Anotherblog

Countdown

And the countdown begins! One day down, four to go. In commemoration of the number four, I had four garmets dry-cleaned today. I may have gone overboard.

Having complained bitterly about the washing-ups inability to do itself, I turned on some Pixies loud - my upstairs neighbours have moved out, so it’s OK now - and laid into it with a scrubbing brush. Take that! Haha! Washing up is good! I should get some more dishes dirty so I can do it again.

Holiday Miscount

*Now* I just feel silly. *Now* there is a mere week to go until I’m on holidays. But at least I’ve been spending the week productively. I bought a CD writer. Now I can transfer “Once Upon A Time” to CD, and I can make compilation CDs to my heart’s content. And I found out that I forgot to credit Jon Blum as “Assistant Director” in Once Upon A Time, something that was easy to fix anyway.

I’ve been cranky all week too, but not in a gripy kind of way, more of a being sullen and grinding my teeth at people’s stupidity, especially my own. How did I fall into this day-to-day existance? I think there was a certain amount of laziness, but there were so many excellent excuses. What’s the point in starting anything when I have only one week until holidays? Don’t I deserve the break from thinking? Maybe the washing up will do itself, if I allow the fungus to mature sufficiently.

Got… to get… my act… together.

Holiday Reading

A mere week to go until I’m on holidays. Yay! Unfortunately, I’ve read almost all of my intended holiday reading. The new Harry Potter book is clever and dark and pretty good, and also finished. Oh well, it was too heavy to take anyway. Hm, what’s left: “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is still unfinished, and I have yet to start “Underworld” or “Idoru”. But I need some fun, lightweight books for the plane. Maybe Georgette Heyer, or Carl Hiassen, or maybe some of the old Roald Dahl. Or perhaps a Dr Who novel or two.

Divine Power

In Divine Power last night, I heard a thousand voices crying out, and then suddenly extinguished. Well, actually, more like 3.4 million, which is how many followers I had accrued before someone called “Goat” attacked. I was running third in population at the time, but I was about 40th in glory, by which the ranks are determined. What are the odds that the #2 or #1 spot was going to attack me? Pretty damn low, you’d think. Still… it must’ve hurt them. I was reduced to 0 population, curse ‘em! Of all the temples in all the theocracies in the world, the goat had to walk into my one! I shall take dire revenge, just you watch!

Actually, I’m sick of Divine Power now. I’m never playing again.

Wait a minute… according to the set of rules I found just here, these exact circumstances mean that I won! Yay! No, you can’t look at them. In fact… whoops! I just lost them. Now go away.

In other, much less important news… I still not only have not found my passport, but I haven’t even written down the name of the village in Italy where I’ll be watching my sister get married in two weeks time. Hmm… that means that I still have two weeks to ask someone! Back to sleep.

X-Men Rave

OK, that’s enough time. Time for a short rant about X-Men. What do you mean, I didn’t give fair warning? There’s the warning right there, in the next post down. The web never lies, you know.

So: as conventional an opinion this is - it seems to have received critical success - I liked X-Men a lot. As someone in rec.arts.movies commented, it’s probably the best live-action hollywood comic-book adaptation. But enough damning with faint praise. What did it do so well?

[Firstly, a caveat - I haven't read *any* of the X-Men comics, or seen the cartoons, or even played the computer games. So I knew almost nothing of the characters before seeing the movie.]

Economy. The film was swiftly paced, and it used its scenes effectively and for multiple purposes. There were never any raw exposition lumps that did not also serve some other purpose - a good example was the scene of the campervan crash, in which we see Wolverine healing - but the scene also served to introduce two other X-men and Sabretooth, and it was told quickly and clearly. Contrast with [warning: easy target] Batman and Robin: the terminally dull ultraviolet hockey fight that served no purpose and took almost ten minutes of screen time. X-Men never extended it’s fighting sequences; we were left wanting *more*. The fights were quick, exciting, satisfying and effectively built-up. The quick pacing allowed more time for character building…

Character. X-Men concentrated on two characters, and allowed others to support. Excellent decision. It would have been easy to try and give all the other X-Men more time, but it would have bloated the film without adding anything significant. Let the sequels give the other X-Men their due.

