movies

Beauty and the Beast Movies

I ended up unintentionally doing a themed movie weekend, and didn’t realize one of the themes until I was thinking about it later. The theme was fantasy romantic comedies with a beauty and the beast theme. Yeah, pretty specific.

The first one was Strange Magic, something I stumbled upon on Disney+. I’d never heard of it, but it was about fairies and was a musical, so I figured why not. It turns out that it’s not Disney or Pixar animation, but rather Lucasfilm. They seem to have turned the people at Industrial Light and Magic who do those animated creatures that get inserted into regular movies loose to do a fully animated movie. Lucas himself was executive producer and has the story credit, so this must have been in the works pre-Disney buyout (and it was released after the buyout, which makes me wonder if Disney maybe buried it and that’s why I never heard of it). It’s an odd little film, kind of A Midsummer Night’s Dream meets Much Ado About Nothing meets Beauty and the Beast meets Moulin Rouge. Like Moulin Rouge, it’s a jukebox musical, with existing pop/rock songs instead of original songs. Oddly for a Lucas story, it’s hard to sum up the plot and really give the sense of it. Basically, a fairy princess has to brave the Dark Forest to rescue her sister from the Bog King who’s trying to eradicate love. But it’s not really about that.

The voice cast has a lot of Broadway cred, though Evan Rachel Wood plays the lead, and I don’t know that she’s done Broadway musicals (she is the voice of the mom in the Frozen movies, where she gets to sing), but she’s got serious chops and holds her own with all the Broadway people. As you can imagine when it’s ILM, the animation is gorgeous. The more humanoid fairies have a weird uncanny valley animated quality to them, but everything else is basically photorealistic. I’m not sure it’s a great movie, but I have to say that it made me rather happy. My face hurt from grinning all the way through it, and I’ll probably watch it again. If you want a sense of what this is like, here’s a clip of the heroine confronting the Bog King (Alan Cumming):

Then the next night, since I was in the mood for fantasy rom-coms, I watched Penelope on Amazon Prime (leaving at the end of the month). This is another one I didn’t hear of when it came out, but I had seen it before when it was the recommended viewing for a writing workshop I was taking. This is essentially a gender-flipped beauty and the beast story. A wealthy family has been cursed so that any girls born into the family will have the face of a pig until someone of their own kind loves them as they are, til death they do part. When a girl is finally born into the family after more than a century, the family sets out to find a man from their class who’ll be willing to marry her. Meanwhile, a reporter is scheming to get a photo of her, and he finds a black sheep from a prominent family who’s down enough on his luck to be bribed to present himself as a suitor. But Penelope has other ideas about her own fate and is tired of being locked away.

Actually, I’m not entirely sure I’d call it a full-on romance, as the main plot is more about Penelope figuring things out for herself, and she’s only with the guy a bit at the beginning and end, but it’s still romantic. It’s also sweet and heartwarming. It’s got a surprisingly A-list class for a movie that seems to have been mostly forgotten, with Christina Ricci and James McAvoy as the leads and people like Peter Dinklage and Reese Witherspoon in supporting roles.

I found the production design interesting in that it’s sort of modern retro, which gives it a fairy tale aura. It was made in 2006, so that would be pre-iPhone, but there are no cell phones, the cameras are all film cameras, they’re using typewriters instead of computers, the cars look maybe 1980s, and a lot of the clothes are more 1930s-1950s. So it’s an indeterminate not now, but still sort of present-day. Add to this the fact that it was filmed in London, so it has an old-world sense to it, but seems to be set in America. Most of the British cast members are doing American accents. The style reminds me of the original Willie Wonka movie, which was filmed mostly in Germany, but most of the characters were American, so it had this weird fairytale sense to it.

