The one movie where he almost convinced me he had talent was The Killer, and that was only after I forced myself to stop taking it seriously and watch it as a comedy.  It went from pretty unbearable to quite enjoyable.

The problem is that that’s the only one of his films that I’ve been able to do it with.

Hard Boiled?  It almost worked the way it wanted to.

Mission Impossible II?  I wanted to vomit.

Face/Off?  I almost fell asleep.

Broken Arrow? I was confused at the inanity.

Windtalkers?  HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!…oh wait…that was a drama…oh…

Okay, so people will tell me that I’ve obviously heavily dosed on his American stuff which, apparently, gets cut down a lot.  Fine.  You know what else was cut down a lot? The Magnificent Ambersons, and that movie was still good.

John Woo is a hack.He manages to create some cogent action sequences that can border on the insane, and that would be awesome, if the rest of the movies were made in the same way.  Instead, all of them treat themselves deathly seriously, except that Woo can’t seem to get anything approaching a decent performance from anyone outside of Chow Yun-Fat, who seems to want to make comedies instead of what Woo makes.  There’s always a little twinkle in his eye.  Maybe he was the only one who really understood what Woo’s subconscious was trying to accomplish, something that Woo’s ego had no idea of.

I first had this thought about a year ago after watching The Killer when I imagined what the memorial reel would be once Woo passed from his mortal coil.  I realized that there wouldn’t be a second of footage from a scene that did not involve flying guns/people/people and guns/doves/debris.  Why does Woo get many passes from the geek community when people like Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay (fan of the latter, but not so much of the former) get eviscerated by certain segments whenever one of their movies is released because of the lack of decent story or character?

I’m dying to see a huge fan of Woo explain to me why Hard Boiled is a great film while The Day After Tomorrow is junk.

The subject was tackled a little messily but well enough for my tastes here, at Big Hollywood, and I have nothing more to add to that specific discussion for two reasons:

1) I don’t care enough.

2) I care even less about the movie Prom.

What suddenly attracted me to the whole little spat was the fact that I just read The Secret Garden for the first time a few days ago.  And no, I’m not a twelve year old girl, but I do feel a little weird for having read the thing at all.  However, what was so interesting was that The Secret Garden was, apparently, exactly was Ms Chen was describing Prom as:  super clean and without any real regard for reality.  And yet (I can’t speak for Ms Chen), the world seems to consider the little book to be a classic of children’s literature, and I am slightly baffled.

I suppose, for the child who has read very little and does not have a particularly strong grasp of the narrative form, The Secret Garden is a fun adventure from India to the moors in the north of England and from pettiness to niceness, and I was along for the ride during it’s first half.  Little Mary quite contrary follows a well thought out path where she learns, on her own, that her spoiled nature is no good when the world stops giving her everything she wants.  She has to adapt, and in that quintessentially British manner, she does so by becoming the nicest and prettiest little girl in the moors.  Everyone starts the novel hating her and ends the novel by loving her.  That was all well and good for the first half, and then she started to work her magic on little Colin, the supposed cripple child of the remote uncle who took Mary in.

He starts of as an even greater brat than Mary had.  He screamed through the night at imagined lumps on his back (why none of the servants ever figured out why he was screaming either indicates that these servants are some of the worst in the world, or the author, Ms Burnett, couldn’t think of any other way for Mary and Colin to connect without any real work on her part.  You see, it begins to get lazy fast as soon as Mary gets Colin to look at his own back.  From that point on (the second half of the book) every time Mary points out a character flaw to Colin, Colin takes a moment and decides that he will no longer do that thing that no one else likes.  Quite a bit of self control for a ten year old child who was the poster child for caning weeks earlier.

My whole point isn’t to knock a well regarded work of children’s literature (although that is a small thing I want to put forward).  My point goes back to the beginning of this post and the supposed worthlessness of “clean” entertainment for children.  Have we gotten to a point in society where even children’s literature cannot hold the innocence of a poorly conceived children’s story?  Does every work of fiction for every age group need to carry the breadth of Dickens and the depth of Dostoevsky?

The Disney Channel is not something I ever watch, mostly because the squeaky clean thing doesn’t really appeal to me.  I like hard edges and dark corners to my entertainment, and it doesn’t sound like Prom is my kind of thing, but I’m also not Prom‘s target audience.  The movie wants to appeal to the same age group as the Disney Channel, and that’s several years younger than I am.

Ultimately, I think that the problem in the original review wasn’t that the author had a truly jaundiced view of childhood and growing up, but that she wasn’t the intended audience for the film.  So what to do about that?  I wasn’t the target audience of The Secret Garden, so should I be barred from reviewing it as an inconsequential and rather completely forgettable piece of fiction?  No, of course not, but no one should hire me to review it.  I can’t imagine the difficulty of assigning movies to tastes and demographics, but then again, maybe there shouldn’t be an assignment process at all.

