Blog – Page 20

Dec

2014

What Am I Reading?

I am drowning in books. I’ve usually got two or three going at once, and my “to read” pile covers my entire dresser and takes up a good amount of space on my Kindle app. I’m going to use my blog like my own mini-Goodreads from time to time and post some thoughts on the books in my library. Here’s what I’m reading now, what I’ve recently read, and what’s up next. I’ll limit each to three, or this would be endless.

So what are you reading?

Reading Now

The Indie Author Power Pack: How to Write, Publish & Market Your Book
by Sean Platt & Johnny B. Truant, David Gaughran, and Joanna Penn

A bundle of three of the top self-publishing how-to guides: Write. Publish. Repeat., Let’s Get Digital, and How to Market a Book. I snatched these up when they were collected and put on sale. I’m only a little ways into the first of the three, but I’m already learning a ton. I listened to an interview with Joanna Penn today and I’m particularly eager to get to her book.

Sky Pirates! (Doctor Who: The New Adventures #40)
by Dave Stone

A series of Doctor Who paperbacks from the 90s that picked up where the original series left off. I mostly never got around to reading these first time around, although this is one of the few I did. I’ve been working my way through the series, and am about two pages in to a re-read of this one. I remember being vaguely confused by it, but maybe it’ll work better for me now that I’m more familiar with the new companions.

Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition #38: The Year of the Doctor

An in-depth look at the production of the various Doctor Who fiftieth anniversary programs. What? I like Doctor Who. A lot. This is the kind of thing you can read in short bursts, so it’s my current bathroom reading.

Recently Read

Orbs
by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

I met Smith at New York Comic Con in October – well, by met I mean I saw him on a panel and then waylaid him on his way to his signing session. He was the only panelist who had started as a self-published author, and I wanted to thank him for his great advice. He was very nice and very encouraging, so I immediately decided to check out his book. I’m so glad I did. Really fun, really strong end-of-the-world sci-fi. If that’s your thing – and it’s definitely mine – check it out.

Complete Works of Anton Chekhov
by Anton Chekhov

All right, I didn’t read the whole thing. I’m directing a reading of an adaptation of his novella “An Anonymous Story,” called Story of an Unknown Man. Being the good and conscientious director I am, I needed to read the source material. I was already a Chekhov fan, so I expected to enjoy it, and I did. I’m glad I had the excuse to pick it up.

Redshirts
by John Scalzi

I picked this up on a whim at Comic Con. It takes place on a familiar starship (almost, but not quite, the Enterprise), and tells the story of a group of lower-level officers who begin to realize the horrible fates that inevitably befall any of their crewmates who are unlucky enough to be selected for an away mission with the bridge crew. It’s hilarious and the central conceit of the book goes a lot deeper than you’d think. A must-read if you’re a Star Trek fan.

In the Queue

The Martian
by Andy Weir

A recommendation (and gift) from my brother. I don’t know much about it – a guy gets stranded on Mars – but I’m looking forward to checking it out.

The Dark of Twilight (Twilight Shifters #1)
by Kate Danley

Kate Danley’s new book! Kate’s a dear friend, I read everything she puts out and I’m never disappointed. Sexy werewolves! Who doesn’t like sexy werewolves?

Yes Please
by Amy Poehler

At Book Con this year (not Comic Con – a different Con), I got to see Amy Poehler interview Martin Short. It was just as great as it sounds. I probably would have gotten this book anyway, because I love Amy Poehler, but that interview put this on my radar.

Dec

2014

Ten Thoughts on Melody Time

Melody Time (1948) is (sigh) yet another package film from the Disney studios. After The Reluctant Dragon, Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, Make Mine Music, and Fun and Fancy Free, I’m kind of running out of enthusiasm for the format. Disney’s still feeling the financial hit of the war, so he’s still throwing a bunch of shorts together on the cheap and calling them features. Better things are coming once we hit the fifties, but for now, let’s put our heads down and see what he’s served us this time, shall we?

