Day in the Life of an Idiot

Absolutely EVERYTHING.

Except I don't think I did much reading this week. Possibly a manga or two. Oh, yes, I did read My Neighbor Seki / Tonari no Seki-kun (Vol. 1) by Takuma Morishige, but I didn't much care for it.  It should have been perfect for me, it's one of those low-drama slice-of-life type stories I've been craving lately, but it was TOO silly. The story is about a middle grade girl, Rumi, and her desk neighbor, Seki. Seki brings toys to school and plays imaginative games with them that Rumi gets emotionally invested in... to the point that SHE'S the one who gets in trouble for goofing off, not him.  This seems to be a never-ending gag.  I could have read the remaining eight volumes that I'd checked out of the library, but I just didn't trust that the story would ever move beyond this. TBF, normally, I don't need it to. This time, I was just much more "meh" about the set-up. Also, I'm a really hard sell on certain types of broad humor, in manga (often the exact same stuff will work just fine for me in anime.)

I also skimmed an on-line manga called Acid Town by Kyuugo. This one, I started to really like, but then the mangaka seemingly got enamored by some side-characters I cared a whole lot less for, and this angst-y yaoi turned very plot-heavy in a way made me skip through a lot of the action waiting to reconnect with our main characters. I reviewed this one because there was enough in it that I found compelling, but it's not something I'd recommend to anyone who doesn't already consume a LOT of manga.

That was about it.  Normally, Christmas is a great time for me to catch up on reading, but I actually ended up really busy the day after Christmas.  We had gotten FREE tickets to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi at 9:15 am on the 26th, and, just as I was headed out the door, my boss from Ramsey County Library called asking if I could fill in for someone who had suddenly quit. I like to do these emergency saves time to time, so that my boss thinks favorably of me, so I agreed. It was kind of a mistake. The movie was GREAT (thank you to those who encouraged me to go), but it wasn't over until noon, and with getting everyone back (we took Mason's girlfriend along), I wasn't really back home and settled until 1 pm. That just MESSED ME UP.  Plus, I am super grateful for the FREE tickets, but OMG I'm not sure I would ever do a movie that early in the morning again.  

First of all, it's just plain weird to see a movie in the morning. Secondly, I did NOT consume enough coffee.  I think, had I to do it over, I would have made sure to get up earlier and made a trip to get an espresso drink from somewhere. For some reason, I was expecting the theater to have better food options.  We went to Oakdale, which I had remembered as being so full-service that they have a bar in the theater. So, I figured they'd have something decent for breakfast, since they have almost a full menu around lunch time.  But, no. The only options were popcorn and pretzel bits.  I opted for the pretzel bits because... small salty bagels?  NO. VERY BAD CHOICE.

We also saw it in mega-ultra max or whatever the better than IMAX version is... and, I didn't need that. We actually had the best seats for that kind of experience (way in the very back row), so we could see the whole screen, but everyone coveted those seats, so I was knee to knee with my neighbor.  

All of that aside, I loved the movie.  Probably because I had read so much hate, I was really expecting a terrible film.  I thought it was fun, very worthy of the Star Wars franchise.  My ships are battered, but unbroken, honestly.  Sure, they tried to spray no homo on some folks, but I'm not entirely sure it worked, especially since a huge part of my personal head canon involves polyamory (and an ace Rey). But, that's all I can say without being spoiler-y and I'm not sure I'm up for a full written dissection, ATM.  I literally can not understand any of the hate.  Given all the warnings, I expected the film to be "messier" than it was. The porgs were fine. WTF, fandom. Chill out. Phantom Menace was a WAY sh*ttier film. ( Okay, one small spoiler )Not that I have feels about it or anything. :-)

If I were a boy, I would totally date Sir Ian McKellen. Plus, it would be weirdly sexy to call him "sir" in bed. The reason I say this, however, is not just because I'm perverse, but also because I watched "Neverwas" last night via Netflix. What a surprisingly good film. It was not the "thriller" it was advertised to be, but Shawn and I decided it was kind of like a psychological drama, rather than a psychological thriller. It was also kind of a fantasy, but not.

