The bad news is that the computer is not being cooperative at all. I tried to scan in yesterday’s drawing twice, only to have it shut off before I could save. The good news is that there is a scanner here at work, so I will be able to scan it in before I go home tonight. I probably won’t be able to post it till tomorrow, though, so you will get a two-for-one then.

In the meantime, you get my thoughts on Prince Caspian, which we took the girls to see over Memorial Day weekend, and will undoubtedly go to see again at the El Capitan in Hollywood, where many props and costumes are on display. When The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe came out, they had the wardrobe of the title in the theater lobby (it was very tempting to climb inside!). Maybe this time they will have Prince Caspian on display — hey, he’s in the title too! It’s not to much to ask, is it?

I was smart, and went by the theater early in the day Saturday to buy tickets; even 4 and 5 hours ahead of show time they were starting to sell out — in part, I’m sure, because they’d given over all the really big theaters at the cineplex to Indiana Jones. Lines, crowd, noise — all very exciting Saturday matinee goings on. We ended up in the 2nd row of a small theater (maybe 15 rows deep), craning our heads up to try and take in the whole screen, and it was really totally worth it.

Prince Caspian has probably always my least favorite of the Narnia books — and by “least favorite” let me make it clear that it’s still on the favorites list. It’s just a little on the dull side, with a lot of wandering back and forth in the woods, so I expected the filmmakers to ratchet up the action by a few degrees, which they did. Maybe, just maybe, a little too much.

My favorite parts of the movie were the subtler, character driven parts: the look on Caspian’s face when the Pevensies march into Aslan’s How ahead of him, the whispered politics of the Telmarine court (did the kids understood what was going on there?), the temptation of Peter by the White Witch … it all left me wanting more, more, more character development and maybe a little less fighting and, well, mouse jokes (I love the depiction of Reepicheep in the film, and am already getting teary-eyed in anticipation of the ending of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but the “yes, I’m a mouse” jokes got boring when repeated ad nauseam).

The two big pieces of character development that I would have liked to seen addressed more thoroughly had to do with Susan and Peter; they go to great lengths to set up, at the beginning of the movie, how these two characters have ill-adjusted to returning the real world after having been king and queen in Narnia. Susan is aloof and isolated. Peter is aggressive and superior. At the end of the movie, we’re told that they aren’t going to return because they have learned all they can from Narnia.

How, exactly? Sure, Susan may give in to the temptation to kiss Caspian in the end (and really, who wouldn’t?), but what caused the change? And does it change how she deals with people back home?

And when is Peter’s moment of truth? Presumably, during his duel with Miraz, he must have some sort of realization that might does not equal right, but it’s not clear when it happens or how it will translate back home.

I’m okay with less about Lucy and Edmund, because they’ll get their shot in the next movie. And, honestly, my very favorite thing about this movie was the anticipation it set for the next — Prince Caspian is not a great story to begin with, but Voyage of the Dawn Treader is, my favorite of the series, I think. Seeing Caspian and Reepicheep in action has whet my appetite for their return, along with pirates, dragons, Dufflepuds, merpeople … I get all twittery just thinking about it.

Still, Prince Caspian was a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to seeing it again. The effects are good, the music is much stronger than the first movie’s soundtrack (I’ve been listening to it over and over again), and the costumes and design are fabulous. I love the details they put into the world; if we can’t actually go through the wardrobe ourselves, it’s nice to be shown such a convincing vision of what it would be like if we could.

I do with, though, that I had tried climbing into that wardrobe when I had the chance….

Program Note: The home PC has a bad motivator. Er, I mean the power supply has crapped out. At the moment, I can get maybe 5 minutes from it before it shuts itself off again. This may very well interrupt the scanning-and-posting of drawings. Also, of other at-home computing pastimes. Just so you know.

In response to my solicitation for requests for my challenge, Annie suggested Val Kilmer. She was thinking one of his The Saint personnas, but since I just watched Willow with the girls last weekend, I decided to do Madmartigan instead.

Ah, Madmartigan! He was probably my first swordsman crush (if you don’t count Luke Skywalker, who wasn’t technically a swordsman). My college friends and I could recite every witty line from Willow, once upon a time.

Of course, in retrospect, there aren’t that many witty lines in that movie.

You young folk don’t know how lucky you are when it comes to fantasy films. My children, who have cut their teeth on the cinematic splendour of The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings will never understand how, once a long, long time ago, movies like Willow were the best we could hope for when it came to seeing epic fantasy on screen.

As for the picture, while it looks reasonably human and male (unless you ask my daughters, who judge gender almost wholly on the basis of hair length), I don’t think it captures any real resemblance to Val himself. His face is so distinctive, I’m not sure how I missed it.

Endnote: In college, I named one of my two goldfish Kilmer. The other was Elwes. When they died, we held Viking funerals for them on the lake. No, really. We did.

I skipped out on my weekly writer’s group meeting last night to attend a signing by Lois McMaster Bujold at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego. I debated about going for a few days, because San Diego is a long way, gas is not cheap, and it was a school night. But when I didn’t manage to talk myself out of wanting to go, I decided to make the trip, and am very glad I did.