We’re off to a promising start. Lots of stars in the opening credits, although I confess the Andrews Sisters, Roy Rogers and Trigger are the only names I immediately recognize. And the sequence for the title song is well done – “Melody Time” is sung by some stylized masks, created by a paint brush. That whole “brush creates the characters” thing has been done before, but it’s cute here and I like the design of the masks. It’s making me hopeful that maybe this wasn’t slapped together as haphazardly as Fun and Fancy Free seemed to be.
“Once Upon a Wintertime” is our first story. Two young lovers are enjoying a sleigh ride pulled by two enormous horses – they’re like the horse from “What’s Opera, Doc?” with longer necks. There’s not much of a story, at first – they stop and go ice skating and make lots of hearts in the snow so we know they’re in love. But then he does something dopey and she gets mad and storms off and because women – am I right, fellas? – she doesn’t see the “Thin Ice” sign. The ice shatters and he tries to save her but he fails miserably and knocks himself unconscious. Her chunk of ice drifts through some rapids towards a deadly drop over a waterfall – wait, where the hell were they ice skating? Whoever made that “Thin Ice” sign was really underselling the danger. Anyway, the animals, led by the poster children for Horse Growth Hormone, rescue her, and she’s back in love with her man even though he did nothing but make the situation worse. Then a close-up on their loving faces fades to a photo of the two of them in a living room. It’s meant to suggest that they lived happily ever after, except I swear that it’s a different woman in the photo. I guess at some point she wised up. Or drowned.
“Bumble Boogie” gives us a jazzy rendition of “Flight of the Bumblebee” while the titular bug tries to escape a Dali-esque hellscape of plant/musical instrument hybrids trying to kill him. It’s an acid trip worthy of Fantasia and I love it.
“The Legend of Johnny Appleseed” is next. The whole thing is a little too Jesus-loves-me-this-I-know for my tastes, but given John Chapman’s real life religiosity that’s probably appropriate. John’s a scrawny little fella who wants to head west with the pioneers (because there’s “plenty of room” – nobody out there already, nope, just unclaimed, uninhabited land as far as the eye can MANIFEST DESTINY), but he doesn’t think he has the suitable skill set to survive out there. His guardian angel appears in a vision, because Johnny is out of his god-damned mind, and convinces him to head west with just a pot on his head, a bag of apple seeds and a Bible. Pretty sure the angel was muttering, “Kill them, Johnny, kill them all and take their eyes,” but my copy didn’t have great sound so he might have been saying something else. Long story short, Johnny spends the rest of his life planting apple orchards all over the country and becomes beloved by the good-hearted pioneer folk for providing them with God’s chosen fruit. After forty years of walking and planting, looking like someone you’d change subway cars to get away from, he dies underneath an apple tree (cyanide poisoning from eating too many apple seeds if I had to guess), and his angel comes to take him to Heaven. They need him, you see, because the afterlife doesn’t have any apple trees. And in a twist worthy of a Christmastime stop-motion “secret origin of Santa” special, it’s revealed that clouds are actually Heaven’s apple orchards, planted by the ghost of Johnny Appleseed. Betcha they didn’t teach you that in your Godless public school, did they, sonny? I hate apples but luckily I’m unlikely to ever get to Heaven.
I did some research on John Chapman after watching this movie (damn you, Disney, for prompting me to learn), and apparently the apple trees were beloved by the pioneers mostly for real estate reasons – orchards were required to maintain their claim on otherwise unclaimed land. Johnny had religious objections to grafting, so the wild apples that grew from his trees were pretty much inedible and only used for making hard cider. Thanks for getting our ancestors drunk, Johnny! Your legacy lives on today!
