The Fandom Awakens

I saw the latest installment of Star Wars on Friday. I had grown to loathe this movie by viewing time because of the inescapable hype. I then made a snarky comment on reddit that blew up enough to make the front page. I knew which character died within an hour. 

This didn't help since I'm highly critical of this franchise. The writing on the first 6 films sucks. While there are some funny moments, most of it makes on the smallest amount of sense necessary to keep the series afloat.  The character development is nonexistent. Leia's planet is blown up and we hear no more about it. Luke's entire family is flambeed but when he goes into battle, he wishes Ben/Boo Radley was there instead of the people who raised him. Anakin and Padme have no chemistry. When she said "I love you," I thought, "Are you sure?" Padme loses the will to live after seeing her babies born? That is the stupidest, most indefensible shit I've ever heard in my life and I've seen Trump at the Republican debates.

I went in prepared to hate this movie. I left with a new appreciation for the franchise. Contrary to what the previous paragraph would have you believe, I don't hate the franchise. I respect what it has done for popular culture but I saw it as an adult when you can't unsee plot holes and bad acting. The Force Awakens fixed most of the issues I had with Star Wars. It even passed the Bechdel Test!

The cast was diverse and talented. The story was interesting, made total sense, and ended in a way that had resolution and left room for the other 2 films we know are coming. The characters had motivations and desires that worked and they grew and changed as the story progressed. It was a good movie. I'd give it a 6.5 out of 10.

Why didn't I rate it higher? I want to give it a 7 but I have 2 major problems with this film and explaining those requires SPOILERS. You have been warned.

1) Cheap CGI

The new cantina scene was great. Maz (Lupita Nyong'o) was an excellent use of motion capture. However the junk dealer on Jakku? He looked ridiculous. I've seen enough episodes of Face Off to recognize the fat suit, foam, and paint that went into this character. It was very half-assed and again, took me out of the moment.

The worst offender was Kylo Ren's mentor. If you can nail Star Wars FaceTime in the prequels, Space Gollum should look better in here. For a big bad, he looked like the forgettable villain in a fairy tale cartoon for little kids. I don't care if he's 20 feet tall (you should call tech support about that BTW). If the Sith leader can look creepy and menacing on video conference, so can Space Gollum. 

2) Derp Vader

Someone kill the casting director. They nailed every character except Kylo Ren. Why did every other character work so well? Because they were either  already established in the universe or the new kids were played by unknowns except Derp Vader. He's played by Adam Driver, better known as Hannah Horvath's boyfriend on Girls.

The second I saw him without the mask, I couldn't take him seriously as a villain. Driver has gotten to much exposure as this weird idiot on an insanely popular show. FFS, one of the Obama kids interned on it! People associate him with this role. I couldn't unsee it and it took me out of the moment. Even his rage tantrums felt like Derp Boyfriend instead of Unstable Bad Guy.

While I'm on the rant, why does he have such nice hair under a freaking helmet? It's like he's out of a damn shampoo ad. Can you at least pretend to make him look different than Derp Boyfriend? Give him a military cut? Anything? How about a vague attempt to make him look like his parents? Derp Vader is a walking joke about the milkman. 

Did Driver do a good job? Yes. Had I never seen him before this, I'd think he was OK. A milkman joke but good. But I have seen him and it's like watching Rob Schneider as the bad guy.

Those two issues are going to be mostly my issues. Unless you've seen Girls, Kylo Ren hasn't been tainted for you. If you love, like, or merely tolerate Star Wars, go see this movie. It's the best in the franchise. The nerds were truly blessed this holiday season.

More Giveaways

One of the things to do when you've got nothing but time is go through the stuff you don't need any more. Who wants some free books and DVDs?

DVDs

Leap Year
Legally Blonde

Serendipity

Practical Magic
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Sucker Punch
The Importance of Being Earnest
To Catch a Thief
Pan's Labyrinth

