Links.
:: In my personal life, I have an eight-year-old, and that dictates a lot of my life. In the world, there are things (war, environmental catastrophes) being done, sometimes in my name, and it appears than I have absolutely nothing to do about it. (Roger answers the same questions that I answered a few days ago.)
:: I honestly don’t even think about money anymore. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I don’t think about being able to spend it. (So does SamuraiFrog.)
:: So c’mon — gimme all your hot monkey love! (Oh, you have got to click through on this one. Trust me…especially if you had any love for the X-Men back in the day….)
:: Whenever I sit back to take a closer look at a series like Star Trek: The Original Series, a series that helped define who I am, I get an almost fuzzy feeling. I’m probably the wrong person to look at this series objectively. It can rarely do wrong and when it does, like your child, you are forgiving and still love it unconditionally. But more often than not it succeeds as it does here. (This is why I’ve long-since stopped believing in ‘looking at something objectively’. It’s a fool’s quest, seeking a target that simply does not exist.)
:: The thing about biographical movies is that for the actors playing people who were actual Real People In History, and particularly for recent Real People, there is a fine line you have to walk between “this is who that person sounded like” and “this is who that person actually was.” People become famous for their verbal tics and how they generally hold themselves, but that’s not who they were, not when you get right down to it. Any person is infinitely more complex than their public persona, and a good actor works to capture the person’s interior life (as best they are able) and use that to bring out the public side of things. (Interesting post about the Oliver Stone movie Nixon, which I blogged about myself a while back.
:: The whole notion of State’s Rights, and the necessity of state representation in Congress has caused a great deal of mischief, and I think the time has come to start rethinking it. (I tend to agree…but I’m not at all sure what to do about it.)
:: It’s not cool to like The Patriot, especially these days after the Fall of Mel Gibson, but even back in the day it had a bad reputation as the American Braveheart. That’s not fair. (As I pointed out in comments, I was liking this movie just fine up until the extremely gratuitous, ‘let’s ratchet the bad guy’s evil all the way up to 11’ torching-the-church scene….)
:: Whether you’re a reader or a writer, reading poorly-written dialogue is the same as being a musician and listening to music being played off-key. There’s only so much of that you can take before it becomes almost painful — and I think that’s why so often bad dialogue is a book killer. (This is what makes me most nervous about re-reading my own stuff…I’m afraid that my dialog is shit. We’ll see…editing starts [gulp] tomorrow….)
More next week! (or not. You can never tell, with me.)