Next up is…oh, dear…”Little Toot.” (Must…resist…fart jokes…) Little Toot is a tugboat and he’s adorable as hell, and the toe-tapping song is sung by the Andrews Sisters, so I pretty much love this from frame one. Toot doesn’t take his job seriously – he just wants to play! – and he accidentally sends an ocean liner crashing into the city, toppling buildings and (presumably) killing thousands. Oh, Toot! You scamp! (Toot doesn’t talk so you could say he’s silent but deadly.) He gets banished to the deep ocean where he saves another ship and all is forgiven and Toot’s a hero. Hooray! Three toots for Little Toot! Toot! Toot! Too – oh, excuse me. I had cucumbers with lunch.
Joyce Kilmer’s poem “Trees” is set to music for the next segment, in which we watch a tree experience the changing seasons. Snore. I fell asleep just typing that. Nothing that wasn’t done better in Fantasia, or even Bambi. On the line, “Only God can make a tree,” the camera pulls back and the tree is in the shape of a cross with a glowing nimbus of light around it. Even the Veggie Tales cast would look at this and say, “A little heavy-handed with the religious stuff, don’t you think?”
“Blame It on the Samba” has…can it be? José Carioca! Donald Duck! Is that Panchito Pistoles? Could it be the Three Caballeros reunited? Oh, no, it’s not Panchito, it’s that irritating Woody Woodpecker rip-off, the nameless Aracuan bird. Oh, well. This segment is still pretty great, despite being a Caballero down. The music is fun and the birds never speak so I don’t have to worry about their complete incomprehensibility. I get worried when a live-action woman shows up, as the unnatural carnal lusts of cartoon fowl are well-documented, but the birds seem to be too caught up in the music to bother her. Also, unlike in other movies, they’re scaled to actual bird size compared to her, which I find weird for some reason. Like most cartoons with José and Donald together, the animators say goodbye to sanity about halfway through and things get really fun. This is definitely a highlight of the film.
Our next, and final, segment opens with tumbleweeds rolling across the desert at dusk while a lonesome voice croons, “Bluuuuuueeee shadooooows…on the traaaaaiiilllll…” Consider the mood well and truly set. It’s the story of “Pecos Bill,” told by live-action Roy Rogers to those two annoying kids from Song of the South, Bobby Driscoll and Luana Patten. (Luana was also the little girl in Fun and Fancy Free, so I guess she was not murdered by the living ventriloquist’s dummies as I hoped feared.) Trigger’s there too, but unfortunately he doesn’t do too much. (I say unfortunately because he’s a better actor than either of the kids.) So, yeah, Pecos Bill, lost in the desert by his parents as they headed west, found and raised by coyotes. (We actually see baby Bill headed to the coyote’s teat to nurse, but just as he’s about to get his lips around her we cut to mama’s face as her expression turns from surprise to pleasure. It’s…unsettling.) Bill basically gets super-powers from living with animals, and Roy sings a bunch of tall tales about Bill’s adventures, which are a lot of fun (apart from the one about the “painted Indians” – I won’t go into it, but…ugh). Then he meets Slue-Foot Sue and falls instantly in love. When we first see Sue she’s riding a giant catfish down a river, while the catfish jumps through the hoops she’s making with her lasso. I kind of fall in love with her, too. Sue meets an unfortunate end – on their wedding day, she gets bucked from Bill’s jealous horse and lands on the moon, stranded there forever, never to be seen again. And that’s why coyotes howl at the moon, Roy tells us in another Rankin-Bass kind of moment. The ending is meant to be silly but it disturbed me a little. Poor Sue, another strong female character fridged to provide motivation for the male protagonist.
And that just about exhausts my thoughts on the subject. Melody Time had more hits than misses, which is about the best you can hope for in these package films. It’s hard to judge them as features, since they’re really collections of cartoon shorts with only the flimsiest of connecting themes. This one’s worth having on in the background while you do housework, I guess. But Disney can do better.

