Category: reviews

Current TV

Laura Highcove

So I’ve been trying to figure out what I can talk about on my blog besides my writing. My interests outside of writing include reading, movies, tv shows (including anime), and video games. All which are different mediums for telling stories and I have started watching them with an eye toward story as well as for entertainment value.
Our current tv watch list is:
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Arrow
Blindspot
Castle
Gotham
The Muppets
The Flash
Sleepy Hollow

We’re enjoying all of these shows (obviously, or else we wouldn’t watch them) but right now, top of the list are The Muppets, Blindspot, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D..

I’ve always been a Muppets fan, and this show reminds me why. The dialogue is snappy, there are great drive by jokes, and it’s just entertaining to watch. I’ve never been able to write humor as well as I would like, but I figure maybe if I keep watching funny things I’ll gain some by osmosis.

Now when my husband and I first saw ads for Blindspot, we figured we’d give it a shot and see if they were obvious about having set tattoos that will be revealed as the show goes on, or if they just bring up tattoos when they need them. Luckily they did the former and it is wonderful. The tattoos have legitimate reasons for taking a certain amount of time to decipher, and the secrets they reveal are not time sensitive. (Besides the first one, which was probably intentional.)

They also kept us guessing with some not to obvious twists. Especially with the three people they just killed off, two of which were really surprising.

Also on that list is Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, which is just on another level of storytelling altogether, and that is because of Joss Whedon. I love watching Joss’ stuff, and I admire him, but I’m not sure I could ever be as cruel to my characters as he is to his. Whenever there is a particularly nasty twist, my husband and I always tell the characters, “No, you don’t get to be happy because you’re written by Joss Whedon.”

I used to watch TV just for entertainment, but since I’ve gotten more serious about my writing, I am much more mindful about pacing and how the shows are written, to the point where I can see some twists coming. (If I see them all, then the show is probably not that well written.) This is helpful to my writing because the more of it I see, the better I can apply those same pieces to my own writing. It also allows me to enjoy watching TV and get something useful out of it.

James Bond’s Spectre

Laura Highcove

So last night my husband and I went to see Spectre. He has wanted to see all the Daniel Craig James Bond movies when they came out, but we never managed to. When I saw Spectre was coming out, I made a point of having a marathon of Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, and Skyfall so that we could see Spectre.

Warning: Spoilers

The opening sequence at the Day of the Dead festival in Mexico City was visually stunning. With the added effect of it being one long shot, it was rather impressive. I also liked the worlds slowest parkour as James walked down and across the rooftops for his assassination.

That is about where my enjoyment of the movie stopped. The chase through the crowd and the helicopter fight were too close and jumbled to be very exciting, and I wasn’t even able to suspend my disbelief that helicopters CAN’T turn over, (much less then come back under control) in order to enjoy the fight.

Then is James Bond getting in trouble for being off doing his own thing. (Shock.) He gets repercussions, and then they mean diddly squat. Not only that, but he steals a car he’s not supposed to have, somehow gets it to Rome (18 hour drive btw, in a rather unique looking car) so he can listen to people talk, have some shadowy guy realize James is there, and have an entirely lackluster car chase through the streets that I’m told was supposed to build tension but during which I simply got sick of him glancing in his rear-view mirror to see his pursuer in exactly the same spot as before. And then he dumped that beautiful car in the river.

Off he goes to get info out of a dying guy he somehow magically knows the location of so he can go find his Bond Girl. Ms. Assassin from Mission Impossible 4. Her dead-fish eyes really worked well for that role, but in this role I felt her just dis-likable.

Then sitting around and waiting in the hotel room before heading off to the middle of nowhere, punctuated by a fight with the ‘heavy’ on the train which wasn’t completely horrible, (He even hit the girl and she got back up and shot him.) before sitting around and waiting until a car came to pick them up. I guess we get a little tension because this guy knows all about them. He shows off his power a bit. Tortures James with a brain drill that is supposed to disable him and does absolutely nothing, nor does the explosion he uses to escape, since he then comes out of that building and drops the bad guys with a shot each.

All while Moriarty …pardon me, ‘C’ is running around being obviously evil while our secondary characters scramble to do something about it.

The walk through the old MI6 building was not bad.

I was impressed that James didn’t shoot the bad guy, and that they had foreshadowed that a bit. (Though this comes right after I saw Jim Gordan decide not to kill a bad guy in Gotham, who then kills a police officer on the way to lockup.) However, I was a little surprised that apparently James actually loved this Bond Girl (like run off together, love) because the actors had no chemistry.

I don’t think I’ve ever spent an entire movie thinking: “So it has to pick up soon since people have said it’s so good.”

So in conclusion, the best part about Spectre is that I saw Skyfall and Q was cute.