This is definitely a feel-good movie, one I think I may want to get on DVD so it’ll be handy for when I need a pick-me-up.

writing life

Book Brain

I have a bad case of what I call Book Brain, when I’m so caught up in writing that I have a hard time focusing on anything other than the book. Other thoughts fly out of my head. In fact, this morning, I was trying to make a to-do list, and I thought of something that needed to go on the list, but in between thinking about it and moving my pen to write it down, I forgot what it was. I’m still not sure what it was. I hope it wasn’t too important.

The Book Brain this week is mostly because I’m so close to finishing this draft. I’m in the middle of writing the big, climactic confrontation with the bad guys, so it’s very painstaking work. Sometimes, I stop to think for so long about what needs to happen next and how it should go that the computer goes to sleep.

Now I’m within 6,000 words of hitting my word count goal for this book. That’s maybe two days of writing, if all goes well. I’m not sure I have enough story left to fill all that up, but I already know of some things I need to go back and add, like entire characters who have shown up at the climax and who turn out to be critical to the plot, but who haven’t appeared before. I need to go back and add them to the story and then weave them in throughout so they’re set up properly to play their role at the end.

I’ll share more details about this book once I’m done and starting the process of getting it ready for publication. It’s something new for me, but I think it has a lot of the elements my fans like about my books, so although it’s in a different kind of setting, it’s still very much a Shanna Swendson book.

The thing that I needed to put on my to-do list just came to me, and this time I managed to write it down.

Now back to my book …

movies

Recent (ish) Disney

I picked up on the Disney animation again, hitting a couple of the somewhat more recent films that I missed at the theater.

First, Moana. I’m not sure why I didn’t see it at the theater, since I’m usually all about the musicals. I think the Thanksgiving release date may have been the challenge, since it came at a busy time of year, and Rogue One came out not long afterward, so I would have been distracted. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. It’s another one of those “no villains” movies. There isn’t really anyone truly evil who’s working to thwart our heroes, other than maybe the crab, but he’s not a movie-long villain, just a minor obstacle. Otherwise, there’s conflict between Moana and Maui and Maui has to get over himself, but he’s not a villain.

The animation is beautiful and vivid and makes the islands and ocean look inviting, even though I’m very much not a beach person. As a bonus for me, a tiny bit from this movie sparked an idea that was the answer to a problem I was having with the book I’m working on, so watching it counted as work. The music is catchy, with a few songs I’ve caught myself singing around the house.

There’s a trend in some of the modern-era Disney movies that I think I’m picking up on, so I’ll have to watch more and see if my theory holds together.

Then I was in the mood for an adventure story, so I went with Atlantis: The Lost Empire. This should have been right up my alley, with an adorkable hero and a steampunky aesthetic, but I didn’t find it very engaging. I may have just been tired. This was a last-second selection when I was planning to watch the live-action Little Mermaid but found out that it was two hours and twenty minutes long, and I wanted something a lot shorter. It was a sharp contrast to the no-villain Moana, with a very obvious mustache-twirling evil villain who had to be defeated.

I couldn’t tell you what about it didn’t fully engage me, but I kept drifting off and thinking about other things, then I’d snap out of a daydream and realize I’d missed a chunk of the movie. Lots of stuff happened and it had a lot of action, so maybe it was just the frame of mind I was in. I think perhaps it was just uninspired and I didn’t connect with any of the characters. It did have an impressive voice cast and it looked great.

I’m not sure what I’ll watch this weekend. I spotted something I’d never heard of that looks interesting, so I may try that. But then they’ve also added a lot of the DC superhero movies to Prime Video and I never saw the second Wonder Woman film. I’ll have to see what mood I’m in and what my focus level is. I had my flu shot this morning, so I probably won’t be at my best this weekend.

My Books

Fall?

After a brutal summer and an August and most of July full of 100+-degree days, we finally have a break, with a string of days only in the low 90s, even sometimes in the 80s. It’s the kind of weather they consider “summer” in more civilized climates, but here it’s a taste of fall. We’ve even had a bit of rain, the first in about six weeks. I’m trying to enjoy it as much as I can, since we’ll be going back to summer weather, though possibly not more 100-degree days.

