NaNoWriMo 2012 wrap up

November is over, as you have undoubtedly heard by now. The fact that I'm here means that I survived it, so here's what happened to me during the 2012 National Novel Writing Month.
For the first time in the nine years that I've been doing this, I wrote every single day for at least three hours. In the past, I've always taken off Thanksgiving, but that's such a bad thing to do, because one little day away from the schedule leads to more days away from it. For me, this has not been about making my word count. I have that whole fifty thousand word thing down, I think. I'm not bragging, because we all know that quantity does not equal quality. My goal is to actually finish a story in 30 days, with the assumption that I will make my word count. In past years, I've written outlines, I've not written outlines, I've written character bios, I've not written character bios. You get the idea. What I did this year was write an outline that was broken down by days, well actually sessions, instead of by story. Some days had two subject areas, some days were the continuation of the previous day. This worked brilliantly for me. Mostly. There were a couple of days that the writing was just not flowing, even though I forced myself to remain at the task, and I got a day behind. I think I've stumbled on the trick for future NaNoWriMos.
I can't tell you if the book was good or bad. Seriously. I, somehow, managed to keep the internal editor off for the whole time I wrote, and he's still off because I'm still taking a break from novel writing. It turns out that it's much easier to write a complete rough draft if you are not spending the last ten or so of the 30 days second guessing everything you've written. I suspect I will be changing lots of things, especially since I haven't yet achieved a final draft for the manuscript that this year was a sequel to. The plan is to finish the current draft on book one, before starting the second draft on this book, so it will remain my Schrodinger book for a while. Until I read what I have written it will both be brilliant and shite.
Another first this November was getting up to write at 5 am on 29 out of the 30 days. Well, maybe 28. On the first, I started writing at midnight and wrote until I was too sleepy to keep going and then went down for a little nap and got up at five, at least that was the intention. I might not have. Let's say I did. On Thanksgiving, I definitely did not get up at five because I didn't set the alarm clock. The whole getting up early thing was brilliant and I am so glad it's over. It is much easier for me to get in that extra hour of writing on the top of the day instead of trying to make room for it at the bottom of the day.
Closely tied with my five am wake up calls, was a change in my radio listening habits. I only listened to NPR from five to six until the last five days when I listened from five until seven. Typically, I listen until 8:30 when I go on my walk. When I wasn't listening to the radio, I had prepared playlists for each of the narrators. They were somewhere between the music I thought the character would prefer to listen to and the music I liked that I thought best evoked the character. This is definitely a trick I will use in the future, with the exception of the classical music playlist. The classical music playlist was a fail, not because I don't like classical music, but because I hadn't listened to the music before. I checked out some from the library, put it on my iPod and let it rip. The music just distracted me. I know you must think that NPR would distract me, and it does at the beginning of the morning, but then I was still eating my breakfast. It's more of the hosts voices soothing me because they're familiar, not unlike favorite music.
I was the last person of those that I followed during the month to actually submit my words for an official count to be declared a winner. It seems to me that if your goal is tor write fifty thousand words, then as soon as you're done, sure, verify and win. But, if you're goal is to write a story, maybe not so much. Even if I had finished a day or two early, I would have gone back to some of the skimpy sections and added more.
I will do National Novel Writing Month next year. A friend and I had an exchange about doing NaNoWriMo and why we continue to do it, and I wrote that I will continue to do this crazy yearly writing rush until I am in a position where an editor has me writing something that keeps me from doing it. That seems a pretty fair trade-off.