Nov

2014

Ten Thoughts on Fun and Fancy Free

I’m watching every Disney movie from the beginning for this series. Sometimes it’s Pinocchio, and it’s so beautiful and amazing that it’s a struggle to contain myself to just ten thoughts. Sometimes it’s Song of the South, and ten thoughts don’t seem nearly enough to elucidate the depths of my revulsion.

And sometimes it’s Fun and Fancy Free.

Fun and Fancy Free (1947) was another of Disney’s package films, made up of two shorts that were originally intended to be features on their own, but, due to financial concerns from the hit the studio took during the war, plus concerns about the artistic merits of the pieces, they were scaled back and bundled together as one movie so that they could hopefully make a little money to fund later, better pictures. The results are unsurprising.

The credits are promising. Edgar Bergen! Dinah Shore! And Mickey, Donald, and Jiminy Cricket are slipped into the credits along with the actors. That’s cute.
We open with Jiminy singing a fun song (which I later find out was cut from Pinocchio, because the key word for this film is “leftovers”) while roaming around somebody’s house. He comes across a fish in a bowl and I wonder for a second if it’s Cleo, but it’s not quite sexy enough. More cute than sexy. (I feel so dirty right now. In case you haven’t read the rest of this series, there’s a disturbing recurrence of sexy fish in Disney movies. It’s not me, it’s them.) And there’s a cat that tries to eat Jiminy, so it’s definitely not that wimp Figaro. By this point it’s clear that JC is in a modern house – given that Pinocchio was set in ye olde timmes, I’m questioning how long crickets live. He comes across a sexy French cancan doll and it cries out, “Mama,” as if it were a baby doll. Creepy. Who lives here?
The first animated short is “Bongo.” It’s about a circus bear who escapes to live out his dream of living in the wilderness. I think it worked out better for Disney that he could burn this off here, rather than developing it into a film of its own. The animation is fine, but nothing special – it’s short feature quality, not full-length. The plot is uninspired. It’s not bad, it’s just kind of dull. There are a lot of long stretches where Dinah Shore sings a perfectly lovely, perfectly sleepy song and nothing much is happening on-screen.
But there’s a circus train! Is it Casey? IS IT CASEY?!?! It’s not Casey. Just some dumb old non-anthropomorphic train. Darn it.
Bongo can ride a unicycle across a high wire while juggling twenty objects but in the forest he trips over a root and can’t climb a tree.
Finally Bongo meets a pretty girl bear and the plot picks up a little. He’s wearing clothes and she’s naked, which is a little disconcerting. The big romantic complication comes when she slaps him and he thinks she’s rejecting her, but actually, as Dinah Shore tells us via the magical medium of song, “a bear likes to say it with a slap.” It, in this case, being a declaration of love. It’s all very “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)”. At first I’m worried about the problematic message this is sending kids about partner abuse, but the she-bear is into it, and I ultimately decide it’s a nice message about initiating your partner into the joys of consensual S&M play. Very forward thinking of you, Walt. Very sex positive.
Back to the framing sequence, and Jiminy Cricket finds an invitation to child actor Luana Patten (she played the annoying little girl in Song of the South) to come to a party next door. He hops over to gate-crash and stumbles upon a complete and utter horror show. It’s a live action sequence with little Luana being thrown a party by adult comedian/ventriloquist Edger Bergen. THERE IS NO ONE ELSE AT THIS PARTY. A grown man is throwing a party for a little girl he is not related to and there are no other guests. The whole living room is decorated and he’s putting on a show just for her. He offers her cake and candy and I keep checking my phone for an Amber Alert. Oh, I guess technically there are other people at the party, Bergen’s dummies Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd. WHO MOVE AND TALK ON THEIR OWN. What the flaming hell? Were children of the forties completely inured to nightmarish homunculi? Because I’m convinced I’m going to wake up tonight to see Mortimer Snerd standing over my bed with a cake knife.
The cartoon for this sequence is “Mickey and the Beanstalk,” which is reasonably well-known from being snipped out of this movie and shown on its own from time to time (with Bergen’s narration mercifully replaced by that of Ludwig von Drake). It’s pretty good – it works as a short a lot better than “Bongo,” although I’m not sure it would have held up as a feature. I can tell it’s unfinished, even though I didn’t learn its history until after I watched – it’s very jumpy, with Bergen’s narration covering big gaps in the narrative.
I will grudgingly admit that the wisecracks from McCarthy and Snerd, interlaced throughout the short, are pretty funny. They comment on it like a 40s version of Mystery Science Theater 3000. They’re funnier when I can’t see them because their jokes aren’t drowned out by my screaming.
And, uh…that’s pretty much that. One mediocre short, one decent short, one terrifying framing sequence, all wrapped up in just over an hour. That was…a movie. I guess? Maybe we’ll do better next time…

Nov

2014

Alan Lennox and the Temp Job of Doom – Free!

Alan Lennox and the Temp Job of Doom, the first book in the series The Future Next Door, is now FREE! I made it free a few days back and it’s been bouncing around on several of Amazon’s top free ebooks list – staying in the top ten for Technothrillers pretty consistently. If you haven’t tried it yet, you’ve got no excuse now!

Alan Lennox has been assigned yet another soul-crushing temp job, keeping him from his first loves – drinking, playing video games, and looking for a boyfriend. But Alan’s new job proves to be anything but boring when his co-workers start turning up dead. The mysterious megacorporation Amalgamated Synergy has taken a deadly interest in Alan and his three roommates, and the hapless quartet are woefully unequipped to deal with the psychotic secretaries, murderous middle managers, and villainous vice-presidents hunting them down. Their investigation leads them deep into Amalgamated Synergy’s headquarters, but can Alan and his friends stay alive long enough to discover who – or what – waits for them on the top floor?

Oct

2014

Ten Thoughts on Song of the South

Oh, boy. Take a deep breath. Hold your nose, maybe. Here we go. Song of the South (1946) was Disney’s first dramatic live-action film, though it does (thankfully) contain some animated segments. It’s based on the “Uncle Remus” stories of Southern African-American folklore collected by Joel Chandler Harris. And I feel like there’s something else notable about it I’m forgetting…oh, right. It’s kinda racist. I had never seen the film before, and odds are neither have you. Its last release in theaters was in 1986, and it’s never been released for the home market in North America, only overseas (and even then the last release was in the UK in 1991). So, it’s kind of hard to come by. Lucky for you, I’m nothing if not resourceful. So let’s dive in, shall we? (After the cut – this is a long one…)

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