Category Archives: Art, Theatre, & Film

Watching Movies

On t!’s recommendation, we watched Minority Report last night instead of tuning into the Oscars. It’s an excellent film – it made me jump in two places. Not that jumping is a standard by which I judge films; the exact opposite, actually. It’s just that this was well-paced, well-written, and well-acted, with a couple of nifty twists.

Unfortunately, even with a running time of two hours and twenty minutes, all of Minority Report could not safely obscure the Academy Awards completely. When we switched off the DVD, there they were, awarding the interesting stuff: soundtracks, best films, and so forth. I did have to check the website this morning though to discover that Spirited Away won Best Animated Feature. I’m thrilled. Actually, I was impressed with the general level of justice done at this year’s Oscars, except for one award: as much as I adored Chicago, it didn’t deserve Best Picture.

In general, I had a wonderful weekend, visiting with friends and cooking and achieving an overall state of relaxation. I seem to have finally hit a plateau after nine months of freelancing at home where I can actually relax and not feel guilty about it. Feeling a constant sense of anger due to the guilt inherently attached to inactivity when you walk away from the computer to sit down and read a book is a lousy way to live, let me tell you. It’s taken me this long to adjust to working in a non-traditional environment. It’s a small victory, but an important one.

24, Season One

We finished watching 24 last night. I’m glad they went with the ending they did, because the alternate one was just awful. Overall, I’m impressed, and my only complaint lies with the weak wife/daughter storyline after episode twelve. It’s almost as if they said, “Hey, we have the full season go-ahead! Great! Jack can do all this cool stuff in the next ten episodes!” Then after a while they said, “Oh, wait… what are we going to do with the women?” and came up with some lame action that rendered them remarkably unsympathetic.

I have been promised cable today! It’s a bit of a pain that Videotron can’t be more specific about the installation, other than saying they’ll be here sometime between 7.30 AM and 8.00 PM, though.

New Article Published!

Urk. When I wasn’t looking, the Owlyblog’s counter passed 10K. How did that happen?

My commentary on Oscar-nominated Lilo & Stitch has been officially web-published, and is up over at the fps site! It’s a five-fold project that looks at all the films nominated for Best Animated Feature Film category this year, each film examined by a different writer in a different light. The project centres around how each Oscar-nominated film stands for something within the animation industry, as opposed to “reviewing” or commenting on “Oscar-worthiness”. It was a really interesting exercise, and I enjoyed it a lot. I thank all the gods out there that Emru responded to the cry of “Who edits the editor?”, so that errors could be corrected and things flowed better. I can fix other people’s writing, but I’m always too involved with my own abstracts and thesis statements to do a final polish on my own work, because I know what I was trying to say all along.

By the way, do you think spring’s finally catching up with the calendar? Winter’s only got another three days, after all.

Stoppard Adapts Pullman

I’ve been meaning to post this for a few days now:

Tom Stoppard is adapting a script for Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass for New Line Cinema.

How cool is that?

(If you’re as cooled out by this as I was, and you’re wondering how on earth they’re going to pull it off, there’s a rather amusing ‘what-if’ scene about the pitch etc here. And the fan site Bridge To The Stars is pretty decent all around.)

Building Models And Letting Them Go Free…

I’m a geek, which is hardly news to you. I’m a geek who has actually built starship models in the past. Nothing recently, alas (although I have a Lego X-Wing in a chest just awaiting the day I throw off the covers and know deep in my bones that it’s a Star Wars Lego day and nothing can stop me!), because I just don’t have the time or space these days. My Excelsior and X-Wing models have survived three moves in the past seven years, and have always been on top of my bookshelves or on windowsills somewhere in my apartment.

Well, during this move, they finally broke. Not into little bits, either – big breaks that really can’t be fixed without a lot of epoxy, prayers, and about five hands to hold it as it dries. So the Excelsior got tossed last week, and this week when I came across my poor shattered X-Wing, I sighed, said good-bye, and placed it right on top of the box I’ve been using to collect further rubbish.

Well, yesterday as I worked on my article about Disney’s use of SF in Lilo & Stitch (yes, I’ll let you know when it’s published on the fps site – remember fps from its print days?), my little black kitten was sitting on the desk, watching me. I was vaguely aware of her presence — one cannot ignore relentless cuteness — but I suddenly snapped into reality when I heard a soft grinding noise. I glanced sideways and saw Nix, her amber eyes on mine, dreamily chewing on an S-foil, with the occasional delicate nibble on an engine casing.

I yelped and waved my hands, and she leapt away, startled. Then I realised that my fierce protection was unwarranted, since it was in the garbage anyway, and I began to laugh. I could almost hear her wail as she streaked under the dining room table: “It’s only a little more carbon scoring, Mummy, and you did such a wonderful job on the carbon scoring….”

Thoughts on 24, Season One

Every time I break my own rule of Never-Compose-A-Blog-Entry-Online, my computer crashes. Thus, you are deprived of a deep, intelligent examination of the television phenomenon 24, which my husband and I began watching this weekend. The highlights were basically as follows:

– Who says the first episode absolutely must be immediately followed by the second? It was a forty-five minute meet-the-characters, these-are-the-environments bite with no cliffhanger.

– We watched six straight hours of 24 on Saturday night, until we hit the end of the two DVDs we had borrowed. Needless to say, as of Monday night, we had the rest of the set in our possession. Damn, this is addictive.

– We’re starting to see how the first eight episodes are nice and tight, operating on the potential reality of ratings not meriting the second half of the season. By episode eight, it is completely possible that all ends can be tied up in two more episodes. Then, things change and become even more complex, presumably because ratings secured the last twelve episodes.

– The only thing better than seeing huge billboards with Keifer Sutherland on them along highways last season is actually sitting in the comfort of my own living room and watching Keifer Sutherland do cool stuff, and being able to select the next episode from the DVD menu to watch him some more.

More good job news: I have been contacted by a woman who took a handful of my courses last fall, who has booked me to do a private seminar for seven women at her home in early April. I’m thrilled that she asked me, and I’m really looking forward to doing it. The only problem? She asked me how much I would charge for such an evening, and I had to admit that I had no idea, and that I’d get back to her. I shouldn’t have been so proud about being able to quote my rate for writing services last weekend; evidently that gets filed under ‘Hubris’, and the universe feels obliged to present me with a situation such as this one to return me to my properly humble state. Normally I’d charge $25 per head for this particular seminar if I taught it in association with the business I usually teach through, but it doesn’t seem fair to apply the same rate, somehow. I want to charge less, but still not sell myself short. (Look, Mum, I can be taught!) I can’t apply the obvious solution — namely, using my writing services hourly rate — because that pretty much equals the average of the per-head fee of my regular seminars, which would mean that I’d be teaching seven people for the price of one.

Grr. My time is money. This was my mantra for a while in January while I worked out that hourly rate, and it looks like I’m going to have to chant it again for a while until I figure this out. Anyone have any ideas? What do companies pay outside specialists to come in and present seminars for their staff – say a three-hour seminar? There’s a huge range of potential fees according to a variety of factors, I know, but anything would help at this point.