Category: Movies

Me Time

Lately I’ve felt overwhelmed. Too much to do and not enough time. Every day I murmur a prayer of thanksgiving because my children are grown and gone. If I were still doing the mom thing . . . I can’t even contemplate it.

It’s not all bad. I’m realizing my lifelong dream/ambition of being a published author. It’s the peripheral obligations that are getting me down.

One of my goals for this calendar year is a monthly date with myself. Too bad I haven’t had time to do that. I barely have time to get in a weekly session of yoga. My second quarter goal is to add another half hour of exercise into my week. But exercise isn’t me time. It’s a peripheral obligation that takes away from the writing time.

I’m in serious need of not only a date with myself, but some substantial me time.

  • I’d like to go to a baseball game.
  • I’d like to do some real cooking on the weekend.
  • I’d love to go to a movie with my husband.
  • I have several ideas for custom music mixes I’d like to work on.
  • Reading without guilt would be so nice!
  • I’d like to sip a glass of wine and relax when I get home from Day Job.

I would also like writing time. Writing is my dream. Something has to give.

Another one of my goals this year is “say no.” Don’t be surprised when you start hearing me say it more often.

Slice of Life Sunday: Movie Review-Authors Anonymous

I reserved the movie Authors Anonymous from my library after someone recommended it. The plot sounded amusing. I’m in a writing group. I’m always looking for a good flick.

The story started out cute, a mock-umentary of sorts, and I thought I would enjoy the movie. But almost immediately, the alleged heroine wasn’t likable. She never went to college. I don’t see that as a problem. But she couldn’t name a favorite author. She couldn’t name any author. Throughout the entire movie. She’d never read a book, yet she was a writer and became extremely successful during the course of the story. She’d never even heard of Fitzgerald or Hemingway. Because she’d never been to college.

EXCEPT: I read Fitzgerald and Hemingway in high school. I went to a small, rural public school, not a posh, private school for exceptional students. We read The Great Gatsby, The Old Man and the Sea, and several other books/authors mentioned in the movie.

I really didn’t like the portrayal of successful authors as ignorant. Authors read other authors. Even the prolific Nora Roberts says, “I don’t think you can write — at least not well — if you don’t love stories, love the written word. One of my greatest pleasures is falling into a story someone else has written.”

The other female in the writing group couldn’t pronounce anyone’s name.  She was trying to come off as smarter than she was, and it didn’t work for her.

The only redeeming quality in the movie was the realistic portrayal of vanity publishing.

This movie may have been directed by a woman, but the underlying misogyny of the writer and his jealousy of the romance genre were first and forefront.

One star.

Capitolfest Reaffirms My Faith in Story

capitol organTV Stevie and I attended Capitolfest this past weekend. We love the Capitol Theatre in Rome, NY, and their annual three-day, silent/early talky movie marathon is always a high point in our year. The above photo is of the theatre’s 1928 original installation Moller organ. This beautiful instrument more than earns its keep over the film festival weekend.

The very first movie of this year’s event was a 1922 silent western, Partners of the Sunset. Within the first few minutes of the film, I found myself grinning. Some aspects of story never change. Ninety two years ago, the story started with two “poor relation” sisters inheriting a ranch out west, from a distant uncle, with the stipulation they must live there for one year in order to inherit. The movie was a romance novel on the big screen. I loved every second.

Miscellaneous observations: George Bancroft and Alec Baldwin share a certain look at times (and camera angle), as do William Powell and Tom Hiddleston.

One of my favorite movies of the weekend was something called High Treason, a dreadful 1929 “futuristic” pic that contained precognitive flashes of both the Holocaust and 9/11. If I had known about this movie back when I was producing my bad movie TV show, I would have tried like crazy to get my hands on a copy. It was so bad, it was good, like Plan 9 From Outer Space. 

The best movies of the weekend were three dramas:

  • Ladies Man (1931)
  • Forgotten Faces (1928) (silent)
  • Laughter in Hell (1933)

Good story telling doesn’t rely on gimmicks, and these three movies prove that. I did, however, think the HEA ending of Laughter in Hell was a bit abrupt, but many movies this festival had the same issue, like rock songs before the Beatles started composing specific endings.

