Archive for December, 2021

movies

Christmas in the City

Skaters at Rockefeller Center
Some city Christmas magic from my trip to New York to research Damsel Under Stress

On Twitter, I’ve been playing around with what the opposite of the standard Hallmark Christmas movie would be, reversing or inverting all the tropes. So, instead of the city girl with a corporate career and a successful, wealthy boyfriend going to her hometown for Christmas to help save her family business and deciding to ditch her career and boyfriend and get back together with her high school boyfriend, you might have the small-town girl working for her family’s business and dating her high school boyfriend who goes to the city, where she ends up getting a corporate career and successful, wealthy boyfriend.

There are also the movies where the big-city girl has to go to a small town that she’s not from, where she discovers the wonder of Christmas and finds it all so magical. I can kind of see someone going to her hometown and being touched by traditions she remembers from childhood, but it seems less likely to me that a city girl would ditch everything for a small town she’s not from.

Really, I don’t get their fascination with small towns. I’m from a small town and have no desire to go back to one. Though I think we might disagree on the definition of “small town.” The town I’m from had a population of about 3,000 when I lived there. They’re a bit above 5,000 now. The “small” towns in these movies are more what I’d call a small city. I can somewhat see the appeal of moving from a major metro area to a smaller city that’s still an actual city and that isn’t part of a major metro area. But if we’re talking about a place where Christmas is particularly magical, I’ve had small-town Christmases and big-city Christmases, and the city wins, hands down. I guess if you’re from a city in the South, you might be charmed by a New England village where you get to take a sleigh ride, but it’s still not going to be a case of “Wow, I had no idea Christmas could be so magical!” unless she was living under a rock in the city.

In most small towns, Christmas amounts to some sad, weathered plastic tinsel and lights on the lampposts of the downtown area and a Christmas parade in which Santa rides on a fire truck. There might be a tree-lighting ceremony in a park. And these things happen early in December, not a day or two before Christmas. There are smaller towns that do bigger things for Christmas, but they do this for tourism purposes and bring in a lot of people from outside the area. One lone visitor wouldn’t stand out among the crowds enough to be adopted by the friendly locals (and that’s another thing — in my small-town experience, the locals are friendly to each other but suspicious of outsiders).

The “small town” in my area that comes closest to the Hallmark Christmas ideal isn’t truly a small town. It’s a former small town that has become a big city in the heart of a major metro area. It still has the quaint old downtown Main Street, and they do it up big for Christmas, but beyond that is major suburban sprawl. At Christmas, the downtown area gets really crowded and has a lot of traffic. People come in busloads, and they book vacation packages at the big resort hotels in the town. It is really festive and Christmassy, but it’s not a truly “small town” experience.

There’s a lot more Christmas stuff going on in big cities than in most small towns. Just about every city in the metro area has a light display, a parade, and a tree-lighting ceremony. There are holiday markets, outdoor concerts, outdoor ice rinks, and concerts involving big-name groups and artists. If I have to watch a production of The Nutcracker, I’d much rather watch the New York City Ballet than the kids at Miss Edna’s Dance ’n’ Twirl. You could do a different Christmas thing every night in December. When I was in high school in a small town, we had church youth group excursions to the big city, in which we’d load up the church van and go to Dallas to go to one of the big malls for Christmas shopping and ice skating. I think it’s far more likely that someone from a small town would go to the city and think everything was so magical than the reverse.

I’m not sure where Hallmark got this small town fetish, but their older movies don’t have it. If you look before 2016 or so, a lot of them take place in cities. No one has to give up their careers or get back with their high school boyfriends. I watched one last weekend, Naughty or Nice, that has the heroine living in the suburbs of a city, and she stays there and stays with her lawyer boyfriend. From around the same time, there’s It’s Christmas Carol, a retelling of A Christmas Carol in which a high-powered professional in Chicago becomes nicer but stays in her career. That one also has Carrie Fisher as all the ghosts, carrying around and drinking from a champagne bottle.