Ms. Bujold was a very engaging speaker and answered a lot of questions from what I feel was a very enlightened audience. I’ve been to a lot of signings where the audience asked a lot of questions about the content of the books — why did this happen, what about that character, etc — but this group were more interested in her process and experience as a writer. Very interesting stuff, from this writer’s point of view. It was recorded for a podcast, so within a few weeks you can hear it yourself if you like.

There’s one point in particular that I’m glad she brought up, which had caught my attention while reading an interview with her last week:

I have come to believe that if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF are fantasies of political agency. (Of which the stereotypical “male teen power fantasy” is again merely an especially gaudy and visible subset.) (Source: Fantasy Book Critic

I think it’s an interesting observation, but I am not sure I entirely agree. Or maybe it’s that I disagree that fantasy should be that way, though it certainly seems to be the case with the bulk of modern popular fantasy. I’m currently preoccupied with the labels we apply to the different genres. Typically, we classify them according to their dressing — this one is fantasy because it has magic, elves and dragons, that one is SF because it has spaceships, time travel and alien viruses. But with all the cross-over and blending, this way only leads to madness and an eternally growing list of sub-genres. Maybe we need to start labeling stories according to the kind of story they tell, instead … but that’s a topic for another post, when I have a better grasp on what it is I actually want to say.

After the signing (I had my ARC of Passage signed, along with my copy of Paladin of Souls and a second copy of Passage that will be a gift for my eldest sister) I got to enjoy a long Girl Geek Gab. I paused on the way out to tell Sam, who works at the store and who is also the co-host of the afore mentioned podcast, Adventures in SciFi Publishing, that I was a fan of the show — this is a very out-of-the-box action for me, since it is not always easy to get my introverted self to initiate conversation, but it really paid off.

We were joined by two other attendees (whom I had conversed with previously while in line to get my books signed) and spent the next hour talking about just about every major SF&F fan topic that you can think of, with topics ranging from whether it was Eowyn or Merry who killed the Witch King, why it was probably a good thing that The Golden Compass didn’t do well at the box office, and a comparison of the relative sizes of particular body parts of certain Jedi knights (”May the Schwartz be with you.”) It was GREAT!

I don’t often get the opportunity to converse about this sort of stuff anymore. My co-workers are great, but none of them are into the SF world (except for the owner of the company, who surprised me by being a Firefly fan) and only look at me strangely when I burst out in defense of Star Wars at a company luncheon. Oh, they all have their own fannish pleasures, so they understand, but their different fandoms so we can’t really share them. My social contacts outside of the office are very slim to none (I’m such a houserat). How rare a treat to be able to say, “Have you seen Viggo’s photography?” and have them know exactly what I’m talking about!

So it was a good night, and not too late (I was home by 11), and hopefully Lost was taped properly so I can watch it over the weekend without having to download it. Next week it will be back to the writer’s group (another group of people I enjoy talking with, but also not into SF-dom) and maybe, just maybe, I’ll have something to share for critique.

Just announced for the NBC fall lineup:

MERLIN - “Merlin” brings to life a new legend for a modern audience. “Merlin” is an exciting, hour-long fantasy series set in the mythic city of Camelot — but inspired by 21st Century storytelling. Before Merlin (Colin Morgan, “Doctor Who”) and Arthur (Bradley James, “Lewis”) became legends, they were ambitious young men looking for adventure, hoping to live up to their family’s expectations, discovering love and finding their own true destiny, making mistakes along the way. The innovative, action-packed drama has cross-generational appeal and paints a picture of Merlin and Arthur’s early life that audiences have never witnessed before. Anthony Head (”Buffy the Vampire Slayer”), Richard Wilson (”A Passage to India”), Angel Coulby (”Magicians”) and Katie McGrath (”The Tudors”) also star. A FremantleMedia Enterprises distribution of a Shine production for BBC. Source

Now, I’m all for the proliferation of fantasy on TV. I’m also for giving the Arthurian legend a serial presentation, instead of trying to compress the whole epic into a two hour cinematic format. A thorough retelling of the whole tale could easily fill half-a-dozen standard television seasons.

But I’m also very, very nervous when anyone actually tries to do fantasy on TV, because if it’s done poorly it just means that much less of a chance that anything good will be given an opportunity to do it right. And then there’s the fact that no one has ever really done a great screen version of the Arthurian legend. Excalibur comes closest, but I don’t think it’s aged very well. As much as I love Monty Python and the Holy Grail I think it’s a little sad that it’s the best movie that’s been done. And as for television — well, let’s just not go there.

So I’ll be anticipating this with the same sort of trepidation as I waited for SciFi’s Earthsea, hoping for the best (hoping that phrases like “new legend for a modern audience” and “inspired by 21st century storytelling” aren’t as foreboding as they sound), but not really counting on it.

Maybe they’ll have pretty costumes and sets anyway. And horses. Horses are good.