Acting. It doesn’t hurt that you have a quite astonishing array of good actors. Hugh Jackman and Anna Paquin were convincing and charismatic in their roles. Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen were suitably dignified and intelligent. Other supporting characters were understated, and rightly so. Their time will come.

Plot. Was intelligent. Huh? What? Mad genius attempts to destroy UN delegates? Well, it was a *bit* more complex than that. What I was impressed by was its efforts to keep the plot solid. The Batman films didn’t have very *deep* plots, but they managed to have an astonishing number of plot-holes. I can’t think of *any* plot holes in X-Men. There are some unexplained moments, such as how the X-Men show up to rescue Wolverine and Rogue in the first place. But they’re not important. The plot was solid and Magneto behaved intelligently.

Direction. Didn’t assume the viewer was a complete idiot. The moment when Professor X makes Sabretooth grab Magneto by the throat was initially confusing - what is going on? - but was quickly resolved. When was the last time a hollywood blockbuster allowed the audience to not know what was going on for that long? Ah, it was a good feeling to have characters in a film work out what was going on *before* the audience (and I’m not counting incidents where the audience has no chance, eg. Arnie in End of Days). Am I going on a bit too much about this? Perhaps it isn’t such a dramatic thing, but there were several moments where the script outsmarted me. I was well pleased. The moment when Wolverine hits Mystique/Storm and you realise that Mystique was *her* and not *him* - I was completely fooled. Which leads me to:

Clever bits. It was a pretty clever film. Yes, it had a lot of stuff to draw on, but I was impressed by the logic. Wolverine’s adamantine skeleton (his mutant power is healing - he can therefore be modified much more easily. And it explains why there aren’t little scars on his knuckles for when the blades come out). Magneto’s trapping of the X-Men in the Statue of Liberty (”Get out of here.” “Why?” “Because I can’t move.”) and their subsequent escape. Magneto’s preperations for Rogue’s kidnapping - poisoning the detector so that he couldn’t locate her *and* would be out of action for the Statue of Liberty scene (and we could naturally assume that he wouldn’t kill Professor X).

Finally - super powers. They were clearly defined and put to inventive use. This is the first film I’ve seen that really *explored* a characters super-powers, and made them interesting.

Bring on the sequel. X-Men has set a high-water mark for super-hero films. Perhaps we’ll see V for Vendetta or Watchmen some year soon?

X-Men

I saw “X-Men” last night. I’ll give a bit of a review later, but meanwhile: see it.

Work Deadline

Wow… work deadlines are actually accelerating. Of course I could stop stressing and start working on them, but what kind of behaviour is that? How could I miss a nice whinge? Did I mention that these blogs are likely to be a long series of whinges? It’s fun. Try it.

Still, I got my act semi-together - briefly - and wrote one set of E-Quest orders. That counts as work. So does vital reading like “Reinventing Comics” - very good indeed - and “Which Lie Did I Tell?”, which was interesting and slightly inspirational. Gosh, screenwriters are human, whoda thunk? It was depressing to see a mildly generic screenplay in progress - Goldman provides one as an example - but also instructive, so I guess that’s OK then.

Too tired to think coherently. Must hunt down passport. I’m going on holidays in three weeks - no, make that two and a bit - and I can’t find my passport in my flat. It’s there *somewhere*, but I don’t know if two weeks is enough time to find it… so I’m applying for an Australian one (the other one is NZ, so that’s OK) in the hope that it will double my chances of actually making it. Meanwhile Anna assures me that we won’t have trouble finding accomodation in Greece, despite it being peak season. The extreme heat, wind, and bush fires are driving everybody away. Goody!

