Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 224

Release Dates and Other Stuff

I finished proofreading book 6 on Tuesday, then gave myself a day off for the Independence Day holiday (though I did do some research reading for an upcoming project). I did some housework and baking, but otherwise it was a lazy day until it was time to head with some friends to the lake to watch fireworks. They were shooting the fireworks from across the lake, so it looked really cool with the reflection in the water, but we were far enough away that we didn't get that visceral "under fire" feeling I like about fireworks. From where we were sitting, we could see at least three other fireworks displays off in the distance, even after our show was over. We're still working out the optimal fireworks experience -- a good show from the right vantage point that doesn't require getting there too terribly early and has enough access points that it's not too hard to leave. There's one show in the area that's awesome and that has all-day entertainment, including a vintage aircraft airshow before the fireworks, but about half a million people (literally, not an exaggeration) come to that, so you have to get there by about 4 in the afternoon, and then it takes hours for the crowds to clear out.

Now, it's back to work. I've been working on a book for a few years, off and on (more off than on) in between other projects. It was initially my response to rejections I was getting on everything else I tried to write that went along the lines of "We love Shanna's work, but we were hoping for something more like Enchanted, Inc. But not something in that series." So I came up with something that had some of the same elements but that was entirely separate. And I think it veered off to be very different, but possibly falling into the same category. I don't know. It's a maddening book, but I do love it in so many ways, and I think it's very close to being ready. On the off chance that books 5 and 6 turn out to make any kind of splash, then it would be nice to have something ready to submit to capitalize on that. And then I can devote myself to book 7.

I for some reason thought I'd announced the release dates for those upcoming books, but apparently I didn't. The planned release date for Much Ado About Magic is August 15. The planned release date for No Quest for the Wicked is currently October 1. Mind you, these are the dates when we'll have everything ready to go with the various online booksellers. The bigger ones apparently launch almost instantly while the others have been known to trickle out. I guess it's like the regular bookstores, where some will shelve a book on release day and others may or may not get around to it for a while. I don't know yet if there will be a hard copy option anywhere. I've got a list of questions in to my agent, and that's one of them. When we were discussing doing this a while ago, that was mentioned as something that could happen, but I don't know the specifics. This is all a brave new world for me and something of an experiment.

Now I need to switch mental gears into this other universe. Would it be considered procrastinating to spend part of the day watching a mood-setting movie?

Romantic Comedy: Crazy, Stupid, Love

Yesterday I made five jars of strawberry jam, went to the library and proofread almost half of book 6. This morning, I was at my desk by 8, so I can only wonder what I'll accomplish today.

The one other movie I watched over the weekend was Crazy, Stupid, Love (that was the way it was punctuated on the HBO listings). I found it to be a very frustrating movie because while most of it was very generic and paint-by-numbers, there was a really intriguing story with some truly surprising twists buried in it. If they'd jettisoned a couple of the plot lines and focused on the one with the fun twists, they might have had something good, but I think they were trying for a Love Actually effect with all the various plot lines showing ways that people can be crazy or stupid for love. Or something like that.

So, what's it about? You may need to make a chart. Going by my sense of amount of screentime devoted to the plots, we had Plot A: After 25 years of marriage, Emily (Julianne Moore) tells her husband Cal (Steve Carell) that she's been sleeping with a co-worker (Kevin Bacon) and wants a divorce. He numbly moves out, and then when he's loudly bemoaning his fate while drowning his sorrows at a bar, the player who stalks his prey in that bar (Ryan Gosling) takes pity on him and starts tutoring him in how to be a single man. Meanwhile, Emily finds that her co-worker is kind of annoying and she misses her husband, but she's hurt that he didn't even put up a fight when she asked for a divorce, and now that he's become quite the ladies' man, she worries that she's lost him/is pissed off at him. Or something like that.

Plot B involves their thirteen-year-old son, who's in love with the seventeen-year-old babysitter. He stalks her, sends her non-stop text messages and stages public events at which he declares his undying devotion. He's convinced that they're soulmates and that one day she'll realize that their age difference doesn't matter, so he disregards all of her rejections and her pleas to leave her alone. His ardent devotion teaches his parents A Valuable Lesson in not giving up on love. Or something like that not involving a restraining order. Meanwhile, the babysitter is in love with Cal, and when he becomes single she hopes it's her chance, if only she can make him see her as something other than a kid.

Plot C centers on the player, who finally comes across a woman on whom his lines don't work (Emma Stone). She recognizes them for the lines they are and laughs at them as being seriously cheesy. She's also not interested because she has a lawyer boyfriend who's the exact opposite of the player type (Josh Groban -- yes, the singer, but as an actor he seems to be cornering the market on clueless dorks). But when her boyfriend disappoints her by not proposing, she goes back to the bar, orders the player to take her home, and very soon the player finds himself needing to ask his married friend for advice on how to have a relationship because he has no clue what to do when he actually wants to keep seeing a woman after the initial conquest.

Plot C was the one with all the real surprises and fun and with the actors/characters with any real life to them. Almost all of the laughs in the movie for me came from this plot, and it had one of the most surprising and romantic scenes I've seen in a romantic comedy in a long time when the player takes the challenging woman home, and she proceeds to analyze and laugh at each step of his usual seduction process, and along the way he ends up breaking every one of his own seduction rules, which leads to the night being far more intimate than either of them planned, and in a totally different way. As far as I was concerned, you could drop Plot B entirely because it was seriously creepy and led to the worst and most contrived scenes in the movie. I did like the turnaround of the single guy tutoring the long-married guy in being single and kind of saving his marriage and then the single guy needing the married guy to tutor him in having a relationship, so we'd need to keep parts of that plot, but we could keep it mostly offscreen. Then we could actually develop the context. We didn't see enough of Emma Stone's relationship with her boyfriend to understand why she turned from him to the player, and they didn't capitalize on that turnabout where he suddenly needed tutoring from his married friend. They skipped straight to a few weeks later so we didn't see those fumbling first steps where he was totally clueless. There was also a lot of fun potential with her snarky best friend, who could easily have stolen the movie. I spent the whole movie thinking she looked familiar and figuring she must have been some teen actor grown up, but then after I saw the closing credits I realized she was just seriously out of context because I knew her as Agent Lee from NCIS, the lawyer-turned-agent who had the semi-kinky affair with Jimmy Palmer and then turned out to be the mole stealing secrets. She was so funny and perfect as the romantic comedy snarky best friend that I couldn't place her from a more serious role in a crime show.

