Monday, March 10, 2008

Midway point?

I think I'm at the half-way point...of Book 1.  Either way it was a good weekend and I feel very accomplished by what I got done.  I killed someone dear to me and there were some creepy night-time meetings and a dislocated shoulder.  All of that finished off chapter 12 and chapter 13 has begun...and a creepy chapter it is destined to be.

I still haven't turned that corner where I can see the end of the tunnel so I still feel like I'm going nowhere very, very slowly.  But I just keep in the back of my head that this IS fun and keep slogging away.  Eventually I'll get to that point where I'll be writing that I've finished and I'll be happy and I'll read this post and wonder how I ever felt that I couldn't do it.

I'm still having trouble keeping other ideas out of my brain but I'll have plenty of time for them right?

So I watched three movies this weekend felt differently about all three:

Beowulf:  I was intensely upset about this.  I've read and loved Beowulf for a very long time.  I get that it was a movie and that movies inherently are interpretations of the source and usually not direct tellings, but OMFG:  Neither Hrothgar nor Beowulf F*cked Grendel's Mother!!  The Dragon was not Beowulf's bastard demon child.  From a storytelling perspective, this just was terrible.  I mean, I get why they had Hrothgar pass his kingdom to Beowulf:  they wanted to keep him there for continuity.  But I don't understand what the point was of having our Hero bone our Villain.  In the stories, Beowulf's sin was pride.  That was his fatal flaw.  This movie could have delved into that and been more cerebral, but they felt the need to stick him with something more tangible (flying bastard demon baby).  I just really felt that the movie betrayed the source material on a very basic level.  Shame.

In the Land of Women:  This movie for me failed because it presented the character (Carter) showed us his problems, showed us the problems of all the peripheral characters, and then solved the problems of the peripheral characters but not his.  You really could have lifted him out of the story and focused on the mother/daughter/cheating husband dynamic and had a satisfying movie.  I'm thinking that having a protagonist no one cares about is bad, but I think it's even worse to leave said protagonist's problems unresolved (they could have at least shown us he was on the road to trying to resolve them).  It was just blah.

Southland Tales:  Being a huge Donnie Darko fan, I've been way excited to see this.  I love Kelley's storytelling.  I will say first that I'm going to have to see that again.  And isn't that the point of a story?  Hate it or love it you want people to want to see it again...to talk about it.  I'm not sure if I hated it or loved it, I'm certainly not ambivalent about it though.  I think there were a lot of disparate elements that maybe almost came together but not quite.  Like when you're putting together that particle board furniture from Wal-Mart and it's got a billion pieces and you get it all done and find that not all the edges line up right.  I give him an A for effort, cause:  DAMN.  I'm going to recommend everyone see it because, again, hate it or love it, it's got style.

Word of the Day:  Pimp

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