The Avengers (2012)

All bow before the mighty mightiness that is Joss Whedon!
How long have I been waiting to watch this film? 10? 15 years? When did the first X-Men film come out? I've been waiting since then. I think I've secretly been wanting one since I saw that 80s-something Captain America movie and the David Hasslehoff film (made for television film maybe?) where he plays Nick Fury. I say secretly because both of those movies totally sucked, though I will admit here to the world that I've seen the Captain America movie twice. I didn't want an Avengers movie that sucked. So, we get that X-Men movie and it was pretty good, and I really liked the first Spiderman, so then I was all like, ya, now we can have an Avengers film.
Of course, I would have cast the Avengers differently - I don't mean the actors whom I am pretty much okay with - well let's say on balance I'm okay with them. I guess I really mean the line-up. Where's Dr. Pym? Where's his lady love, Janet VanDyne? It seems kind of weird to have an Avengers without Antman/Giantman/Goliath and the Wasp. At least they got Iron Man, Thor and Captain America, all of whom are essential. I'm okay with Hawkeye and Black Widow. I guess. Hulk? Not so much. I understand this venture is as much about a movie franchise as about anything else, so I understand why they want to tie their lines together. And I'm a big fan of the Iron Man movies - and I liked both Captain America and Thor. Heck, I even liked the Hulk movie. Both of them. The Hulk is not a franchise I'm terribly interested in, especially hearing that the next Hulk film will reboot him once again. But, you know what would really rock? A movie about Vision and the Scarlet Witch. You could bring Pym in through that, and that's how you beef up the ranks of the Avengers without the Hulk.
You know what I really liked about the Avengers comic books? You're really bring together already established heroes, so when they're together they have a whole bunch of baddies that allow for match-ups you would never see in the individual books. Plus, back in the day, it was not uncommon for the Avengers to cross paths with both the Fantastic Four and the X-Men. Throw Spiderman into the mix and you've got all the big names of the Marvel Universe. I know this leaves the Hulk out, but every once in a while you can use him as a foil for The Thing or for Thor. And lest you think I forgot about Daredevil, he can guest star in one of the Spiderman movies, and maybe even get a spin-off, but only after we've spun off several mutant teams.
Which reminds me, why the hell is there even one Ghost Rider movie? Now two of them! That is a crime against nature. There are so many worthwhile comics that can be made into film...like instead of giving me these crap Ghost Rider and Blade movies, give me something Alpha Flight flavored, please. Notice, I'm not hating on the Punisher movies. The Dolph Lundgren outing aside, they're actually pretty good, I just don't happen to really like the Punisher.
Okay time to actually get to the casting of the Avengers. Scarlett Johansson - really? She didn't suck as Black Widow, but the casting was a move not unlike casting Jennifer Garner as Elektra. They're both decent enough actresses, but so not the best choice for those roles. Or you know what while I'm on this subject, Halle Berry as Storm. Berry is competent and cute and everything, but so not Storm. Everyone knows that Angela Bassett should have been cast as Storm. She would have kicked ass! I guess now I've got to supply answers to the obvious questions of who I would have cast as Black Widow and Elektra. Elektra is easy - I would have cast Angelina Jolie. She's a little old now, but when Daredevil and Elektra came out, she would have been perfect. Then maybe Ben Afleck would have gotten together with her and Brad Pitt would have stayed with Jennifer Aniston. Oh the world would be a different place. For Black Widow, I wanted someone sulkier and silkier - I mean she is the ultimate femme fatale, not the dangerous school girl. Now that I think about it, I wouldn't even have used Black Widow, I would have stayed more true to the Hawkeye angle and use Mockingbird. I'm not trying to sneak out of answering this - I would have gone with Kate Beckinsale as BW.
The other actor I'm not fully on board with is Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner. Don't get me wrong, I like Ruffalo and he does a good enough job, but he just doesn't look like Dr. Bruce Banner. You know who would have been an inspired choice? Joseph Gordon Levitt. I'm not just saying that for my librarian, I really think he would be good.
I really liked this film. Except for the bit about Phil. Phil! What will we do now?