In general, there were some great moments, but otherwise there was a lot that annoyed me about this movie. I was watching some of the featurettes on the When Harry Met Sally DVD, and in one of them, they were talking about something I hadn't realized about that movie that's probably one of the reasons I love it so much: the man and woman are given equal weight. Neither is made the buffoon or butt of the joke, neither is totally right or wrong, neither is the bad guy. I've found that a lot of romantic comedies, especially the ones I consider "cynical," have the policy that the man is always wrong, probably because they figure that women will make up most of the audience, and it's a way to pander to the audience. That's one of the problems with this movie. With Plot A, the wife was the one who cheated and who asks for a divorce, and yet the movie acts like she's right and he's wrong, he's the one who didn't fight for her, he has to move out, he's in the wrong for having other relationships after she cheats and asks for the divorce, and he's the one who has to win her back. It's very one-sided in a situation where there's wrong on both sides. If she hadn't cheated and if it had just been about her feeling like he'd given up, it would have made more sense, but if you're unhappy with your marriage, maybe you should talk to your husband about that, go into marriage counseling, take a vacation together, or something other than cheat and jump straight to divorce. If asking for divorce was meant to shake him up and force him to fight, that's a rather passive-aggressive way of going about it because it's no-win for him. If he does put up a fight, then he looks like he's controlling and not respecting her wishes, but if he doesn't fight it means he doesn't care. I felt like, given the circumstances, she should have been the one trying to get him back when she realized divorce wasn't really what she wanted. Then even in the plot I liked there was a bit of that "the woman is always right" thing going on. We didn't get the context to know what their relationship was like, but she was the one who decided that he was going to propose when he promised a surprise. I thought his actual surprise was far more appropriate to the situation and it would have been a bad time to propose, and I thought his reason for not proposing, that he wasn't ready for it, was perfectly valid. And yet that was apparently meant to be reasonable grounds for her rushing off and flinging herself at the hot guy who tried to pick her up in a bar once. Now, maybe if we'd learned that he always had some excuse for not proposing and she'd realized he was never going to commit it would have made sense, but as shown in the movie, he was a jerk because he didn't propose when she thought he was going to, even though she wasn't sure she wanted him to -- another no-win. If he had proposed, it would have probably been one of those humiliating public "I'll have to think about it" situations. I hate it when movies do stuff like that (the reason I can't watch the end of Notting Hill -- I hate that he's the one who has to do the chase and the public humiliation show of devotion when she's the one who's jerked him around, denied being with him and wrongfully mistrusted him at every turn. She should have had to be the one to publicly acknowledge and apologize to him). As a woman, I can hold my own without being propped up by screenwriters, and I'm okay with a woman being in the wrong when she really is wrong. I don't hate men and want to see them suffer for me even when I'm wrong.

But the really frustrating thing for me is that I can't steal this story. I sometimes get some of my best ideas from books or movies that have some spark of something interesting that wasn't capitalized on, and by the time I've written the story that I think it should have been, no one would recognize the source. But the parts of this one I liked had just enough originality and just enough really surprising twists that I can't take the parts that worked and write what should have been without the source being really obvious, and without those parts it would be a pretty generic story.

Brave and Curly Hair

I think this is going to be a very productive day. Before noon, I've proofread two chapters, made a batch of strawberry jam (the cooking part, now it has to cool, cook again, and then go in jars), and walked to the library (which counts as both errand and exercise). Some of this is because of what I call the summer insomnia, which means I wake up freakishly early (for me), no matter what time I went to bed or how badly I slept the night before. Without setting an alarm, I was up in time to go to the early church service yesterday. I may as well make use of the time, especially since I more than make up for it during winter hibernation mode. I could do without the weird sleep pattern of going to sleep, then waking up from a deep sleep and thinking it's darker than when I usually get up and wondering if it's worthwhile to go back to sleep or if I should just get up -- and then I look at the clock and discover that it's an hour since I went to bed, and then it takes me a couple of hours to really get back to sleep.

I kind of gave up on Project Bad Romantic Comedy. There's a certain formulaic type that I need for what I'm working on, and there are some not-so-hideous examples. You've Got Mail fits pretty perfectly, and while it is rather formulaic and I have some issues with it, it doesn't strike me as too cynical. I don't feel like the people making it thought it was stupid. I think I came to this realization when I just couldn't force myself to watch Life As We Know It, and then it occurred to me that it doesn't fit the pattern I want, anyway. There are plot contrivances that make that movie sound awful (really, talk to the people you want to raise your child if something happens to you, and don't use your orphaned child as a matchmaking tool), but it isn't the kind of awful I need.

I went with a big group of friends to see Brave, and I wonder if we got a special edition that was different from what the critics saw because way too many critics sneered at it as "Pixar makes a Disney princess movie." And it was so not a Disney princess movie. There's no Prince Charming anywhere in sight, no hint of romance, no hint that the heroine is even looking for a romance, ever. A character who happens to be a princess doesn't make something a Disney princess movie. I kind of get the feeling that some of the reviews were a subconscious expression of "ewww, girl cooties!" -- that it was judged on some different standard just because it had a girl as the main character.

I happened to love it because it was a different twist on the princess story that was more about figuring out how to be yourself and how to get the other people in your life to let you be yourself. It was also about how there's more than one way to be a girl, and no one way is 100 percent right or wrong. You have to find what works for you in your situation, and you have to let the other girls/women in your life find their own way. That's an incredibly powerful message for girls, who seem to have these all-or-nothing ideals thrown at them -- you must be a Disney Princess! You must not be anything like a Disney Princess! I recently read a really good rant on that topic, criticizing one of those "those girly girls are stupid and awful and only the girls who fit this particular mode of being a geek girl are on the money" things that tend to get passed around Facebook. Whatever your age, see it with your mother or your daughter.

But the truly important thing about the movie was the hair. I understand they had to practically invent new technology to do it, but they got the hair right. It was wild and curly, and it looked like wild, curly hair really looks. Naturally curly hair isn't uniform. Some curls are tighter than others. Some form into perfect ringlets while others are just wavy frizz, and they got this right. They also got the way this kind of hair looks wet right. I was really impressed. Merida's hair looks exactly like mine when I don't use styling products and let it dry loose (though mine is much darker and more of an auburn than a red). Even better, they never straightened her hair. It was the way it was. If this movie had come out when I was a kid, I think it would have totally changed my self image and I'd have come to terms with my curls a lot earlier. I was a child in the 70s, when stick straight was the way to go. The Disney princesses may have had a bit of bounce to their hair, but they didn't have real curls. When a movie or TV show did have a character with truly curly hair, she was usually considered the awkward, geeky one (Sarah Jessica Parker in Square Pegs). If a curly haired character ever went through a transformation to become the love interest or be considered beautiful, her hair got straightened. The overall message from the media was that sleek, straight, shiny hair was the only way to be beautiful, and no matter how many times your parents tell you how great curly hair is, if you're being bombarded by those images, it's hard to get past the brainwashing that your kind of hair is something that needs to be corrected. Brave never actually tells us whether or not Merida is supposed to be considered beautiful. That's not really an issue for her (something else that keeps this from being a Disney princess movie). But she's shown as fierce and powerful and all kinds of wonderful, and she has that hair that she never has to change, and there will be dolls and costumes and action figures with that hair. I know how much it would have meant to me as a kid to have a doll with hair like mine. I came out of the theater saying in awe, "They got the hair right!"