My body has gone into “fall” mode, so I’m sure it’ll be disappointed. I’m enjoying sitting on the patio in the mornings for as long as I want, until I feel like I need to get to work, without having to retreat indoors because it’s too hot. I walked to the library yesterday without feeling like I would die from heat stroke. I may even begin cooking again instead of just eating a lot of salads. Last night, I mixed up a batch of refrigerator biscuit/roll dough and made cinnamon rolls with it for breakfast this morning. It’s baking season again. Next up will be soup. I feel like I’m trying to cram all the fall things in this week before it gets hot again, in case this is all we’ll get.

Fall is my favorite time of year, but we don’t get much of it here. We might get a week like this one in September, then summer returns, and then we might get a week or two in October. It doesn’t start really feeling like proper fall until Thanksgiving, maybe. By then, Christmas has taken over.

I’ve found that a lot of the books that are the first in my series seem to take place in September. Some of that may be because I tend to start new projects in August or September, and I write the season I’m in. September is also a good time to travel, since prices tend to drop after Labor Day, and that means my research trips tend to come around that time, so I write the season I researched. That’s why Enchanted, Inc. starts in late September. In a week or so, it will have been 20 years since the trip I took to New York to research the setting before I started writing, and I wrote that time of year because it was what was vivid to me. But I think my tendency to set new series in September also has something to do with the sense of new beginnings that comes around the start of the school year. New school year, new book — it’s pretty much the same in my mind. In a couple of works in progress, the September setting means there’s a ticking clock—they have to deal with things before winter sets in—so it’s actually relevant to the plot.

The book I’m working on now is set in the spring, which is a real mindset shift. I was going with the time of year when someone was likely to be hungry, and spring was a difficult time before hothouses, good food preservation and storage methods, and transportation that allowed food to be brought from other parts of the world. In the spring, not enough new things had grown to provide much food, but the food stored over the winter was running out. I wanted a character to be on the edge of desperation and not able to find much to eat, so spring it was, and it fits with an idea of the character gradually blossoming as the world wakes up. Though I’ll admit that habit keeps trying to kick in, so my brain wants it to be fall. I’m writing a festival scene now, and although they’re decorating with garlands of flowers, my mental image keeps trying to be of fall leaves and corn husks. Another book, brain. We’ll do a fall book in this setting, I’m sure.

writing

Open Spaces

Watching that Dungeons and Dragons movie last weekend reminded me of something I’ve noticed in fantasy movies that amuses me: the obligatory scene of the heroes riding across a nearly deserted landscape. Fictional fantasy worlds seem to be just about entirely unpopulated. The characters very seldom run across any kind of civilization when they travel long distances.

But given that most of these fantasy worlds are at least somewhat based on medieval Europe, that’s pretty unlikely. The population was lower then, but that meant that each of the settlements was smaller. They weren’t very spread-out, though. When your only transportation is by foot or horse, things tend to be closer together. In a leisurely afternoon stroll in England, I once walked through three villages — and that was on the public footpath instead of on the direct road (which was built on an old Roman road, so it’s a road that would have existed in medieval times). If I’d been on the main road and had walked another half hour or so, I’d have hit two more villages. Apparently, there were even more villages that died off over the years, either literally (a number were depopulated after the Black Death) or just by becoming irrelevant once people no longer needed to live so close together or they relocated to be near railroads.

Germany is similar. You can avoid civilization on the public walking paths through the woods, sort of. You still may run across a farm or a hamlet (smaller than a village), though. Just a casual afternoon stroll can take you through several villages if you’re not on a path designed to be a nature walk.

In some of these fictional cases, they’re avoiding civilization. That’s why Frodo and his friends don’t seem to run into any towns before they reach Bree at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings. But if that world was populated like the England that world was based on, they’d have to work to bypass the villages along the way. I sometimes amuse myself by imagining that the thirty seconds we see of the characters in these movies riding in a vast overhead shot is the only thirty seconds they have to run free between villages.