I’d toyed with drafting a Christmas story during this month as a way to keep the writing habit while I’m working on research, but then the month got away from me, and now it’s a week until Christmas. Instead of adding work, I’m going to take next week off, so no posts (especially since my scheduling doesn’t seem to be working). I may do a “year in review” post the week after Christmas, but I’m mostly going to take it easy, bake, and snark at Christmas movies.

movies

Fantasy and Frozen

I’ve scheduled this post a couple of times, and it never seems to post, so it’s originally from right before Thanksgiving. Maybe my server just hates Frozen.

I’ve been watching movies that give me a “fall” vibe, so I rewatched Frozen 2 recently. It’s got an autumn setting and plenty of pretty fall forest imagery. And I came to the realization while watching that I might like it a bit better than the original film. It doesn’t have any one song as iconic as a couple of the songs in the first one, but I think I like the story better, maybe because it’s more of a fantasy story and less of a Disney princess story. As much as the first one tried to interrogate the usual Disney princess tropes (like mocking the idea of marrying someone you’ve just met after you sing a duet together), it was still pretty princessy. In the second, I feel like there’s more worldbuilding and some actual development of the magic instead of there just being magic because it’s a fairy tale. Maybe that’s the distinction: the first one was more of a fairy tale, while the second was a fantasy story that actually developed the culture and history of the world and looked into what the magic was all about. We seldom learn much about the world where a Disney princess movie is set. There’s little culture or history. We just know there’s a prince.

I found myself thinking that you could take the story of this film and make a decent “serious” live-action fantasy — not in the way that Disney has been doing live-action remakes, but making a different movie with the same core story. Take out Olaf, the musical numbers, and the cutesy stuff like pretending the reindeer are talking — basically, the stuff aimed at kids — and treat the history and the battles more realistically, and you could have something that fits in the Lord of the Rings mold. Thinking about how I’d rewrite it, I think I’d pretty much ignore the first movie and just start with the given that there’s the queen with ice powers and her more extroverted sister, then bad stuff happens in their kingdom and they have to go on a quest to resolve it by facing their family’s history. I might make Kristoff one of the reindeer herders, so Anna meets and gets to know him on the quest rather than them being in an established relationship with all the waffling about proposing. Or possibly he’s someone she meets on the journey to get to the place where the enchanted forest is. Have real battle scenes in the flashbacks and real fighting in the present. CGI could make the water horse look really cool.

I noticed that on Disney+ you can get a version dubbed in Norwegian. I’ll have to try watching these movies that way when I’m a little more advanced in my language study. Right now, I can read a lot pretty well, but I can’t seem to understand much when I hear the language spoken. I don’t even pick up many words on the train announcements on Slow TV (real-time videos of train journeys in Norway — you can watch it online, and it’s nice and relaxing. They just put a camera in a train, so it’s like being on a train ride, watching the scenery go by). They’re using words that are in my vocabulary, but I don’t pick up on them when I hear them. The only time I’ve been able to actually follow and understand what a Norwegian was saying was in a video I saw of a speech by the current king of Norway. I could understand him, but he apparently is considered to have an American accent, since he spent a good chunk of his childhood and went to elementary school in the US during WWII. Maybe watching a movie with a familiar story in that language will help me tune my ear into it. I don’t think I can count on running into the king if I ever go there to travel, so I need to be able to understand what I hear. Most people there do speak good English, but it’s good to be able to understand some of what you’re hearing. That also makes eavesdropping more entertaining.

writing

Conventional Wisdom

Some of my recent reading and viewing has made me question the conventional wisdom about writing. The things I’ve enjoyed most have violated the “rules,” while I find that stories that do what editors say they want are much less satisfying.

One of the bits of advice is to “put your characters in a tree and throw rocks at them, and then set the tree on fire.” To keep tension high and pages turning, your characters should be in constant trouble. Things should never work out well for them, and if something they do works, that outcome should land them in even bigger trouble. They shouldn’t get what they want during the course of the book, until maybe the end, unless what they want is actually bad for them.

