Realms Frontpage Update: Welcome to NaNoWriMo
Greetings, all. Since last week’s update of the Evertime Realms frontpage, I’ve undertaken a new writing challenge that I’m excited to tell you guys about. I’ve registered for National Novel Writing Month. If you’ve never heard of it… well, then you’re obviously not reading the Realms Livejournal or the new Think About It Central, because I’ve been discussing it extensively there. But in a nutshell, this is a challenge that takes place every November. Writers sign up to write a complete novel of at least 50,000 words between November 1 and the stroke of midnight on November 30. My novel is currently titled A Long November (but between you and me, I think I’m changing my mind about that title) and I’m doing pretty good - as of November 6 I’d made it to 13,627 words, putting me about two days ahead of pace to hit 50K at the end of the month. Personally, I think it can’t hurt to have that padding. People who’ve read my stuff for a while know that every year I write a new Christmas short story as my “card” for the year. That’s what A Long November is going to be. So you’ll definitely get to read it come December. But if you’d like to keep track of my progress and read an excerpt from the first chapter, it’s already available at my NaNoWriMo Profile Page.
From the “What I’m Watching Department
I managed to catch two movies this weekend and, as always seems to be the case when I do a double-dip, one was very good and one was pretty bad. I’ll start with the good.
I’ve been waiting to see Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit for years. I love all of the shorts and I thought Aardman Animation’s first feature-length film, Chicken Run, was one of the best animated films in years. This movie was a no-brainer for me, and I wasn’t disappointed in the least. The basic premise is this - goofy inventor Wallace and his genius dog Gromit have started a pest control business to save their neighbor’s gardens from ravenous rabbits in the days before a big annual vegetable festival. As they start to run out of storage space for all the captive rabbits, though, Wallace decides to try an experiment to modify their behavior and make them safe to let free. The experiment goes wrong, of course, and a giant bunny-beast begins to terrorize the gardens by the light of the moon.
The film follows classic horror movie formula right up to a twist and a spectacular climactic battle scene with a jilted lover who wants to destroy the monster not to protect the community, but for revenge. But every step of the way, the movie is hysterical. The film is full of jokes for the grown-ups, including a few slightly bawdy references that fly right over kids’ heads, but it’s got a lot for the kids there too. There were a lot of children in the theater and they were laughing almost as much as I was. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that I laughed out loud more in this film than any other movie I’ve seen this year.
The other movie I saw this weekend was the video game adaptation Doom, and honestly, the best thing I can say for it is that it wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be. An experiment on a Mars base sends a squad of “crack” Marines to investigate, only to bring them face-to-face with a group of horrific monsters.
There are two things, I think, that saved this movie from being the absolute crapfest I expected. First, despite what the trailers make you think, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is not actually the star. He’s on screen a lot of time and he’s still got that painfully bad acting that makes every movie he’s in stink up the theater, but the movie isn’t about him. The second thing is that, thank God, there is no crappy tacked-on love story, even though there’s a hot blonde waiting right there.
The bad highly outweighs the good, though. This is the movie that leaves you walking out asking a billion and one questions the writers should have asked themselves before the movie even went into production: why does a “crack” squad of Marines include a kid who has never been on a mission before and at least two clearly certifiable psychopaths? Why, in a base on Mars, where the outside atmosphere is instantly lethal, would you construct a gun capable of vaporizing a bulkhead? What was the point of demonstrating that the teleportation device can cause painful accidents if that information is never used in the movie? Why, if the movie takes place 40 years in the future, does one of the Marines play a handheld video game that would have looked like an antique ten years ago? And so on and so on and so on. As far as bad movies go, it’s slightly more enjoyable than The Fog, because I have to admit I like punching through all the thousand-and-one plot holes, but it’s not going to become a classic cult favorite crappy movie because it’s not quite bad enough to have repeat viewing and ridiculing value.
Blake’s Universal Rules of the Universe!
Rule #154: If you can’t do something smart, do something right. - Shepherd Derrial Book, Serenity
New This Week:
Today’s new additions to the Evertime Realms archives, friends, are my “Everything But Imaginary” column In the Court of the King, my “Think About It” column NaNoWriMo Mania, my monthly movie column, Blake’s November Movie Pre-Cap, and the following reviews at Comixtreme.com: Batman: Gotham County Line #2 (Fair), Desolation Jones #4 (Very Good), Jonah Hex #1 (Very Good), Seven Soldiers: Bulleteer #1 (Very Good), Swamp Thing #21 (Awful), The Winter Men #3 (Fair) and Uncle Scrooge #347! Enjoy.