The Avengers at IMDb

The Breed (2001)

I'm a sucker (no pun intended) for movies set "In the Near Future". It's often a set up for a dystopian tale, or an urban fantasy masquerading as a science fiction film. In the case of The Breed, it's both.
The main character, Grant (Bokkem Woodbine), is an NSA agent, but I'm not sure that NSA is meant to mean the National Security Agency, which in the real world is known for it's spooks - he's more of a noir homicide detective slash U.S. Marshall. The society is very "Brazil" but of a Soviet vein instead of the British-style bureaucracy.
The foul-mouthed Grant and his partner Phil (Reed Diamond) are working with the police to find a serial killer that is taking young women and draining them of their blood. Through luck they happen upon a van suspected to have been used by the killer, and indeed it had been for the killer is still in the near-by building with his latest victim. Grant watches as the man he shot dead gets up and rips out Phil's throat before climbing up a sheer wall, which Grant sees from the trash bin he has been thrown into. He reports to his superiors everything he saw, including the killers fangs; and when called into the director's office expects to be dismissed out of hand but is instead brought into the cabal of those that know that vampires walk amongst us. By this point, Grant has said 'fuck' a dozen times, including directly to the director and we're only a little over ten minutes into the movie. Now, I'm not one of those that thinks this word should be avoided - if the character needs to say 'fuck', the character needs to say 'fuck'. I get that. But, what I don't get is that only Grant says it, well at least at this point in the movie he is the only one to have been using it. If this is how they're going to show that Grant is a bad-ass or a free spirit, it doesn't bode well for the next hour or so. And to some extent this is what they did. Ho-hum.
At the NSA offices, between propaganda messages playing in the background, Grant is read into the secret and introduced to his new partner, Aaron Grey (Adrian Paul), who just happens to be a police detective for the vampire police. I know Paul for his work in the show Highlander, so of course immediately begin to draw comparisons between one immortal character and another. He's playing roughly the same character, but no complaints as he acts circles around Woodbine. Grey is a relatively young vampire only 80 or 90 years old if the near future were to happen today. He has flashbacks to his days being persecuted by the Nazis and later tells Grant his origin story and reveals that the leader of the vampire people's himself, Cross (Peter Halasz), turned him.
The outcome of the movie is predictable - the leader of the opposition, a vampire named West (Zen Gesner), is a red herring and the leader Cross, is of course the real baddie. Grant's vampire love interest Lucy Westenra (Bai Ling) follows a similarly predictable path lover-traitor-true patriot-lover. All the while I am left thinking that minus the fucking constant fucking use of the fucking f-word and the five seconds of naked boobs and naked butt (both on women of course - who would ever want to see a man's naked butt?) that I am likely watching the pilot for a television series, especially when the film ends with Grey coming to Westenra's place to collect Grant to go investigate a murder. The quality of the special effects and acting would certainly bear this out, but since I haven't seen anything like this since the film came out, which kind of surprises me. It they did make a series based on this premise, especially if it starred Paul, I would watch it.
The one thing that surprised me about this film was the way that it dealt with Grant's initial desire to kill all the vampires, which is the feeling that much of the NSA carries through to the end. It didn't treat it as heroic, but instead compared it to the racism that was exhibited by the Nazis. They did this with a heavy hand, and I can only imagine that they felt that such an explicit comparison was necessary for their desired audience, Grey at one point says to Grant, "You're a racist, just like the Nazis", an audience which I imagine to be comprised of Gen Xers and Gen Yers who may or may not know their history and who are more likely than not less than sober. Actually, profanity aside, I felt like this film should have proceeded by an ad saying, "From the writers who brought you Highlander and the producers that brought you Xena and the Adventures of Hercules".