Author Challenge

Laura Highcove

So a few weeks ago my DIYMFA mentor suggested I do an author challenge. In it, I picked an author in my genre (fantasy) and read three of their books. One of their earliest, one of their most recent books, and one that is right in between. This process is to help me see how an author has evolved as a writer from the first book they published, forward by giving a wide sample.

At first I was going to choose Brandon Sanderson (because Brandon Sanderson…), but then I decided I would choose my first favorite fantasy author, Mercedes Lackey. I read her gryffin series (The Black Gryphon, The White Gryphon, The Silver Gryphon) what feels like a million years ago. I didn’t read any of her more famous books about the Companions until much later. I am also such a fan of her Joust books and the 500 Kingdoms. I just love most everything this woman writes (not that I’ve read it all, she has written a lot).

So I went and found a list of her books. Her first book was Arrows of the Queen which was published in 1987. I chose that one. Right in the middle were two books that I already owned. I decided to choose the one I had enjoyed reading more, called Brightly Burning. Her most recent book is part of the Elemental Masters series. I have not read any of that series, but I chose it anyway. It seems pretty stand alone. It is called Steadfast.
So I started off with Arrows of the Queen. I have to say that the plot for this book was rather rough. The story jumped around and didn’t really focus well and when we got to the big bad conflict at the end I was left a little lost. However, I could see the care and detail she put into her characters and her world. Foreshadowing for books she wouldn’t write for years were all in this first book, and the characters were alive and real and I cared about them.

Since it was my second time reading Brightly Burning, I was able to look into it with a bit more detail. What really got to me is I got about a quarter way into the book before the actual plot started. I just felt that there didn’t need to be quite so much back-story. Once the ‘actual’ story started, the story and plot worked well. Again, the characters and world are wonderful.

I am about halfway through Steadfast and so far it is proceeding in standard Mercedes Lackey fare, though I feel like the ending is pretty well-dictated at this point and I’m not anticipating a twist. This doesn’t mean I’m not enjoying it.

When I read and immerse myself in a book, unless there’s a major issue, I just read it and enjoy it. Now that I’ve learned to read more like a writer I can see that authors are not gods. They are good at certain things and not as good at others.

The book can be entirely enjoyable without being perfect. That was something I knew logically, but it’s different having read the books and seen the imperfections.

It gives me more confidence in my own writing not needing to be perfect. Now I still have to figure out what my strengths in writing are, but baby steps.

Writing Process

Laura Highcove

I have been writing for a long time. When I was young, I would pound out stories that only amounted to a couple hundred words each. I evolved and the stories got longer. Then I began to come up with more ideas and so I had dozens of stories floating around.

My process worked thus:

1) Work on a story from the beginning. If it was already partially written, I would edit and tighten and add new ideas. If it was brand new I would jump in and start writing without any more planning than maybe my main character’s name.

2) Get a new idea. This could either apply to the story I was currently working on, or any of the others. In either case the result would be going back to step one.

My process did not contain a lot of focus. I would jump among my projects all the time. The only way I would make any headway is when I stayed interested in a project long enough (and didn’t have any shiny new ideas) to get to the end. This did not happen very often.

However, over the years, due to sheer number of hours, the cream steadily rose. The stories for which I had ideas continued to get better and develop. The stories that weren’t as great fell by the wayside.

Then three years ago, I had an experience that started me down the path to serious self reflection. One of the many things that came out of that was a desire to gain mastery of writing.

I picked one of my stories, Shifting Winds, and I worked on it exclusively. I read articles, I read books, I struggled with my free time and my other obligations and I eventually found my DIYMFA mentor.

I struggled a lot with my process. October and November of last year I started over with a brand new story, The Storyteller, which I worked on ‘revising’ from January to June of this year. Through mostly pure grit, I kept with it through figuring out that I didn’t really have a rough draft, to realizing how underdeveloped the world and the characters were and trying to figure out how I was going to get this story from where it was to publishable.

I am still adapting my writing process. When I started The Storyteller, my plan was to force myself to focus on the story and just write through to the end. Well over the period of six months I came to realize that that process didn’t work for me. Since I develop my story as I write, writing straight through to the end just gives me a lot of scattered thoughts and rewritten scenes.

So I had to stop over this month of downtime as I let The Storyteller sit, and think about how I could improve my process. What worked for me in the past was writing and then going back and cleaning up, and then writing a bit more, then going back and cleaning it up, etc. What didn’t work about that back in the day was my jumping around among stories, but I don’t have that problem anymore now that I decided to be more focused.

I’m still working on accepting the fact that I am just going to be slower in turning out books than other writers. I am annoyed by this fact. That’s okay. I can be annoyed. I just have to keep writing, which thankfully has become a habit at this point.

