I’m supposed to be blogging at 70 Days of Sweat today. but there is some sort of technical difficulty with my post (Help me, Alison! I’ll be your best friend!) and until that is resolved, you won’t get to hear about my rocking writing outfit (it involves robots).
It’s also officially winter around here, and I hate to whine, considering how hard they are getting it in the Northeast and the Midwest, but holy schmoly, why anyone would want to live out outside the tropics still baffles me. I have entered that period of time where I’m just permanently cold and will be staying that way until May. SB keeps talking about how great it will be when it snows, but…no.
This was a big audience weekend for me. I went to see Amanda Brice dance in The Nutcracker on Saturday night. I don’t think I’ve seen The Nutcracker since I was a little girl, and I never remembered being a big fan. I really enjoyed it this weekend, however, and I think I realized why I didn’t like it as a child. It was because the story was over halfway through the show. They defeated the Mouse King, and then the second half of the ballet was just… celebration? Fun, but boring to a my childhood self. As an adult, I was able to set aside my ravenous need for story and simply enjoy some dancing. (The E.T.A. Hoffman story, by the way, has a whole other act with the Mouse Queen and a quest and it isn’t until the very end that the spell on the nutcracker is broken, but it didn’t leave as much room for dances of sugar plum fairies…)
Then, on Sunday, I watched Live Free or Die Hard (if you like the Die Hard franchise, and I do, and like Justin Long, and I very much do), and then Waitress, which I was really looking forward to, and was really disappointed by (totally lost my sympathy for the main character, which is an important lesson in storytelling), and then Tin Man, which I was also very much looking forward to.
I remain undecided about it. On the plus side, woo, fun! Steampunk! Plus, I’m so intrigued by any vividly imagined retelling of something so a part of the cultural consciousness. Also, having read almost all of the Baum books, I gotta say, this is far from the weirdest thing he ever came up with (the vegetable people living inside the hollow earth might take the prize there), so it’s not that much of a stretch, and I don’t think he would be against any of it. And, Alan Cumming. Plus, they set up the Caine character SO FREAKIN’ WELL (his first name is Wyatt, and I love it!) and that torture was brilliant. Brilliant story.
On the minus side, I think they’ve got a lot of interesting ideas there that they aren’t really exploring, I’m not totally sold on Zooey Deschanel’s choices in portraying DG (is she for even one minute surprised about the things she’s seeing?), and so much of the plot seems to hinge on, whenever they get in a pickle, they know someone, and whenever things are going well, they come across some other invention of Azkadelia’s that is in their way. (“Azkadelia’s vapors?” Come on. On top of her flying monkey tattoos and life-sucking breath and psychic-lion-brain-sucking machine, and brain-removal surgery, and the iron torture device/life-support machine –not to mention that’s plenty enough reason for him to be a “tin man” without needing to resort to calling cops “tin men” and also, why, if he was a cop, did he live way out in the woods…?) Anyway, I am sitting on my hands, waiting for it to come together in the next installment. (Speaking of the next installment, if you’re trying to become the queen of a given kingdom, why would you invent a machine that could destroy said kingdom, as the Mystic man seems to intimate in the previews? Questions…) Right now, I’m wondering if Glitch actually did invent all this stuff for her, which would be a cool twist and character-wise, etc…
And we watched Desk Set. I love that movie.
What did you do this weekend?
December 3rd, 2007 at 10:43 am
We should swap places since I’m DYING for snow. And it’s 70 degrees here today.
I went to a winter parade (fun!) and watched Transformers. Surprisingly good.
I also managed to get 25 pages typed and felt great about that.
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December 3rd, 2007 at 11:51 am
I loved Waitress! Why did you lose sympathy for the lead?
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December 3rd, 2007 at 11:54 am
I liked Transformers, too, Jessica! I didn’t really understand the end, but Shia LeBouf was so realistic in the role. I loved the scene with his parents, especially the one with his dad. It was so natural and winning.
Congrats on all the writing!
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December 3rd, 2007 at 11:57 am
It seemed to me that the ending of Transformers was left open for a sequel. Shia was fantastic and I loved Josh Duhamel, too. (How gorgeous is he!)
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December 3rd, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Robin, can’t get behind movies that glorify adultery, and this one did on several different levels.
Mostly because she was sleeping with a happily married man and seemed to feel no compunction about that. I was totally with her re: escaping her awful husband and even if she’d chosen to sleep with someone ELSE — she had an awful husband that she was trying to leave from the very beginning of the story, etc. etc., but the guy she picked instead?
