Here’s a quick update of what I have been doing this weekend in the order of occurrence.
1. Yelled at a DVD
I watched the movie Adam Friday night. It was a sort of Asperger love story. In general it was a good movie. My yelling didn’t come until the very end.
Rose Byrne plays Beth the love interest of Aspergian title character played by Hugh Dancy. Beth is a teacher who dreams of being a published children’s book author. So far so good. At one point she tells Adam about her hope of someday winning a Newbery award. I was impressed that the moviemakers at least had some familiarity with children’s publishing.
That all fell apart at the end when we finally got to see the book that Beth had been working on in published form. The problem? It was a picture book, and as anyone familiar with children’s books and their awards knows, picture books win Caldecott awards not Newbery awards, thus my yelling.
2. Met author Josh Berk
Debut author Josh Berk was in town at the Clinton Book Shop signing copies of his novel, The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin. Josh let me in on a little secret, his dad has proved to be a very helpful amateur publicist. I had gone down to the store with my parents, and on the walk down my father was talking about his plan to get everyone he knows to buy 10 copies of my book when it comes out. So, my dad and Josh’s dad had the chance to talk some shop, and hopefully Dad picked up a few pointers.
3. Made some website updates
It started out as just a few quick updates on my website. I wanted to add a little to my about me page and clean up my contact page because the formatting was weird on there. I succeeded in making the formatting worse, fought with it for at least an hour, and then ended up redoing the entire contact page with vaguely appropriate photos. Since this all took far longer than I anticipated that cleaning project I began this morning will have to wait for a rainy day. Well, another rainy day.
I saw the new Alice in Wonderland movie last night, and loved it. I have been obsessed with the Alice books for some time, but always disappointed by every film adaptation ever attempted. (In fact the closest anyone has come to capturing the magic of Alice on film may be that episode of The Muppet Show with Brooke Shields as Alice.)
Like that episode of The Muppet Show, but in a completely different way, this new version of Alice deviates quite a bit from the original stories, but does so in a novel way, imagining an older Alice who is on the verge of an unwanted marriage and escapes into the magical Wonderland/Underland.
I love the new premise. In typical Wizard of Oz fashion, the characters in Underland mirror the people she knows in her real life, but what I really liked is that these characters are played by completely different actors and actresses. It made Underland that much more magical of a place.
Of course, the movie was as beautiful and haunting as only a Tim Burton film can be. Costumes were fantastic. The merging of real actors and animation seemed seemless. The set brought to life the magic and wonder of the fantasy world. That combined with a decent plot, made for a very enjoyable film.
Though I could do without the 3-D stuff (much of it just appears sort of blurry to my messed up eyes) I don’t think it really detracted from what is an excellent movie that managed to capture all the things I love about the Alice books in brilliant cinematic way.
I am so excited about the new Alice in Wonderland movie coming out. I’ve loved the Alice books for a long time, have a healthy collection of Alice in Wonderland crap collectibles, and have always been disappointed that all the movie versions of the book pretty much sucked, but with Tim Burton at the helm and the premise being a return to Wonderland by a 19 year-old Alice, I have a feeling that this new movie is going to finally succeed in turning a couple of great books into a great movie.
Dad kindly gave me this article about the film from USA Today, because he knew about my Alice obsession. I already wanted to see the movie based on all the trailers I had seen and buzz I had heard, and well because I think Tim Burton is a genius, but the article only drove home the fact that I must see this movie.
It also made me realize that I would love to see a movie of Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey directed by Tim Burton. Yes, I know I just finished the book last week, and I know that probably nothing will happen cinematically until the other two books in the trilogy are out, but it would make for an awesome film, especially by someone with Tim Burton’s visual imagination.
So what book would you love to see turned into a movie? Who should direct it? Who would star in it?
They can also make hilarious videos and post them on YouTube, as the below spoof commercial proves. I found this by way of blogger Megan Rebekah. The star and creator of the spoof commercial is Lara Zielin author of Donut Days. And authors if you are looking for a way to promote books, hilarious YouTube videos never hurt. I am now thinking I need to get my hands on a copy of Donut Days.
I’ve always been a big supporter of the little guy, whether it’s a book from a small press or better yet a book from a small press bought at an independent book store. I really don’t think the best movies out there are the ones that cost the most to make and get the big advertising campaigns. Big is not always better.
Proof of that is an independent movie called Phasma Ex Machina. Chances are this movie won’t be coming to your local cineplex, which is too bad because it looks awesome. I discovered the trailer on a screenwriting blog I follow. You can visit their website to learn more about the film and the folks behind it, or just watch this trailer. Doesn’t this movie look creepy good?
Thanks to Scott Myers’ Go Into The Story blog I learned about Emily Hagins, who at the age of 12 decided to make a feature-length zombie movie. The video above is actually a trailer for a documentary that was made of Emily and her movie making efforts.
