Happy Thanksgiving!
Sorry for the lack of an update last week, friends. I spent pretty much the entire weekend in Thibodaux working on the set for the upcoming play Mr. 80%, directed by Ronée Garcia Bourgeois with the able assistance of some schmuck named Blake. It’s coming together really well - the set looks great and our performers are doing a fine job. If you’re going to be in the area in the first two weekends in December, come on down! We open on December 1, and there’s plenty of information available on Thibodaux Playhouse.com.
Before then, of course, comes one of my favorite days of the year: Thanksgiving. I love Thanksgiving. I love the food, I love the parade, I love the fact that it’s more or less the official kickoff of the Christmas season, which I honestly do believe, as the song says, is the most wonderful time of the year. Mostly, I love being with my family. We always spend the early part of the day with my father’s family, and in the evening, we go to my grandmother’s house. In both cases, we eat enough food to collapse a star into a black hole should it experience such a sudden influx of gravity. I, of course, make my own contribution: that’s me making the pumpkin pies last year. (Yes, I also love pumpkin pie.) But even on Thanksgiving, I’m still going to work. This NaNoWriMo experiment is going too well for me to slack off even for the greatest of holidays. As of last night, A Long November was 37,545 words long, and that’s nothing to sneeze at, no matter how badly my allergies are acting up at any given moment.
From the “What I’m Watching” Department
I saw two more movies this weekend that I wanted to rap with you guys about. First up, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
As anyone who reads this site or my columns should know, I’m a huge fan of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter mythos, and while the films in the series haven’t been perfect, they’ve been a pretty satisfying representation of the books. I’d say Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire falls into that same category. In this fourth installment of the series, Harry’s home of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is chosen to play host to the legendary Triwizard Tournament, a competition that pits the most able students of three Wizarding academies against one another in a quest for eternal glory. Director Mike Newell (directing his first Harry Potter film) and screenwriter Steve Cloves (reportedly doing his fourth and final Harry Potter film) do a very able job translating the book to the screen. While there are certainly a lot of things that had to be omitted (the book was over 600 pages long), unlike Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, I don’t think the film really omitted anything vital to the continuing story arc of the series.
The child actors who have been with this series since its inception, particularly Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson, are really coming into their own as performers. They have really made the characters their own, to the point where bringing in anyone else for the final three movies would almost be inconceivable. The movie is far more about these three characters and the incredible darkness they have to overcome than it is about magic, witchcraft or special effects. It’s a parable about the power of good over evil, love over hatred, and it takes a skilled performer to get that across without sounding preachy or heavy-handed. Overall, this was another very satisfying movie in a satisfying series.
Moving on, the other film I saw this weekend was Shopgirl, based on the book by and starring the incredible Steve Martin. Martin also wrote the screenplay, and that’s probably going to surprise the heck out of a lot of people. He’s so well known as an over-the-top slapstick performer that few realize how strong a writer he is or how good a performer he can be in a smaller, quieter film. This subdued romantic comedy is about a young woman named Mirabelle (Claire Danes) who gets involved alternately with a good-hearted loser named Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman) and an older customer (Martin). Martin’s character is financially well off, but not looking for anything serious. Schwartzman has genuine feeling and emotion, but he has no idea how to treat a woman.
This is perhaps the most honestly emotional film I’ve seen in a very long time. All three main characters in this movie grow and evolve in very natural ways, very believable ways. There’s no point in the movie where I was shaking my head thinking, “I just don’t buy that.” On the contrary, I bought it all. Martin’s writing was excellent and the performances were very strong. It was a good film - not a great film, a good one - but considering the low caliber of movie that’s been cranked out this year, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see it garner a lot of nominations come Oscar time, particularly for Martin’s screenplay, Danes’ performance, and maybe even for Best Picture.
Blake’s Universal Rules of the Universe!
Rule #155: If you can’t make a comic interesting with Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman in it, it’s not the fault of the characters. - Gail Simone
New This Week:
Today’s new additions to the Evertime Realms archives, friends, are my “Everything But Imaginary” columns Doing the Reprint Rumba and What’s in a Number?, my “Think About It” columns Coup of the Animation Nation and A Little Thanks, My Comixtreme special, Deconstructing Infinite Crisis #2, and the following reviews at Comixtreme.com: Infinite Crisis #2 (Great), Opposite Forces #3 (Very Good), Son of Vulcan #6 (Great), Batman and the Monster Men #1 (Good), Batman: Journey Into Knight (Fair), Captain Atom: Armageddon #2 (Very Good) and Fables #43 (Very Good). Enjoy.