movies

A New (to me) RomCom

Last weekend, I stumbled across a British romantic comedy on Peacock that I’d never heard of, Man Up. It has a really fun meet-cute premise, plus actual character growth arcs and one of the better “rom-com dashes” near the end that I’ve seen (if you’re going to throw in the cliche, you may as well have fun with it).

A terminally single woman gets mistaken by a man for his blind date at a train station. She’s getting tired of her sister nagging her to put herself out there and take chances to find love, so she impulsively decides to let him go on thinking she’s his date and goes off with him for a night out. But when she finds that she actually likes him she has to worry about how and when to own up to what she did and how he’ll react to the truth. And it turns out that he has his own hidden agenda behind this date as he’s recovering from a painful divorce.

My scoring system for romcoms is that they have to be both funny and romantic. I want to smile much of the way through and laugh at least one or two times, and I want to want the couple to get together rather than wanting to tell them to run. This one actually works on both counts. There are some cringeworthy moments where you feel secondhand embarrassment, but those are also really funny. Mixed in among the wackiness is some genuine emotional depth. There are times when you want to slap both characters, but then there are also moments when you want to hug them, and the ending is really satisfying because you feel like they’ve both learned something valuable and changed.

Lake Bell and Simon Pegg are the leads, and they seem to have tapped the National Theatre for the deep-bench supporting cast full of noted British actors. Even the room service waiter who appears in one scene is a recognizable actor. I’d say the tone is similar to Bridget Jones’s Diary, in that we have a somewhat hapless single woman in London who gets into scrapes, and it can get somewhat raunchy in moments. For the most part, it’s pretty grounded, like something you could believe would happen (apparently, the inspiration behind the script is that the writer was mistaken for someone’s blind date, and she wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t immediately corrected the guy), but then there are a few events that go over the top in a rather delightful way.

As I said, I’d never heard of this film, but it was exactly the sort of thing I’ve been wishing existed that they don’t make nearly enough of. It’s about ten years old, so would have come out during a time when I could walk to a movie theater and went to movies frequently. I don’t know if it got a wide release in the US or if it was just badly marketed. It’s on Peacock now, so if you’re craving a romcom, this one might be fun. It got me started playing with romcom ideas, like how could you take that premise and add magic to it?

Books

More Cozy Cottagecore Fantasy

If you like my Rydding Village books and need something to keep you entertained while I write book 3 (you’ve already read book 2, right?), I have a recommendation for you: The Spellshop, by Sarah Beth Durst. I’ve known Sarah a really long time. I think we first met in 2006, and we’ve hung out together when we’re at the same events, bonding over curly hair and fantasy books. As soon as she started talking about this book, I was excited. It’s along the same lines as the Rydding Village books, in that it’s cottagecore cozy fantasy about a woman finding refuge in a magical village.

An extremely introverted librarian packs up as many books as she can and flees when a revolution sets the city and the library on fire. The only place she can think of to go for refuge is her childhood home on a remote island. She initially plans to just keep the spellbooks safe, since unauthorized use of magic is absolutely forbidden, but when she learns that the people on the island are suffering because the sorcerers who were supposed to be visiting to take care of things haven’t been, she starts looking up spells she can use to help. She can sell “remedies” to help the islanders, including the handsome merhorse farmer next door. She’s safe as long as no outsiders come to the island, but then a storm blows in a refugee who could put everything at risk.

This is a sweet, charming book about community that also gets into issues dealing with resources and how they should be fairly allocated, as well as questions about the difference between what’s right and what’s legal. There’s a subtle, gentle romance, but it’s mostly about the loner heroine learning to allow herself to be part of a community and to open her heart and explore her abilities. It’s like one of those women’s fiction books about the woman going to a village and opening a bakery/cafe/candy shop/bookstore, only in a magical world with flying cats, sentient spider plants, tree spirits, and merhorses.