Dude, out of the frying pan…! I mean, he was clearly a grade-A jerk, since he was actually SNEAKING AROUND on his apparently perfectly lovely wife. I just couldn’t get behind it. I coudln’t figure out why he was being held up as this fabulous person, blah blah. He. Was. Cheating. On. His. Wife. And she was clearly in SO MUCH TROUBLE with her husband and instead of him helping her, he’s driving her around in a Lexus and buying her solid gold pie plates? Ick ick and ICK.
The only character I liked was the waitress who married the weird nerdy guy.
I wished the guy she was sleeping with had not had that conflict, and yet she STILL decided to move on without him. That would have been nice.
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December 3rd, 2007 at 12:09 pm
I spent Thanksgiving on a tropical island and have to confess I missed cool, foggy mornings. Of course I live in SoCal and have been in the snow 4 times in my life, so by no means do I love *real* cold.
Spent the weekend relaxing, finishing watching Das Boot (which is not relaxing), Dexter, re-watching some of The Wire season 2, and Chuck.
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December 3rd, 2007 at 12:19 pm
We got our Christmas tree this weekend, my first real tree in years! I missed that real tree smell.
I’m hating this cold!! BRRR!!! And I saw snow flurries this morning.
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December 3rd, 2007 at 12:42 pm
I watched all of Firefly in sequence this weekend. WHY DID IT END???? Dumb dumb dumb tv people…
Robin – I’ve gotta agree with Diana in principle on this one.(Principle only because I haven’t seen Waitress)
I also caught sweet home alabama -I always feel bad for Dr. McDreamy in that movie. Same type of reason as Diana lists above. Had he been a jerk in the movie, it might have been ok.
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December 3rd, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Actually, Patrick, bringing it back to the “deleted scenes” discussion of last week, apparently there was a whole deleted plotline about Patrick Dempsey’s character falling in love with Reese’s assistant while she was gone (Reese’s asst.? His asst? Someone’s asst.) I don’t know why they cut it, but it made it “easier” on him being dumped.
I didn’t like that movie either, though. I think it was because it was billed as a rom com but was really more of a drama. Plus, dead dogs…
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December 3rd, 2007 at 12:49 pm
It was so nice on Saturday (was in the low 60’s)I decided to take my dog Potter to the dog park to burn off some energy, Then in the evening I finished all the little minor details for “The Big ‘Ol Raleigh Bash” (aka second wedding reception)
On Sunday I Decorated the outside of the house, put away waedding presents, started wedding thank you’s, and watched The Tin Man which was AWESOME, Can’t wait for night two.
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December 3rd, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Dragonfly, belated congrats on the wedding! BEST WISHES to you and your husband!
And please don’t tell me you’ve started on your thank you notes. I’m such a bad bride… I’m so behind everything.
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December 3rd, 2007 at 1:00 pm
That would have made it better. The only villian in the movie seemed to be Candice Bergen.
Yeah, not a true Rom Com, but cute at times. That’s about the best I hope for in Rom Com these days.
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December 3rd, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Diana,
The only reason I have started the Thank You’s is because my husband leaves for Iraq in Jan and want to make sure he gets a chance to sign them before he leaves. I figured if I do 5 a night it won’t be too bad. I am lucky we had a very small wedding so should be quick work. Then I have to think about starting on my Christmas Cards. *Sigh*
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December 3rd, 2007 at 1:11 pm
I think the problem with romantic comedies nowadays is trying to come up with a realistic conflict. A lot of the tried and true stuff like class differences are not going to read as realistic to modern audiences. There’s a reason that Kubrick said that Lolita was the only modern romance — there was true conflict there.
I really liked the film Secretary, with James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal. I bought the romance and I laughed a a lot. But you have to be up for how it’s kinda kinky. And I also liked Something New, though in the end I couldn’t figure out what the hero saw in the heroine. (This was also my problem with My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which I did like, but they failed to sell me on what she saw in HIM –other than the fact that he paid attention to her — and what he saw in HER — other than the fact that her family was awesome and colorful and his was not.)
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December 3rd, 2007 at 1:22 pm
(I just sent you an email related to this post.)
I enjoyed LFDH, but I didn’t buy the plausability of Timothy O. tracking Bruce and Justin the way he did.
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December 3rd, 2007 at 4:25 pm
This weekend I wrote and wrote and wrote some more. However by 4:00 PM on Sunday, after a major two day marathon (wc unbelievable) I also wrote those wonderful words ‘The End’.
I watched Transformers a couple of weeks ago and loved the movie.
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