Perhaps with the death of old media we’ll see less and less of this.  Older generations beating on the work designed for the younger, or the intelligentsia trashing movies about men who fly around in tights to save the world.  Are their opinions invalid?  Nope, but if they don’t want to see those types of movies, they shouldn’t be forced to, even for a paycheck.

So begin with me!  Free the movie critics from the bonds of writing about movies they don’t want to see!  Give them a blog and let the live on ad revenue!

Seriously, why should Britain pay for your life of leisure? Isn't a military salary good enough?

For those of you who might remember from high school (I read it on my own), but Thomas Paine had some things to say about monarchies at the beginning of his pamphlet Common Sense.  In talking about the nature of a hereditary system, Paine says,

For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever, and though himself might deserve some decent degree of honors of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them. One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.

Don't mess with...Virginia?

Some harsh words that, if said by an MP in Parliament today, would probably ruffle some feathers.  Yes, there are anti-royalists in the British government today, but words this strong would be deemed a little too much, at least.  And Paine said them more than 230 years ago.

The institution of a monarchy is un-American at its core.  As can be evidenced by the rest of Common Sense (of which John Adams said, “the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain” without it), the American republic was established as an exact contradiction to the system of a monarchy.  Instead of having a family rule in perpetuity (at least until the next guy came along, killed everyone, and said God chose him), Americans elect representatives who serve for certain periods of time, after which their constituents can choose the previously elected again or go another route with someone new.  In the American system, there isn’t even a “ruler”, there are merely those representing the interests of the people.

Now, it makes sense for someone like J.R.R. Tolkien to write lovingly about monarchies in The Lord of the Rings.  After all, he was British, and (politically) a royalist before anything else.  He loved the pageantry of kings and queens and found divine inspiration in their rule (never mind all of the kings who screwed everything up, were swine, and committed borderline genocide on those who thought differently from them).  But, when it comes to an American writing fantasy, we all seem to immediately go to the monarchy as well like little writer sheep following the original (Tolkien).

"Just as long as I'm not the one getting persecuted, I'm good with it!" - Tolkien (citation needed)

Another factor to throw in, is that most fantasies are written in medieval periods which naturally gravitate towards heavy centralization of government due mostly to the fact that, without exception, the masses are stupid and uneducated in medieval periods.  That’s why they’re medieval instead of modern.  There can be only one source of education when it’s highly expensive and impractical when most people are so close to death everyday that all they have time for is harvesting or finding food and making more kids to help in the fields.  It makes sense from a naturalistic perspective (something I’ll touch on again in another post, possibly).

However, and I could be really wrong about this (I read The Lord of the Rings and not much else outside of that in the fantasy realms), but monarchies are still seen as the only alternative, and usually as a positive in modern fantasy, especially American fantasy.  I can get it, to a degree.  It’s cool to have the banners, the crowns, and the genuflecting to an authority in chain mail, but I must point back to Thomas Paine and the original idea of the immorality of monarchies at their core: they’re un-American at best and outright evil at worst.

This was my high school...pretty much.

This all started while watching the first episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones adaptation.  I had known almost nothing about the show/book before I started watching the previewed fifteen minutes.  I just knew that those fifteen minutes were well shot, well acted, and intriguing.  I really enjoyed the first episode (I’m guessing that those calling it the best show on television have seen more than the first episode because there wasn’t enough of an impression there to take me anywhere close to that pronouncement), but I began to have this nagging question in my mind: why would an American write a fantasy novel about a bunch of people fighting over a crown?  It’s….un-American.

Good, violent, boobie filled, stuff.

In my novel (buy!buy!buy!) A Quest through Winter Sleep, I do fall into that trap, partially.  The world is set in a medieval period with a queen as the head of a government, but she’s nowhere near the focus of the novel.  No, she’s in two scenes, and she’s not portrayed all that positively.  People tell our main character, Fanny, that they owe so much to her, but Fanny knows that the queen never helped her during any tough harvests, and that she’s barely helping her at all on her journey to find her mother.  She decides that monarchies and loyalties to princes are unnecessary elements of the outside world that she wants nothing to do with.  So, I used the idea of a monarchy, but I neither focus on nor prop it up.