One more miscellaneous observation: I had a “tiffany” this weekend. If you read my blog, you know I hate special effects used for the sake of using special effects. I loathed The Dark Knight for that reason alone. Bang-bang-blow-em-up makes me crazy. This weekend I realized I don’t like a lot of 1930s movies for a similar reason. But special effects weren’t the new toy in that era. Sound was. And far too many movies have a gratuitous scene of a woman singing. Frequently, she’s not even a particularly good singer. But we have sound, by gum, we’re going to put a song in the movie. Most often, the singing-scene could be cut and the story would lose absolutely nothing.

And that’s a wrap.

 

 

 
 

Man of Steel: A Movie Review

Finally watched Man of Steel last night. There were four things I really liked about the movie.

1) Henry Cavill. Need I say more?

2) Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, Russell Crowe, and Laurence Fishburne in their roles.

3) Krypton (Superman’s home planet) being destroyed by mining its core. This is my own crackpot theory about the increase in earthquakes on this planet. It felt nice to be validated.

4) Young Clark Kent having a meltdown in his fourth grade (?) class room because of his heightened senses. This is something I working on in my current WIP, so it was good to see a visualization.

The thing I didn’t feel strongly about either way:

1) Amy Adams as Lois Lane. I’m indifferent to Amy Adams as an actress. I’ve seen her in roles I’ve loved and roles I loathed. She just didn’t do it for me as Lois Lane. I didn’t hate her in the part, but I didn’t believe in her, either.  In my opinion, the best Lois Lane was Teri Hatcher (Lois & Clark: the New Adventures of Superman).

The thing I really hated about the movie:

1) The script. The plot. Whatever.

SPOILER ALERT (DO NOT READ PAST HERE IF YOU DON’T WANT SPOILERS)

A) I have never made bones about how much I despise special effects for the sake of special effects, and this movie has them coming out the wazoo. I felt DC was competing with Marvel for movie bragging rights. Epic fail. Actually that’s what I hate most about Marvel movies, too. Whatever happened to the element of story in movies? Oh. Right. Action adventure doesn’t need enough story/plot to carry a full 2 hour movie, not in this day of computer graphics.

B) I do not have problems with resetting canon. I adore the reset in the Star Trek movies (although I really didn’t think it was that much of a reset). I don’t mind the changes in Superman’s history. I wish I’d thought of the Civil Defense shelters myself when Superman came back from being dead. But Lois Lane knowing Clark Kent is Superman’s disguise from the get-go? As the old cheer from my junior high school days went: no no never never uh-uh uuuuuuh. What is the point? To make Lois & Supes a crime-fighting team? Castle and Becket? Please.

C) I wish Superman would focus more on “truth and justice” than battling extra-terrestrials. That’s why he was the hero of my childhood. Without truth and justice, we will never be able to cope when technology finally does come for us.

 

 

 

Saving Mr. Banks

I took a break from promoting my book (see info to the right) to watch a movie with TV Stevie last night. We chose Saving Mr. Banks. Although I’d never seen Disney’s Mary Poppins as a child, I did have the Disney version of the book (bright pink cover), and my Chromos watched the motion picture incessantly when they were younger. I am familiar with the story.

TV Stevie and I liked the movie (Saving Mr. Banks) a lot. Tom Hanks, Emma Thompson, Paul Giamatti, and Colin Farrell were great in their roles. I thought the pacing was a bit slow at times, but it was okay.

One question was never answered, and the writer in me is plagued by that, even though it was a minor thing.

But the thing that haunted me throughout the movie was the similarity of P.L. Travers’ childhood (as portrayed in the movie) to that of Francie Nolan in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  After reading about P.L. Travers life on Wikipedia and learning some of the poetic license used by the Saving Mr. Banks writers, I have to wonder if they were influenced by A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Or are dreaming, drunken Irish fathers a stereotype?