been Kissed--but he lacks both the arrogance and swagger to be a good Lancelot. Gwenyfar wasn't too bad but not nearly fanatical enough, and Mordred...well, he was certainly evil, but he was so black-hat it was pathetic that Arthur ever trusted him in the least. Things I missed that weren't there: Kevin, the stealing of the holy regalia that sends all the Knights of the Round Table off on quests for the Holy Grail, and the whole Morgaine/Accolon plot against Arthur. And they only skirted around the whole Morgaine/Lancelot unrequited love, but then they did only have three hours for story:-). So yes, it didn't live up to my hopes in the least but it certainly could have been worse than it was. I've scratched that particular itch and can finally stop wondering if it's any good.

Back to writing today. aliettedb, let me know if you got the critique so I can resend if you didn't.

Quite the busy weekend. Birthday parties and movies, and problems with our new phone service. We have radio towers behind our house and we recently switched to phone over IP, and now we can hear the radio station loud and clear over our telephones. The Comcast techs were out for two days straight, with four different people trying to figure out why it was doing that and what to do about it. We still don't have any definitive answer, and it turns out that everyone in our neighborhood who has the phone over IP has the same problem, so it's looking like it's probably not something that's going to easily fixed (right now the techs think both the phone and the radio are broadcasting on the same frequency and so that's why there's the overlap, and it will be too costly to overhaul the whole system on account of one neighborhood, so we'll probably end up switching back to our old phone company.). Hopefully the will get back to us later this week with the final word on what they can and can't do for us, so we can make a decision. I'm tired of hearing news radio every time I pick up the phone (and the caller on the other end can hear it too).

On the movie front, we took the kids out to see Kingdom of the Crystal Skull yesterday, and while it wasn't my favorite Indiana Jones movie, it was better than I was expecting, based on what I've heard others say about it on their blogs and such. It's enjoyable if you don't think on it too hard, The kids truly enjoyed the movie, particularly Gaaron, who left the theater annoying his sister by repeatedly humming the theme song. This was actually his first full movie in a theater. We took him to see Cars when he was 2, but that lasted all of 30 minutes before he just couldn't stay still and I had to take him outside to the car (and Cars is a long movie, so we sat out there for almost an hour and half waiting for Jeff and Dana to come out.). He did really well this time though, had a bit of a squirming episode about 30 minutes in, but once he switched seats with Jeff, he sat still for the rest of the movie. He is, of course, a huge Indiana Jones fan and I'm glad he was able to concentrate well enough to stay for the whole film. He also had soda for the first time (before drinking, he asked me what it was and after he'd taken a sip, he said, "Ooh, I love this!" Got me laughing. Neither of the kids are allowed soda at home though, only when we go out to dinner.). On the whole, I thought the movie was much, much better than Temple of Doom, but I think  I still like Raiders and Last Crusade better.

Good day of rewriting yesterday on "The Hearts of Men." Though I'm actually adding more words than I'm cutting, which is unusual for me, but on the whole I think the additions are good for character development and POV as well as connecting the theme. I'm probably looking at about 7700-8000 for this draft and I'm intent on having it finished tomorrow. Today though Jeff's taken the day off and we're going out to lunch and a movie while the kids are at school. We're going to see 10,000 BC, which I'm excited to see and think it looks pretty cool.

So The Spiderwick Chronicles was really very good and I'm glad we went to see it. Dana enjoyed it tremendously too and we just might go out and buy the books to read together.

"Love, Blood and Octli" made Dave Trusdale's 2007 SF and Fantasy Recommended Reading List, which is very cool and a first for me (and I'm thrilled to see that two of my TOC mates made his Best of Year list, so big congrats to Tom Doyle and J. Kenneth Sargent!). A nice little milestone.

Today's task is going to be to go through the journal and tag everything, to make it easier to find things. I've never done any tagging so it's nearly impossible to find anything, especially when I go back looking for stuff I wrote months or even years ago, so, since it's snowing here (it was 70 degrees yesterday, this morning it's blizzarding, but that's Colorado for you!), I'm going to work on fixing this. 

Dana has the day off from school today because of parent/teacher conferences, so I'm going to take a break from my latest obsession and we're going to go out and see The Spiderwick Chronicles today. I haven't read the books and quite frankly the previews didn't do much for me, but there's not any other kid movies out right now and she really wants to see it, so we're going. We need some mom/daughter time anyway.

In writing plans, I'm thinking about either starting work on the rewrite of "The Hearts of Men" or maybe starting a new One World story that I've had in mind for a little while (I'm reluctant to start this one because I don't really have any solid plot in mind or even theme), or maybe I'll take a look at the SSC trigger over at LH and see if I can come up with anything.

I wanted to post this last night, but apparently LJ was down for the count for a few hours. Progress-wise, I didn't do any actual writing yesterday. Instead, I spent a couple hours rereading what I have done right now of the Malinche story, since i haven't worked on it for over a week. Most of it seems pretty good, though there's still quite a few hitches to work out in rewrite, but on the whole it feels worth finishing (even though it at 25k right now and needs probably another 10k to finish.). I'm planning to get back to writing it today.