Lindor’s Costume

Of course, mustn’t forget Lindor’s costume at the Buffy night - extreme effort, much admired. By god it must have hurt to be a woman when you had to wear a corset every day…

I ran a 1950s monster-horror RPG on the weekend, which I was mildly pleased with. Ted and I brainstemmed it (it’s like brainstorming, only it’s at 8:00am, quite cold, and we are cycling and also rather unfit) and I wrote it up in the afternoon and we played it in the evening. I’d have liked to have a bit of a practice run, but that’s the way with game scenarios - you really can’t give them too much attention because they’re probably going to go off your carefully forged rails fairly quickly. As it happened, the game was a bit too railroady, but now that I think of it, all the monster-horror movies of the 1950’s *did* have reactive (rather than active) heroes. A bit too much work for the GM. But the players didn’t seem to mind :-)

Mad shopping frenzy on Saturday: I decided that I ought to buy screenplays for some of my favorite films, and start reading more about movies. I decided this in the bookstore as I was looking around and spotted
“Which Lie Did I Tell? - More tales of the Screentrade”, by William Goldman. It is enjoyable reading, but is mainly aimed at hollywood writers. The amount of shit that people have to go through to get a star in their film is amazing: I have resolved that I will always finance my own films and will never get a star. So there. This is (amazingly enough) a pretty easy promise to keep: I’m doing so little on Bullet Hole that it feels like I’m not going to finish it… argh!

Next book: Reinventing Comics, the sequal to Understanding Comics, by Scott Chief McCloud. Very good so far, and I can justify it as research. Bullet Hole is a medium-crossing film, at least in theory.

The Screenplays: Fargo, Being John Malcovich, Rushmore, and Henry Fool. I read Being John Malcovich again, and there are interesting little bits that were cut from the film - you can understand why, but the extra bits do fill in some gaps in the story! Fargo is exactly as the Coen Brothers said - every “yah” is scripted. The only deviation from the screenplay to film (a fun hobby, folks) so far is the car crash at the beginning - it is scripted as crashing into a pole, but in the film it went off the road and rolled.

So, um, yes, I wonder where all my time has been going…

Canberra Party

That was fun. The trip to Canberra was kind of boring, but much better than the equivalent bus trip: the extra leg-room and wandering around possibilities of trains make it worth the slight extra expense and extra hour of travel. And there’s always the alleged romance of trains, which for me is the ability to fall asleep quickly while looking at moving scenery, something impossible to do on buses because they put some hideous video on and crank up the volume.

Then off to the party: mellow, but cool. Everyone made some kinda effort. There was a werewolf guy, another Wesley (without business cards… heheheh), a couple of Initiative chaps, and others that I am too hazed out to remember. I stayed up until Dave woke up at 6:00am and took me back to the train station to sleep all the way home. The details are fuzzy because they merge all together, but I think I watched about six buffy episodes. Or maybe I dreamed four of them. I remember the hideous advertisements. I must have been awake.

I started a rather interesting book on the train too: Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond. It is a brief history of the last 11,000 years and attempts to answer the question: why didn’t Papua New Guinea colonise Europe instead of vice versa?

So tired… must sleep…

Wesley, Rogue Demon Hunter

Oboy am I in for it… equest orders still not done, and I’m heading off to Canberra this afternoon for Jimbo’s party. It is a theme party of buffy characters: I’m going as Wesley, rogue demon hunter. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time or patience to get a crossbow or axe, or for that matter, Wesley’s mercifully brief black leather effort. So it’ll have to be business cards and a cream linen jacket, which I should be able to manage.
The other people at work mock me mercilessly for my buffy-watching practices. But I have been carefully plotting revenge. I replaced all the signs in North Sydney by ones that are slightly fuzzy. Carlos has already bought a pair of glasses, and I’m sure Alistair is not too far behind. That’ll show them, and their Ally-watching ways…

The NTSC conversion is done. Today, heart in mouth, I send it off to Atlas games. Would sending it express seem a little too desperate? Would air mail be sufficient? Hm, I suppose the wait will do me good.