Gotham

Laura Highcove

So at this point I’ve seen a decent number of episodes of Gotham (It’s seven). Gotham is, in case you didn’t know, the city where Batman does his Batman thing. In this TV series, which airs on Fox at Mondays at 8, is actually focusing on James Gordon just after Bruce Wayne’s parents are murdered, (spoilers!) so at least a decade or two before Bruce goes vigilante. The series follows Jim around as one of the only good cops in corrupt Gotham.

So far we’ve had a lot of ‘monster of the week’ episodes, with the mob boss/penguin storyline weaving its way through the background. At first the overacting nearly killed me. Perhaps it’s because Batman is such a well-known franchise that everyone wanted it to do well so bad that they tried too hard. I don’t know. It was just painful. Thankfully it has gotten better (depending on the character …Fish is still pretty bad.). I also thought the pacing of this show seemed off, but the most recent episode really pulled things together beautifully. That’s part of why I decided to write this review now. The show has proven itself to me to be smart and well written enough to stick with at least until the end of the season.

Now for the characters:

Jim is likable, and I think he is, for the most part, realistically written. You just feel bad for him because he wants to do good and is so far underwater. Every little win for him then feels that much bigger because of the odds.

His partner Harvey is the jaded cop who was once like Jim. His actor is one of the only ones I think has acted well from the beginning. I feel like he is a character, not an actor playing a character.

They also show off Bruce Wayne as a child. He annoyed me at first, but now that he’s further past his parent’s murder, he’s started showing the characteristics of the Bruce Wayne we know and love as Batman. He is, though, still just a child who lost his parents recently and they don’t forget that. I’m warming up to Alfred. He is another of the actors doing a good job; I just didn’t necessarily like the character to begin.

I am disgusted with Barbara. I’m not sure if it’s that the actress has no charisma with the other characters, if the character was written poorly, or it’s a combination of both. I wince whenever she’s on screen and am sort of upset that I know she’s the one that ends up with Jim, so there won’t be any losing her … and all of the scenes that she had with the female cop, Montoya, feel like they were just put in there to have a yaylesbiancouple to drum up some funsexualtension or something. It falls flat; the actresses have no chemistry with each other at all. Just. Yuck.

However, I feel like the Penguin is stealing the show. It is a hard feat to pull off a character being so utterly evil and yet entirely endearing at the same time. He’s the bad guy, he will stay a bad guy, and yet I find myself rooting for him. Perhaps I will change my tune a bit if?/when! he betrays Jim.

They’ve also thrown Selina Kyle in (not really doing much yet, but she saw the Waynes’ killer apparently, so I’m sure it will come up). Poison Ivy as a child was in like one episode. Edward Nygma is just an awkward, pathetic dweeb, but I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re going for. Oh, I also love that they have the three crime bosses vying for position. I mean Gotham is all about the crime. For a while I thought Falcone was going to get shoved to the side, but they reminded us why he is the most powerful man in Gotham.

Overall, this show is worth watching if you’re a fan of the world around Batman. If not, there’s very little there for you. I don’t think it’s so well written that it would be enjoyable without a preconceived relationship with the characters. Then I could be wrong. I had no attachment to the penguin before watching Gotham and now I love him.

Elantris by Brandon Sanderson

Laura Highcove

Elantris starts off in a world on the verge of a religious war. There are only two holdout countries and from those two countries we get the main characters who are signed up for political marriage; only the prince dies while the princess is on route.

Or at least everyone is told he died, because it’s a better idea than telling them he turned into one of the cursed creatures of Elantris. We follow the prince through the mysterious circumstances inside Elantris, which used to be a wonderful place filled with god-like creatures. On the outside, the princess, now a widow, tries to establish herself in the court with many of the prince’s old friends. She also has to pit herself against a powerful representative of the strongest religion in the world as he tries to convert everyone before a time limit.

In my opinion, the characters were believable and a lot of fun to follow. The mystery of Elantris kept me guessing, and I enjoyed finding out about it along the way. There were a few plot devices that were very obviously there only to be useful at the end, but those are forgivable, and there were plenty of others that managed to catch me by surprise.

One of the things I like about this book is the relationships/friendships between characters. Also, I feel like the author knows the ins and outs of his world such that he can play with it in a way that really makes the world feel real. I felt satisfied having read this book and would recommend it to others.

Frozen

Laura Highcove

So on Tuesday I walked into the back room of Fun N Games, now newly moved to University Mall, where we hold our weekly D&D session. Gloves immediately stood up, pointed at me, and said ‘You have to go see Frozen.’ Now if you know Gloves, you will know that this is very odd behavior for him, as he is the type of guy who is perfectly happy in his own opinions, but for the most part does not try to impart them on other people. Therefore, my husband and I knew that this sort of declaration warranted attention.

We proceeded to talk about how the commercials and advertising for the movie were horrible, or at least did not make me excited about going to see the movie, which is the point of advertising. At that moment of the conversation with Gloves, I knew two things: One: Frozen was based on ‘The Snow Queen’ fairy tale, and they had both an annoying snowman mascot AND another hoofed animal acting like a dog (A la Tangled) which is a pet peeve of mine, as I actually work with horses.