It certainly makes me look at my spider plant differently, and I feel a little sad about having to rehome the giant granddaddy one when I moved. The one danger of reading this as a follow-up to Bread and Burglary might be that you’d be even hungrier, as there’s a lot of talk about jam and baked goods.

My Books

Release Day!

Bread and Burglary book coverIt’s a release day birthday for me. Bread and Burglary goes on sale today as an e-book. The paperback should be on sale at Amazon tomorrow (August 8), and it may take a little time to get picked up by other systems. Amazon changed their way of handling paperbacks since my last book, so my usual timing for setting up the paperback so it would come out at the same time as the e-book turned out to be off. I don’t currently have any plans for audio. That’s beyond my budget right now, so the series needs to either sell well enough for me to make the kind of money I’d need to invest in audio and show that it would be profitable in audio, or well enough for Audible to see it as a good bet and buy the audio rights.

I don’t have huge plans for my birthday, other than going out to buy some cake. I’d thought about having a big day out and playing tourist at one of the big historical sites nearby, but there’s a chance of storms this afternoon (both the outer bands of Debby and a front coming in), and I don’t want to be driving through the mountains in a thunderstorm, so I’m sticking closer to home. I’ll see what strikes my fancy once I leave the house. A book I put on hold at the library is in, so if it’s looking like a rainy afternoon, I may pick up a takeout lunch and spend the afternoon curled up with a book. The perfect birthday!

Enjoy the new book. In the coming weeks, I’ll post some behind the scenes stuff and maybe a recipe.

Books

New Library Benefits

One fun thing about the move is that now I have access to two local library systems, and they have different books from my old library system. Late last year, I read Mystic and Rider by Sharon Shinn, the start of a series, but my library system didn’t have the second book. I tried requesting it through Interlibrary Loan, but something must have gone wrong because even though several library systems in the metro area had it, they never got it in for me. But the library here did have it, so I finally got to read book 2, The Thirteenth House.

This series is structured somewhat like a romance series, with it being about a group of people, and each book has a different person from within the group as a main character. There’s also a different romance in each book. There’s an overarching plot about some political turmoil in the kingdom that this group is helping the king deal with, but this book could still function as a standalone. I barely remembered the first book, it’s been so long since I read it, and I was able to follow the story. It’s the sort of thing where you could follow the plot if you hadn’t read the earlier book, but you’d grasp more about the characters and situation if you had.

This book centers on the young noblewoman who has shapeshifting powers, and even though this seems to be a somewhat medieval-ish fantasy world (medieval technology, but it otherwise doesn’t seem to be pinned to any particular era from our history), this particular book has a very Regency vibe. It’s the social season, in which the nobles of the elite Twelve Houses of the kingdom each host big house parties and balls for the other nobles, who make the circuit of them all, along with some of the upper lesser nobles in each province, known collectively as the Thirteenth House. Our heroine is using her shapechanging abilities to impersonate her introverted sister and attend the social functions on her behalf. Meanwhile, the other members of the group are guarding the young princess, who’s making her big social debut. There are rumblings of threats from disgruntled lesser nobles, and the regent who would advise the princess if she became queen has been threatened. What complicates things for our heroine is the fact that she fell in love with this regent, and he with her, when she rescued him from kidnappers. The only problem is that he’s married. She’s never worried about social conventions before, but is this a social convention she’s willing to break? And if she does, could she lose out on another possible love?

This book is less of a “fantasy road trip” than the first one in the series, since they aren’t really on a quest, but they are on a journey as they travel around the kingdom. It’s fun seeing a lot of the conventions of the Regency romance placed in a magical world. The romance in this one is not one that could fit into a genre romance novel, and it provides an angsty contrast to the Regency-like fun in the rest of the plot. Romance readers might have issues with the relationship, but I would encourage you not to judge it without reading the whole book because it does work out in a satisfying way for the character, and there are some twists.