The Bread at IMDb

Wrecked (2010)

So, I think we can all agree that Adrian Brody rocks, can't we? Sure. I think we can also agree that just because a good actor is in a movie that it does not guarantee that the movie will be good. It will likely be better than if a crappy actor were filling the role, but not a sign that it's good. Can you see where I'm going with this?
She tells me, "I'm not familiar with this, but 'that-one-guy' recommends it. Rotten Tomatoes didn't like it, but 'that-one-guy' did." So, she wasn't exactly forcing this down my throat. Lesson learned. If 'that-one-guy' likes a movie, but Rotten Tomatoes doesn't, I'm going to go with Rotten Tomatoes. Aren't you impressed with me for one, not using 'that-one-guy's' real name, and two for not going agro on this dude?
Meh.
The only real question is why I watched the whole damned thing, though I did start writing this while it was still playing and go and get myself a snack and opened up the laptop to move some files onto a memory stick.
I'm debating with myself, well by the time you read this, I will have already decided I suppose, about whether to critique the film, or just let it pass that you shouldn't watch it. Okay, but just the biggies.
The whole movie, but in particular the last third, the director has a hard time the narrative device - is it first person or is it third person or is it third person omniscient? It just goes from one to the next without rhyme or reason and little exposition. It's almost like someone took a class on the possible camera angles and then focused on using all of them without thinking once about how it effected the story telling.
Music was another problem. You don't hear any for the first 45 minutes or so and you're cool with it, because no music fits the story style, but then all the sudden there's background music like any other movie. It's jarring.
Let's see, I made a little promise to myself that I would only talk about three things, so the third thing about this movie that bothered me was that it was utterly predictable. I felt like I was watching some drama on television where you know the only reason they're telling you something is so that in a little while they can reveal that reality is the exact opposite. Once you've figured this out, you know exactly how the movie is going to go.
I think I've now spent as much time thinking about this as the director did.
One aside, there are only 8 cast members and two of them are named Adrian. What are the odds of that? Also, why didn't they give the animals credits? Um, crap. That's four complaints. There is a dog that has a significant role, but no credits for her.

Wrecked on IMDb

Mirror Mirror (2012)