I can see what it wasn't exactly a blockbuster.

But, I really ended up liking it tremendously. The story is about a Christopher Robin/Christopher Tolkien type character, whose father wrote a massively famous epic fantasy/children's story in which, like the first example, he was the star of. The father, unlike either of my two examples, suffers from manic depression and ultimately kills himself. The son blames himself and has distanced himself from his father's work (the "Neverwas" of the title) as well as devotes himself to the study of psychology. He ends up back at his hometown on the 25th anniversary of his father's suicide and worms his way into a job at the very mental health facility that had unsuccessfully treated his dad. The mystery/fantasy part comes in when it starts to seem as if there is a very REAL possibility that Neverwas was a real place... there even seems to be photographic evidence suggesting this... and that Ian McKellen's character is its king.

The movie has a lot of very moving, subtle moments. Shawn didn't trust the ending to satisfy. In fact, she was so convinced it was going to be utterly tragic that she got up and got ready for bed ten minutes from the end telling me to let her know if it was okay and she'd only watch it if it was.

The ending was way more than okay. It was borderline "feel good." It satisfied me deeply, if I were to be perfectly honest. It wasn't quite dramatic enough to be a tearjerker, but I think that might be another reason it wasn't a huge blockbuster. Subtle isn't usually what people go to the movies for.

Anyway, not much else new to report. I'm about to go pick up Eleanor for our usual Wednesday coffee/writing date.

Last night I got out to see IRON MAN 2 with my usual Marvel buddy, seanmmurphy. I know a lot of people are more lukewarm about this installment, but I enjoyed it tremendously. Of course, I'll say without spoiling that the cross-over-y bits were lovely, and I can only hope that this grand experiment Marvel seems to be up to actually works.

I have my doubts.

Thing is, I think they have a misunderstanding of movie-goers and Americans, in general. Like I told seanmmurphy last night, my agent speculated that one of the reasons Penguin was done with my Garnet Lacey series was because I'd committed the cardinal sin of marrying the two love interests. _Everyone knows_ you can no longer have fun, spark or excitment once you're in a committed relationship. I'd really hoped to prove them wrong. Because, for me, after twenty four years, I'm still head over heels, crazy in love. Every day is an adventure BECAUSE she's with me, BECAUSE of our history.

But the larger issue is that it has been established that romances are about "first blush," NEW love. American culture is very much about the new and improved. Throw out the old. Get the divorce and find the new, better, stronger, faster lover.

I think one of the reasons for that is because we don't have a lot of successful stories about romance between committed partners. The writers of the movie Titanic ignored one of the true life romances of that disaster (Mr. and Mrs. Strauss, an older couple, who stayed together and died together because they refused to be parted) and made up a more palatiable romance for American audiences (which was both forbidden -- by class -- and new and young.)

This relates to IRON MAN 2, how? Well, Marvel is expecting people to commit to characters. "Lost" and other serial TV shows have to give you the "previously, on 'Lost'..." bits because they know Americans audiences have etch-a-sketch brains. If it didn't just happen, they don't remember it. (By Americans, I mean, of course the general, average viewer. It is well established that fan brains are different. We have a legendary/notorious retention of storyline details and we are more comfortable with going with what's not familiar for a lot longer than the average reader/viewer.)

I don't know what that's going to be like, if, several years from now, they do success in making the Avengers movie. There's going to have to start being more than just a few hints and cameos.

And then there's going to be trouble.

Hollywood does NOT like ensemble casts. This to me is the reason for the relative failure of movies like THE FANTASTIC FOUR and SERENITY. It should be noted that I liked both movies, though I found them problematic. The problems centered around this issue. I think both tried too hard to fit the classic Hollywood mold and be about ONE character having ONE problem. The FF are a team AND a family. Their story needs to involve every character equally. Same was true of "Firefly" the TV show, which didn't translate well when they tried to make it mostly just about Captain tightpants/Mal.