On the sub front, after about a 2 week dry spell, got two rejections yesterday, one of which had me scratching my head and wondering what the reader was thinking to make such a blatantly false statement about a particular subgenre (and no, I won't go into detail about it. I was quite offended by the stupidity of the remark yesterday but don't want to bring it up full-steam again today. I have far too much real work to do to waste time with it anymore. It suffices me to just say what I've already said about the matter and move on.). I then submitted both stories out again, one to Jim Baen's Universe, the other to Heliotrope.

Last night I stayed up watching United 93. Intense.

Thank you everyone for your birthday wishes.

We got a bit late to the movie last night but still managed to get pretty descent seats. Dana was pretty impatient for the movie to start (and she wasn't very amused by the half hour of previews before the movie) and then wiggle-wormed through the whole last half. Overall I was disappointed. The story felt rushed and just plain skimmed over in most places (it probably doesn't help matters that I just reread the book recently). Of course, I had this same impression after seeing Goblet of Fire but grew to like it more the more times I saw it. I suspect this one will be the same way (Jeff, who hasn't read any of the books, thought it was really good.). I think the problem is trying to cram a 700 page story into a 2 hour movie (though I also found myself bored for a lot of the beginning because the story seemed so much thinner and hurried over than in the book.), and the rest of the movies will have this same problem. I did think Daniel Radcliff (who plays Harry) was better in this one than any of the other movies and even Rupert Grint (who plays Ron) didn't have any moments of dumbass-delivered lines like he's had in other movies. Even though Harry's haircut in this movie goes against Rowling's descriptions of him, I liked it here and thought it made Harry look more mature (which is only right given the events of Goblet of Fire). So this morning I'm feeling a bit more charitable about the film than I did last night after it ended (though there are some really nice special effects in this one that I was impressed with from the start.). One character I was really disappointed with was Kreacher, who was nowhere near as scheming and conniving as in the book. He was nothing at all like I imagined him and had such a brief roll. I heard that the writers originally left him out of the movie but put him in when Rowling suggested that he would play a vital role in the last book, and unfortunately, he does come across as an after-thought in the movie.

So today is a day of packing the trailer to go, so I don't think I'll be posting again until I get back. Have a good week, everyone.

When I got up this morning, the muse felt like playing some Age of Empires, so I said okay. I did get my contributor's copy of Distant Passages 2 today in the mail and I'm quite tickled by how nice it looks. On Friday night, lacking anything good on television, I decided to watch Howl's Moving Castle, which I'd never seen before, and I rather enjoyed it. I'm usually not a big fan of anime, but I was quite taken by the details and animation in this one; makes me want to go find the other movies this guy's made. Maybe I'll watch it again tomorrow, with Dana. I think she'd probably like it.

But for now bedtime.

Okay, I'll stop now. A Bond quote is always a good place to stop. :)

My overall impression of the film, now that I've had a couple days to think about it, is this: What exactly was your point, Mel? What exactly was I supposed to take away from viewing this film?

On the whole, I think Apocalypto would have been a really good movie, if it had been completely rewritten and told from someone else's POV, say a young warrior coming of age while living in the main city. What I really disliked about this movie was the whole return to the idea of the "noble savage", how the innocent hunter/gatherers are the victims of civilization and its thirst for destruction; not that there isn't an element of truth to this dynamic. My problem was that in this movie everything was catagorically split into good and evil, with the simple jungle folk being inherently good and the metropolitan Maya being fiends--every single one of them, from the hardened warriors to the obese young son of the king. It was in no way balance to reflect real human beings and their differing attitudes about how other humans are treated. I can understand why a good deal of native organizations take issue with the portrayal of the Maya in this film; while we were driving to my inlaws house to get the kids after the movie, Jeff asked if it was true that the Maya raided villages like in the movie, and when I couldn't give him an answer (because my knowledge of the Maya is very pale in comparison to what I know of the Aztecs), his reaction was, "I guess they were just savages." I take exception with that statement, but it's exactly what an average viewer would take away from viewing this film, so can I really blame him? If I hadn't already learned better by studying the Aztecs and having read Jenning's novel, I probably would have come to the same conclusion. After all, it backs up something we all know about them--the human sacrifice element--and pile-drives it into the ground without regard to addressing anything else the Maya accomplished, like mathematics or astronomy or writing.

One thing I will not hesitate to give Gibson props for is that this film is visually stunning, particularly the scenes in the city. The care given to the little details was commendable and all the characters were interesting to look at (I was particularly fascinated by Zero Wolf, played by Raol Trujillo. His costuming was wonderful.). Now, if only Gibson had spent as much time on the story as he did the sets and costuming....

Regarding the violence, there's been a lot of complaining in the media that the film was too graphic, but really I didn't think it was any more graphic than Gladiator (in fact, I'd say that Gladiator is more graphic). Given the nature of the storyline and the weapons employed by the Maya, I think the gore could have been elevated and still be within the realm of reality (though I certainly wouldn't want to see that. But it was often on my mind that their weapons would do far more damage and cleaving than was being portrayed, particularly those obsidian-edge swords.).

About an hour and half into the movie, I found myself wishing it was over and was dismayed to know that it probably wouldn't be over soon since there were still too many warriors that our hero Jaguar Paw hadn't killed yet. And it was at about that time that I realized that this was not a movie I was going to buy on DVD. Disappointing, really. This could have been so much more than it was.