That was how it stuck in my memory all that time. But when I saw it was going to be on tv, I decided to watch it again, see if it lived up to my memory or if I should give it some slack. (I even bothered to take notes on my thoughts for future reference, if anyone’s wondering why I’m writing this two years and one month later.)

My first impressions, I like the Greek art that’s apparent in parts of the movie, and how that style inspired other parts of the movie as well. It reminds me of Sleeping Beauty, how that movie was animated to look like medieval art.

I like the muses, even back when I first saw the movie I liked the muses. I did back then what I always do, I analyzed the girls’ outfits and hair styles and picked my favorite ones. ahaha. (My favorite back then: the one with the long hair, of course.)

I also, surprisingly, like Hades. The first time around I didn’t like him, for reasons I can’t remember. Was he too loud? Was it because he was the Greek equivalent of Satan? I don’t know. I can’t remember why I like him now, either, since I didn’t write notes on that… Maybe he was funny.

The second viewing, I found that I don’t like Hades’ two sidekicks. One guy’s voice just grates on my ears. (Oh man, I’m looking through Wikipedia at that actor’s filmography, and he was the sandman in Are You Afraid of the Dark?! So that’s where I remember his voice from. Creeepy.) The both of them I find to just be bumbling idiots, not funny at all but annoying.

Philoctetes, I never liked him. He’s ugly and annoying and gross and I don’t enjoy his scenes at all. blegh.

Another complaint I had when I was a kid was that Disney mangled the Greek mythology! I did not like the old stories being changed just to fit the current story. For example, why is Hera all nice and motherly with Hercules? She isn’t even his mom in Greek mythology! Now, though, it’s just a minor complaint. After all, I did decide to take movies at face value. Of course it wouldn’t have fit into Disney’s storyline that Hera, who is most undeniably Zeus’ wife, isn’t Hercules’ mom. There has to be a bad guy, and it can’t be Hercules’ own “mom”!

Now for my favorite part of the movie, now and even back then: Megara! And her song “I Won’t Say (I’m in Love).” Megara wasn’t like other female Disney characters at all, and that’s exactly why I liked her then and now. She was sassy, cynical, and she wouldn’t have cared for anyone’s wounds (Belle) or wanted to sacrifice herself for others (Pocahontas, Mulan). And her voice is so un-Disneylike as well, it’s so low, not like a certain high-voiced sixteen-year-old (Snow White).

Overall, the plotline is pretty standard fare for Disney, and some characters I like, some I detest. I don’t think of this movie with distaste anymore, though. And I don’t feel guilty about liking Megara and her song while hating the rest of the movie, because I don’t hate it anymore!

(But what’s number one on my disliked Disney movie list now…?)

Years later, a movie came out based on the book, and I knew who two of the four stars were, Alexis Bledel and Amber Tamblyn. I’d seen bits of America Ferrera in the Disney Channel movie but didn’t know about her until I started watching Ugly Betty. I didn’t know who Blake Lively was until after I saw the movie, when she started Gossip Girl. So I definitely had to see the movie, I loved Alexis and Amber, and after Ugly Betty I especially wanted to see America in a different role.

I thought the movie was a fun watch, but not much else. Then the second movie came out, which of course I had to see as well. After I saw that movie, I felt I had to read the series since I didn’t know how much the movies were channging the story. I just thought it was a disservice to see only the movies and not read any of the books.

So I bought the book used from Amazon, which ended up costing about the same if I’d bought the book new from a local bookstore. Bah!

It being an easy read, I finished the book in just a few days. My thoughts? A fun story, if you’re expecting a young adult book geared for girls, which I was.

The movie was pretty faithful to the book. As faithful as can be, going from a medium that works in the head to a visual medium. Lena’s story was changed the most, but honestly, you can’t fit underage nudity into a PG-rated film. Besides, I think the film version of Lena’s story is cute. It’s very teen movie/chick-flick/rom-com, whatever you want to call it.

The problem now is that I want to read the rest of the series, considering the second movie skipped the two next books and went straight for the fourth storyline! But I don’t want to spend $8 on books I’ll read only once. Maybe I should look into the power of the County of L.A. public library system and get the book from another libary lent to my local library…

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My Star Trek backstory: I was a Star Wars kid. My brothers and I watched my dad’s VHS tapes of the original trilogy many, many times. My parents watched both Star Wars and Star Trek, although Mum favored the latter. She thought it was more creative than Star Wars, it could do so much more, explore different ideas. I think she saw the original run on television. Both parents watched The Next Generation and Voyager, and Daddy watched Enterprise. I watched TNG as a kid, saw some episodes of Voyager, and I’ve seen a couple episodes of the original series. Haven’t seen any of the movies. Except for the newest one, of course. Yes, this was my first Star Trek movie. *grin*