I have another movie to discuss, but that will have to wait until tomorrow because I suspect it will be a long rant.

Romantic Comedy: The Very Thought of You

I normally don't post on weekends, but I have a feeling this is going to be a movie-intensive weekend, so if I don't get one of them out of the way today, I'll end up with a more epic than usual post.

Last night, I seemed to be in A Mood (yes, it deserves capital letters), and I couldn't face the idea of watching a movie I knew would piss me off, which meant my Bad Romantic Comedy project was a no-go, but I was afraid to go for an unknown quantity. One of the reasons I buy movies I've already seen (and reread books) is that there are times when you need just the right thing, and getting something that seems like it might be right but turns out to be wrong can ruin everything. The only safe approach is going with a known quantity. Since I highlighted it in my list, since I hadn't watched it in ages, and since I needed a movie just that length, I decided to watch The Very Thought of You (the original title that's on the DVD cover shown on the IMDB page is Martha -- Meet Frank, Daniel, and Laurence).

The story's about three guys who have been best friends since childhood. Now they've grown up to be a superficial big-shot music producer (Tom Hollander) and a former child star turned embittered unemployed actor (Rufus Sewell) who now resent/disrespect each other and the nice-guy peacemaker caught in the middle (Joseph Fiennes and His Amazing Eyelashes). Their friendship is strained, perhaps to the breaking point, when all three of them independently meet and fall in love with the same woman (Monica Potter), an American who got fed up with her life, went to the airport and bought the first ticket she could afford to go anywhere else -- and ended up in London. What makes this film unique is the story structure because we see it play out from the perspectives of each of the three guys, and it isn't until we see the last story that we find out what's really been going on all along. It's not a Rashomon kind of thing with subjective viewpoints. What we see is the objective truth. We're just limited to the information each guy has at that time. The first two stories take place more or less sequentially, but the third story overlaps the first two and fills in the gaps. It's hard to talk about it without telling which guy of the three is Mr. Right, but then that's pretty obvious even from the start of the movie, since it's told in a framing story with the Joseph Fiennes character telling all this to his psychiatrist neighbor (Ray Winstone).

So, rating it as a romantic comedy, I'll first tackle the "is it romantic?" question. I think so, though the romance comes later in the film and isn't at all your typical movie romance. For one thing, this isn't any kind of "opposites attract" thing that involves lots of bickering and witty banter. This romance is the rare case in movies of the two people being absolutely perfect for each other from the start. They're soulmates. They have a tendency to say the same things (like he'll say a line we previously heard her say before they even met) and can finish each other's sentences within hours of meeting. They figure out pretty quickly that this is IT. The romantic conflict comes from the friends, with him having to wrestle with the dilemma of choosing loyalty to his lifelong friends or being with this woman he's just met but who may be the love of his life -- and then him having to deal with the fallout when she discovers that the three guys pursuing her know each other, and she has to wonder how real any of it is. I find it very refreshing to see a relationship where they're obviously compatible and it's things outside the relationship that cause the problems, and it means I'm really pulling for them to work it out and get together -- and I think it will work out for them even after the cameras stop rolling.

On the "is it funny?" side, it's more of a wry sense of amusement rather than a lot of big, comic scenes. A lot of the humor comes from the characters. The two friends are rather ridiculous, and it's fun to see how unimpressed she is with their antics that they think are guaranteed seduction. The entire opening sequence involves the over-the-top things the music producer does to try to get closer to her and the way her common sense foils them all (and in ways that undermine a lot of romantic comedy tropes -- she acts like a real person would act here, not like a romantic comedy heroine). I've never thought of Rufus Sewell as funny. He's generally more the smoldering type, but he plays on that typecasting here to show how ridiculous that smoldering, bitter actor type can be. I think most of the laugh-out-loud moments are from him. Joseph Fiennes is mostly the straight man, but he gets a subtle kind of funny as his frustration builds to the breaking point even as the surge of emotions leaves him totally frozen and inarticulate. His scenes with the neighbor as he tells the story are some of the funniest in the movie, and I think the biggest laugh in the movie goes to Ray Winstone in one of those scenes. It's also surprising just how funny it can be when two people who are perfect for each other find each other. They become total dorks with the giddiness of that and with the way they're totally in sync without realizing it. You probably won't laugh until you cry, but you'll smile a lot.

I first saw this movie on TV on a weekend afternoon, either on some cable channel or on a local station back in the day when the local stations would air something other than infomercials when they weren't airing a network sporting event on weekend afternoons. Because of that story structure, it's the kind of movie you want to rewatch once you know what was going on, but it was impossible to find. I finally found a VHS copy at a used bookstore. I don't think it got much of a theatrical release because I'd never heard of it until it came on TV, and normally I'd be all over a British romantic comedy starring Joseph Fiennes and His Amazing Eyelashes (yes, they deserve equal billing). I do wonder why he hasn't become a bigger star. I think he's better looking than his more famous brother. He's been in some big films (for crying out loud, he was Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love), and he seems to be a really talented actor. I guess he's mostly stayed busy on the British stage and has avoided the limelight, so he's probably happier that way, but it limits my opportunities to be spellbound by The Amazing Eyelashes (seriously, those eyelashes are incredible. He must have had to learn to synchronize his blinking and walking so he doesn't trip. I hope he doesn't wear glasses or they'll be constantly smudged).

There is a kind of rough, low-budget quality to this film, but for me, it scratches my romantic comedy itches while breaking most of the romantic comedy molds, and that's a real achievement. Now I need to see if I can find this on DVD because I think my VHS tape is disintegrating.

And now today I'm off to see Brave with some friends.

Romantic Comedies -- a List

In response to a reader question, here's a starting point list of romantic comedy films. I'm mostly going by memory and what's in my collection. This list is likely to grow or change because I imagine titles will be popping into my head for days. (And it's already happening)

Classic films (films that came out before I was born)
The Philadelphia Story (love, love, love -- fabulous dialogue)
Bringing Up Baby
The Awful Truth
It Happened One Night
My Favorite Wife (there's a later version called Move Over Darling, with Doris Day and James Garner, but I like the B&W Irene Dunne/Cary Grant version better)
The Shop Around the Corner (far superior to the remake, You've Got Mail)
Charade

Historical (set in a time period different from when they were made -- costume romantic comedies)
Pride and Prejudice -- the miniseries with Colin Firth (I wasn't crazy about the film version with Keira Knightley)
Sense and Sensibility (the Emma Thompson version)
Emma (just about any version -- I think I've liked all the recent ones. There was an A&E version with a young Kate Beckinsale, then there was the Gwyneth Paltrow big-screen version and then a more recent PBS miniseries)
A Room with a View
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Much Ado About Nothing (the Emma Thompson/Kenneth Branagh version)
Down With Love (a spoof of the early 60s Doris Day films)
Shakespeare in Love
I Capture the Castle
Cold Comfort Farm
(the bottom three might not technically be romances as two of them don't have the happy romantic ending and one hardly deals with the romantic relationship, but they still scratch the romantic comedy itch for me)