To give you a further look into the future, I will say that I have several books planned in this little series of mine (none of which are directly related to any others), and the third book does follow the actions of a queen during a time of war, and I plan on making her look good, but that’s one element in a larger work that watches a country evolve from medieval to futuristic.  I even had a whole timeline worked out (I lost the notebook it was in a few years ago and have hated myself for it ever since) where I tracked the evolution of the country from monarchy to democratic republic.  None of the books would have taken place during that period (although I probably could have written one or two), but I’m always watching for the world to move on, unlike almost every other major fantasy work (I think The Golden Compass is a good exception to this) where the entirety of eternity will be spent in the medieval period, which means that the authors can keep their invented countries in monarchies in perpetuity.  They don’t seen any evolution of the world, they want to keep their masses in subjugation to princes who make war for years at a time instead of moving on to a world where commerce is used instead.

How….un-American.

But, then again, I could be completely wrong and someone will write back to me with a thousand examples of fantasy that have broken free from these ideas, in which case I will respond with the redefinition of fantasy in this post to mean “mainstream fantasy”, and pray for the best.

I’ve loved this thing since I got it.

Amazing? Why, yes I am, thank you very much. The reader's not bad either.

You might say I overpaid…and I’d agree.  Especially with the Kindle at, what is it now?, $140?  Yeah, there’s no question that I overpaid for the device itself, but this thing is turning itself worthwhile far quicker than I thought it would.

You see, I keep a little spreadsheet of all the books I’ve read on it with all the paperback prices of everything I read for free in the public domain.  I’ve kept this little log with diligence for months now, and do you know what I’ve found?

After about nine months, I’ve already almost read half of the eReader back.

That’s a beautiful thing.

My girlfriend has that cheap Kindle, and I like it too, but there are differences that keep me a steady fan of my little guy.

Firstly, the screen on mine is much bigger while the lines are kind of dictated on the Kindle.  What does that mean?  That means that I can read significantly more per page.  Why is that important?  Because with electronic book readers, the battery is only used when a page is turned.  So with more words per page means that I have more pages per battery charge and longer in between.  The glare on the touch screen doesn’t really bother me, because I can hold the thing at an angle and get rid of it.

I mean, seriously, people.  There are those on Amazon who damn Sony into a fiery oblivion because they have to do this.  The device ain’t perfect, but it’s also not suddenly worthless because I need to occasionally hold the thing at a ten degree angle.

Anyway…this whole thing has suddenly turned me onto the actual possibilities of the Internet.  I’ve always known that it was a great communication tool, but I always scoffed when someone put it on the list of Modern World Wonders.  Aren’t all of those supposed to be buildings?

But, when I discovered Gutenberg, I figured it out.  Suddenly, I could just download a plethora of ideas, but not just ideas on the next Metal Gear Solid or ideas on how racist someone can be in anonymity under a video featuring a cute cat doing cute cat things.  No!  I could have de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, Shakespeare, Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Joyce (minus Finnegan’s Wake for more reasons than one),   and Jane Austen without ever rising from my chair.  I had sort of known that this type of activity was possible in the past, but who wants to read five hundred page novels on a computer screen?  It was my eReader that showed me that possibility.  I had complete access to, and a proper forum to read, all of those authors I had been avoiding, whether on purpose or not, throughout the course of my life.

No...he IS happy that we can read him digitally, but M Bastiat is French...remember that.

I find it weird to thank Sony for helping to open me up to all of those authors that had been hidden in one way or another to me, but that heartless corporation (which refuses to turn everything around and make me some damn money on the stock market!), in conjunction with those bleeding hearties at Gutenberg, have done it.

Thank you little inanimate object.

Thank you.

I swear, I’m trying.

First off, I finished one of the stories I wrote of earlier.  Its tentative title is “Journey”, but that reminds me too much of music I have no taste for, so I’ll probably change it rather quickly.  It’s going to be the forth in a series of five stories.  Set on the first intergalactic flight between Earth and Alpha Centari, the story tries to portray a small antithesis to what most speculative fiction tends to be: a socialist wetdream.  So, no, there are no sing alongs about the ever knowledgeable elders who rule ever so justly or some idealized and borderline fascist super government that sent them out with only the intent of spreading happiness (cause, yeah, that’s exactly what Il Duce tried to do).

Ach!  Politics!

Alright…I’m turning that off.

Anyway, the idea was to create a little world that functioned more like I thought a couple hundred year journey would function, i.e. as a real society.  Stores, farms, lawyers, doctors, and (just like my main character) an accountant.

The entire thing was built on the idea of a really good twist (as James at work told me it was…so it must be), but I was suddenly caught up with the idea that the twist was little more than a punchline to a joke.  I racked my brain and thought I came up with a decent ending.  One that gives my main character, a woman, a decent ending and a small turning point in her life.