So back to the movie. Figuring out who the characters were was fun; since I’ve only seen an episode here and there I only really knew Kirk, Spock, and the doctor. But from popular culture I’ve picked up Scotty, Uhura, and Sulu, and I learned about Chekov from Futurama. *grins* I didn’t figure out who the other guy driving the Enterprise was until I heard him pronounce Vs as Ws. XD

I’m not sure that I like knowing who some of the actors are though. While seeing Zoe Saldana was a delightful surprise, I see her more as Zoe Saldana, not Uhura, which kind of ruins things… It doesn’t help that I haven’t really seen Uhura in the tv show, so it’s more Zoe playing a part for me, not Zoe playing this character that I should know.

Another big surprise was Simon Pegg! I didn’t recognize him until his second camera shot, and even then I wasn’t sure until Mum whispered to me, “Hot Fuzz,” and that she was sure it was him. I’ve never seen Scotty in the show … or at least I’ve seen him portrayed in Simpsons and Futurama more often than in Star Trek which probably isn’t a good thing, heh. But I really liked the character. I really liked Simon Pegg. XD I never did see that movie where he was playing that running character.

Watching John Cho was fun, but I kept remembering him in his Harold (& Kumar) role, and yeeeah that sort of really ruined the role for me. murrr. But again, I haven’t seen much of Sulu in the show so I was watching him playing a character, not playing someone I should know.

During the course of the movie I realized, hey, Star Trek was really cool, it had an Asian character in it! Sort of like Whoopi Goldberg’s story about loving Star Trek and seeing a black woman on tv. Because I remember early in the movie there was another Asian character, who I think got blown up, but regardless he was there, being Asian.

Normally I hate being so ethnocentric, I mean why should it matter what ethnicity or color someone is, right? We should all be colorblind. But I’ve been thinking about Asians in the media more and more, starting from the time when I heard about Avatar characters in the live-action movie being cast as white people. (Or at least all the good guys.) Um, nice way to whitewash a story which is so very influenced by Asian cultures.

I’d read Derek Kirk Kim’s blog entry about Avatar and his story about how he and his brother loved acting, but never tried to make it in Hollywood because they didn’t want to get stuck with stereotypical roles. Then when I linked it online, someone told me her husband quit acting for the same reason.

While I didn’t care at the time about the lack of representation of Asians in the media (I don’t need to see “myself” on the screen because … well I just don’t, I’m secure enough to not need it), I realized oh, it’s not just about me, there are Asians out there who would like acting jobs but can’t get them because … they’ve got Asian faces. Hollywood (rightly?) thinks that most of America can’t connect to an Asian face, they need to see a white (or sometimes black) face to really empathize with the character.

(Mum is of the opinion that Hollywood isn’t really as liberal as it seems, because everyone is white. There are some black actors, a handful of Asians, very few of any other ethnicity. No one is willing to use non-white actors, lest they put off everyone else in the industry. But I digress.)

This week I saw a new episode of Without a Trace that had Chinese people in it! When I saw the previews I was intrigued, it’s not often there are Asians on tv. (I still remember that episode of Cold Case that was about the Japanese internment camps, which I will not comment about here.) I stepped in about 20 minutes into the episode, and I was really happy to see Asians speaking English with American accents, like most Asians that I know! But the more I watched the episode, the more it was about a Chinatown scandal and about being ethnically Chinese.

So … wow. Chinese people only go missing when it has to do with being from China, huh? Or in the case of the other episode, Japanese people only go missing when it involves the internment camps.

I asked Mum, why are Asians in the media always portrayed as being ethnically Asian, not as Americans with Asian faces? She said it’s because Hollywood just doesn’t get it, they don’t know what Asian Americans are really like, they can only think in terms of country of origin.

I guess not only do Asians not make it as actors, they don’t make it as writers either?

I put forth all of that in order to, in a roundabout way, explain why I really love Star Trek and how it’s so cool because it had an Asian character in it! Now I feel like watching the original Star Trek series just so I can know those characters. I will just have to grit my teeth and bear it whenever Shatner’s on screen…

edit@10pm, August 9, 2009: I found an entry someone wrote on Livejournal about the character Uhura on Star Trek that I really enjoyed reading and thought I’d link it here.

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Random comments…

Not sure about the boy character. Maybe he served as a person for Coraline to talk to in the movie.

The 3D aspect was tiring my eyes after a while. It didn’t help that either A) my ears are crooked or B) my eyes are crooked, so I couldn’t quite see the screen clearly without holding up one side of the 3D glasses. (Also, the 3D glasses took an instant dislike to my eyeglasses and kept trying to put distance between them.)