I watched a Fantasy Cheese (low-budget fantasy full of cliches and tropes) movie a while back that was particularly amusing, in that it had the hero walk across the kingdom to the home of the lord who was supposed to give him a position in his court, and he never ran across another soul — no farmhouses, no villages, no towns, not even an inn at a crossroads. I imagine that was to do with the budget. They’d have had to hire more actors or do more set decorating to have something that looked appropriate. They shot the lord’s home at an actual castle, but there must not have been any good villages that weren’t too modern.

This came up for me in a book I’ve been working on that involves a journey, and I had to rework my map because I realized there needed to be more towns, especially as they got closer to the center of civilization. I’d been thinking in Texas scale when I needed to think Europe scale, or at the very least the northeast of the United States. Being used to Texas warps your thinking. You even look at maps differently. I remember a business trip to Connecticut when my coworkers made me navigate, and until I realized that the fold-out gas station map of Connecticut was on a different scale than the map of Texas, we kept missing exits. It would look like the exit we needed was at least fifteen minutes away on the Texas scale when it was actually right ahead. If you’re in a world moving at horse or foot speed, you’re probably going to have some kind of settlement within a day’s walk of any other settlement if the general area is settled.

So, what fantasy needs is more villages unless the characters are actively trying to avoid people. Come to think of it, I guess the D&D characters were avoiding people, since they’d escaped from prison. Still, that soaring overhead shot maybe should have included a village in the distance.

movies

Dungeons & Dragons

Last weekend’s movie was Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which is now on Prime Video. I thought it was a lot of fun. I’ve never played D&D, but I’ve hung around with a lot of people who do, so I’ve absorbed enough about the game to get the gist of most of the references, though I’m sure I missed a lot. Even without knowing anything about the source material, I thought it was a good fantasy adventure movie that didn’t take itself too seriously.

The gist of the story is that a thief and his barbarian sidekick escape from prison (after they got caught in a failed heist while the rest of their crew escaped) to find that a member of their crew has set himself up as a ruler and is raising the thief’s daughter, turning her against him. The thief pulls the rest of his old crew together, picking up an additional member, in order to pull off the heist that will get back what the one who betrayed him took. Of course, they have to go on a number of quests to find the things they’ll need to pull off this heist, and along the way they learn what’s really going on and that it’s far bigger than just a grudge against an old colleague.

It’s not quite a spoof of fantasy movies or games, though it still has some wink/nudge moments mocking the tropes, but it’s funny and yet it’s still a good fantasy/adventure. It’s not quite on the cleverness level of The Princess Bride, but it’s in a similar vein in that it manages to straddle the line between spoofing a genre while also being a good example of the thing it’s spoofing. The casting is just about perfect, and they flip a few tropes — the barbarian is a woman, the relationship with the female sidekick remains platonic, and the wizard is the youngest, least experienced member of the party instead of being a white-bearded elder.

I will confess that in spite of never having played D&D, I’ve long had a fascination with it. I just never had the chance to play. I think I first heard about it in junior high, when a guy in one of my classes mentioned it. He wanted to copy one of my doodles in class because he thought it would make a great dungeon design. Unfortunately, he lived on the other side of town, so I couldn’t join his game. Then we moved to the country outside a small town that was caught up in the whole satanic panic thing. They had seminars about how rock and roll music was of the devil, so I doubt anyone played D&D. Even if they did, I wouldn’t have had transportation to get together with them. When I got to college, the people I hung around with were hard-core, experienced gamers who didn’t have the patience to deal with a newbie. They had a long-running campaign going and didn’t even like me watching or asking questions while they played.