I really enjoy this kind of series structure, with the big-picture external plot that carries through the whole series and the individual romance plots in each book. We get to see the world and the characters through different eyes in each book since there’s a different protagonist. The main characters from the first book are secondary characters here, and we get to see how they’re progressing. Meanwhile, potential storylines are being set up for the other characters that I assume will play out in future books. This is what I’m trying to do with the Rydding Village series, though I’m sort of keeping Elwyn as a secondary heroine in all the books, so there’s the book heroine and then there’s Elwyn as the series heroine, and we’ll get both their perspectives in each book. The big picture plot will start to have a bigger effect starting in book three, which I’m gearing up to start writing.

fantasy

What Era?

A couple of weeks ago, I was having a very lazy Sunday and spent the afternoon lying on the sofa, watching history videos on YouTube. One came up that was about how most “medieval” fantasy is actually more based on the Stuart era, so 1600s through early 1700s. Of course, anything that combines history and fantasy is right down my alley, so I watched it, and I think he had some interesting points.

One thing he pointed out was that the kind of inn/tavern that’s common in fantasy fiction and in things like Dungeons and Dragons, like the Prancing Pony in The Lord of the Rings, is more of an 18th century coaching in than an actual medieval inn. The roasted potatoes or potato-laden stew they get in inns would be from the 1600s or later, since potatoes weren’t grown in Europe until then.

Then there’s clothing. The aesthetic of most fantasy clothing is more 16th century than medieval. Take the female Renaissance festival uniform of blouse, lace-up bodice, and skirt, which you also see in Disney fairy tale depictions and lots of fantasy art. That’s mid-1600s, not medieval. In the medieval era, women were more likely to wear one-piece dresses. Men’s fantasy clothing also dates later. The Hobbit outfits with their frock coats and waistcoats are late 1600s and beyond — and it’s not just the costuming for the films. That’s what Tolkien described in the books. The tall boots with cuffed tops that we see in so much fantasy art are from the 1600s. About the only truly medieval look we see in fantasy is the long tunic with a sword belt.

Neuschwanstein Castle, like something out of a fairytale, on a snowy day
Neuschwanstein Castle looks like something from a fairytale, but was built in the 1800s. (I took this photo from a rickety suspended bridge, and it was utterly terrifying.)
Warwick Castle, with thick walls and towers
This is a medieval castle. Warwick Castle in England.

The Gothic style of architecture, with its spires and graceful pointed arches, was only used for churches during the medieval period. Castles built then were fortresses. They needed to be something that could keep the enemy out. The imagery of Gothic-style castles, so common in fantasy art, comes from the Victorian Gothic Revival. Neuschwanstein, the castle that inspired the Disneyland castle (and so many fantasy castles), was built in the late 1800s.

It didn’t come up in the video, but I’ll add that the roaring fire in the massive fireplace is also post-medieval. In the medieval era, they were more likely to have an open hearth in the middle of the floor. Existing medieval buildings have often been retrofitted to add fireplaces and chimneys. It’s like the way my current home has central air conditioning and fiber Internet, but that doesn’t mean it had those things when it was built in 1924.

In general, the “medieval” fantasy aesthetic is based on the 1600s, but without gunpowder. It is possible that some authors really did mean for things to be properly medieval, but the cover artists went with more common fantasy imagery and the authors were tearing their hair out over the inaccuracy. For instance, I know that Katherine Kurtz was very particular about being as close as possible to historical accuracy for her Deryni series, with one part of the timeline set in the 10th century and another part in the 12th century, and she describes the clothing based on that, but on the book covers, the men are wearing those tall cuffed boots.

I found all this interesting because I’d decided to mentally set a world I’ve been building in the 1640s for the aesthetic and technology (minus gunpowder), mostly because the clothes are closest to fitting that fairytale look I had in mind. I guess even without consciously being aware of it, my “medieval” fantasy was being more Stuart.