Contemporary (meaning I saw them first-run or could have seen them first-run)
Not all of these are brilliant movies. I may have some issues with some of them, but for the most part, I don't think any of them are truly bad movies that I would consider "cynical."
Bridget Jones's Diary (but not the sequel)
While You Were Sleeping
When Harry Met Sally …
Love Actually
The Holiday
Letters to Juliet (I've only watched it once and liked it then, but I haven't had a chance to revisit and be more analytical about it)
You've Got Mail (but not as good as the original)
The Very Thought of You (had a different title for British release -- kind of obscure, but very interesting because it plays a lot with perception and viewpoint)
I'm With Lucy (another obscure one, but interesting because of the story structure because it's non-linear -- the heroine is getting ready for her wedding and telling the story of how she met her husband, and then the stories of several men she dated in the past year are woven together, but we don't know which one she's marrying)
Clueless
Four Weddings and a Funeral (except for the ending)
Mrs. Winterbourne
Notting Hill (except for the ending)
Office Space
The Fabulous Baker Boys
Working Girl
Hope Floats
Sleepless in Seattle (though I really don't think of this one as that romantic, since they don't even meet until the end)
Romancing the Stone

Paranormal/Fantasy
Tangled (yes, the cartoon, the one Disney fairy tale movie that is structurally a romantic comedy)
Kate and Leopold (trivia note: this screenwriter wrote the Enchanted, Inc. screenplay that didn't get produced. I'd love to see what he did with it to see if I like it or to see why Universal didn't like it)
Just Like Heaven
Sliding Doors (I'm not sure how comedic this one really is, but it works when I'm moody and need to both laugh and cry)
The Princess Bride (not really focused on the romance, but still, it has to be on all lists of movies to watch)
Enchanted (duh, can't believe I forgot this one)

The Bad Ones
To be honest, I've enjoyed some of these, but mostly, they irk me and I wish they could have been done better
Leap Year (just a few tweaks to the script and it could have been decent)
Raising Helen
Something Borrowed
28 Dresses
Knocked Up (I know this was very successful, but I hated it, mostly because I loathe that overgrown frat boy man child thing)
Must Love Dogs (I read the book, but somehow the movie was bland)
The Wedding Date (an abomination -- they completely missed the point of the book it was based on)
New in Town -- I couldn't get past the first 20 minutes on HBO, so it has to go on a "bad" list
Because I Said So -- I think I have a rant written somewhere about this one. The problem isn't so much the cynicism behind it as it is the fact that it doesn't seem to realize it's about pathological behavior. It had potential, though
Addicted to Love -- something Meg Ryan would probably want off her resume. She tried to act edgy. It didn't work.
French Kiss -- I saw it on a date and still barely remember it

Cynical Comedies

I finished entering my copy edits yesterday. Now I need to do a good proofreading pass, but today I'm mostly going to focus on other things, like research. I did my grocery shopping this morning and may have allowed myself to get a little self-indulgent, but then it struck me that I sold a book this week. Yes, it was to Japan and not the US, and it wasn't the kind of money I get in the US, but it was more than I got for writing category romances, and it was a sale based almost entirely on my past performance rather than the proposed plot of the book, so that should be celebrated. One of my indulgences was a bouquet of flowers from the quick clearance rack in the floral department. There was some yuck, but I was able to take out the good flowers and put them in various size vases (depending on how the stems looked) that are now scattered around my house. I've aspired to being the kind of person who keeps fresh flowers around the house, and although they're not at all practical, they make me happy. And they're better for my thighs than chocolate (though I got some of that, too).

There's going to be one challenge in my project to research the cheesy, bad romantic comedies that fit all the stereotypes: I tend not to have them in my collection. I do have some movies that I consider flawed but that still have something about them that intrigues me, but the kinds of movies I need to watch are the dull, forgettable ones that don't give me a reason to want to watch them again. I guess I'm going to have to rely on cable TV and the library.

What I'm going for are what I call the "cynical" romantic comedies -- not the ones where the movie itself is about being cynical about romance, but the ones where I get the feeling that the people making the movie are cynical about what they're making. They don't like these kinds of movies, they don't understand why people like them and they don't have a lot of respect for the people who like them, but hey, they're relatively cheap to produce, with few special effects or stunts, they don't require a huge cast and you can generally just focus on getting names for the leads and fill out the rest of the cast with B-listers, and all you have to do is follow the formula and the fans will eat it up. It's the movie equivalent of the people who read one Harlequin romance (or just think they know what a Harlequin romance is) and decide that it should be easy enough to crank one of those out in a weekend because all you have to do is follow the formula, and then they'll be rich. Of course, those people generally don't get books published because either they start writing and realize that it's not that easy or their books are immediately rejected because they don't understand or have respect for what they're writing and it shows. But somehow, people who don't seem to get romantic comedy still keep getting romantic comedies made, perhaps because the people who make the money decisions in Hollywood are also cynical about such things, while the editors and publishers at Harlequin truly do love romance novels.

But what we end up with in movies is films that follow the formula but that lack heart (and often logic). We get a couple of attractive people who bicker a lot but who, for some reason, are forced to be around each other. Then we get a montage of scenes of them together set against a romantic pop song to tell us they're falling in love. Some secret comes out or some betrayal happens to drive them apart, then one of them will run frantically across town to reach the other one so they can get back together again. Sometimes they think they're being edgy and throw in what they think are twists, like moving the sex to the beginning of the relationship, relying on gross-out humor, letting the woman act more like the man, etc., but it's still the same old thing at the core. Now to find enough of these movies to pick up on enough cliches I can use in my spoof. I can probably just search IMDB for Katherine Heigl. These kinds of films have been the bulk of her career lately. HBO is obliging me by having Life as We Know It in their rotation right now. Sometimes I can count on Lifetime showing some of these kinds of things, but they're more in "my Internet lover is trying to kill me" mode right now. They mostly seem to show romantic comedies at Valentine's Day or Christmas.

It did occur to me that my wacky dream the other night about having to go back to high school sounds like the premise for a high-concept comedy, though I suspect Hollywood would make my character male because there would need to be a romance, and 40-something man with 20-something woman is standard operating procedure in Hollywood, while a 40-something woman with a 20-something man would become about the enormous age difference and how weird and creepy it is rather than about the idea of the student knowing a lot more than the teacher. I also can't think of any contrived reason for a successful author to have to take a high school English class, so maybe it would have to be college, with the young teacher being a graduate student teaching assistant leading the study/discussion group, and maybe the successful writer is self-educated but now wants the degree. Even there, I would think a successful author would be able to test out of freshman English, and universities are often willing to grant credit for relevant life experience. Being a bestselling author would probably meet a lot of English course requirements. There was a movie called Teacher's Pet that did sort of go along these lines, where Doris Day was a journalism professor and Clark Gable was a self-taught, experienced newsman who scoffed at the idea of teaching journalism in school instead of in the newsroom (reporters should start as copy boys, like he did), with a lot of ivory tower vs. the real world bickering, but as I recall, he wasn't actually enrolled in her class. He just sat in on it to mess with her.