I don’t really like competitive games where there are winners and losers, but this looks like collaborative storytelling and it might be fun. I’m now at the phase of life where finding times when everyone can get together is challenging, and the people I know who are into it have their own groups already. I’d just like to try one short session to see if I enjoy it. The idea of gathering with friends to do that sort of thing appeals to me. Maybe if I ever get back to going to conventions, I can find an “intro to gaming” session and play.

In the meantime, at least we have one more big-budget fantasy movie to add to the rotation, something that’s not as serious as Lord of the Rings but not as cheap and silly as all the Fantasy Cheese movies.

Life

Up on the Roof

First, a bit of news: If you haven’t tried my mystery series yet, the first book, Interview with a Dead Editor, is on sale through Labor Day for 99 cents, so this is a good time to give it a try, or to tell someone else about it.

I’ve been having an interesting week. My condo complex is getting new roofs, removing the clay tile (actually, apparently it’s concrete fake clay), putting on new decking, new waterproof layer, and then new tiles that are actually coated metal but that look like clay tiles. It’s been somewhat disruptive.

Last week, they were doing the buildings across from me, near my garage. They had supplies blocking my garage door, and I had to get them to move them. They brought over a forklift, and I felt so powerful, having a forklift coming to serve me. This week, though, they had reached my neighbors, which meant all the equipment has been in front of my house, more or less blocking me in. It’s a good thing I wasn’t going anywhere.

Yesterday, it was my turn. They start pretty early in the morning, take the hot part of the afternoon off, then work until sunset. I was sitting on the patio, eating breakfast, when I looked up and saw a face peering over the edge of my roof. They warned me they were about to be removing the tiles on the edge of the roof, so I scurried back under the covered part, and good thing, too, because there was a lot of debris falling.

The noise on the roof wasn’t too bad for most of the day. There was clanking when they removed the tiles and I kept hearing footsteps up there. But they they started dragging around the new decking and there was hammering. I kept jumping in surprise with every bang.

Next up, they have to put on the shingles, and I don’t know when that will happen. That seems to take them longer. I guess it’s good that we aren’t getting any rain. The main issue when that happens will be the sound of power tools. It makes a really annoying sound when they use a power saw to cut the metal shingle sheets. I was hearing it in my sleep last night, even though it’s been down the block. I don’t know how I’ll handle it when it’s next to my house. If I got more warning, I might go visit my parents then. For the first stage, I didn’t find out until the day before, and they already had my garage blocked with heavy equipment.

In spite of the disruption, I managed to get a lot of writing done. Imagine what I could do if there wasn’t all that pounding.

movies

Disney Girls

One thing that struck me in my recent viewing of Disney animated films was the role of female characters. Even though most of these movies are targeted toward a female audience and many of the main characters are female, there actually aren’t a lot of girls or women in these movies.

Most of the female roles come down to three categories, the heroine (or love interest, if the main character is male), the mother figure, and the villain. Very few of the female characters have female friends. For the heroines, the only women in their lives are either mother figures or villains. These movies don’t pass the Bechdel Test. This is a very low-bar test for female representation in movies that merely requires that there are two female characters who have names and who talk to each other about something other than a man.

For the fairy tale movies, some of this is baked into the stories, especially before they started going beyond the basics of the tales and fleshing them out with characters and details. The only female characters in Snow White are the evil queen and Snow White, and I guess there’s not a lot of room to add female characters unless some of the dwarfs are women. This one might even sort of pass the Bechdel Test, given that Snow White and the queen in disguise have a conversation about the apple, but the queen doesn’t get an onscreen name, so I’m giving it a fail.

In Cinderella, we have female villains and the mother figure of the fairy godmother. Cinderella sort of has conversations with her stepfamily, so I guess it passes the Bechdel Test, but it’s interesting that her animal friends who get names are all male. The female mice are more in the background and don’t interact directly with Cinderella. If they were going to make up characters to add to the story, it seems like it would have made more sense for her confidants to be female.