Best of Discovery Vol 7

Books

Nonfiction

How To Talk about a Book You Haven't Read

The Modern Girl's Guide to Life

The Modern Girl's Guide to Sticky Situations

Spirit Guides & Angel Guardians - Webster

The Gift of Fear - De Becker

Narrative Nonfiction

It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro

Love Sick - Frances Kuffel

Spoon Fed - Severson

Someday My Prince Will Come - Fine

How To Get Divorced by 30 - Rothchild

Exes and Ohs - Lester

Don't Look Behind You - Allison

Never Have I Ever - Heaney

Islands Apart - McAlpine

We Bought a Zoo - Mee
Cleaving - Julie Powell

I Don't Care About Your Band - Klausner

Japan Took the JAP Out of Me - Cook

Love with a Chance of Drowning - DeRoche

Gumbo Tales - Roahen

Smile When You're Lying - Thompson

No Touch Monkey - Halliday

Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost - Friedman

Have I Got a Guy For You - Strauss

How the World Makes Love - Wisner

Fiction

Godmother - Carolyn Turgeon

The Unit - Holmquvist

Jennifer Johnson Is Sick of Being Single - McElhatton

Skeleton Creek - Carman

The Promise of Stardust - Sibley

The Secret Lives of Dresses - McKean

Miss Darcy Falls in Love - Lathan

Go Mutants - Doyle
Slumdog Millionaire - Swarump

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things - Mackler

Dog on It - Quinn

Thereby Hangs a Tail - Quinn

Last Call - Pedersen

Shine Shine Shine - Netzer

The Ninth Wife - Stolls

The Opposite of Love - Buxbaum

Genre Fiction

The Somnambulist - Jonathan Barnes

The Domino Men - Jonathan Barnes

The Vampire Shrink - Hilburn

Zombie CSU - Jonathan Maberry

Vampire Taxonomy - Woerner

Dying to Live - Paffenroth

House - Peretti
Howl - Wacks

Mammoth Book of Steampunk

Call of the Jersey Devil - Voltaire

Bitten - Armstrong

Reel Steel - Matheson

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms - Jemisin

Horns of Ruin - Akers

V Is for Vampire - Castro 

Terribly Twisted Tales - Rabe & Greenberg

Enchantment Place - Little

Robert Asprin's Myth-Quoted - NYE

The Alchemist - Scott

The Magician - Scott

The Sorceress - Scott

The Compound - Bodeen

Dark Road Rising - Elrod

The Immersion Book of Steampunk

Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters

The Wild Wood - De Lint

Christmas

The Stupidest Angel - Moore

The Fat Man - Harmon

Skipping Christmas - Grisham

The North Pole Employee Handbook

Graphic Novels

American Virgin: Head 1

Wonder Woman: Blood 1 (new 52)

House of Mystery: Room and Boredom 1

Morning Glories 1

Morning Glories 2

PopSugar Reading Challenge Book 7 or Catty Burglars

For ‘based on a true story’ I read The Bling Ring by Nancy Jo Sales. I saw the movie by Sofia Coppolla and decided to get the whole story. As interesting as this tale is, I don’t have strong feelings about it.

It read like a longer, more detailed article than the one that originally postedin Vanity Fair. It was broken up in a similar way to a magazine article and the tone was very comparable. Sales remains the teller of facts rather than the caster of judgments. The consummate journalist, Sales is trying to get the kids to tell their story rather than narrate her own ideas about it.

Sales definitely has an opinion on some of these kids. You can find her contempt for Alexis Neiers in their conversation about karma. I would have been curious to hear more about what the working mother thought of this interesting assortment of law breakers. Criminal loving Courtney, mastermind Rachel, shallow reality star hopeful Alexis, or the humbled Nick.

As much as I enjoyed hearing the facts, I wanted to hear about who needed to be slapped as well. I left all of this feeling very much on the outside looking in. I needed more than Sales was able to get to feel satisfied.

Current Music: Just Like My Heart by Fault Lines

The Great Purge of 2014: DVDs

Looking around I realized that I have way too much stuff. It's not just books; it's clothes, DVDs, board games, purses, and even shoes. Yes, I of the massive feet, own too many shoes. It is definitely time for another purge.

I don't know too many women who would wear my clothes well but I know a couple of people who might be able to make some things work. Purses are pretty universal among women so I'll post the ones I don't have much need for anymore. Shoes are a lost cause. Those bad boys are just going to good will. 

Board games will have all their original pieces and in good to like new condition. I take care of my things. That list is forthcoming. I may also go through books again once I get through the rest of this stuff. This time we're focusing on DVDs.

TV Shows

Charmed seasons 1-5

The Office seasons 1-6
Arrested Development Seasons 1-3
Mythbusters Collection 6

Movies

Finding Nemo
Enchanted
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
27 Dresses
Killers
The Ugly Truth
He's Just Not That Into You
In Her Shoes
The Devil Wears Prada
New Year's Eve
Valentine's Day
Kinky Boots
Pay It Forward
Inception
Ocean's Eleven
Ocean's Thirteen
I, Robot
Freakonomics
Murder on the Orient Express
Thank You for Smoking
City Slickers
Young Frankenstein
The Other Boleyn Girl
Camp
Patch Adams
A Life Less Ordinary
Batman Begins
The Dark Knight
Airplane
Monty Python and the Holy Grail 

(Before everyone puts on their crazy pants, I never watch it alone and most of my friends have a copy. I'll never be far from arguing whether women distributing swords is a valid form of government.)

A Lack of Color

I have a celebrity crush on Nonso Anozie. I watched Ender's Game and tweeted that he was just as cute in that as he was Game of Thrones. He favorited it and I did a fangirl squee.