So will Marvel be able to pull of an ensemble cast of big name actors all together on one screen? I don't know. I hope they can buck all the trends.

I'm at my favorite coffee shop today because today is Thursday, and Thursday is my busy day.

First of all, it's always recycling. It's also fish tank changing day. Thursday is the day that I volunteer to stuff folders at Mason's school, as well. Tonight is Wyrdsmiths, which means that soon I need to go home find the handouts from last week, read and critique them, AND print out what I'm going to hand out tonight. By chance this evening is also a meeting for parents, etc., of gifted students and I agreed to go to that since it's downtown and they're going to provide my dinner (and it gets done before Wyrdsmiths starts).

Did I mention busy?

Oy.

Even so, I managed to finish Scott Westerfeld's SO YESTERDAY, which I enjoyed. The hero is a teenager named Hunter whose job it is to spot trends, sniff out cool just before it hits the mainstream. His love interest is a girl named Jen who is an Innovator, someone who invents cool just before it hits mainstream, but, consequentially, is also a bit odd and out of step in her own way. They get caught up in a mystery involving shoes. (Seriously.)

I'd really wanted to read Westerfeld's UGLY/PRETTIES series, but my library only had one that seemed to be far along in the series. SO YESTERDAY was the only one of his that they had that was self-contained. As I mentioned before I was actually a fan of Westerfeld's and didn't know it. I read both the short story and what eventually became the novel EVOLUTION'S DARLING, which I found weird, but compelling. Westerfeld has some kind of funky writing juju, I think. I suspect he shouldn't be as popular as he is, but his narrative tone/voice is strangely compelling. I wish I could figure out how to harvest that, and make it work for me.

Shawn and I also watched "My Life in Ruins" a chick-flick about a 40-something woman who works as a tour guide in Greece who finds true love with a scruffy bus driver named "Poopy." (Seriously.)

Say what you will, but I tend to really enjoy feel good movies where people find love. One thing I've learned about myself is that I'm not terribly discriminating about what I want from a movie. I was a terrible movie reviewer when I did it for focusPOINT because I'm not all that critical of these kinds of sappy, formulaic films. I get wound up about my science fiction or my angel movies and I tend to find art films obtuse and irritating, but the Hollywood formula works for me. I like my action films to run like a big advertisement for the video game with a lot of explosions, and I want my romances to be sappy and predictable.

It's embarrassing, really. Shawn inevitably looks over at me and says, horrified, "Are you sniffling???"

I don't want to talk about it. I'm easy, okay?

My folks are coming up this weekend to celebrate my birthday with me (early), and to see the Louvre exhibit at the MIA. I should probably add "clean the house" to the list of things I need to do today. Oh, but that reminds me. I need to pick up a cheese pizza for Mason and Shawn. They're going to have a movie night in my absence.

Well, I should go do something constructive... or start on my to-do list!

Some of the things that I bought in our recent trip to HalfPrice Books were a few single-issues of “The Amazing Spider-Man” title, written by J. Michael Straczynski.

40 / 481 “Sensitive Issues”
42 / 483 “A Strange Turn of Events”
43 / 484 “Cold Arms”
44/ 485 “Arms and the Men”
45 / 486 “Until the Stars Turn Cold”

Which, by chance, is almost a complete story arc, and, as a bonus, I actually read an issue or two preceding so I knew that Aunt May had recently discovered Peter’s secret identity. I didn’t know, however, that Pete and Mary Jane had separated, so it took me a couple of issues to realize that she wasn’t just off in L.A. for a movie shoot, and that when Petey misses her (uh, because he’s in the astral plane at the time) at the airport it’s a REALLY BIG DEAL.