I’m reading a couple of books right now, one that follows this advice, and one that doesn’t. Following this advice is why I’m reading two books. I realized I can’t read the “characters in a tree” book at bedtime because it stresses me out too much, so this is the book I read in bits and pieces when I have reading time during the day. The main character in this book starts in a bad situation, gets out of that situation only to land in another bad situation, and everything that looks like it might help only makes matters worse. The main character is up against impossible odds and going through terrible things. It does make for an exciting book, but I have to admit that I’m not finding it very fun to read, and though you’d think this would make for a page turner, I can only bear to read a few pages at a time before I have to put the book down.

The other book isn’t really throwing rocks at the characters, but it may actually have higher stakes and deeper conflict. If the characters fail at their assignment, it could affect their futures, but they’re learning that if they succeed, it might make things worse for society. They do have some personal struggles, so things aren’t entirely easy for them, but we move in and out of those parts instead of things getting worse and worse. The “worse” part is more about that dilemma of what to do. I’m tearing through this book and only putting it down at night when I can’t keep my eyes open, even though it’s not as obviously tense as the other book. It’s by an established author, so I don’t know if that dilemma would count as enough tension for a major publisher to buy it from an author without a name.

The other conventional wisdom, something I hear often from my agent and from editors, is that the main character needs to have agency. The plot needs to be driven by the decisions the main character makes, and these decisions should be what leads to the defeat of the villain and the conclusion of the book.

But a while ago I was watching a miniseries based on a Victorian novel, and although it violated this in a big way, I found it incredibly satisfying because the villain got a huge comeuppance she brought entirely upon herself. The heroine did nothing but stand her ground and hold true to her personal ethics. She never actually tried to oppose the villain. I often find that it’s far more satisfying when the villain brings about their own downfall than when the hero defeats the villain. In this case, it was a lower-conflict situation, not really a “vs.” type of conflict. The villain wasn’t truly evil. She just wanted something and thought the heroine was in the way, but everything she did to try to get the heroine out of the way just made her own situation worse and backfired. Ultimately, circumstances shifted so that she suddenly needed the heroine to get what she wanted, after she’d spent all this time being terrible to her, and the moment in which the villain realized this was an outright fist pump of triumph moment of awesomeness. The villain bringing about her own downfall and having to eat crow was far more entertaining and satisfying than if the heroine had been trying at all to stop or defeat her.

This was based on a Victorian book, so I’m not sure you could get something like that published now, with a heroine who doesn’t have a goal other than getting through life and maybe having a little happiness and who has very little agency. I guess you could compare it to the Cinderella story, where Cinderella is just trying to survive, maybe go to a ball, but she’s not really trying to bring down her stepmother. It’s the stepmother who ends up making herself look bad to the prince.

I’ve been trying to think of ways to pull off this kind of story in today’s market because it really is so fun when the villains defeat themselves. It’s also reassuring, serving as a sign that evil doesn’t pay and that it will cause its own downfall. That doesn’t mean things are easy for the hero. They can only win by not giving in or giving up, and they may go through some tough stuff along the way. I wonder if you could make the hero fail, but then the bad guys are still defeated because they brought it upon themselves.

I think there may be a disconnect between what people want to read and what editors like. I’m sure that reading tons of manuscripts of varying quality skews your tastes. You’d be drawn to things that make you sit up and take notice, that are more intense. Quieter books don’t stand out so easily unless they have something else going for them.

Life

Tis the Season, I Guess

I have this weird thing about the holiday season in which I resist starting the festivities, only to find them sneaking up on me, so I have that “how can it be Christmas already?” feeling. I’m so not ready for it to be the Christmas season. They’ve started playing Christmas and Christmas-adjacent music on the classical radio station, and I find myself shuddering when an obvious Christmas piece comes on. It’s not so much that I hate the holidays (though some of the overkill and excess gets to me), but I’m still enjoying fall. The trees have just started turning colors here, and it’s still rather warm. I’m not ready to switch from “fall” mode to “Christmas” mode. I also tend to like anticipation more than I like the actual thing. I like looking forward to the holiday season, so I try to stretch out the anticipation.

