Under the Drill

Two holes in my teeth. No kidding. I knew I was in trouble when my nicotine gum started to crunch. Then, 2 weeks later, a filling fell out right in the middle of a cinnamon bagel.

My dentist loves me. Got an appointment this morning.

CONTAGION

This movie should be listed under When Multiple Points of View Don't Work:

CONTAGION



I give it a C+. There was one annoying character, a woman on the Let's Figure Out What To Do About This Disease committee (a CDC employee?) who was SUCH a PIA and so obnoxious that I prayed throughout the whole movie that she'd catch the PigBat disease. If I'd been allowed to her see convulsing and frothing at the mouth, I'd have happily elevated this movie to a B.

Like THE DEBT, this was another plot-driven film with little or no attention given to character development. You've probably deduced by now that I don't care for plot-driven movies. But the real reason it gets a C+ is because, after a strong beginning, the movie lagged. More than once I'd find myself thinking I hope something happens pretty soon. Then something would happen. Yay. Then it would lag again. If you're going to rely on PLOT, then by all means make the PLOT holds people's attention. The techno-babble bored me, I'm a nurse, for pete's sake.

I can't complain (for once) about the medical scenes. I thought, unlike 99.9% of others, these were very well done, although doctors don't generally stand in the middle of the hall and tell someone their loved ones have died. I let that one slide.

(By the way, did anyone who didn't know Matt Damon was in this film actually recognize Matt Damon? I didn't. He looks heavier in the movie, and--because he had nothing to smile about--his teeth didn't give him away. When I got home my husband was watching THE BOURNE IDENTITY and I thought, oh yeah--that's Matt Damon. To me, it's actually a plus when I don't recognize the actors).

So you've got a bunch of characters running around, either coming down with the disease or trying to stop the disease, and not nearly enough time spent on each one. And although this might sounds mean and shallow, all those incredibly close close-ups of Laurence Fishburn's complexion were extremely distracting. Hello! Makeup department? Can you do nothing for this man?

Finally, I was extremely ticked off because they never showed what happened to Marion Cotillard's character at the end. The best character? Jude Law, a rogue blogger with hideous (and so obviously prosthetic) teeth. He was awesome!

P.S. Best line in the movie: "Blogging is graffiti with punctuation." :)

Dear Live Journal

WHY don't my links work anymore?

Between this and all all your

I see why people are giving up and moving to Wordpress.

I pay you twenty bucks a year and I'm not sure why.

Sincerely,

A dissatisfied customer

A Wednesday Ramble...

Now that my Borders cafe is gone, I've been spending time at Panera's trying to get some writing done. The problem with Panera's is, they...

Serve. Food.

Dammit.

I'm chewing nicorette gum like crazy which doesn't really help my TMJ, but writing without cigarettes is like dancing without feet. At least I don't have bad breath.

I'm working on a proposal for a sequel to THE UNQUIET. It's iffy, but I figured I'd give it a shot. My self-imposed deadline personal writing goal is to have this wrapped up by the end up the month. Then I can look forward to...

TA-DAH!

NATIONAL NOVEL WRITING MONTH!

Both SAY THE WORD and THE UNQUIET started out as NaNo novels. I'm going to try for a third. I don't know if it'll be this one, or something else. Anyone else doing NaNo? Huh? Pretty please?

Also, I'm still on my movie kick. Beth just found two movies we've been eager to see, and ordered them online. Probably no one has heard of them but us:

SUNDAYS AND CYBELE:



and

BONJOUR TRISTESSE:



Probably next weekend we'll see CONTAGION and then maybe take a break for a bit before all this buttered popcorn gives us twin attacks. :)

Movie Blather

Yesterday I was going to post my own memory of 9/11/01. But it so paled in comparison to those who actually experienced it, I decided to watch the memorial instead.


Then, to cheer up a bit, I went to the movies (AGAIN) and saw THE DEBT.







I mean, it's Helen Mirren, right?


Please. I gave it a B-minus because it kept my interest, i.e. I didn't snore through half the film. But about 2/3 of the way through I thought, Isn't this about over yet? That's never a good sign. Not with a movie. Not with a book.



I will try to avoid spoliers, but what is a spoiler to you might not be a spoiler to me, lol.


My # 1 problem was that there was no character development. The movie was driven by the plot and nothing else. Who were these three people who wanted to capture the Nazi doctor? We knew they were Jewish, that they lost family in the Holocaust.


But WHO. WERE. THEY? I had no fricking idea, which made it really, really hard to care what happened to them.


# 2: Who was this Nazi doctor? OK, anyone can guess that he was based on Josef Mengele. Near the beginning, one character skimmed through a few photos of children's corpses, presumably victims of the doctor's vicious experiments. We get no further look into what this doctor actually did, or who HE was. I'm not saying we needed another half-hour of flashbacks detailing this man's crimes. But, for me, a couple of photos didn't do it. He was OBVIOUSLY evil, and that certainly came through, so maybe the writers didn't feel it necessary to add anything else. It's just that I felt no connection to these photos; they seemed almost incidental. Frankly, given the lack of anything else to make me hate this doctor--aside from my knowledge of history and the doctor's repellent personality--the pics themselves could've been left out.


