One of last weekend’s movies was Mean Girls (the original, not the musical). I’m not sure why I was drawn to it. I think part of it was that I was looking for movies that contained Christmas elements but that weren’t “Christmas” movies, and I remembered the talent show scene.

I saw this movie in the theater when it was originally released, though I think I caught it later in the run at the dollar theater. My agent had suggested I consider writing young adult, and since it had been a long time since I was a young adult, I was doing research. I read the non-fiction book the movie was based on, then decided to go see the movie. The book was a bit uncomfortable to read because it brought back a lot of memories. I’d seen and experienced so many of the things the author mentioned about how girls treat each other, and I had a similar reaction to the movie, though I was lucky to be a teen before three-way calling was common (and I can only imagine how social media comes into play).

Though one big difference for me was that my Mean Girls experience came in elementary school, not high school. The popular girl in my high school class was popular because she was really sweet and nice. She was also very shy and introverted, so she just hung around with her best friend. There was no entourage, no group of wannabes. I was sort of in the tertiary level of friends with her, since we had most of our classes together and were in the same Sunday school class at church, so we were “school” and “church” friends, though we never hung out together away from school. I wasn’t really included or welcomed in high school, since I was the new kid in a place where most of the kids had been there at least since elementary school, but I wasn’t bullied. I was just left alone. I think it did help that for my freshman year I had some bully protection from the senior girl I sat with in band who was the queen bee of the school that year. If you’ve ever watched that reality show about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, I shared a music stand with Kelli (the director of the cheerleaders) as a freshman, and although we didn’t really talk and I wouldn’t have considered us friends, I also got the sense that I’d been put in the “don’t mess with her” category, and the older guys kind of watched over me while the senior girls were fairly nice, and no one younger went against that.

But my elementary school experience could have been a case study in that book, not at school, but at home. We moved to a small, isolated neighborhood on an army post the summer before second grade. There weren’t enough girls for there to be multiple cliques, so everyone from first through third grade hung out together, with maybe eight girls at the most. I was the only girl in my grade most of the time, so it was the third graders, me, and a few select first graders. There was very much a queen bee who ruled the group and decided who was in or out, and she was a mini Regina George. She dictated what TV shows everyone watched (there was no point in looking for anyone to play outside with while the Bewitched rerun was on every evening), what clothes everyone should wear, what foods were in and out, etc. I remember that the worst thing anyone could say about you was that you were “conceited,” and it didn’t take much to be considered conceited. Just having confidence or thinking you were at all good was being conceited. She loved to set up traps. One of her favorite things for us to play was beauty pageant, where you had to show confidence and be willing to show off a talent to win (she was the judge), but if you acted like you thought you were any good you were conceited.

I think most of the power she held was because there were so few girls, so if she didn’t let you in the group, your only option for friends would be the boys or whoever was also an outcast at that time, mostly the one girl a year younger than I was who was never really in the group because she was considered weird. The queen bee mostly let me in the group, but I didn’t fit in well since I was younger than most of them. It was most stressful in the summers. During the school year I had friends at school and was involved in activities after school, so I didn’t need friends at home so much. It was during the summer when she really flexed her power. I remember a bit of angst especially the second summer, when I went in and out of favor. That was when I learned I didn’t mind playing with the boys or with the weird girl, and when the queen bee thought she was losing power over me, she really doubled down. I came in last for all the beauty pageants. She moved away sometime when I was in third grade, and all the girls in the neighborhood felt like we’d had a weight lifted. We didn’t have another mean girl like that, and the girl group was a lot less cohesive, more smaller groups of girls or else blending with the boys.

That experience inoculated me against the whole mean girl routine. I learned that they don’t have power over you if you don’t care what they think about you. I was bullied during the second half of sixth grade and seventh grade but I didn’t notice until they escalated to the point of getting physical because those girls weren’t even on my radar for noticing they existed, let alone caring, and that frustrated them enough to lead them to physically attack me so I had to notice them. I don’t recall them being particularly popular, and I don’t think anyone cared all that much about being friends with them (though it’s possible I was oblivious since none of my friends cared about them, but other girls might have wanted their favor). They didn’t have power and were trying to get it.