But I still think it was worth the $5 seeing the movie in 3D. :D Mum and I went to see it in the new, fancy, higher-priced theater which charges about $3 more, and then there was a $2 charge for use of the 3D glasses.

I really liked the 3D-ness of the movie. It was definitely subtle, but pulled you into the movie. But because my eyes are funky somehow, it hurt to look at anything too “close” to me. (The closer something is to the audience, the more blurry it is, and the more I have to cross my eyes to focus on it…it’s weird. I was also never any good at those Magic Eye 3D picture books, either.)

Going into the theater I saw these preschool-aged kids, and I sort of worried for them. But I shouldn’t have. Kids these days are so jaded, nothing can faze them. Either that or they were just covering their eyes during the movie, which I couldn’t see.

Dude! That movie was so creepy! I was seriously feeling anxious about Coraline and even myself! And I don’t normally get scared in movies unless it’s in my face—you know, people or things jumping out of the dark, some maniac running toward the viewers with a bloody hacksaw…

The Other Miss Forcible? (Or was it the Other Miss Spink?) Hi-larious. She got a lot of laughs in the theater.

The Other Mother’s real form … creepy. And they didn’t come up with it until near the end of production?! Totally worth it. I would hate to ever meet her face to face.

The Other Father and all the other people in the Other Mother’s world … oh my gosh, I felt for them, really I did.

I loved the movie. :D Even if it didn’t look the way I pictured it in my head (Dave McKean wins with me, hands down). It’s just a different take or interpretation of the story. Definitely buying when it comes out on DVD. Which reminds me, I still have to buy Stardust. O_o

There was a narrator who set up most of the scenes and gave context to the short lines that passed between the actors. The movie jumped around a lot between scenes.

I thought it was the weirdest thing (in the beginning) that Munch kept looking at the camera (or viewer). Freaky! But it was really the only way that I was drawn into the movie.

The way everything else was set up, I felt very disconnected from everything and from the characters, and that the characters were disconnected from each other.

But then it was very successful in expressing Munch’s state of mind, his madness, the childhood events that shaped him.

What really sucked was that I was struggling to stay awake during the movie (no fault of the film; it was just one of my sleepy days). A lot of the lines went through my head without imparting any bit of information, and I ended up sleeping for about ten or fifteen minutes, halfway through the second part. Argh!

But hey, if the film got that much through to me in that state, imagine how much better it is when you’re fully awake! hah! And luckily, the movie is on DVD! The question now is, do I want to add it to my library or just watch it a second time? (The guy who played Munch sure was cute though…)

I almost forgot to watch it, even though I’d been planning to watch it since commercials aired in March. Luckily C had to go work in his studio so I made dinner late and caught the movie ten minutes in.

(Spoiler, sort of.) One thing I wonder about, plot-wise, is if Ithaca is 25 and the girl is somewhere in her teens (I assume 15+ but I’m not a good judge of age), then how the heck is that workable? Calliope (the girl) would go through all that training, then in ten years her rule is up, and they need to find the next girl? What? Ithaca was found at 5 … correct? So she had her powers for 20 years. Maybe what’s-his-face (sorry can’t remember his name … William?) was supposed to be searching for those 20 years for the next girl? Or at least 15 or whatever years, however old Calliope is. But then he’s only in his 20s himself, so he would have begun searching at 10? What was that whole thing about seekers being old? (End of spoiler.)

I don’t know, I shouldn’t bother with the little things, it was only a tv movie. *grin*

The big thing I do want to complain about is a comment made by the character William. Remember, I didn’t see the first ten minutes of the movie the first time around, so I watched the rerun at 10 o’clock.

The reporter friend guy gets the invitation to Ithaca’s dinner thing in the mail and his wife says he and William should go, since she’s so very pregnant and can’t fit into any sort of nice evening gown. Then William says (paraphrasing), “Sure, like two guys going to a ball isn’t gay.” What?!

The comment itself isn’t what’s bugging me, it wasn’t that bad (right? I’m not underreacting, am I?). But I do hate that this is a movie airing on ABC Family, so probably kids as young as … 8? could be watching it. I don’t care that William used the word “gay” when kids are watching, but I can’t stand that he used it in that joking, derogatory manner.

Maybe I’m overreacting about this and gays have become so much a part of the norm we can joke about them now…? But it still creates this idea for kids that it’s okay to say things like that! They might say it around other kids, who might or might not be gay, and those kids will feel … however they feel. Marginalized?

:x Sorry, my brain’s shutting down now … this is why I suck at blogging. Argh.