Sleeping Beauty still has the heroine/mother figures/villain triad, and about the only conversation Aurora/Briar Rose has with the fairies is about the prince, though this is one of the few of the fairy tale movies that is full of active female characters.

Jumping ahead to more modern Disney princesses, all of Ariel’s fishy friends are male, as are most of the enchanted objects Belle interacts with, with the exception of Mrs. Potts (mother figure) and the Wardrobe. But all their conversations are about the Beast. All of Rapunzel’s friends are male. We finally get an actual female friendship with Tiana and Charlotte in The Princess and the Frog, but Charlotte spends most of the movie offscreen, and most of the other characters are male. Frozen has dual female heroines, but the only other female character is a female-coded troll (the sequel does a bit better).

Maybe the secondary characters in the female-led movies are male to balance it out. Except the male-led movies are also male-dominated. The Lion King has the mother, who’s offscreen most of the movie, Nala, and a secondary villain. So, about the same number of women as the female-led movies, only less screen time. In Peter Pan, Wendy, her mother, and the mermaids are the only women who get any dialogue. Tinkerbell just chimes, while Tiger Lily never speaks. The mermaids only talk about Peter. We get two mother figures in The Jungle Book, the wolf at the beginning and the elephant. Then the girl shows up at the end and sings her song but otherwise doesn’t talk. At least Lady Cluck and Marian are friends in Robin Hood, though I think they mostly talk about Robin, and then there’s a female bunny child and a couple of mothers among the villagers. Cluck is a rare character who doesn’t fit the heroine/love interest, villain, or mother figure mold. In Aladdin, Jasmine is the only female character (unless there’s a cameo moment I forgot). We don’t even have a mother figure or female villain there.

I could go on because almost all of them are like this. But this isn’t unique to Disney. When I was helping with the church youth musicals, we ran up against this in trying to find a show. The audience for musical theater is predominantly female. Most of the people interested in participating in musical theater are female. And yet most of the roles in most shows are male. I suppose they don’t have a hard time casting male roles for pro productions in New York (though I’d bet they have a smaller pool to choose from than they do for female roles), but for amateur productions, especially those for teens, it’s nearly impossible to fill all the male roles while there are dozens of girls trying out for each female part. For our musicals, they ended up gender flipping every role that didn’t absolutely have to be male and bringing in adult men to fill some of the male roles, so that they only needed maybe three or four teen guys, and even then there might be two who were actual theater kids (often the ones from the performing arts high school in another city who couldn’t get lead roles in school productions and wanted to beef up their resumes) and a couple who could manage to walk on stage and say a line or two. Meanwhile, the chorus would be packed with girls who had voice and dance training (in these shows, everyone who tried out got some kind of role). The lead female actress would be Broadway-caliber. About the only “girly” show that actually has mostly female roles is the Broadway version of Cinderella.

Or look at the Star Wars saga (other than the TV series, which are a lot more balanced). Even when the main character is female, they keep the girl and two guys combination for the main trio. Rogue One had a female lead, but only two women with speaking parts.

I guess I can partially thank this tendency for my writing career because the fact that just about every work of popular culture when I was a kid, aside from Charlie’s Angels, had only one female character meant that I had to make up my own characters to play when we were playing whatever TV show or movie as we ran around the neighborhood. I had to make up another nurse or doctor when we played M*A*S*H, another Enterprise crew member when we played Star Trek, a female cop when we played CHiPS, a female X-wing pilot when we played Star Wars, etc., if I didn’t win the argument about who got to play the one female character in the show or movie.

By the way, the post title is a reference to a Beach Boys song later also recorded by the Captain & Tennille (which is how I know it), though I think it was more about the live-action movies Disney did in the 50s and their TV shows (like the Mickey Mouse Club) than about the animated princesses.