My Rydding Village world is a mix of things. I think we’re at close to a 1600s level of technology, though in rural areas things don’t change all that much from the 1500s through the 1700s. We’re late enough to have fireplaces, but not quite to the point of having iron stoves. The 1600s and early 1700s buildings at the Museum of Frontier Culture are close to what I imagine. I keep picturing Elwyn in medieval style dresses, the kind that are close-fitting through the body and with full skirts, but Mair is usually wearing more the Renaissance festival type outfit in my head. But there’s also a lot of Regency-style culture going on in the upper classes. I think it’s just a general pre-industrial world with bits and pieces from a lot of eras rather than being based on any one particular time period.

My Books

Rydding Village Book 2

Bread and Burglary book coverAfter a bit of a delay caused by my move across the country, followed by another delay due to my procrastination about getting a book cover made, I’m pleased to announce that Bread and Burglary, book two in the Tales of Rydding Village series, will be published August 7, and the e-book is currently available for preorder. There will be a paperback on release day, but they don’t let you preorder those.

This book follows up on Tea and Empathy, continuing with the development of what’s going on with Elwyn and Bryn from that book, but also focusing on Lucina the baker. We find out why she has so much trouble sleeping, and finding out that the guard who stayed to become the new apprentice smith is from the homeland she had to flee doesn’t help matters. Things get even worse when items begin disappearing from people’s homes, and of course the newcomer is the first suspect. Lucina worries they’ll start to wonder about her, too, if he’s the thief, so the best thing she can do is try to clear his name. Meanwhile, he’s homesick and excited to meet someone from his homeland.

It’s my usual mix of mystery, magic, and a hint of romance. And this one will make you hungry because there’s a lot of baking. I did a fair amount of baking while I was plotting it and writing the first draft. I wrote the first draft before the move, then started revising it while I was waiting for my furniture to be delivered to my new home. Without Internet or a television, I didn’t have a lot else to do, so I spent a whole day reading the draft and making revision notes.

I already have the next book planned and partially outlined, so I hope to be able to get that one out before the end of the year.

I set August 7 as the release date because that’s my birthday. I figured I’d be sure to remember it, and it gives me something else to celebrate. I don’t know what I’ll do for my birthday, since I don’t know a lot of people here and it seems like most of the places downtown are closed on Wednesdays. Celebrating a book release helps make the day special, no matter what else I do, but I’m pretty sure cake will be involved. Buying the new book would make a great birthday gift for me. I have dreams of making it at least onto the top ten list of one of the Amazon categories.

movies, fantasy

The Journey’s Beginning

Last weekend, I decided to go back to where it all began and rewatch the movie that got me started thinking about that whole romantic fantasy road trip subgenre, which made me realize it was a thing that I like, which made me realize that a story idea I had long ago actually could fit into that, which led me to replot it and try to write it. I’m currently rewriting it (I’ve been working on it off and on, but I’ve also written seven other books and a number of novellas since then), so since I found this movie on Hoopla, I thought I’d rewatch.

Back in early 2021, I started watching a fantasy movie called The Crown and the Dragon on Amazon, and very early in the movie I knew that this was a kind of movie I’d like, so I stopped it to go make popcorn before settling down to properly watch it. It perfectly fit what I later identified as the romantic fantasy road trip story structure. I’d never seen it before, but I knew each major beat that would happen — not really predicting the outcome, just knowing where the turning points would be. It was interesting rewatching it after doing so much thinking about this topic.

This movie is just barely fantasy cheese. It looks gorgeous. There’s not a lot of info on IMDB, but based on the names of most of the production crew, I’m guessing it was filmed in Ireland. The cinematography is excellent, the score is good, and the acting is far above most fantasy cheese. The actors are neither wooden nor overdoing it. Most of them don’t have a lot of film credits, so I’m guessing they mostly cast Irish stage actors. The two things that drag the movie down are the effects and the plot. Any time a dragon shows up, it’s painful. It’s like someone taped a stick figure drawing of a dragon to the film, or else like a really bad Photoshop job where you can tell that an image has just been pasted into another image, without correcting the light angles, shadows, etc. Then there’s the plot.