# 3: I am SO SURE anyone would believe a demented old man in a mental hospital when he says he is the Butcher of Buchenwald--let alone a journalist who, like everyone else IN THE WHOLE FREAKING WORLD, believes the doctor was killed back in 1965.


# 4: The older versions of the male characters looked nothing like the younger versions. Worse, the two guys kind of looked alike to me. Fire the casting director.


# 5: The chick (in the apartment) had a GUN. Why didn't she keep it handy? Stupid, and not very believable considering who she was, what she was trying to accomplish, and who her prisoner was. She's no Clarice Starling, that's for sure.


# 5: I found last 15 minutes of the film to be totally unbelievable.



Still, I watched it, was mostly not bored, and if you like thriller/espionage/post-Holocaust films with Helen Mirren and a couple of plot holes, go see it. :)

THE UNQUIET Revealed

Yes, I know it's a Saturday and hardly anyone will see this...but here is the final cover for THE UNQUIET.






Thank you, thank you to Melissa Marr and Lisa McMann for the following blurbs:

“Filled with romance, madness, and dangerous ghosts, Garsee’s THE UNQUIET is a haunting read you shouldn’t miss.” Melissa Marr, New York Times bestselling author of WICKED LOVELY.

"THE UNQUIET is a swirling, marvelous journey into madness...or out of it. You decide." Lisa McMann, New York Times bestselling author of the WAKE trilogy and CRYER'S CROSS.



:) :) :)

We Are Never Alone

Happy Book Birthday to everyone who helped make DEAR BULLY: 70 AUTHORS TELL THEIR STORIES a reality. A special thanks to Megan Kelley Hall and Carrie Jones for all their hard work. YOU GUYS ROCK! Words can't describe how proud I am to be a part of this project.

After I sat down and read it from beginning to end, I realized something: I could identify with almost every single story.

Bullied and ostracized? Of course. I was there. But that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Teased because I was new to a school? Been there. Because I was fat? Been there. Because I was "different"? Been there.

Riddled with guilt because I watched someone else be bullied and didn't speak up out of fear of becoming the next target? Been there.

Trying to stand up for myself, only to have my complaints either ignored, minimized, or ridiculed by a teacher? Yes, it happened.

Saying something mean to someone else for no other reason except that person was there, and vulnerable, and an easy target? Yes, been there, too. And no, I'm not proud of it. It bothered me for years and I've never forgiven myself. If I had a way to contact that person and apologize, I'd do it in a heartbeat. In fact I often wondered if the reason I was later bullied myself was nothing but simple karmic payback.

Having my heart broken when I realized my own child was also a victim of bullying? Torn between whether or not to step in, or allow him/her to work it out by themselves out of fear that the bullying will only get worse...and worse...?

Yes. I've been there. And that's a terrible dilemma to be in.

There is a story for everyone, because bullying happens everywhere, to everyone, in many different ways. It's time for all of us--without exception--to take a stand and say NO MORE.

We are not alone. We are not alone.

Each and every story touched my heart. Thank you, all of you, from the very bottom of that heart.

Please Help A Library in Desperate Need

A casualty of the floods: Kate Messner's Blog: A Library in Need.

Time A-wastin'

Thanks for your supportive comments below. I was in a slump when I wrote it. I actually still in that same slump, but dealing a bit better. I'm sure I do have some kind of attention deficit disorder, totally undiagnosed because I've been smoking all this years. It's frustrating as hell, but it won't get the best of me. So. What have I been doing while I've NOT been writing? Well, aside from work, I did see three movies in the past couple weeks:

THE HELP, based on Kathryn's Stockett's novel.

If you haven't seen the movie, see it. If you haven't read the book, read it!

Then there's FRIGHT NIGHT:



Please. $24 for two tickets because it's a 3-D movie? Me: "Goody, goody. What, we're paying for the glasses?" Beth: "You gave to give the glasses back." Me: "Bull****. I'm keeping 'em." I didn't. The thing about 3-D is, it's a whole lot of fun when you're, um, ten years old. This was an R-rated movie. Adults generally don't care one way or another if something's 3-D. We also don't think it's cool to sit there for 2 hours with those funny-colored glasses crammed down over our own glasses. If I'd known about the jacked-up price in advance, I'd have skipped the whole thing. It wasn't that great, and the CGI effects were nothing compared to the effects in the original.

Next: DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK:



Another CGI bomb. Remember the original with Kim Darby? OMG, that one scared the crap out of me. I still can't sleep with my arms or feet hanging off the bed. This version had one good scare. The rest involved little CGI creatures running around and causing great havoc for one of the stupidest families in cinematic history.

REMAKES SUCK. Being a horror movie buff, though, I couldn't resist.

Now I'm waiting impatiently for PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3.