All in all, it probably needs another draft, but I’m happy with it as a whole, now to finish “Cockroach”, the first of the series that I had started before my hard drive crashed and lost.  I’m almost up to where I left off with a fairly radically different approach (I think that I’d rather have my original, but oh well).

Until next time, folks.

Last time I did this, it was a bit of a bust.  I was never really that into it and it functioned mainly as a communication tool between me and America…despite the fact that I continued to use my cell phone (which was mistake).

Anyway…things have certainly changed.

Three-ish years ago when I started this…I was directionless and had no real plan, so I moved to Italy to teach English.  That turned out to be one of the greatest experiences of my life, and I’d happily recommend the idea to anyone (it’s easy, doesn’t require any kind of degree, and you can make a decent living off of it), but it was not for me in the long run.

So now, here I am in Birmingham, Alabama going to Business School?  What?  Those who knew me before I left are incredulous when we play catch up and I tell them about what I’m doing.  When I throw in the fact that I’m applying to, have gotten into, and will be attending a Master’s Program in Statistics, they become even more flabbergasted.  Why?  Well, my English Literature undergrad degree might have something to do with that.

And there is why I am back here.  I don’t have a whole lot of outlets for my creative side anymore.  I have to write business plans and discuss marketing strategies in the midst of lots of uncomplicated math (accounting is just adding and subtracting, don’t you know).  Yet, despite it all, I continue to write.  I finished my first novel while in Italy (more on that in a moment), and am still knee deep into the first draft of my second.  I’ve also begun a small series of short stories partially inspired as a counter to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series (of which I’m almost done with the second book, Foundation and Empire).  I enjoy these things, and if I could pay all of my bills with them, then I’d probably drop this whole business thing….

Wait a second…

That gives me an idea…

Yes, I’ve decided to sell my first novel.  Already it is on Amazon for Kindle.  I decided to bypass the entire dinosaur model of publishing and go straight to the source.  It’s called A Quest through Winter Sleep.

In all honesty, I’d give the book a pretty good rating.  Like a weak three stars.  Decent first novel.

Walker Percy and Sylvia Plath both burned their first novels.  I self publish mine and wait for people to tear me asunder.  How exciting!

Anyway…buy it.  Read it.  Share it.  Tell the world about a fresh new talent.

Or forget about it…whatever.  :)

I’ll be back later with a greater outline of things to come, but essentially, I’m going to talk about my writing.

I’m really into politics, but it won’t come up here.

I’m really into film, and I’m going to bring it up (maybe post a review or two), but nothing major.

This is going to become my ground for writing and getting feedback.

That is all.

First, I need to tell you something about the Italian language.  First, look at this, it’s a random article in Italian.  Look at the endings of the vast majority of words.  What do they have in common?  Almost all Italian words end in vowels (with the exception of a few small words like con (with) and some words taken from other languages like computer (same in Italian)).

Now, knowing that, imagine a tiny classroom.  It’s me and one Italian who has been speaking this language where words only end with vowels.  And they are just beginning to learn the English language.  What do you think that sounds like?

HI-larious.  I mean it.  It’s just really funny because they continue to add little vowel sounds to the end of pretty much every word.

Imagine again.  I say, “going”, and they say, “goinga” or “goinge”.  It’s just one of the small ways I amuse myself as I trudge through twelve hour days where I teach for five.  I have small bits of fun.

And, yesterday, I think that I finally came to the understanding of why teachers go back to teach little snot nosed kids day after day, year after year.

I have a couple of classes in a middle school.  One is with a bunch of 12 year olds that are becoming a little difficult to control, and the other is a group of 13 year olds.  Those 13 year olds are all fairly good with their levels of English (it’s about a B1, pre-intermediate, if that means anything to anybody).  For the first two classes, I had to throw out my lesson plans because I would introduce a topic or grammar point that I was going to cover for two hours, and they would respond with “We know it.”  So, in the second class, I just suddenly decided to teach them the present perfect tense (i.e. “I have gone”).  It’s a difficult tense because it talks about the past, but there is supposed to be some great connection with the present.  It’s weird.

Anyway, I taught them, they seemed to understand.  A week passed and I entered the classroom again with a review of the subject.  They knew the basic structure and they kind of had a handle of the usage, but then I taught them the usage of “for” and “since” (i.e. “I haven’t gone to bed since last night.).  They are confused.  I explain and I explain.  Finally, after about twenty minutes of explanation and examples, about half of the class of ten suddenly get it at once.  All of their eyes beam with the cracking of some ancient code, and they understand.  They giddily turn to the other students who don’t understand and explain in Italian.  Then the other students’ eyes light up.  It felt good.