Life

The Importance of Trees

I read in two different, entirely unrelated nonfiction books last week about the importance of exposure to nature, especially trees. One book was about inner chatter, that voice in your head that can be good (it’s how you learn and remember things and organize your thoughts) or that can drive you nuts when it goes into overdrive (welcome to my life). One good way to calm it down so you can focus on other things is to look at nature. The book discussed research on the topic. There was a study of people living in public housing. People were randomly assigned to apartments, so they made for a good study group, and they found that people who got apartments that overlooked some kind of green space had better outcomes than people whose apartments overlooked things like parking lots or courtyards without any kind of greenery. Then they conducted a study in which people were given some kind of task assignment, then sent out to take a walk on one of two specific routes. The people assigned to walk through a park did a better job on the task when they returned than the people assigned to walk on a city route without greenery.

It seems that the brain only has so much voluntary focus in it, and dealing with something like a city requires voluntary focus. But the brain doesn’t have to work to focus on nature. It’s naturally drawn to notice things like trees and plants, so when you’re in nature, you have more focus left over. There’s also an issue of awe. Nature has a way of putting life in perspective so that you feel less overwhelmed by your daily stresses.

Then there’s the calming effect. The other book I read got into the idea of forest bathing, of immersing yourself in the forest as a way of getting perspective. It lowers the blood pressure and has a spiritual benefit.

I suppose none of this is all that surprising. I’ve always had a thing for trees and green spaces, perhaps because I spent much of my childhood on the plains of west Texas and Oklahoma. I remember feeling like I’d exhaled when we visited relatives in northern Louisiana where they were surrounded by pine trees or when we went camping in the woods in east Texas. A childhood friend from Oklahoma visited our old neighborhood late last year and mentioned the grove of trees I loved, and I remembered that my favorite place to play was a small (very small) grove of trees. When we moved to Germany, where we lived on the edge of a great forest, it felt like coming home. Some of my fondest memories are of taking long walks in the woods on the public walking paths.

Unfortunately, I currently live back on the plains. The forests we have are small and scrubby. I can see trees from my office window, but they’re just crepe myrtles, which are essentially overgrown bushes. Right now, I can’t get out to what trees we do have because we have dangerous levels of heat. You don’t want to go walking outdoors. I can’t even see the trees nearby because I’m keeping my blinds closed in an attempt to keep my house somewhat cool.

But according to one of those books, looking at pictures or videos of nature has a similar effect on the brain. I’ve found a number of YouTube channels of people walking in the woods. They’re shot first-person style, so it gives you the feeling of walking in the woods, rather than of watching someone else walk (the good ones have some kind of stabilization, so the camera doesn’t shake with each step). I’ve found that watching a few minutes of a virtual walk in the woods before I start work in the morning helps with my focus. Then I found some of these videos shot in an area that’s serving as a model for the fictional location in a book I’m developing, so I’m killing two birds with one stone. I’m getting a dose of nature while immersing myself in the world of my book.

And then I got the really bright idea to set up my mini jogging trampoline (I don’t have a treadmill) in front of my TV and walk in place while watching the video of a walk through my book setting inspiration, so I’m really multitasking, getting exercise, research, and nature exposure. I’m finding that ideas pop into my head as I walk and watch the video.

The only problem is that I feel sad when I turn off the video and find myself back in my hot, dry, barren world. I’m less happy about being where I am after spending time in a place I like much better. When I got out of school, I had plans to move to a place that was green and full of trees and hills, but I got a job here and ended up staying. I’m not sure which is worse for my emotional well-being, no exposure to nature (and trees) or exposure that makes me sad about where I live. I’m actually looking into relocating because the cost of living here is skyrocketing to the point I can’t afford to buy any house in my area and I want to get out of my current house, and if I have to leave the area, I might as well go to a place that’s cooler and greener.

movies

A Question of Destiny

I didn’t do any Disney movies last weekend because I got sidetracked and ended up creating a thematic double feature.