Not that the plot is necessarily bad. There aren’t big holes or logical leaps. It just seems to be missing a lot of context. I’ve watched this movie twice, and I still don’t have a good sense of what’s actually going on. The heroine is on a mission to bring a particular item to a castle in time for a king to be crowned, while the bad guys are trying to stop this, and yet we never see the king and we don’t really know why he needs this item. The item’s actually needed for fighting a dragon. We don’t know who the bad guys are or what they’re trying to do. I know fantasy writers are encouraged to leave some of their worldbuilding off the page because you don’t have to explain everything, but you do need to leave the stuff that’s essential for understanding the story. This movie feels like it was based on an 800-page novel that had to be cut down to a two-hour movie, and then the movie had to be cut to under 90 minutes so it could be on TV. Given that this movie is just under 90 minutes and has transitions that seem like they were created to stick in commercial breaks, I wonder if maybe it did start as a longer movie, then the only distribution it got was on TV, so they ended up cutting the stuff that explained the plot.

But it really does fit my pattern. We have the hero and heroine striking the bargain for him to help her get to the castle. There’s bickering along the way, until they’re attacked by the bad guys and barely escape together, which leads to a bonding scene and later to dancing. At their destination, he’s ready to leave her to her destiny, but then he returns to her and helps her achieve her destiny.

The romance is satisfying (though a bit more development in the middle might have helped). The fantasy elements had potential if they’d been explained a bit more. They needed much better dragon effects because that was 1980s-level bad, even though this movie was from the 21st century. There are some continuity issues (that may result from things being cut), like the heroine falling in mud in one scene and the same clothes being pristine in the next scene, or the hero having nothing but the clothes he’s wearing, and then in the next scene, with no explanation he has on different clothes and a sword. Or the time he drops the sword and dives into the ocean to escape a bad guy in one scene, but then in the next scene he has the sword again after he’s out of the water. All in all I’d say the impression is good fantasy cheese that’s a bit frustrating because with a bit of work and a slightly bigger budget it could have been a good romantasy movie. The people making the movie did a good enough job with what must have been a tiny budget that they should have been able to get the chance to go on and do bigger and better things. I remain annoyed by the scarcity of good, big-budget fantasy films. There’s clearly an audience, but aside from the Lord of the Rings movies, it’s like the studios have no clue what to do with them. They don’t know how to pick projects, and they utterly fail in promoting them, which then creates the self-fulfilling prophecy that fantasy movies don’t do well enough to justify the budgets they require.

My Books

Twenty Years Ago

Enchanted, Inc. book cover, showing cartoon fairy and frog prince in business attireOn Monday (July 22 if you’re reading the archives), it will have been twenty years since I got the book deal to have the first two Enchanted, Inc. books published.

I wrote the first book in the fall of 2003, got an agent in early 2004, then spent some time making revisions that my agent suggested. The book went out on submission to editors in late May. I’d been published before and was used to dealing with publishers, but I still was rather naively optimistic. I was so sure that the idea was clever and perfect for the market, so I had high hopes of the book being eagerly snatched up by publishers.

That wasn’t quite the case. Rejections began trickling in. By the time July rolled around, I was starting to get nervous. There were some positive signs, though. A number of editors loved it and had passed it on to the next level for consideration.

Then in mid July, one publisher announced the intention to make an offer on it. Since it was still with several other publishers, that triggered an auction. That’s when all the editors who are interested in a book have to make offers by a certain time, and then there’s negotiation as the agent lets all the interested parties know what’s on the table. A big part of it is money, but other things can also come into play, like whether they’re willing to go for a multi-book deal, the payment schedule on the advance, what promotion will be involved, and publication date. You might be willing to take a lower advance to get the book published faster, for instance. There might be conference calls with the editors to discuss their vision and plans for the book so the author can figure out which editor they want to deal with.