I still don’t want to do this forever (there are days where I wonder if I’ll get all the way to December), but at least I understand why all those teachers put up with all those awful children.  I get it.

Until next time…

Okay, this show has never been light and fluffy.  I started watching the new version of Galactica, loved it, and tried to watch some of the old show.  It was unbearable.  I tried again about a year ago and when I saw the crew of Galactica head to a casino planet mere hours after their entire civilization had been destroyed, I turned it off and will never look back.  It’s dishonest about its characters and situations and so cheesy it gives Cheet-O’s a bad name, plus it’s so obviously a cheap Star Wars knock off that I can’t excuse it for anything.

Awesome. Or not.

Well, this new version of Battlestar comes along and feeds on our post 9.11 fears.  People are scared all the time.  The bad guys are complex and terrifying in their monstrosities.  Characters have flaws and will never become the perfect beacons of light that have blighted Star Trek for the last thirty years.  It’s also been dark and willing to talk about subjects that are unpleasant (abortion, euthenasia, and alcohol abuse come to mind) while taking its characters through Hell (the occupation on New Caprica was just brutal).

But now, there is a new level of wow.

Pretty.

It came about the time that Dee blew her brains out.  She seemed happy.  She had begun a reconnection with her ex-husband, Lee.  She put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger because she knew that at that moment, she would be at her happiest and never get close to it again because that one hope that had drawn her through the previous three years had been taken away.  Earth was no paradise.  It was worse than the world they had fled.  Apocalypse had visited Earth some many years in the past, and the planet was unlivable, so Dee ended it.

No, this one is pretty.

Let’s see something like Lost or The Sopranos do that.

Ron D. Moore, the showrunner, has, through the years, given me incredible entertainment in this show with everything I’ve listed above, but with that finger pull, I will now follow him anywhere.  If he says that he wants to settle into an easy life of writing rom-coms for Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson, I would be first in line for all of them, because I know that they would have his incredible sense of story and narrative on display.  This man understands where you can take characters better than just about anybody in television.

And then (back to the episode), he tells us that the final cylon is someone who actually makes sense, i.e. she was really revealed to be a cylon in the first season.  In lesser hands, the showrunner would have chosen to forget that little moment at the end of “Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down” and said Starbuck was a cylon.  Instead, he gives us the logical choice, and provides himself with room to explore even further.  To naturally expand on the show’s mythology and characters’ lives.

Ron D. Moore, you will never read this, but you are a frakkin’ genius.

I could make excuses (my internet was out, I wasn’t doing anything, and giant bees attacked are all valid reasons), but the solid fact of the matter is that I haven’t written anything here.

What have I been doing?

Well, there was the Christmas potluck at Sara and Jen’s apartment where we had a healthy mixture of dogs in a blanket, chili, mashed potatoes, and pasta on Christmas Eve.  There was New Years where Allison and I were almost destroyed by Italians and their fireworks.  Stuff was exploding mere feet above my head.  Twas a good time.  The locals also seemed to be trying to light a tree on fire through fireworks explosions.  My guess is that they got pretty close but couldn’t quite pull it off, cause that tree is still standing.  This was all in front of the Coliseum where over a million people gathered to usher in the new year.  It was like a giant block party filled with people from every corner of the globe.  We were there for about twenty minutes and left about five minutes after midnight.  Good times.  Good times.

I’ve been writing a good bit, but not nearly as much as I should have been.  I’ve reached Chapter 6 of my rewrite (the second draft is now 124 pages long with another 320 to go in the original draft).  I’m not sure if I’m going to reach my goal of finishing the rewrite by my birthday.  Well, looks like I should hunker down and work, right?

I’m back to work teaching on one side of the city and then on the other about three seconds later.  It’s good, except when I sub for a teacher who quit because she couldn’t deal with the screaming 9 year olds.  I played cop for an hour and ten minutes out of the hour and a half class.  I had to hold the smallest kid up at one point so the others would stop hitting him.  It was chaos and I just feel bad for those who have to do it all the time.  I’m just hoping that I don’t end up having to, although when my normal class does end (the one that I normally have at that time) I have a strong feeling that I’m gonna be right back there.  I can’t wait!

Overall, I love it here.  Rome is a beautiful city (I go to a church every Sunday that has been standing in one form or another for over seventeen hundred years).  I enjoy my job most of the time, and I have enough free time to both enjoy the city and get lost in my own little worlds that I try to put down on paper.

I promise that I will begin writing here more.  It’s a failing on my part, and I will do my best to keep it up.  Shoot me a line if you feel like I haven’t posted enough.  I throw something up.  Maybe about a movie, or about some slice of life here.  I’ll do something.

Until next time…whenever that manages to be…