Who is he? He's the black guy in GoT, Dracula (the series), Ender's Game, and The Grey.

I never truly appreciated how white washed my media was until I had to explain who he is but I was definitely starting to see it in Ender's Game. One of the characters was known for being Spanish and an incredibly beautiful young boy. In the book it is very clear this character has tan skin and black hair. While Moises Arias is mixed and fluent in Spanish, he looked as Anglo as anyone in that movie.

Arias did a very good job in the role but they didn't do much to make him look the part. It makes me wonder if the auditioned anyone who did. Something similar happened on The Hunger Games. Jennifer Lawrence did an amazing job but I don't think the casting should have been a call for Aryan breeding.

Looking at GoT, almost everyone is white. There are 2 black characters, the pirate and the richest man in Qarth. Even the background characters have little diversity. I'm against colorblind casting in a period piece but this is a fantasy where characters' hair colors aren't restricted to the norms. Why is the skin color?

Why can't there be any background Wildlings that look like Eskimos? Why can't some of the average citizens in King's Landing have some diversity? Why was the BFF in Warm Bodies a white girl when she's a one-armed black chick in the book?

I have a friend from India who has a roommate named Igor. His group house is like a mini-UN with all the places of origins in that house. The group of people I socialize with includes a variety of faiths, races, genders, and professions. (This includes a Chinese doctor and very WASP-y lawyer. Make your own jokes.)

Why can't Hollywood reflect my reality? If the level of whitewashing in Hollywood is starting to grate on white people, you know it's time to change.

Music: City of Angels by Thirty Seconds to Mars

Love Me, Love My Media

I found a great article about how one woman refuses to date any man from the internet who doesn't admit to watching or reading something by women.

I posted this article on FB and had two major disagreements in any hour. The stand out quotes were:

"I read and watch what I like to read and watch. The gender, ethnicity, and religion of the creator don't matter to me."

"The quote "If that’s how you want this to go, that’s your call, but I’ll be over here flirting with the guy who wants to talk about how Pulp Fiction paved the way for Inglorious Basterds" would be (justifiably) ridiculed if it was said by a man."

Of course the Tarantino comparison should be ridiculed. Male directors making violent movies with almost exclusively male casts isn't anything new and the article says as much. The only thing The L Word and OITNB have in common is the lesbian relationships, hour long format, and women dominating the story. There is limited overlap in subject matter, locations, actors, broadcast format, etc. Male characters are the supporting cast and that's the rarity.

"It severely warps our sense of humanity when all the stories we absorb are ones in which men are people and women are background decoration." Of course we all primarily consume media we like but what you like is a valid factor when selecting who to have coffee with from the internet. 

But if you only like books, TV shows, and movies starring, directed by, and written by white men, you're only hearing the stories of (mostly white) men. And I say from experience, not all men can capture a female voice. We are not as conscious of our boobs as some male writers like to think we are.

If you never hear stories by people of color, people of faith (or atheism if you're religious), women or some intersection of the above, you're only hearing part of the story. An Asian immigrant woman is going to have a different point of view than a lesbian from Brooklyn or a gay man from the Bible Belt.

What bothered me was that my friends dismissed the article without really seeing the point. It's about the dominance of male voices and how that's completely normal. 

Female directors, female writers, and female lead movies are grossly underrepresented. Only one female has won an Academy Award for Best Director ever. What was the last female lead movie you saw? Can you name a movie with a female lead that realistically deals with issues women face?

Geeks have been begging for a Wonder Woman movie since The Avengers came out but the studios kept offering BS reasons why it wasn't happening. Like how men wouldn't see a female lead action movie (Lara Croft) or there'd be a lack of audience (millions of forum posts on the internet disagree). 

Fans shouldn't have to fight for media that's both wanted and needed. Batman got a reboot, Thor and Captain America got 2 movies, Iron Man got 3, Arrow and The Flash got live action TV shows before Wonder Woman gets her day in the sun. Also, can we get a little more Black Widow please?

I wouldn't call either of these guys sexist but I don't know if I'd call them feminists either. What seems fairly obvious to me clearly isn't to them. The world is doing a much better job of telling their story so it may be harder for them to see.

The big lessons to take away are:

1) Don't list too many of anything on your internet dating profile. 

Keep your list of media to 5 or 6, 10 at the absolute max. Give a sampling. When it comes to dating profiles, too much is never a good idea.

2) Be open minded. 

If a guy only lists a handful of media and they're all by men, he may deserve a chance. Maybe he just needs some help to find the right female driven show/book. And men, find some female centered media. Learning more about our lives and our voices can only be good for you.