Then Blake brought up the fact that he had read a review that said the reviewer basically could not say anything about the movie, because it was all a spoiler. I thought about that for a moment. It’s a rather tall order. It also would explain why there was nothing other than joke scenes in the commercials, in addition to a line from the main!? character saying ‘That’s not a blizzard, that’s my sister’, which did not actually occur in the movie. Spoiler!?

After seeing the movie, I can understand why they decided that pretty much, the movie is a spoiler for the movie. I will now proceed to explain why I think the marketing was done the way it was, which is in fact spoiler. If you haven’t seen the movie, go patronize it with money. If you have, you have no worry of spoilers.

Reasons the commercials were horrible:

1) They did not want to show Anna in princess garb, that cut out a large portion of scenes at the beginning.
2) They wanted you to think Elsa was the villain and there are no real villainy scenes with Elsa, because she’s not a villain.
3) They couldn’t show the actual villain, because unlike most Disney movies, who the villain was is actually a surprise. And most of the rest of the time he’s on camera, he’s singing or with Anna in princess garb.

However, I was really happy with the way I feel they played with tropes in this movie. Elsa became a queen and then went rogue (not villain, but still rogue). The trope being Disney Queens are evil.

Also, I have a thing for fairy tail characters who know (to some extent) that they exist in a fairy tale world. (My top two favorite books ever are examples of this, ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ by Diana Wynne Jones and The Fairy Godmother by Mercades Lackey) When they say ‘a supreme act of love’ and everyone goes right to ‘true love’s kiss’. (It’s a theme in ABC (owned by Disney)’s Once Upon A Time, which is also wonderful, go see it.)

Then there is Anna, who is an action girl, ready to go out there and deal with life on her terms, then becomes a damsel in distress. Sadface. They rush her back to the castle only to find out her ‘true love’ Hans is the villain at which point we assume she needs Khristoff to save her … only then she sacrifices herself for Elsa, which causes her to save herself! A wonderful break from normal fairy taleing, even if it makes Khristoff a rather handsome ancillary character.

So both girls had wonderful character development, the snowman ended up being rather perfect, and now the Internets have someone to pair Jack Frost with. Plus, the ice palace was rather spectacular.

Thor: The Dark World

Laura Highcove

Last week when Thor: The Dark World came out, my husband and I took our date night out to see it. He, because it was a super hero movie, me because of Loki. Don’t judge me. The movie’s premise worked really good. There always needs to be some sort of explanation of why, when a world rending evil is lurking in a world where the Avengers exist, that the Avengers all (or part of at least) don’t just swoop in to save the day. This movie handled that by having the only proof of it happening unknown until things were really rocking, oh and having most of it take place in other worlds where mere humans can’t go.

Did I mention spoilers? I’m mentioning spoilers now. Open movie, cleaning up stuff from the last movie until new threat from unknown and ‘thought long gone’ source. Way to get Thor off his lazy, saving the nine worlds butt, and back to his ‘girlfriend. I guess the movie is technically named after him, so I accept that he must be part of the movie. But Loki! In Jail! With Books! >.> I am also super happy that they finally really showed what Frigg(a) could do.

Truthfully at the end of the movie I simply sat back and thought to myself ‘This movie gave me everything it was that I wanted, without even really knowing that I wanted it.’

Casual Vacancy

Laura Highcove

So this is the ‘other’ book written by JK Rowling. I wasn’t really interested in ever reading it. It wasn’t Harry Potter and it didn’t sound like a fantasy, so why bother? Then I heard from Morgan that it was apparently a really good book. She said that all of the characters are unlikable, and yet you want to keep reading anyway. That caught my interest, because if the characters are unlikable, then the story must be something amazing. So I downloaded it on my Kindle, and gave it a shot.

I saw immediately why it’s such a popular book. The woman is a wordsmith like I have rarely seen. I don’t remember this level of craft in the Harry Potter books, but perhaps she just stuck with a particular style throughout those and tried something new in this one. Reading her words was like sailing down a smooth, crystal blue river that is lined with the most luscious garden. Now the plot might be good too, I didn’t get far enough into it to really form an opinion.

That being said, I will not be finishing the book. I think I got about 30% into it (says my Kindle) and the unlikable characters are just too much for me. I don’t read to stare into the blackness of the human soul. Probably why I hated so much reading books for school; all they care about is blackness of souls. I read (and write) fantasy. I want my characters to be heroic on top of their humanity. I don’t want to be wishing I could punch every character in the nose through the pages of the book. I want to read to enjoy myself and root for the main characters. Heck, I even like my villains to be affable. But I certainly will be going back to it on occasion to review the art she made out of those words.