And now I am going to force myself to enjoy a summer day. I may hit the swimming pool, and I bought a packet of Slush Puppies at Target (the ones with the juice in plastic tubes that you freeze). Other than when I taught Vacation Bible School a couple of years ago, I don't think I've had those since I was a kid, and they say "summer" to me. I will try not to think about how much better a crisp, cool autumn day would be.

Revisiting When Harry Met Sally ...

As I mentioned, for an upcoming project I need to study romantic comedy movies. I'm going to do a spoof-like twist that requires knowing all the cliches and stereotypes. But since Nora Ephron passed away and since you need to understand the foundations of the stereotypes and cliches (even the stalest cliche was original at one point), I started my study with When Harry Met Sally …, which is one of my all-time favorite movies. I have a lot of emotional associations with this movie that make it difficult for me to assess the movie itself, but I'm finally far enough removed from most of those associations to finally be objective. So, I'll start with the movie itself.

When it comes to judging a romantic comedy, for me it comes down to two questions: Is it funny? and Is it romantic?

For funny, I need to laugh out loud at least once. I want witty dialogue that's so appropriate that I find myself quoting it when I'm in similar situations. I'm not a fan of gross-out or humiliation humor, which is why most current "romantic comedies" fail for me. I'm the weirdo who cried all the way through There's Something About Mary because to me, all those "funny" situations were so sad and awful.

For romantic, it gets a little more nebulous. I need to want the couple to get together, and I need to be able to see why they should be together. I also want to get the sense that they know why they should be together. Screenwriting teacher Michael Hague joked in a seminar about a movie where the big revelation of feelings should have been "I love you because we're in this movie together," and too often, that's what's going on. Yes, there are going to have to be differences between the characters to have a movie, but you can't spend the whole movie focusing on how different they are without showing any moments of connection and expect me to believe that they belong together. I'm especially not a fan of cheats and shortcuts like the romantic montage set to a pop song with lyrics that tell us what we should be feeling, or contrived big emotional moments, like the cliched "rom com dash" at the end of the movie. I also want there to be more to the relationship than lust, so I'm not a fan of using a hot sex scene as a shortcut to tell us they belong together.

When Harry Met Sally … wins on both counts. The characters have funny quirks, the dialogue is hilarious, and there are brilliant comic set pieces like the infamous diner scene. And yet I never feel like the movie is trying too hard or doing funny things just to be funny. For instance, the infamous diner scene is directly tied to the emotional crisis of the movie. It happens because Harry has just been talking about how he hates to stay overnight after sleeping with a woman, but he doesn't think they mind because he knows they had a good time in bed with him. Then Sally proceeds to prove that he can't be so sure they really had such a good time. But then when they do end up sleeping together, and he does get up to leave, she can't help but remember what he said about his other dates, and she fears she's just another notch on his bedpost he wants to escape. What was hysterically funny becomes emotionally relevant. You can't remove the humor from the movie and still have the same story.

As for romance, this couple seems unlikely in every way, and they have enough differences for funny conflict, but the movie focuses more on their connection, using the differences just as seasoning. We see them have long conversations. We see trust building and growing. We see how they can be honest with each other, how they challenge each other. We can see how they're better together than they are apart, how they make each other better people. I find it interesting that there is a "developing relationship" montage in the movie, but instead of being set to a pop song, it's set to voiceover of a late night phone call between the two of them. The only musical montages are the two Christmas season montages, which contrast between the Christmas when they're friends and the Christmas when they aren't. We do have perhaps one of the earlier examples of the "rom com dash" when Harry realizes his love for Sally and rushes to find her, but I think this one works because he explains why he felt he had to do it. It's not just there because the screenwriter thought it was an obligatory part of that kind of movie.

This may be Meg Ryan's best role and performance of her career, and she seems to have spent the rest of her career either trying to recapture or escape from Sally, without quite grasping what it was about Sally that worked. Sally is an uptight neurotic, but she's so relentlessly perky that it balances out without it falling into Ryan's later "perma-snit" romantic comedy performances. I never would have considered Billy Crystal a romantic leading man, but he's so funny and charming here that I can totally see falling for him. I think this was also Carrie Fisher's best role, making full use of her natural snark.

One thing I found interesting in this viewing was just how absolutely perfect all the dialogue was. Every line zings, and as a writer, I can recognize the work that went into this script. Then those lines are all delivered with perfect timing, nuance and inflection. And yet there's an improvisational quality about all those scenes that makes it seem like these people really are just spontaneously saying these perfect lines in such perfect ways. I almost feel like I'm eavesdropping on a private conversation. I think it helps that the music is used mostly in transitions, and there's no score behind the conversation scenes, which makes it sound less "movie" and more natural. It's really hard to make it look this easy, so this movie is a triumph of writing, acting and directing.

Then there's all the lovely New York scenery (mostly in the fall) and the score of jazz standards, which helped introduce Harry Connick Jr. to the world (I immediately bought the soundtrack, which was part of my discovery of jazz when I was just at the "this is the kind of music I like" stage of discovering jazz -- and I think I need this soundtrack on CD. I'm listening to the cassette now).

But this was also the perfect movie that hit at the perfect time in my life. I saw it late in the summer between my junior and senior years of college. That summer was sort of my "training wheels for adult life" phase. I stayed in Austin and had a job at a weekly entertainment newspaper (a now long-defunct more family-oriented alternative to the Chronicle, for those who know Austin media). That was when Austin was more bust than boom, so you could get cheap apartments, especially in the summer when most of the students were away, so I got a fully furnished apartment in walking distance of campus for a song, and then my friends going away for the summer stashed their stuff with me, so I ended up with a TV and VCR and a couple of stereo systems. My job was mostly part-time, so I still had plenty of free time, and my job meant I knew everything that was going on around town. I dressed up like a grown-up and went to work at the newspaper, lived in a semi-chic (for that time) apartment near the middle of the city, took informal summer courses at the university (including ballet), and went to a lot of movies (sometimes with passes I got at the newspaper). It was all very single-in-the-city stuff, and it was sheer heaven.

So, one afternoon I went to see When Harry Met Sally, since I'd read the press kit at work and our critic liked it. I was hooked pretty much from the beginning, since it started with the heroine having graduated from college and heading to New York to be a journalist -- something I hoped would soon be happening for me. Even Sally's car was a lot like the one I had, though mine was beige (I didn't get a close enough look to judge the make and model, but I think mine was even the same model from several years later). I kind of looked at this movie as a preview of what I hoped my life would soon be like. It was like getting to watch my fantasies play out on the big screen. I realized while watching this time that my senior year wardrobe was very much like Sally's wardrobe in the movie (though I had a fedora instead of a bowler hat). I don't know if that was something I did subconsciously because of the movie or because that's what was in style then, but I definitely seemed to have been going for that look. This is also a rare case of a heroine's hair getting curlier as she became more romantically desirable. Normally, they start at frizzy/curly, then their hair becomes flat and straight when we're supposed to see them as beautiful. I don't know if Sally was supposed to have had a perm or if she was supposed to have had naturally curly hair that she quit blow-drying into submission as she softened and matured, but it was still very validating for me.