Music: Wonder by The Doubleclicks

Premium Cable

I’ve been using my funemployment to take advantage of premium cable. So far I’ve watched

Perks of Being a Wallflower

Phrases that come to mind when I try to evaluate Perks are ‘good not great’ and ‘it was OK.’ It wasn’t bad but it just didn’t speak to me. I know so many people my age who act like teenagers that it was weird to watch teenagers be more mature and handle major dramas.

Warm Bodies

I like my love stories a bit different so throwing in some zombies worked for me. I liked it in the theater and it still holds up. It’s a good way to introduce a wimp/muggle into the zombie genre

Taken 2

Holy crap was Taken 2 unimpressive. The premise was weak and the story just wasn’t as good as the original. That will very soon be one of those movies on FX you leave on in the background just for the noise. 

Argo

I read the memoir of the Tony Mendez so it was really interesting to see it play out on the big screen. Some things were definitely dramatized but it translated reasonably well.

The Hobbit

It was like rather than love. I enjoyed the book many years ago but I’m not nuts about them stretching it into a trilogy. I know they’re throwing in a bunch of stuff from the Silmarilion and book nuts complain how they never include enough stuff from the book but this may dilute the original source material. We’ll see how it all comes together.

Hopefully I won't be funemployed much longer. I've had 4 interviews between 2 departments at the same place. Tomorrow will be mostly a snow day so I'll probably watch something else while I put up the Christmas tree.

Music: Chasing Twisters by Delta Rae

Stupid Is as Stupid Watches

I saw a pre-release of About Time with my friend Lizzie. We ended up in a conversation with the woman next to us about Girls and Sex and the City. It wasn’t a positive conversation.

For the record, I tried really hard to like Girls. Despite Lena Dunham’s talent sa a writer I hate every character on that show. They are all incredibly self-involved, self-destructive, whiney, and idiotic. No person I know is acquainted with anyone like them so to people outside of Brooklyn, they’re not that believable either.

I thought SATC was overrated as well. These women were doing things in their 30s I know better than to do in my 20s. Samantha would have all kinds of STDs and major emotional intimacy issues. I’ve only known one person my adult life that rivals Charlotte for unrealistic ideas about love and marriage. Carrie spends so much money on designer items and time in emotionally unavailable men that if she were your friend, you’d want to smack her.

The woman next to us said “It’s like they’re glorifying stupidity.” I agree totally.

SATC reinforces the same stupid stereotypes I wish women would get away from. Carrie spends so much money on designer shoes and clothes that she can’t afford her apartment. Years are wasted pining after Mr. Big who was emotionally unavailable. IRL, neither of these situations would have ended well but where’s the fun in reality? Better to teach women you can make a man fall in love with you and designer clothes are more important than rent.

Charlotte firmly believes in the Park Avenue fairytale and once she thinks she has it, she stops working for anything else. When that falls apart, she doesn’t have much left. Despite these major mistakes, she learns nothing. In the second movie she becomes overwhelmed by her family despite not working and having a nanny. The lesson here is that you can have unrealistic ideas about love and marriage and you’ll end up being Mrs. X from The Nanny Diaries.

Girls teaches that you can be a useless, selfish, and lazy but there aren’t any consequences. When Hannah gets an ebook deal and is faced with real work and possible success, she self-sabotages. I found her pathetic but the popularity of the show will reinforce the behavior.

Emotional stability and plotlines based in reality must not make compelling television because these stories keep repeating. In About Time, a woman makes similar mistakes but doesn’t get off so easily. It broke your heart to watch but I loved that she had bona fide consequences.

Maybe that’s why I said About Time was quiet. Every person in the movie was realistic and didn’t act like idiots. We need more of that on TV. I’m going to back to my genre fiction where women don’t take crap and kick butt. Let me know when muggle writers start writing better women.

Music: Suffragette by Nina Gordon

About About Time

About Time is the story of Tim who discovers the men in his family can travel back in their own timelines and do things differently. Because most of these men aren’t big players in history, their actions haven’t had any major consequences for the larger world but that doesn’t mean consequences don’t happen to them.

I love that the protagonist is awkward, bumbling, and sweet. He’s not an action star or ridiculously good looking but a normal, dorky guy. I know guys like Tim and I was definitely rooting for him. He had this amazing power and used it wisely. The message was about the time we have and enjoying our lives which is a little hackneyed but was done differently enough that I liked it.

The words I keep coming back to are quiet and sweet. Tim had an ordinary life with an extraordinary thing he used in small ways. He had a wonderful family and used his ability to get the most out of them. A typical guy might be a little bored but most women will enjoy it. I’m not a romantic and I had a good time.

Also, anyone else find it odd that this is the second ‘moving in time’ movie Rachel McAdams has done? That plot line isn’t over done yet. I smell typecasting.

Music: Unconditionally by Katy Perry