I think I’m wired more toward the ecclesiastical holiday calendar, in which the time leading up to Christmas is Advent, which is a more contemplative period of waiting, and then Christmas season starts on Christmas Day and involves 12 days of festivities. But no one seems to want to party after Christmas Day other than on New Year’s Eve. Instead, we get the month of December full of activities, and it all abruptly stops on Christmas.

But I made myself get my Christmas decorations up last night so that two weeks from now I’m not feeling like the whole season passed me by. I put on holiday music while I decorated the tree. It’s going to be another low-key year, without the usual parties and large gatherings. I don’t miss the feeling of being overwhelmed by so many activities, but there are a few smaller get-togethers I do miss.

Now that I’ve had my booster shot, I may try to get back to choir in time for Christmas Eve. It’s going to take some work, since I haven’t sung and have barely talked for so long. I’ve started doing some voice warm-up exercises I’ve found on YouTube, and I feel worn-out after a five-minute warm-up. If I do a few of those a day, maybe I’ll be able to sing a whole song in a week or two.

The warm weather means that I may try doing some light walks, when I take my daily walk after dark so I can look at all the decorations in the neighborhood. It’s a festive way to get exercise, though I probably undo the benefits when I come home and have cocoa and cookies or bring a travel mug of cocoa with me during the walk. I’m making my own personal parties since getting together in groups indoors, with people not wearing masks because they’re eating and drinking, isn’t happening again this year.

Long Holiday and Holiday Movies

I got an extra-long Thanksgiving holiday. I started early, going to my parents’ house on Tuesday, and then Monday morning I got my COVID booster shot, so I’ve been taking it easy the past couple of days. Actually, though, I’ve probably spent more time than usual doing work-related stuff, since “taking it easy” meant reading some books that are research for a project and watching relevant documentaries. I just haven’t been sitting at my desk. I’m now at the point where my arm is still a bit sore and I get tired easily, but I don’t feel so bad as long as I don’t try to do too much.

I started the annual Christmas movie viewing last night, since there was a movie that had been offered as a preview for a paid channel that would be leaving Prime that day, and after watching it, I’m not sure how many of these I’ll manage to watch this year. I’ve realized that most of my viewing the last year or so has been either historical or fantasy-related. In other words, not at all realistic. Not that these movies are truly “realistic,” but they look enough like real life that seeing large groups of people gathering closely without masks made me a bit anxious. Then there was the scene of characters in a restaurant that made me simultaneously wistful and anxious. Maybe I’ll limit myself to the ones with fantasy elements. If they’re repeating the same day over and over again or having wishes come true, I don’t have to worry about it taking place in the real world.

While I unironically enjoy some of these because they’re basically romantic comedies with snow, I’ll admit that I watch to snark for most of them. The one last night was supposed to be more of a drama than a rom-com, since it was a “something bad happened to me once around Christmas, so now I don’t really celebrate Christmas but when I visit a small town for some other reason and get roped into all their local celebrations, I can see how magical Christmas is” story (Hallmark plot #12). This chick just about lost her mind at the town tree lighting event. It wasn’t anything too elaborate. They just turned on the tree while singing Christmas carols, and Santa was there. My neighborhood does something more elaborate than that, so it was hard to buy that she’d never seen anything like it or that this town was so special that it celebrated Christmas in a way that you don’t experience anywhere else.

I once wrote a script for a Christmas movie, which I turned into a book. I’ve been pondering drafting another one this year as a way to stay in the writing habit while I’m doing the development work for a series. I have a few ideas I’ve been playing with in my head, but most of them are kind of spoofs on Hallmark, like merging the Christmas disaster movie the Sci Fi channel used to do with the Hallmark holiday rom-com movie, or finding the town where all those Christmas movies take place and uncovering their dark secret. I may wait a day or two to decide about that. Right now, it sounds exhausting, and typing makes my arm a bit sore. I also need to get my Christmas decorations up to set the proper mood.