In the town where I used to live, they had a bad mean girl issue in elementary school. It got so bad they brought in counselors to try to deal with it, and it didn’t do any good. The son of one of my friends was in that class, and my friend said the boys in that class didn’t start dating until they were in college because they were so turned off by the girls they were in school with. They didn’t realize until they got to college that girls could be fun and nice instead of hateful bitches. That fits with my experience that it was less of an issue once we hit the teens. But I guess a movie about 8-10 year-old mean girls wouldn’t have had the same box office appeal. I don’t know if that crop of girls retained power in high school, but that school was so big that it would have been hard to have a core clique. It’s a lot easier to take over a class in elementary school and rule over who gets invited to birthday parties, etc.

One of the movies I watched last weekend was The Fall Guy, a movie that says a lot about Hollywood today — not necessarily within the movie itself, but in the concept behind it.

I really enjoyed the movie. It’s essentially an action romantic comedy. It hits all the rom-com beats, but in the context of some pretty ridiculous action sequences, like the declaration of love during a chase with things blowing up in the background, or the big “misunderstanding” happening because of an attempted kidnapping that turns into a chase and fight scene. The cast is clearly having fun and well aware of what movie they’re in while still managing to play it perfectly straight. It’s pretty much the perfect popcorn movie or date movie. I laughed out loud several times.

But it’s also a sign of how utterly terrified Hollywood seems to be of anything original right now. Every movie has to be tied to or based on something else. It has to be a sequel, a remake, based on a book/movie/comic book/videogame, etc. In this case, the movie is supposedly based on the 1980s TV series The Fall Guy. I watched that series. I don’t remember much about it because it’s not all that memorable. It was the kind of thing that was fun to watch, but as soon it was over you forgot that you watched it.

But the movie actually has almost nothing to do with the series. There’s the title, the name of the main character and the fact that he’s a stunt man, and two of the stars of the series show up in cameos that have nothing to do with their series roles. The TV series was about a stunt man who worked as a bounty hunter in between movies. He usually used his stunt skills to bring in the fugitives, like fancy driving or fighting, but sometimes rigging something like a stunt as a trap. As I recall, a lot of episodes began with what looked like an action sequence with our hero in grave danger, and then we’d find out he was filming a movie stunt. Later in the episode, that same stunt would be key to bringing in the fugitive.

The movie is about a stunt man who got scared away from the industry (and everything else) when he was badly injured in a stunt that failed. Now he’s being encouraged to come back to double once more for a toxic action star who likes to pretend he does all his own stunts, and the director of the film turns out to be the woman he ghosted after his accident. Things get complicated when the star disappears, and the stunt man needs to find him to save the movie for the woman he loves.

The premise and the stories are so different that if they’d changed the name of the movie and the main character, they could have made this movie with no credit to the TV series without getting sued. The fact that the character is a stunt man isn’t enough similarity. The creators of the original series could have watched this movie without having a moment of “hey, this looks like our series.” The series was a hit at its time, but it’s hardly a classic. I’d totally forgotten about it until I heard about the movie. I don’t think I ever saw it in reruns on cable. I think it may be on one of the free streaming services, but it didn’t get any kind of big revival from streaming. In all my time on TV forums, I’ve never seen anyone bring it up. I don’t see what the benefit was to tying this movie to the TV show. It may actually have turned off more potential viewers than it attracted. It doesn’t have a huge fan base that would be lured to the movie, but there are a lot of people who are turned off by the remake fever and who won’t go see something that’s a remake of an old TV show.

I’d be curious to know the story behind this — was there ever an original idea for a movie about a stunt man that couldn’t get made until they linked it to an old TV show? Are they so afraid of not being linked to something else that they wouldn’t make a high-concept movie about a stunt man restarting his career without it being a remake of something, even if that was a nearly forgotten TV show?

I’m not against all adaptations. I often enjoy movie adaptations of favorite books. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by some — I remember sneering at the idea of basing a movie on a theme park ride, but the Pirates of the Caribbean series was really fun (I’ve never been on the ride, so I don’t know how much it had to do with the movie. Was it yet another case of a movie that could have stood on its own without the tie-in and had little to do with the thing it was supposedly based on?). There have been cases of remakes that were better than the original when there’s a reason to remake it, like improved technology or a change in society. But I’m getting tired of the “Hey, you liked this thing, so here’s another version of it!” attitude when it crowds out everything else in the market.

First, a bit of news: Audible has bought the audiobook rights for the first two Rydding Village books, and it looks like they’re planning to release in late January. It will depend on how well these do whether or not they do any other books.