The superhero story involves a crazed entrepreneur who decides that it’d be cool to upgrade Doc Ock’s mechanical arms and, you know, rob banks and generally cause havoc. Octavius is tricked into giving over the arms by being offered a job as a consultant to a cybernetic research company or some such. Anyway, of course, even though he’s initially overcome, Doc Ock is able to get his arms back and start kicking his doppleganger’s a$$. This happens, for once, not in NYC, but LA (which turns out to be quite convenient.)

The soap opera (which is my favorite part) has to do with how awkward it is that Aunt May now knows and Mary Jane knows, but neither of them knows that the other one is in on the BIG secret. And, of course, Peter is trying to apologize for being in the astral plane when he should have been at the airport, but MJ is having none of it. She’s getting tired of being second on his “to do” list (even if number one *is* saving the world.) And, wouldn’t you know it? The movie she’s involved in is a superhero movie (Brad Pitt as “Lobster Man!!”) and her role is to play the first girlfriend who is killed by the bad guy and makes Wolverine, er, “Lobster Man” go feral and get stronger or whatever. This plot device allows MJ and her co-star to have a lot of revealing conversations about what it’s really like to be a super-hero’s girlfriend and what might motivate someone to BE a super-hero.

I love any comic that deals with the “reality” of being a hero, so I’m a sucker for this particular storyline. And, honestly, I’m beginning to realize that I’m a big fan of the way Straczynski writes Peter Parker/Spider-Man. He lets us explore some vaguely uncomfortable issues, like, at one point the Brad Pitt stand-in says to MJ that he thinks that the girlfriend of a super-hero is fooling herself if she thinks she’s anything other than a doormat, because, really, at the end of the day, he’s going to save the world, not hang out with the girl.

And, of course, that’s exactly what she’s dealing with.

That and I love that Aunt May hates that Peter is constantly in harm’s way… it made me hyper-aware that every punch landed was going to leave some kind of mark. We see him at one point putting on make-up to disguise a facial bruise, and, of course, May notices because those things are never good at real cover-up (heck, it doesn’t always do that good a job at hiding acne, which it’s supposed to!) And, that just gets my mind going, you know? How *does* he hide all his bruises from his students/colleagues at school? (Peter Parker, if you don’t know, now teaches high school science in the inner city. Apparently the benefits of being a freelance photographer for the “Bugle” sucked more than working for the New York City School District, which is almost hard to believe….) But, anyway, what must they think, that he’s in some kind of fight club or something? That MJ beats him up?

I suspect Stracznyski deals with that at some point. He seems to like teasing out these kinds of “what ifs” which is what makes him a writer after my own heart.

Even though this issues are WAY old, if you find them in collection I heartily recommend picking them up.

Also, I’d promised a review of sorts of “Outlander” the movie starring Jesus (from Mel Gibson’s film in Aramaic) as a space alien who lands in Norway in 700 A.D. and accidentally brings with him the last of a vengeful a alien species, who just happen to look a bit like mythological dragons. It’s “Alien” meets “Thirteenth Warrior.” And it’s kind of cool.

Boing-boing or Gizmoto (where Shawn first heard of it), I suspect made it seem much cooler than the reality, but there were several bits I enjoyed tremendously. First of all, the love interest (played by MJ Parker! No, although she was a fiery red-head,) kicks some serious butthocks. SPOILER! She actually kills both aliens, not the hero. And, speaking of “heroes” this guy isn’t typical. First of all, it becomes clear that his people in general, and him in specific, are responsible for genocide of the alien race that’s now trying to eat the humans. We get some pretty grizzly images of bulldozers shoving burnt alien bodies into gigantic mass graves. I thought at this point our sympathies were meant to be stretched, that maybe after this reveal, the hero would, you know, grow some morals and decide instead of mass slaughter, he’d make some kind of peace with the poor, oppressed aliens. Nope. Worse, the visuals we get imply that maybe alien #1 is (or was,) a pregnant female because suddenly a smaller alien appears on stage. And we kill them both.

