Mostly Rambling about RotS and Anita Blake

Still feeling a little down but not too bad.

I called my mom and dad yesterday. I really don't call them often enough. It had been about two months since I last called but I saw them in person mid-Oct so it hadn't been that long since we talked. I called because it occurred to me that I didn't know if they knew I wasn't living in the same place anymore. So I called and let them know. When I told Dad he seemed to want to say something when I mentioned staying with friends until I found something more permanent but I interrupted him and changed the subject to how they were doing. They're fine though Dad's arthritis has been acting up due to the changing weather. Mom mentioned that my sister had called them but hadn't mentioned that we weren't living in the same place or that we weren't living together anymore.

I watched Revenge of the Sith again last night. Meh. It's still the best of the prequels but still doesn't come close to the greatness of the OT. How would I fix the prequels? I sometime think about finding copies of the shooting scripts and doing a rewrite but I'm trying to work on my own stuff so not going to happen. The first thing I would do is pull out all that Chosen One crap. The whole "bringing balance to the force" stuff is the main thing weighing down the prequels because it doesn't mesh with the OT. If you watch the movies in numbered order, it gets a lot of talk time in the first three movies and then in the last three no one mentions it. I would make the prequels about Anikin Skywalker, a hot shot pilot who was also a Jedi trained by Obi-Wan. He would just be a Jedi who gets seduced by the dark side and ends up destroying the Jedi order. The most important thing to me would be for Anikin to become Darth Vader in a way that flowed into the OT. Right now as the prequels stand I have a huge disconnect between Anikin and Vader. They just don't feel like the same character to me. I could go on but I think I'm in danger of ranting.

I've started rereading Blue Moon by Laurell K Hamilton. It's the eight book in her Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series. It's not as good as I remember. I'm not sure why. I think it's because I can see the slide toward more sex based stories. I really liked Anita Blake in the early novels. She was badass killing vamps and raising the dead in her day job. She wasn't falling into everyone's bed and when she started dating a guy he was a stand up guy who wanted to wait before having sex. Then she rejected that guy and went for the guy she had been rejecting from the first book. The began a slow but steady shift from her day job and police side work to vampire politics. This shift also brought with it an increase in sex. Sex is fine if it's there from the start. I read her Merry Gentry books, which had sex in them from the start, and enjoyed the sex in them. I read Anita Blake books for the badass vampire hunter who worked with police on supernatural crimes. That character has mostly stopped existing in the books after the ninth book. Now vampire politics drive the story with lots of sex thrown in. It's not the story I want to read. And I haven't been reading them. I read the tenth book and skimmed the eleventh and just couldn't connect with the story anymore. It's saddens me because I really did like the first nine books. So when I see a new Anita Blake book I want to read it and sometimes I peek inside but it's just so much vampire politics and sex that I just can't get in to it.

Ok I think I've ranted enough about that. Till next time.

Gilly

Star Trek Afterthoughts

After watching a bootlegged copy of the new Star Trek movie Sunday night I decided to see the movie properly in the theater at least once. Today my niece and I went to see it. My niece is not a Trek fan but having seen the movie I thought she might like it and I personally like cultivating her inner geek. After the movie she told me that she had been confused at first but as the movie unfolded she caught what was going on. Her take on the movie as a whole was, "That was awesome!"

I would agree that the movie was awesome. Characters were spot on, the effects were grin inducing and I liked the story that was told.

Now one minor complaint.

I have a slight problem with how the female members of Starfleet are dressed. Nothing wrong with the minidress that 99% of them wear except that it isn't realistic. Why would a military organization have a different duty uniform for women? They wouldn't. The minidress uniforms are an artifact of a tv series that aired in the late 60's. Later series and movies did away with the different duty uniforms for males and females. So why is it in this movie? It feels very out of place considering that during the opening scenes, set twenty fiveish years earlier, there was nary a skirt to be seen. Skip forward 25 years storywise and suddenly every female Starfleet member is in a skirt. To make matters even stranger, I know I saw at least one female crew member wearing pants and a regular tunic. This makes it seem like given the choice between pants and a minidress, 99% of women would chose the dress. Yikes. Can anyone say big step backward?

I'm just saying they took the time to realize the old bridge looked outdated, so they changed it to look much more advanced but couldn't apply the same logic to the the female minidress uniform.

Despite that minor irritant I really enjoyed the movie and would highly recommend it.

Infowhore's Library - Next [Spoiler warning]

I watched Next starring Nicolas Cage, Jessica Biel and Julianne Moore. Next is about a stage magician(Cage) who can see two minutes into the future. Julianne Moore is a FBI agent who wants his help to track down a nuclear device in the hands of terrorists. Jessica Biel is Cage's love interest and damsel in distress.

In the summer of 2007 I went to see Spider-Man 3 in the theater. Next was also playing and I after I got out of Spider-Man 3 I almost went to see it. I decided instead to see Spider-Man 3 again and I am glad I did because I almost certainly would have been kicked out when I started yelling at the screen.

Basically this movie has no ending. You can argue that it's supposed to be ambiguous and make you think. I say blah and double blah. Half the movie is completely invalidated when it rewinds to an earlier point revealing everything that happened after to be little more than one possible future. That's right half the movie, the action packed full of cool things happening half, didn't happen and the movie ends with no resolution. I would have perferred that they all died in the nuclear explosion. Then we would have gotten some kind of lession about how even if we could see the future we still wouldn't be able to see everything. Kind of an Outer Limits type ending. I could have excepted that.

Toward the end when they began to bend and outright break the rules of how his power worked I began to get nervous. Then I remembered the rule of cool and decided it was fine. Watching someone who can see the future direct a small squad of armed FBI agents was awesome. I have to admit the geek in me was screaming, "He's like a JEDI!!" And when he says, "I made a mistake. It's happening now," just before the explosion, all I could think was, "Oh, shit."

Most of the movie's faults fall under the rule of cool. The ending a a huge cop out in my eyes. I was going to rate this movie a 5 out 5 however the it was just a dream ending left me with a very sour taste in my mouth. So I'm torn between giving it a 4 for the majority of the movie and a 2 for the ending.