And then there was that friends issue, which hit home because most of my closest friends tend to be men. In one of the interview clips they showed of Nora Ephron this week, she said that men didn't really want women friends because they have friends, so if they were friends with women, it was because they wanted something more, and women want men friends because they want to understand men better. I disagree entirely, but maybe it's a geek thing. I tend to have male friends because they're more likely to have interests in common with me. I had a few female friends before college, but in a group, I usually was more comfortable with the guys because I had something to talk about with them. If those guys were friends with me only because they wanted something more, then they never showed it and missed some big opportunities. I had a bad habit of developing crushes on my various guy friends, but looking back, I'm not sure that it was because I actually was attracted to them. It was more about proximity. In junior high, I was the queen of the crush from afar, but when I got to high school, the town was too small for there to be such a thing as "afar," and I think I also realized that my odds would improve significantly if I focused my interests on the guys I actually knew, the ones who liked me enough to hang around with me. From there, it seemed pretty obvious to me that if they liked me enough to hang around with me, and if they realized that I liked them enough to hang around with them, then maybe when it came time for them to ask someone out, I'd be the most likely candidate. Except it didn't work out that way at all. They hung around with me and asked out other girls. That led to a fair amount of pining, so this movie, in which the male friend realizes that his female friend is the love of his life, was essentially my romantic fantasy. It gave me hope.

Looking at it now from the other side of forty, as much as I like the idea of friends becoming lovers, I know that it's really tricky to make it work. For one thing, if you're not both on the same page at the same time, it can get really awkward. For another, if you've known each other well as friends for a long time, you know too much about each other. There have been a few male friends I was attracted to that I never would have dated because there were things about them that I could accept as a friend but that I couldn't tolerate as a girlfriend and that would be a dealbreaker for me as a wife. I also know myself well enough to know that I'm not a person who can be friends with an ex. My exes are pretty much erased from my life (though part of that is that they often become exes by vanishing entirely). Therefore, if a friendship is really valuable to me, any romantic feelings would have to be really, really strong, and what I've seen about the guy would have to lead me to believe we'd be compatible in a romantic relationship or marriage for me to be willing to risk the friendship by taking that leap, and I'd still want to move slowly and cautiously before getting to the point of no return. I think that what I consider friends into lovers is really just a slow-burn relationship, where there's initial attraction, then you become friends and get to know each other on that level before the attraction becomes something stronger and deeper and based on more than the initial vibe, so it just looks like friends becoming lovers, but you were never really "just" friends. You were merely building a foundation for an eventual relationship. I think that's what I tend to write. I certainly no longer dream about any of my male friends looking at me and having that burst of realization that I'm the one they've been looking for all along (most of my male friends are married, anyway).

So I guess I both agree with and differ with the premise of the movie, but it's still my gold standard for romantic comedy. More like that, please! Or, in the language of the film, I'll have what she's having.

The Miracle of Tea

I somehow managed to violate the laws of physics this morning. Every morning, I make a pot of tea, and I make it in the same way, filling the teapot to the top with water. Then I pour a cup full -- the same kind of cup every morning, the teacups that go with my dinnerware -- and pour the rest into my Thermos to drink throughout the day. If I pour that first cup, then the rest of the tea from that pot fits into my Thermos with a little room left over. In fact, I have at times managed to fit a pot of tea into that Thermos without pouring a cup first. But today, I poured my usual cup of tea, then started pouring tea into the Thermos, but then I noticed that the liquid wasn't going through the strainer. I removed the strainer and saw that the Thermos was close to overflowing, and yet there was still tea in the pot. I have no idea how that could happen. Someone must have known I'd need extra tea today. It was a miracle!

I was sad to open the newspaper this morning and see an obituary for Nora Ephron. I remember reading her novel Heartburn when I was in high school. And then, of course, there's When Harry Met Sally …, one of the best romantic comedies ever and one of the few that has me saying, "Yes, that's exactly how that is." Since I don't have choir tonight, I may do a memorial viewing of that movie. Part of the research I need to do for an upcoming project involves finding the archetypal/stereotypical romantic comedy, so I'll need to watch it anyway. And, yes, it's the same project that requires research on totalitarian/police state regimes. What could I possibly be cooking up with that combo? Mwa ha ha haaaa! Actually, romantic comedies might be a fun topic for a blog post series, since I'm always griping about not getting the right kind of romantic comedies. What is the right kind, and what's wrong with the ones that exist?

Oh, I just thought of a possible answer to the tea mystery. There's a possibility that I forgot to pour out the hot water I use to pre-heat the Thermos before I poured in the tea. The way I make tea, it's strong enough that an extra half-cup of water in the pot doesn't make enough difference for me to taste it. That just goes to show that I need a cup of tea before I'm capable of making a pot of tea. I guess I'll never know what happened, since there's no way to prove it.

You'd think that getting a new contract (even though it's not a big one and not enough to ease all my financial woes) would have made me feel more secure, but last night I had another one of those "returning to school" nightmares that usually indicate insecurity. I'm always dreaming about going back to high school or college, at the age I am now and with the experiences I have now. Last night, I was in a high school English class with a relatively young, new teacher. I'd been in the class for a week when we got an assignment that had something to do with creating charts of the character arcs for the Twilight series, and I told the teacher I'd read the first book, but I hadn't read the rest of the series. She told me that she'd given the assignment, and I reminded her that I'd only been in the class for a week, which wasn't time to read that series. I could plow through Thomas Hardy or Charles Dickens quickly, but those books were a real slog. Normally in those nightmares, this would have been one of those "I didn't study for the test/didn't do the assigned reading and am unprepared" things that leaves me in a panic, but I started snarking at her about the assignment, and later an older teacher came to ask me what I'd said to this teacher to make her cry. It turned out that she felt really insecure having me in her class, since I was a published author, and my criticism of her assignment really hurt. Perhaps it's a sign of growth or progress that I got that twist and maybe have grown out of the "unprepared" nightmare. In the dream, I just kind of rolled my eyes and did the assignment based on what I'd heard about those books, throwing in some critiques. It still felt kind of nightmarish, given that I, at my age, was having to take a high school English class, but I think it was my first back-to-school nightmare where I ended up feeling like I had the upper hand instead of ending up in a panic. Even so, I woke from that dream and somehow messed up making a pot of tea, so it must have left me a little addled.