As it happens I too made some movies in my youth, but in terms of professionalism, Emily has me beat by a mile. With the help of my sister and, if they happened to be in town, my cousins, I made short little mostly plotless movies with some shaky camera work thanks to our clunky old camcorder.
My cousin jokes that she can’t believe our classic Adventure in the Wilderness which begins with an unscripted as the “credits are rolling” (technically the credits were written in chalk on our driveway) fight between my cousins that involves spitting never won an Oscar. It is one wild ride of a movie, but that’s mostly because we filmed it outside and whoever happened to be holding the camera (we took turns so we could all be in the movie) had to do a lot of running around, and our yard was amazingly bumpy. Dramamine is advised before a screening of Adventure in the Wilderness.
For her picture Emily actually hired actors (who for the most part weren’t even related to her) and she actually bought props instead of using sticks that she found in her front yard. I think she even had a script, another thing that was completely lacking from my early cinematic efforts. Still, in our defense our films were made in an era before Craigslist and YouTube. Surely, if I had grown up in another era someone would be making a documentary about Adventure in the Wilderness . . . or not.
Leo Tolstoy said that, “Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Well, actually he said it in Russian, but not speaking Russian or having a keyboard with the Cyrillic alphabet, this is the best I can do. On a similar note, my mother has a wooden sign that hangs on the side of the refrigerator that reads, “As far as anybody knows, we are a normal family.”
Of course, there’s no such thing as a normal family, as anyone who has relatives should be well aware of, and that’s what makes stories about dysfunctional families so appealing. I just read the memoir Sweet and Low: A Family Storyby Rich Cohen which presents a history of his own not-so-normal family, who among other things are the folks who invented and made a fortune off of Sweet’N Low.
It’s a testament to Cohen’s writing and perhaps my own quirkiness that I found the history of artificial sweeteners so fascinating, but of course the real story here is the wackiness of this family and the business that they run. I loved the scene early in the book when the author’s older brother learned at an early age that the dice (or in this case the little scraps of paper) were stacked against him, and he was not the favorite grandchild.
Reading about the Eisenstadt clan reminded me very much of another family with a business of their own. I am talking about The Bluths, of course, subject of the now defunct television series Arrested Development. Not being much of a television watcher, I missed the series when it originally aired, but thanks to the miracle of modern technology, I have been working my way through the series on Hulu.com. The similarities are striking. There’s the FBI raid, the shady attorney and the cold-hearted matriarch. Arrested Development lacks an eccentric aunt living in a super-chilled room, but I think Buster makes a pretty good stand-in for Aunt Gladys.
Apparently, when short on inspiration, one need only turn to one’s own family for endlessly entertaining material. To avoid being disinherited as Cohen’s branch of the family was, you might want to change the names and some of the distinguishing characteristics of your family members. Cohen offers some tips for writing family memoirs in this Slate article.
I watched the movie Be Kind Rewind last night. This is a light-hearted tale about a couple of guys who set out to save a video store after accidentally erasing all the tapes, by recreating the movies with an old camcorder and some very low-budget special effects. Here’s the trailer for the movie:
Be Kind Rewind introduced the term Sweded to the world, and the concept has become something of a You Tube phenomenon. I was actually introduced to the term reading the completely awesome blog Go Into The Story, which I recommend to anyone interested in writing or movies, and especially to those interested in both. Sweded refers to the idea of making amateur versions of feature films.
Watching Be Kind Rewind and the Sweded movies they created, I was reminded of my own early filmmaking efforts. As children, my sister and I had access to a camcorder and an excessive amount of free time. We did not necessarily make Sweded movies so much as we made our own original sequels or short films styled after popular cinema. Our first movie was something we called Karate Kid Part 57 and showed a gray-bearded (the beard in this case was an old Ginny Doll “mink” stole) who puts aside his old man’s cane to engage in one last match. Like Jerry and Mike in the movie we began with only two actors and no extra camera person. The result was a bizarre and hilarious film that never failed to crack us up no matter how many times we watched it.
Some day I will figure out a way to convert those old video tapes to digital files and upload them to You Tube, but until then I will just share with you this great example of a Sweded film:
It started out as just a few quick updates on my website. I wanted to add a little to my about me page and clean up my contact page because the formatting was weird on there. I succeeded in making the formatting worse, fought with it for at least an hour, and then ended up redoing the entire contact page with vaguely appropriate photos. Since this all took far longer than I anticipated that cleaning project I began this morning will have to wait for a rainy day. Well, another rainy day.
What I'm Doing, What I'm Watching | Alissa | 
March 28, 2010 9:08 pm | 
Comments (4) 
Leo Tolstoy said that, “Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Well, actually he said it in Russian, but not speaking Russian or having a keyboard with the Cyrillic alphabet, this is the best I can do. On a similar note, my mother has a wooden sign that hangs on the side of the refrigerator that reads, “As far as anybody knows, we are a normal family.”
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