Closing statement … stupid Disney is still furthering a world where gays are seen as bad and can be shot or tortured. Am I going too far there? Oh yeah.

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First time I read the book, Stardust didn’t thrill me that much. One of my lesser-liked books of Neil’s. (Apparently, according to my 2005 book list, I read it about two and a half years ago.)

The movie on the other hand, I loved dearly and can’t wait to get the DVD and watch it again. It was so much fun, so magical.

I thought to myself, if I liked the movie so much, why didn’t I care for the book? Which is why I decided to read Stardust again. My conclusion: it must be Neil’s writing style. While reading it I would feel sort of ho hum and wonder what book I was going to read next. But when I would imagine parts of the book as the movie

[edit, January 3, 2009:] … What the heck? What happened to the rest of this entry? Did I not write it? Did WordPress or my server lose it? I probably wanted to say that the story … came alive. But I don’t remember what else I was going to say.

Am sort of regretting now that I didn’t start a movie list for this year. My thoughts, ‘what movies would I see this year?’ and ‘should I really put as much emphasis on movies that I do on books?’ Mreh.

I normally don’t watch war movies. Partly because they’re loud with all the explosions, but also because I don’t like to see what’s inside the human body when it’s cut up, and how the cut up person reacts to seeing what’s inside him. I’ve seen portions of Band of Brothers, not all of it, and parts of Saving Private Ryan (yes, I still have yet to see that movie). I guess I just don’t like seeing the results of a bunch of grunts (men?) with influence going at it. I’m too sensitive.

But anyway! I thought Flags of Our Fathers was good. I liked it. What else can I say? My knowledge of last century’s events suck. I don’t know anything about World War I, not much about World War II (outside of the concentration and internment camps), and don’t know much of anything of U.S. presidencies. Mum says it’s likely because I was homeschooled … but that she doesn’t know much about the World Wars either…. It’s only because of my dad the history nut that I know what I do know of recent history. But he gets annoyed when I ask too many questions, like I must be really ignorant or something. >.>

Anyway! So yeah, I had absolutely no clue that the picture taken was of the second flag, and that the first flag was taken down because of some stupid military person who wanted it as a souvenir. *twitch* That’s all I have to say about the plot.

I had no idea Doc was played played by Ryan Phillippe. O_o He just looked like some young kid to me. (Then again, I had trouble at the beginning keeping all the characters straight.) I finally figured it out around the time I saw Robert Patrick (X-Files!) and Jason Gray-Stanford (Disher! XD). Melanie Lynskey (Rose in Two and a Half Men) was also in the movie. Woo!

Also, Friday after Gypsy Mum had me watch The World of Henry Orient again, just to see if I’d like it this time, and yeah I did. Nice movie. Wasn’t much interested by the Henry Orient part. But ya gotta love Angela Lansbury. (I like The Harvey Girls, she plays someone completely different from Mrs. Potts. XD)

Mum told me that Gypsy Rose Lee came to the filming of the movie and cried when she saw Natalie Wood on stage, because she had the walk down perfect.

In other news, N bought Aly & AJ’s album Insomniatic. (From Wal-Mart. Hulk smash!!) Wheee! It’s a great album. :D Whenever I listen to Potential Breakup Song today I get weepy. It’s just … so good. *wipes away tear*

One thing that is confusing me though, is that I keep picturing Shevraeth as another male character with long pale hair, who wears a cape… If you thought Lucius Malfoy, you either spend too much time in the Harry Potter realm or you’ve read Court Duel and think the same way I do.

I don’t remember the way I pictured Lucius in the books (movie media overload, boo), but if you take his movie portrayal, make him thinner, a bit younger, and not as … sneery, then you’ve got my image of Shevraeth.

The part where I’m getting confused is, I don’t like Lucius (I’m a good girl; I hates on the bad guys), but I definitely like Shevraeth. So I have this image in my head with an association that I don’t think of favorably … yet I like the character!

It’s sort of like in The Shop Around the Corner, which I saw Saturday (woo free OnDemand TCM movies). The lady admits to being confused in the beginning because she had mixed identities or something in her head. asdjkl; need to rewatch the movie to know what she said… [edit: "psychologically mixed up" is what she said]

Anyway. I’m almost done with the book. Chapter nineteen of part two. It’s such a fun story! But I don’t want it to end. :( Do I read and continue the fun, or not read and still have a bit of story left to live in? *laugh* Right, like I could do anything else.

After I’m done with this book I can go back to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I’m about two-thirds done in that one. It’s a great book, it’s just not as fun as Crown Duel. I wonder, are there adult fantasy books with strong heroines that are as fun?