First, on Friday night I watched Megamind. I’d been thinking about this one after seeing a Cinema Therapy video on it. Cinema Therapy is a fun YouTube channel in which a filmmaker and his therapist friend discuss movies in terms of mental health and relationships. They may discuss a particular movie, using it to highlight a relationship or mental health issue. They may do a roundup or top ten list, ranking movies for things like depiction of healthy (or unhealthy) relationships. They do spotlights on heroes, showing the issues the heroes face and how the way they overcome them is what makes them heroes. And they look at villains and what kind of help they’d need to get over their problems. I recently watched the episode they did on Megamind, using it to illustrate the issue of the “nice guy” who’s only doing good things to get attention or praise and expects to be rewarded, as opposed to kindness, which is doing the right thing because it’s the right thing, without it being transactional. When I saw that the movie was on Prime, I decided to watch it. I thought I’d seen it on HBO back when it first came out, but I’m not sure. Maybe I saw clips.

The movie is sort of a spoof on the Superman story. A baby on another world gets put in a pod by his parents and sent away from a dying world. But there are actually two pods from two different planets. One is basically Superman, but the other is a blue-skinned creature with a giant brain. The Not!Superman pod lands with a wealthy family, and the other lands in a prison, where the prisoners adopt the child and bring him up. When he ends up in school with the other kid, he realizes he’ll never be able to compete at being good, so he decides to be a supervillain and the nemesis to MetroMan. They’re fairly evenly matched, so all of Megamind’s evil schemes always come close to succeeding before he’s foiled at the last second by MetroMan. But then one of his schemes actually works and he gets to take over the city. Now what? Maybe he needs to create a hero to be his new nemesis, since a villain is nothing without a hero to fight. But what if the new hero actually turns out to be bad? Can a villain become a hero?

I normally don’t have a lot of patience for the “poor, sad villain can’t help being evil and it’s all the hero’s fault for not being nice to him” story, but I actually buy this one because in some respects it’s true. Megamind doesn’t stand a chance, growing up in a prison and being raised by felons, and MetroMan is kind of a jerk and a bully. But ultimately, it also makes it clear that it was Megamind’s choices that made him a villain, and different choices can give him a different outcome. The story is ultimately about the idea that there is no destiny, that you choose who you want to be, and the choices you make reflect the kind of person you are. This becomes clear when the wrong guy ends up getting turned into the new superhero. He’s the guy who thinks he deserves the girl because he’s “nice” to her, but he’s only nice because he wants her, and he gets mad when she doesn’t respond to him the way he wants.

The movie is a lot of fun, has some great laugh-out-loud moments and an excellent cast (including Brad Pitt having fun mocking his own image as MetroMan — he really does seem to like those roles that allow him to mock himself) and is thought-provoking.

Then I noticed that The Iron Giant is also on Prime and is leaving at the end of the month, so I figured that would make a good Saturday movie to fit the theme, since that whole move is about the giant choosing what he wants to be. In the late 50s, during the Sputnik era, a strange thing crashes to earth. A young boy in rural Maine discovers a giant metal man and befriends him, hiding him from the authorities. But what is the iron giant, and is he a threat? Maybe he can decide for himself.

I remember watching this movie on HBO, and I remembered the major points, but not a lot of the details. It’s directed by Brad Bird, who went on to do The Incredibles for Pixar. I found myself wondering how this movie would have worked if it had been a Pixar film. It has that kind of heart. Most of the movie is more conventional hand-drawn, 2-D animation, with the robot being computer animated. I’m not super crazy about the hand-drawn animation. There’s a Saturday-morning cartoon feel to it, which may have been deliberate. It’s nowhere near as rich as the Disney animation, especially with the human characters. But would there have been the robot vs. human contrast if the whole thing had been done Pixar-style?

The movie is quite sweet and gets into that issue of deciding who you want to be and whether you’re a friend or an enemy depends not on what you are but on what you do. It gets a little heavy-handed at times and isn’t quite as amusing as Megamind, but it does bring a tear to my eye a few times.

And now I’m inspired to go out and create my own destiny!