Meanwhile, since there are so many books I want to get written, in addition to the contracted one, I'm going to be really pushing my productivity this summer. My goal is to not only put in a good amount of time at actual work, but to also fit in time for exercise and organizing my house. The one thing that can easily go is my Internet time. I can cut back severely without losing anything because I tend to get into doom loops, where I check the same sites over and over to see if they've changed. I can get exactly the same info by checking once in the morning, once in the early afternoon and once around close of business. To make me less likely to get drawn into the Internet doom loop when I take a break to check e-mail, I've started not turning on the ceiling fan in my office during those Internet breaks. It gets really hot and stuffy up here without the fan, so I'm more likely to check e-mail and then get back to work. During the summer, especially, I work somewhere downstairs, like the living room or bedroom and leave the office for tasks that require the Internet. No WiFi here. I'd never get anything done.

But Wait, There's More!

It's been a while since I had an Enchanted, Inc. series update, other than that I'm working on the book 5 copyedits and the final push toward publication. So, I may as well share an additional bit of news I've been holding back. It falls into the category of "but wait, there's more!"

You see, not only did the Japanese publisher want the fifth book in the series even though the US publisher didn't, but that one did well enough that they asked for a sixth book. I wrote that one last year, and that means that not only will book 5, Much Ado About Magic, be published this summer, but so will book 6, No Quest for the Wicked. I don't have final publication dates, but the plan is to do them less than a month apart, so you won't have to wait too long after reading book 5 to see what happens next.

And, drumroll please, yesterday I accepted an offer from the Japanese publisher to do a seventh book, so there will be even more. That book only exists in a brief synopsis, so I have to write it and edit it and do all the usual stuff that leads to publication. Whether I digitally publish that one, as well, depends on how well these two books this summer sell. There is some expense in getting cover art, copyediting, formatting, etc., to publish a book, and I don't know yet if they'll earn enough to cover those expenses. It's even kind of a risk to have already done all that for book 6 without seeing how book 5 sells, but we thought that doing two books back-to-back would increase exposure. Even when you're acting as your own publisher, you still have to think like a publisher, so the books have to make a profit in order to keep doing them. It's just that my profit expectations are different from a major corporation's. I don't have to maintain a building in Manhattan or a huge staff, and I'm the only author whose books I have access to, so I'm not weighing the potential profitability of one book vs. another and choosing the one I think will make the most money, even if both books would be profitable. I just need it to earn more money than it cost to produce it.

So, what happens with the seventh book comes down to readers. It will help if those who know this is coming and follow the news buy the new books on publication day (and don't worry, I'll let you know). That raises the ranking and makes them more visible to readers who might be interested but who don't follow everything I say online. And then if they buy the books within the first week, that raises the odds of making one of the e-book bestseller lists, when then raises visibility to others. I'm not hoping for Fifty Shades of Grey type numbers that will then have major publishers paying millions to publish the print editions. I'd just like a respectable enough showing that my agent can then use it in negotiating future deals with publishers for other books. And maybe to have someone at my old publisher asking questions like "Didn't we publish this series? Why didn't we publish these books?" I'll never know unless I can find a spy on the inside, but it's fun to imagine.

On another topic, I was able to track down some books about living under totalitarian regimes via Wikipedia. I know it's not a valid research source, but they have a good search engine and interconnected articles, so I was able to search key terms, and then find links within those articles to get to the specific topics I wanted, and then they usually have a bibliography or list of recommended reading. I'd search for books on those lists in my library's online catalogue, and if I found them, I'd then also do the search for nearby items on the shelf. For the more immediate need, it was just research to build a situation and not a major part of the book. But for the future book, there's a lot of reading there, and I'm a little giddy with glee at the thought of doing it. Though, with any luck, it'll be a couple of years before I get to write it because I'll be busy writing the sequels to the book in that genre that's already on submission.

Some of this reading has involved revisiting books I read in high school, and that's brought me to a realization. I've always claimed that I never went through a moody teen "I'm dark and that makes me deep" phase where I wore a lot of black and listened to depressing music (I was into ABBA as a teen), and I've been old-person baffled by the popularity of dystopias in teen fiction today. Well, it turns out I did have my phase like that, but instead of it coming out through music, I had this weird obsession with World War II. I've been reading some of those same books now and finding them almost too grim to tolerate, but I read them over and over again as a teen. I don't know if it was better or worse that my dystopia really happened, but I still think it's different from today's dystopian trend. It's hard to get much grimmer than the Warsaw ghetto, but that's in our past. Today's dystopias are about the future, and I prefer to think of the future as a shiny, happy place where we're always trying to improve. I don't want the future to be grim and bleak.

I'm still not sure why all that stuff appealed to me so strongly when I was a teen. I've always been a history nut, and I had lived in Germany as a pre-teen, so I think some of it was trying to understand it all and work it all out. I wasn't particularly happy as a teenager and was pretty lonely and felt like an outsider, so maybe I identified with the persecution and it helped put my own situation in perspective -- no matter how bad I thought my life was, I had it very, very easy. Then there's all that triumph of the human spirit stuff that comes in many of those stories, the people who risked everything to help others and those who made a desperate stand against tyranny, in spite of hopeless odds.

Anyway, after doing the current round of research, I sense a chick lit binge coming on so I don't get too moody.

And it looks like my summer survival strategy will be to focus on work. I want to have the first draft of this book done this summer so I can enjoy the fall without being locked inside with a manuscript.

Movie Monday: Not as Advertised

Summer is now upon us, with our first 100-degree day yesterday. This should not be a surprise, since I have a calendar and have lived in Texas a long time. But I was still wrapping my mind around spring, so I can't believe it's summer already. I feel like marking off the days until fall like a prisoner marking off the days of his sentence. If I tell myself it's just July and August I have to get through (only one week of June left, so that hardly counts) and then things will get better, it's not quite as discouraging. Yeah, I know, we have "summer" weather through September, but it's usually not in the 100-degree range then. Because it was hot and I was tired, it was a big movie and TV weekend, so a few reviews!

First, I caught up with the first and second episodes of Bunheads, from ABC Family. A "bunhead" is a ballet dancer, because of the ubiquitous mandatory hairstyle (though I must say that when I've heard the term used by dancers, it's not in the sense of "this is what we call ourselves." It's the way they describe the subset of dancers who have nothing in their lives or in their heads but dance). This series is about a ballerina turned Broadway dancer turned Vegas showgirl who realizes she may never be able to get back to legitimate dance, and in a moment of desperation, she impulsively agrees to marry the ardent admirer who's been plying her with flowers and gifts for a year. He's kind to her in a way no one else has been lately, and the way he describes his home in a small town on the California coast makes it sound idyllic. Except he neglected to mention that he shares that home with his mother, a kooky and strong-willed former ballerina who now runs the town's dancing school and who is not at all happy about her precious boy bringing home this floozy. At first, I thought this was going to be like something out of a Susan Elizabeth Phillips novel. She writes romances that usually have the heroine being utterly down and out, so she does something impulsively out of desperation that gets her into what at first seems like a worse situation, though if she can manage it right and survive it may be the best thing that happens to her. But then there are very strong indications (that constitute a major spoiler) that the show is going to be more about the relationship between the wife and mother than about the wife and her husband coming to terms with what they've done. Meanwhile, there are the teenage aspiring ballerinas at the dancing school who have their own stories. It's by the creator of Gilmore Girls, so there's lots of snappy banter and quirky characters. The first two episodes made me bawl in a good way, so I'll probably end up watching the series, but I'll have to wait for the right mood to watch it (like I can only read a Susan Elizabeth Phillips book when I'm in a certain mood).