The auction was originally set for July 21, but there was a schedule conflict, so it was moved to July 22. As soon as the auction was announced, more rejections rolled in as publishers declined to participate. I was beginning to wonder what would happen if you had an auction but nobody came. At least I still had that initial publisher, right? Except they couldn’t make an offer because the executive who needed to sign off on it was out of touch. But then an offer came in from Ballantine Books. My agent didn’t think the other publisher could match it, so we took that offer. I’d sold my book in a two-book deal, so it was guaranteed a sequel.

There have been times when I’ve wondered if maybe we should have waited on that other publisher. They were going to publish it as fantasy, while Ballantine was publishing it on the mainstream side of the house as chick lit. The chick lit market tanked not long after the second book was published (but fortunately after I got another two-book deal for books three and four), but the urban fantasy market was just taking off.

I celebrated the book sale by buying a pair of shoes, the shoes now known as the Infamous Red Stilettos. I’d spotted them when shopping with a friend around the time I landed an agent, and I was drawn to them about the same way Katie was in Once Upon Stilettos. I didn’t have the money for them, but I told my friend that if I sold the book, I’d buy those shoes. When I called her to tell her I’d sold the book, she told me we were going shoe shopping. It was during that shopping trip that I made a quip about the shoes being magical, and that was when I came up with that storyline for the next book (I already had the part about the corporate spy in the proposal I’d sent to the publisher).

The timing of the sale worked out great because there was a big writing conference the next week, so I got to celebrate with my writer friends and meet my agent in person.

I can’t believe it’s been twenty years. Surprisingly, that book is still in print, when a lot of other books that came out around that time (and got more of a publicity push) have gone out of print. It’s been optioned for film/TV twice, though both times the option was allowed to lapse without anything getting done. It’s been published around the world in a number of languages. I have copies on my shelf in Japanese, Dutch, German, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese, to name a few. The series ended up being nine books and a short story collection, which is more than I originally planned. I’d planned it as a five-book series.

I think a celebration is in order for Monday. I won’t buy more shoes, but maybe I’ll get some ice cream when I go to the community band concert in the park that night.

movies

Good Fantasy Cheese

I actually managed to watch a whole movie last weekend, something I hadn’t done since the move. It was one I thought might fit my fantasy road trip pattern, something in the “fantasy cheese” category that I originally saw on a Saturday night on the Sci Fi Channel. It’s currently streaming on most of the ad-supported services, but it’s also on the hoopla library system, without ads.

The movie is George and the Dragon, but it showed on Sci Fi as something like Dragonsword, and it’s a rather odd movie. To paraphrase a line from a book I had as a kid, when it’s good, it’s very, very good, but when it’s bad, it’s horrible.

The story is essentially a spin on the St. George and the dragon myth. War-weary Sir George returns home after the Crusades and just wants a plot of land where he can live a quiet life. He goes to the king to ask permission to buy some land and learns that the king’s daughter has disappeared on the eve of her wedding. The king says he’ll give George the land if he can find the princess. But the princess has other plans involving what may be the last dragon egg, and George isn’t a fan of dragons after one maimed his father (though he’s not entirely sure he believes his father about that).

When compared to the other fantasy cheese movies on Sci Fi, this one is a cut above. When compared to “real” movies, it’s on the B-movie end of things. It’s very tongue-in-cheek in a lot of places. I got the feeling the filmmakers were trying to do something along the lines of The Princess Bride, with some self-aware humor. The fact that the closing credits are bloopers and outtakes shows that the movie wasn’t meant to be taken entirely seriously, and for the most part the humor works, though there are some odd bits like a skateboard chase scene involving a priest (that I would suspect could be mapped onto the similar scenes in Back to the Future). Yes, a medieval skateboard chase. The priest lands on a little wagon and the sides fall off, turning it into a skateboard. This has very little to do with the overall plot, but it sets the tone.

The casting is mostly better than the usual fantasy cheese movie, in that most of the actors are moderately (even well) known and most of them are quite good. We have James Purefoy and Piper Perabo as the leads, with people like Simon Callow and Joan Plowright in small roles, Val Kilmer in an uncredited cameo, and Michael Clarke Duncan and Patrick Swayze in supporting roles.