I have to start this out by saying I was predisposed not to like this film. I am not really very much of a Julia Roberts fan, but I'm not sure that it's entirely her fault. My first exposure to her was in Pretty Woman, which a girl in my dorm owned and played all the time. I can't think of how many times I got stuck watching part of that film. No really, I can't think of it, because it will make me digress or something and I'll go all batshit crazy. Still, maybe that wasn't as bad as our one term RA, one term because the first term RA who coincidentally had the same name as this guy, totally sucked at this job, but now I really am digressing (and you thought I meant regress), but this guy would play the Sound of Music every Friday and Saturday night - for three months straight - to draw in the unsuspecting drunk girls who were wandering around in hopes that he might get lucky. I can not make this shit up. I wish I could. On several occasions I went looking for a particular drunk girl who was affiliated with me and found her there and on at least three other occasions was contacted by my peers to intercede on their behalf and retrieve their drunken, bewildered lady friends. I was a junior still living in a dorm at this point, so was like the old man of the castle so to speak. In those days I literally did not know what fear was - anxiety...humiliation...sure, but not fear. I would march in and retrieve the half dozen or so girls and make sure they all got home. I don't know what this dude would have done if he had ever ended up with one of these drunken girls alone. Part of me says he was such a bumpkin that he wouldn't have done anything, but the other part of me - the part of me that has come into being since those long ago days - thinks that any man who cooks up a way to attract drunk girls to his room so he can fool around (the worst kept secret, at least among the guys, in our dorm) probably doesn't have a lot of scruples. It does help to know that the last time I saw him, the plumpish doofus who was never as smart as he first seemed, was devoting his life to selling business cards for a living and had become outright round and was going bald, all of this only four or five years after graduation.
Anyhoo, that movie strongly influenced me against Julia Roberts. Yet, I have seen her in films and can admit that not only did she not suck, that she was indeed quite good. I particularly her in the Ocean's Eleven franchise and Pret-a-Porter. But not in this movie. Sorry, Julia. If you had that certain je ne sais quois that Nathan Lane possesses, I could have bought a campy, evil queen and actually embraced that as it would have more matched the feeling of other parts of the film. But, she doesn't have it, and even though Lane does, the scenes in which they are together just accentuates her lack of this stuffness. Maybe Joan Cusack has it, or Kristen Wiig. But, Hollywood doesn't think them beautiful enough to pull off the "fairest of them all". Maybe they can't, but if you're going campy with your movie, then go campy.
I also had been told this was not the greatest movie. I know that one should go into these things with as little preconception as possible, right? Or not. I trust my friend's opinion on these matter, particularly concerning fairy tales and fables. But, I wanted to see for myself. It could be good, or at least have some hidden gem moments. I am right, because it totally did. But, she was also right. Not that good of a movie.
There is also a third reason, and until George Lucas did his Star Wars prequels, I would have called this the Scrappy Doo effect. This is a reference to a reboot of the classic Scooby Doo comics in which they changed a lot and added a munchkin by the name of Scrappy Doo. In case you're still wondering, I think he totally sucked. Lucas changed all of this by raising the bar, or should it be lowering the bar on how something can suck by changing a formula that works by taking out some essential, if minor, elements and adding a totally annoying character who is unaware of any faults he may have. Yes, I mean Jar-Jar Binks. These are really just two obvious examples of a phenomenon in popular media endemic to the United States since World War II that is trying to add a touch of comedy to a serious story to take the edge off. This is why there is Orko in He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, or Snarf in the Thundercats, or any of the Witwickys in the Transformers cartoons from the 80s, or most any Eddie Murphy movie where Eddie is both the serious character and the comedic distraction. I hate to say it, but it's Brighton, Nathan Lane's character in this film. Don't get me wrong, I love Nathan Lane, but his character in this film is a comedic distraction to keep the queen from being just detetably evil, hoping to make her tolerantly evil - tolerant enough to sit through the whole film. I thought this every time I saw a trailer for this film. But, I kept hoping that it would be more campy, in which case Brighton would not have been out of place and thus not served the same purpose.
There were two things during the film that I didn't like, and oddly enough one was the special effects. Well, not all of the specail effects. Most of them were quite good. But when the queen goes through the mirror - which was very cool and a cool concept - the huts on the lake look like CGI huts. They can look real, or look cartoony, or look like they're made of plastic, but they can not look like they are CGI. Can not.
The other issue which bothered me were the dwarves on stilts - which are another cool concept and looked cool - there are scenes of them doing their thing and the stunt people do not look like the actors playing the dwarves. Sure, they were dressed up the same, but they were in general thinner and in general possessing arms of a longer proportion to their bodies than the actors. This is one of those little things that I should never notice, just like the CGI.
I did watch it all the way through, though. It does have some things going for it. There was more than a nod to an Alice in Wonderland a la the cartoon version look. Obviously the party that the queen throws is this theme, but the gentry's hair and clothing styles throughout the whole film lived up to this and I thought were quite good. I also like watching the Prince and Princess interact. If they had more screen time, it would have been a better movie - I mean more screen time together with appropriately witty banter of course.
Then comes the ending of the film. I liked the servants on ice skates at the wedding of the queen and the Prince. When I first saw them, I immediately thought of Mel Brooks and Hitler on Ice. And then I thought that this movie likely would have been a whole lot better if it had been a musical. It would ahve solved so many problems. First and foremost would have been a different actress as the queen. It would also pretty much have guaranteed the campiness needed for this film to have succeeded.
As the story resolves, lo and behold if the King ain't really still alive and it's none other than Sean Bean. What a pleasant surprise. The actor, 'cause the King still being alive was not a surprise. I really like Bean who hasn't done me wrong yet. Sure, the films don't always work for me, but he does.
And finally the finale...here's the musical that I wanted. I almost thought it was going to go a Bollywood route, which would have been sweeeeeeet! Instead, we got a Shrek style ending if Shrek had used an original song and been live action. This did keep me from hating this film. Well, this and Sean Bean. And the dwarves.

Mirror Mirror on IMDB