Then I had a couple of HBO movies that fell into the category of "should have/could have been better, and I want to see the movie that was in my head." There was The Eagle, which was about a Roman soldier whose father led the Ninth Legion that was lost in northern Britain. Now, he wants to restore his family's honor by traveling with the aid of his British slave north of Hadrian's Wall to recover the eagle standard that was lost with the legion. I think this movie thought it was a buddy road trip movie built around the growing friendship and trust between the Roman and his slave. It even had a few big turning points based on the question of whether or not they really trusted each other and ended with an eighties buddy cop show freeze-frame. And I really wanted to get that out of this movie because that was the interesting part. But it was all sadly underwritten, so when we weren't sure if the slave really was turning on the Roman when he got a chance or if that was a plan to help keep the Roman alive, I didn't feel any pangs of loss about how their friendship might not have been real. I didn't feel any sense of betrayal. I just thought the slave had made a good decision, and even if he was selling out his master, then good for him. In fact, we never really saw any reason for the slave to have any loyalty to the Roman. Yeah, the Roman had spared his life in the arena when he was forced to fight a gladiator, but in my view, that's not a life debt. That's just not being a total jerk. After all, the Romans had already killed this guy's whole family, enslaved him and threw him in an arena with a heavily armored gladiator twice his size. Saying, "Hey, let's not kill him because he shows great courage," is only just beginning to atone for what's been done to him. Not to mention, the slave saves his master's life pretty quickly on the journey. Given all that happened to him, I needed a lot more reasons why this guy didn't slit his master's throat and run for it at the first opportunity. A lot of that probably comes down to the fact that Channing Tatum played the Roman, and my, but is he a chunk of wood -- and not even all that attractive a chunk of wood, since he's so dull. His reaction to everything seemed to be "huh." His slave tells him the terrible story of what the Romans did to his family, and his response is essentially "huh." His slave seems to betray him by telling the Celtic tribes north of the wall that he's actually the slave, and instead of getting angry betrayal or even "so, this is what it's like to be a slave, it kind of sucks, so I can't blame him for screwing me over," we mostly get "huh." It also didn't help that Jamie Bell played the slave, and he had an excess of charisma and life that made his co-star look even worse. I must say, he's grown up nice since his Billy Elliot days, and I don't know if he's still dancing, but he still has the dancer's body. And there's something about his face that made me think we have the perfect casting if they ever need someone to play Arthur Darvill's (Rory on Doctor Who) younger brother, although he'd look like a midget in comparison.

However, a good script and good acting couldn't have saved this movie from one fatal flaw: it was essentially Saving Private Ryan, but over an object instead of a man. In Saving Private Ryan, the issue of whether this one man was worth the sacrifices it took to find him was a key ethical dilemma of the story, and it ended up haunting him throughout his life, as he always wondered if what he did with his life was worth the sacrifices that had been made for him. Here, they're putting everything on the line to retrieve a metal bird on a stick, and they even end up bringing in the surviving members of the lost legion who have gone on to build lives in that area, and a lot of them and a lot of Celts die in the battle, and no one ever raises even the tiniest bit of doubt as to whether it's all worth it. The hero never has any self-awareness of the futility of what he's doing, never questions it, never realizes that the way to restore honor to his family is by doing something honorable, not by getting a lot of people killed to steal back an object. He just brings back the eagle and everyone says "You win! Now take command of a legion!" and then buddy cop freeze frame and that's that. That alone put this in Saturday-night SyFy movie territory. They'd have just had to make the tribes north of the wall into zombies, vampires or warlocks. The movie is based on a novel, and now I want to read the novel to see if it handles some of these things better. As it is, I'm already mentally rewriting it to involve more of a renegotiation of the relationship between master and slave once they're in the slave's territory and the master suddenly realizes that the basis of their relationship has become meaningless. Hmm, sounds like a good core of a story idea to put in a different plot. Must add to literary bucket list.

Then on Sunday I went for something completely different. I was in a chick flick mood, so I watched One Day. The description made it sound like a kind of blend between When Harry Met Sally and Four Weddings and a Funeral: two people meet at college graduation, and then we visit them on that date for the next twenty years and get glimpses of how their lives and relationship have developed. So, like When Harry Met Sally, they meet at graduation, but it takes years for them to get their act together and really find each other, and like in Four Weddings and a Funeral, we only see them at particular times. However, this is so very not that kind of movie. For one thing, it's not really a romance, at least not in genre fiction terms. The book it was based on might have been eligible for "novel with strong romantic elements" for the Romance Writers of America Rita award, but I suspect that most of the romance novelist judges would have hurled it across the room with great force because it's a love story written by a man, which generally means they get together for a while and then something parts them -- it was good while it lasted, but it can't be forever (exhibit A: Nicholas Sparks). That attitude in general pisses me off because romances tend to get dismissed entirely by the literary establishment and even the pseudo literary book clubs, while if someone dies or the couple is forced to part, then it's considered more real and valid. I'm not a huge fan of romance the way it's published today, but that's more to do with the fact that lust has replaced the romance part of it, not because of the happy endings. What's so wrong with a happy ending? I suppose even hinting this way might count as a spoiler, but it's more of a warning of what not to expect. I don't know if this was meant to be a comedy. There's a lot of supposedly witty banter and some quirky characters, but the only time I laughed out loud was at the most tragic thing that happened. I was doing commentary by this point, and I said to myself, "Okay, now [this thing] will happen." I meant it snarkily, like it would be the most cliched thing ever to happen. And then it did, and I couldn't help but laugh.

So, basically, this is the story of two unlikeable people who ignore the obvious and mess up their lives and a lot of other people's lives along the way, while much of the major stuff happens off-screen because of that device of only seeing them on that one day every year. We don't see them become friends, so we never know why they're friends, since all they do is criticize each other and they seem to have nothing in common. We also don't see why they decide they can't be anything but friends and why they delay so long in considering that, which is even more maddening when the end of the movie loops back around to the day after the day they met and we see the immediate aftermath of that first day. In short, a lot of stuff happens because it's in the script, not because there's any reason these characters would do these things. Plus, this movie tries to convince us that Anne Hathaway is a frumpy sad-sack by putting a pair of glasses on her and making her hair frizzy.

And now I want to see a really good chick flick -- something with witty dialogue, a love story that ends well between people I want to see get together, and with some fun supporting characters, something that makes me both laugh and cry. Definitely not a Bridesmaids-esque "women can be nasty, too" story or the common these days "uptight shrew forces overgrown manchild to grow up" story. I checked IMDB for the coming year, and there's nothing on the radar.

But in the meantime, I will get through the summer by being crazy busy with work. On to the final proofread of book 5!