Swayze is by far the weakest link and the biggest “why?” in the movie. Not that he’s bad if you take his performance out of context. He does a good job portraying his character and seems to be having a lot of fun. The problem is that the movie is set in medieval England, and Swayze sounds like he’s from Texas. I’m sure it would have been even worse if he’d attempted an English accent, but this is worse than Kevin Costner’s attempt at Robin Hood. True, the people in this time period (and more on that later) would have been speaking either Norman French or Old English and we have to assume that everyone is being translated into modern English, but it would help if everyone who’s from the same place sounds like they’re at least from the same continent. (Duncan and Kilmer also use American accents, but they’re not supposed to be English, so it’s not so grating.) Piper Perabo is American (and also a Texan), but she does a decent English accent (at least, to my American ears).

As for the time period, I’m not sure what was going on with that. George is returning from the Crusades (in an opening that’s basically a copy of Prince of Thieves), which would put this after the Norman Conquest, but we’re dealing with a King Edgar, who’s not on the list of Norman kings, and who has his court in the north of England, where the main threat is from the Picts, which would put this during the Saxon era and before the Saxon kingdoms consolidated — long before the Crusades. This is supposedly England in our world, but at times they treat it like secondary world fantasy. The costumes are generic medieval-ish. Some of the men’s costumes are pretty good, aside from the poor kid who goes through the movie with a bath mat tied around his shoulder. The princess wears a dress that’s obviously polyester stretch velvet. She looks like she’s wearing a princess costume from Spirit Halloween.

But George is a wonderful character, going through all this stuff when he really just wants a quiet life, and Purefoy manages to find a nice balance in making him world-weary without being a downer. The duke the princess is supposed to marry keeps trying to make him jealous about marrying the princess, and George doesn’t care. He just wants his land. He and the princess have good chemistry. She’s very much the modern “spunky princess,” but I think it works here. As long as the film focuses on George, the princess, the royal advisor, and the kid who’s helping them, the film is a lot of fun. There are some excellent fight scenes that are quite inventive, especially one where there are multiple factions and shifting allegiances, with people going from fighting each other to fighting the common enemy and then back to fighting each other. In these parts, Patrick Swayze is even good, probably because he’s not talking.

This is very much a turn-off-your-brain popcorn flick, but it can be fun if you’re looking for a fantasy film you haven’t seen dozens of times (why are there so few good fantasy films?). It’s better than some of the cheaply made movies on the free streaming services and the lead characters are pretty likable. It has a nice ending that leaves you with a smile.

It turned out not to really fit my fantasy road trip pattern because the road trip is a very small part of the movie. It’s the good part, which may be why that was all I remembered of it. It is kind of a fantasy rom-com, though the hero and heroine don’t meet until about halfway through the movie.

Books, TV

Reboots

It seems like half the movies and TV shows being made right now are reboots of some kind or another. The movie listings have to include dates so that you’ll know which version it is. If you look at the TV schedule, you might think you were back in the mid-80s because all the shows seem to have come from that era. There’s Night Court, The Equalizer, and for a while there were new versions of Magnum, PI and Hawaii 5-0 (I don’t know if they’re still on).

Night Court is a sequel, of sorts, following up on the characters and events of the original series, with the daughter of the original series’ main character taking over the courtroom where her father once presided and the prosecutor from the original series now coming out of retirement to be a public defender. There’s a Frasier reboot that’s also apparently a sequel (I haven’t watched it).

I believe Magnum, Hawaii 5-0 (the only one of this bunch I’ve watched), The Equalizer, and the new Walker, Texas Ranger are all reboots/reimaginings, taking the concept of the original series and doing an entirely new series set in the present day.

I loved the old Night Court but found the new one to be not funny at all. I think part of the problem was that it was still essentially an 80s sitcom, so it felt stale and dated to me. This might have been the perfect opportunity to really reimagine it and change the format. The concept of the series could have made for a good mockumentary, like The Office or Parks and Recreation, since a young judge taking over the courtroom where her father once presided is the sort of thing someone might make a documentary about. It would have been interesting to see these characters when they knew they were on camera.