The end.


But, you know, our hero falls in love and adopts an orphan, oh, and become king, so I guess it’s all good. I also thought that our hero would inject a little modern/alien thinking into Old Norse and let the heroine, who, in point of fact, saved her people, become the queen, but no, he totally accepts the badge of kingliness and rules happily ever after, I guess.

Maybe she liberates herself in the sequel. (No, there isn’t one.)

However, there’s a cool skiffy bit where, after our dude crash lands, we find out that Earth is an abandoned seed colony, which explains why he’s bipedal and presumably can intermix with the locals, as it were. Also, he doesn’t start out speaking English (or Old Norse, as the case may be.) There are subtitles (from alienish) at the beginning and then he’s injected with language skills Matrix-style, and then everyone speaks English. Which, you know, is enough hand-waving for me, honestly.

I’m not entirely sure I’d recommend it, but it’s cool for its genre: Viking/Space Aliens. It’s certainly something to be seen.

It's finally raining here in Saint Paul. It started early this morning and has been soaking us non-stop all day. We need it badly, though it meant that there was no "bouncy house" at the birtday party Mason attending this afternoon for a school friend. Mason, of course, asked after it in his very precocious way and informed me that, "it most assuredly will be here next year."

The party was a lot of fun, despite the fact that it was regulated to the indoors. The mom had crafts ready, and they have a relatively newer house with a finished basement for the kids to roam around in (as well as exciting toys, like marble puzzles, as well as board games of all sorts.) Mason had an awesome time. I only feel a bit bad because we got his friend a series of books he already had the first five of, and now I can't find the reciept for them to make an exchange.

Last night Shawn and I finally watched "Life Without People." I had no idea David Brin was one of the commenters in that! And, secondly, it's the kind of movie I've been thinking about a lot afterwards. I keep looking around thinking, "Huh, how long would it take for THAT to be overgrown." The movie did wonders for my sense of my own gardening skills, however. Clearly, the fact that my garden is recognizable as intentional at ALL is a major testimony to my abilities. And, when things get overgrown I'm just going to say, "Look, it's an experiement in 'Life without People.' I'm returning things to their natural state."

I do see how they could make a miniseries out of the idea though. I had a lot of unanswered questions, myself. They made the whole "and then the animals return and the entire ecosystem rebounds" idea seem like good grounds to promote genocide, yet, only in one instance, did they talk about invasive species and their effect. (In the movie it was some kind of foreign muscle that cogs the Hoover dams cooling pipes.) But, I was thinking: what about all the work the DNR does to keep native species healthy and not overrun by invasive aliens, as it were? I mean, it's great that the wolf and deer population would boom, but wouldn't the purple loosestrife boom too? And what of the one butterfly that lives only on wild lupine that tons of gardeners in the Upper Midwest intentionally plant (and cultivate, etc.) in their gardens? I think that the documentary director/writers focused way more on how much better earth would be without us (which I can agree with, for the most part,) but at the expense of full-picture-ness, I think.

Also, I'm totally craving the next disc for "The Closer" (a cable TV show starring Kyra Segwick a.ka. Mrs. Kevin Bacon, that's really just a jazzed up police procedural for a quirky priority homocide team in Los Angeles, but which is surprisingly addictive.)

Mason right now is reading, even though it's past his bedtime. He's getting one of those nights where he can stay up as long as he likes as long as he's reading. I stopped in at HalfPrice Books to get the present for his friend's birthday today, and they had a summer reading promotional called "Feed Your Brain." If kids log in at least fifteen minutes a day reading every day, they're eligible for a $3.00 coupon. Mason has decided this is a challenge to read as much as humanly possible.

Who am I to dissude him?

I'm going to log-off now and see what other Netflix we have around the house and try to convince Shawn it's time for popcorn and a movie.