Meanwhile, last weekend was a Despicable Me kind of weekend. The fourth movie was on Peacock, but I couldn’t remember anything about the third one, so I decided to watch that one first. In case you haven’t been bombarded by the product marketing from these movies, particularly the Minions, the gist of the series is that a supervillain who’s actually a decent guy deep down inside needs kids as part of his complicated evil scheme and adopts three girls from an orphanage, which ends up turning his life upside down so he’s no longer a villain. In the second movie, he meets a ninja-like super spy and gets married.

It turns out that the reason I couldn’t remember the third movie is that I hadn’t ever seen it. Nothing about it was familiar, and I didn’t get that, “Oh, yeah, this,” burst of realization that I usually get when I’m reading or watching something I don’t remember but that it turns out I have read or seen before. That movie is pretty forgettable, even if you have seen it. A week later, I can barely remember it. In that one, both Gru (our villain turned hero) and Lucy (his wife) lose their jobs in the Anti-Villain League after an operation goes wrong. When Gru hears from a twin brother he didn’t know he had (it’s a Parent Trap situation of each parent taking a twin, except for the part where they end up at the same summer camp), the family reunion seems like a good idea, except the brother is keen to learn how to be a supervillain from Gru, and Gru thinks he might be able to work with his brother to take down his enemy so he and Lucy can get their jobs back, but he doesn’t want his brother to know that he’s not really a supervillain anymore.

The thing that I like about these movies is the underlying sweetness. They’re about family bonds, whether by birth or adoption. Lucy is a good stepmom to Gru’s adopted daughters, not at all a wicked stepmother. She’s trying to figure things out because she’s not exactly the maternal type. Gru loves his family and is elated to be reunited with his brother. You expect the brother to be a rival, but it’s not a competition. But the execution of this plot is pretty blah. Even the Minions aren’t all that interesting or fun.

The fourth movie has a really fun premise: Gru and his family have to go into hiding after his nemesis escapes from prison and is bent on revenge, so they have to blend into a bland upscale suburb under fake identities. Unfortunately, it doesn’t use this premise at all, which is frustrating. I loved the idea of seeing this Eastern European-ish former supervillain and his quirky superspy wife, plus their eccentric kids and a few Minions, trying to blend in with posh suburbanites and their country club lifestyle. Talk about a culture clash!

In the Save the Cat screenwriting structure, the second quarter of the story is called “Fun and Games” or “The Promise of the Premise.” If you take the core premise of the story and list the things you expect to happen, this is when most of those things happen. You’re playing with the concept as the characters test the waters of the situation they’ve found themselves in. They usually cross some kind of threshold and enter a new situation at about a quarter of the way through the story, then things get really serious and make a turn at around the halfway point, so this part is about exploring the new situation. Most of the stuff in a movie trailer tends to come from this section of the movie, since it gives you an idea of what the movie is about without giving any real turning point spoilers.

It’s not exactly a huge mental exercise to come up with a list of things that can happen with Gru and his family in the suburbs, but they don’t really do any of it. Almost all of the situations they find themselves in come from the setup of their hiding being utterly incompetent. For instance, they give Lucy the cover job of being a high-end hairstylist — something she has no training or experience in. The big joke is that she screws up with her first client and has to flee when the client comes after her for revenge. That’s just bad planning, not a culture clash of a ninja-like superspy having to fit in with the country club suburban moms. I wanted to see her chaperoning a school field trip and having to use her skills to keep the kids in line and out of trouble but without getting caught doing something a normal mom shouldn’t be able to do. Or at a playdate with the youngest and fending off a bully or a loose dog on the playground.

They tell us that the oldest, a middle schooler, had a bad day at school, but we never see her at school. The problem with the youngest is that she doesn’t want to tell her fake name, since that’s a lie. Her dad just tells her she needs to lie without explaining why.

As for Gru himself, his main story isn’t about trying to blend in. It’s about the neighbor’s daughter being an aspiring supervillain who recognizes him and blackmails him into helping her with a heist. I do like the way her story turns out, but I still wanted something more for Gru, since a lot of his insecurity is whether someone like him really can be a good father. What happens if he’s in a place where the only thing he has going on is being a good father and keeping his family safe, but he can’t openly use any of his usual methods? The only culture clash moment is when his neighbor invites him to play tennis, and a Minion goes along and plays umpire, tilting the game in Gru’s favor. It’s funny, but it’s more of that hiding incompetence, as going out in public with a Minion is pretty much waving a giant “Here’s Gru!” flag.

The movie itself is actually okay and a lot of fun, but I found myself very frustrated by what it wasn’t. I’m surprised that with all the people in the movie industry who had to have been involved in creating it, no one said, “Hey, shouldn’t we be playing with the culture clash here?”