This got me started pondering what other series they could reboot. They already did Charlies Angels as a movie. Remington Steele could be quite timely in the era of #MeToo. It’s basically a series about sexism and mansplaining, since it’s about a woman who’s an expert in her field but has so much trouble being taken seriously that she has to invent a male boss to be the figurehead for her business, and then when a con artist steps into the role of the imaginary boss, people listen to him even though he has no expertise. It might be interesting to turn it from a romantic comedy to a psychological thriller, given that he’s essentially blackmailing her and holding her business hostage. As much as I loved Pierce Brosnan in the series, it is kind of creepy that the characters fell in love, when you think about it (though I missed the final season or two when they got together because I was in college without TV access).

Since they rebooted Magnum, they could do a follow-up series of Simon and Simon, its schedule mate. That was a series about two brothers who were complete opposites (one a slick preppie, one a laid-back cowboy) running a small private investigation agency in San Diego, and I think the timing works out that they could do a series about their kids having taken over the agency. Make one of the cousins a woman, and maybe she’s the laid-back one who likes the agency the way it is while her male cousin wants to grow the business to be a major agency.

I wonder if a reboot of Moonlighting would work. That was the series that introduced Bruce Willis. It was about a former model (Cybill Shepherd) who lost all her money when her accountant cheated her and fled the country. One of the few investments she had left was a low-end private investigation agency that was meant to be a tax write-off. She decided to go to work there and actually run it to make money, since it was her remaining source of income, and she clashed with the wacky detective who’d been running the place. A lot of the success of the series was due to Bruce Willis’s personal charisma and the chemistry between him and Shepherd (though apparently they actually loathed each other), so I’m not sure if you could recapture that. I’d just want to see someone play with that concept and be willing to do some of the wild stuff they did, like the black-and-white episode or the one where they did The Taming of the Shrew, but without it flying horribly off the rails in the later seasons. “The Moonlighting Curse” is what they call a series being ruined by the leads getting together romantically, but I don’t think it was the fact that they got together romantically so much as it was the way they got together. They dragged it out a bit too much with the will they/won’t they and a lot of contrived obstacles, then got the monkey wrench of Shepherd’s real-life pregnancy, with twins, so it was impossible to hide it behind a potted plant, and that led to writing the pregnancy in with weird stuff like the fetus’s perspective. I think you could have them get together without it ruining the series if it were done gradually without all the monkey wrenches. The basic personality clashes would still be there.

Thinking about all this made me ponder whether you could do a reboot of a book. I know long-running franchises like the Nancy Drew books get updated. Nancy keeps getting moved forward in time, from the 30s to the 50s and then to the 70s and to modern times. Apparently, she’s now a modern teen with a cell phone and Internet. I just know as a kid I liked the 30s and 50s ones, hated the newer 70s ones because Nancy’s clothes were a lot better on the covers and in the illustrations when she wasn’t wearing bell bottoms.

But would there be any market for taking a book published in the 80s or 90s and rewriting it to take place in the 2020s? Would the author write the same concept differently if they wrote it now? I found myself thinking about that as I approach the 20th anniversary of selling Enchanted, Inc. to a publisher. How would I write it differently if I wrote it now? Not just going in and adding smart phones and changing the pop culture references, but taking that same concept of a woman immune to magic being recruited by a magical company and writing it again. What would be different if I did that? I can’t say for certain, mostly because I have zero interest in doing that, so I can’t wrap my brain around it. It’s not the kind of story I want to tell now.

Looking at my bookcase, there’s nothing that really jumps out at me as a “I wish the author could go back and redo this” situation, though that’s probably because I only have the books I absolutely love on my bookcase (especially after all the purging I did before the move). I wouldn’t have kept the ones that needed a do over.

Is there a book you’d want to see revisited and updated in some way?

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