I don’t know what this weekend’s movie(s) will be. I’m not sure what I’m in the mood for.

A couple of weeks ago, I was feeling tired and stressed, so when I was looking for a movie to watch, I found myself turning to The Emperor’s New Groove, and I realized that it’s become my main comfort movie. I think I watch it at least twice a year. It’s short, sweet, and laugh-out-loud funny. But what makes it something I watch over and over again when I need to boost my mood? Since my life’s motto is “If it’s Worth Analyzing, It’s Worth Overanalyzing,” I put some thought into it.

For those not familiar with this movie, it’s an animated Disney movie that supposedly went through a really troubled production history and that flew under the radar to the point that I wasn’t aware it existed until I was babysitting for a friend and it was what the kid wanted to watch. It’s the story of a selfish, spoiled young Incan emperor who gets turned into a llama by his scheming advisor and has to rely on the peasant he’s planning to displace so he can build a water park for himself in order to get back to the palace and get turned back into a human. A buddy road trip story ensues.

One reason it’s a comfort movie is that it’s guaranteed to make me laugh. The humor is really densely layered, with a lot of subtle sight gags and sly references. No matter how many times I’ve watched it, I find some new little gem I never noticed before. There’s also fun in spotting and anticipating the running gags (“Wrong lever!”). I’m amused by the way they fit all the pop culture anachronisms into that setting. What would a diner look like in the ancient Andes? The whole movie is so funny and silly that by the end of it I’ve smiled and laughed enough that my mood actually changes.

But it’s also oddly profound, with one of the better redemption arcs I’ve seen. I guess it’s a spoiler to say that the emperor does get redeemed, but that’s pretty obvious for this kind of movie. I find that the transformation really works here because we see how hard it is for him to get over his selfishness and self-centeredness to gain empathy and realize that the world doesn’t have to revolve around him. The peasant (voiced by John Goodman) is a truly good person who is kinder to the emperor than the emperor deserves, but that sort of kindness is exactly what he needs. By the end of the movie, you believe the transformation really will work and last. The story is well structured to set it all up, with some full-circle callbacks so you can see how the character has learned and changed.

Meanwhile, the true villain gets a satisfying comeuppance and the slow-witted henchman figures out the difference between right and wrong. He’s never truly bad and messes up when he can’t go through with doing something wrong, but it takes him a while to come to the conclusion that working for the villain is a bad idea. On this latest viewing, I found myself thinking that I really need a Kronk, someone to cook me delicious food and do my bidding. (apparently, there’s a sequel about Kronk and a TV series, which I need to watch)

The good guys are truly good, honest people, and they don’t even try to harm the bad guys. The bad guys bring all their woes onto themselves. And yet it doesn’t feel like a black/white morality play, probably because the villain is humorously exaggerated and the good guy is just an honest working man, not any kind of great hero. He’s not trying to defeat a villain. He’s just trying to help someone who needs it and hoping that this help will change the emperor’s mind and spare his home.

The whole movie is like a warm hug, but with enough snark that it isn’t obnoxiously sappy. Now that I’ve realized it works as a comfort movie, I won’t have to scroll through the streaming service menus to decide what to watch when I’ve had a really stressful week and just want to laugh and feel good. I may need to get this one on DVD in case it ever gets removed from the streaming service or I decide to drop that service.

But thinking about this made me realize the power of story. This silly movie made for kids has a healing effect on me. It lightens my heart and makes me see the world in a more positive light. I can think of so many other stories, whether books, TV shows, or movies, that have a similar effect. They make me feel better about myself, make me want to be better, inspire me to create or dream. How many people have found and pursued their life’s calling because something in a story spoke to them and set them on that path? I’ve actually found that it’s the stories that might be deemed “fluff” that have had the biggest impact on me. It’s never the serious literary fiction that inspires me in a way that seeps into my real life. It’s the fantasy, the chick-lit, the animated Disney movies.

Considering this made me think about my work in a different way. I’ve always written to entertain, not necessarily inspire, but by entertaining the way I do, maybe I am a healer of sorts. I can make someone’s day better, comfort them, make them feel like a part of a community (even if it’s imaginary), inspire them to find whatever “magic” is within them, even if they’re utterly ordinary. Thinking this way about my work has been incredibly motivating. I’ll need to keep it in mind for those days when it’s hard to make myself open that document and start writing. I have to remember that someone out there needs this story, so I must write it.

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.