Er … I mean Sweeney Todd, of course, which I’m happy to report gets two thumbs up from this critic’s corner. I’ve been a fan of this unique work of musical theater since introduced to it by my drama teacher back in high school (so, for those of you keeping track, that’s in excess of twenty years), and I was utterly delighted with Tim Burton’s envisioning of Stephen Sondheim’s work. There are a few subtle changes — most notable is the elimination of all the chorus bits — but nothing that doesn’t make sense for the change in medium, and nothing that is too jarring to someone as familiar with the original score as I am. Johnny Depp’s performance is just mesmerizing, and I liked Helena Bonham Carter’s Mrs. Lovett (though I must confess I still favor Angela Lansbury’s rendition in the original). My favorite moment was the duet “Pretty Women” by Depp and Alan Rickman — it’s such a treat to see two favorite actors doing something in a movie that they don’t normally get to do, and doing it so well.

I like that there are more great musicals making it to the silver screen — it’s so much better than movies being made into musicals, don’t you think? I hope it’s a trend that continues.

It’s New Year’s Eve, and I’ve been thinking about the traditional “Year in Review” or “I Resolve…” type of post, but I’m not sure if I’ll get to it. It’s been a long, tiring month, with the usual holiday business complicated by weeks of illness and heavy deadlines at work, and I’m just finally starting to get my energy level up to where I feel I can accomplish stuff — and I’d rather do the stuff I’ve been putting off for weeks instead of blogging. I’ll just leave it to say that instead of the usual “resolutions” or “goals” I’m trying to focus on creating a list of priorities for the coming year, those areas in my life on which I most want to (or need to) focus my attention. I’ll spend time tonight and tomorrow deciding what those priorities are going to be, and how I’m going to keep on track.

At the moment, however, my priority is lunch!

A few nights ago, I watched a History Channel special on the mythology of Star Wars. Nothing in the show was particularly groundbreaking, especially to someone like myself who has paid attention this sort of mythic analysis for a lot of years. It was not very critical, but I think it was produced (at least in part) by Lucasfilm, so that’s not very surprising. But it did have a lot of fun clips from the movies along with an interesting panel of guests: along with the expected representatives of academia, it featured comments from notable filmmakers Joss Whedon, Kevin Smith, J.J. Abrams and Peter Jackson, news commentators Linda Ellerbee, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw, and some unexpected oddballs (for this subject) like Newt Gingrich, Nancy Pelosi and Stephen Colbert.

The special is part of the 30 year anniversary hoopla celebrating the release of the first Star Wars film in 1977, and wow does it feel strange to think that it’s been 30 years already. Even stranger to think that there are people — adult, grown-up, with-kids-of-their-own people — who have lived their entire lives post-Star Wars. Some of them are probably reading this right now and thinking, “Yeah, so…?” To them, I can only extend the feeble explanation that life is just somehow different in a world with Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.

I don’t know that it’s exactly right to claim that Star Wars changed my life — it’s possible I would have fallen into the world of fantasy and mythic storytelling without its influence, that my predilection for these things are in fact what made Star Wars so appealing to my developing creative personality. I would have still found the Wardrobe, after all, and after Narnia I would have journeyed into Prydain, and Earthsea, and Middle Earth, and Camelot. But Star Wars…Star Wars was first, and it colored everything, in more ways than I have yet been able to perceive.

A big one was this: at 8 years old, when I first saw the commercials for Star Wars, I didn’t even want to see it. Why? Because it was about space, and it was about war. It’s natural that an 8-year-old wouldn’t want to see an war movie, right? But I think the whole space thing chilled me more. I remember being newly conscious of the vastness of the universe beyond the sky blue vault of our earthly heavens, and it freaked me out. I had no inclination to go watch something that was going to remind of all my fears of the strangeness above, especially if it was a war movie to boot. But my best friend, Karen Brown (who must have moved away not long after), dragged me to see it with her family. As we waited in the long line outside the theater, she assured me that her dad had seen it, and that it was funny, not scary. So, trepidatious but willing to suck it up for my friend, I went in.

I loved it, naturally. I don’t know that my fear of space dissipated immediately upon that first viewing, but it certainly opened the door. I insisted my whole family go to see it, of course, and I remember sitting in the fourth or fifth row with my dad and grandfather (neither of whom ever went to movies with us), gaping up as the Imperial Cruiser inched across the screen over our heads. My grandfather’s work in the space program was suddenly much more interesting. I didn’t mind watching Star Trek reruns with my family on the weekends. I didn’t care for the creepy television production of Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, but when Battlestar Galactica came along, oh yeah, I was there!

My younger sister and I collected Star Wars action figures (sadly, all gone, except for one Han Solo floating around somewhere). We collected trading cards (also sadly gone, but here’s a funny trivia note: the profiles of Luke and Leia in the set for the Empire Strikes Back have their ages set at two years apart; in light of the later revelation that they were twins, I never forgot that detail). I joined the Star Wars Fan Club one year. I dressed up as Luke Skywalker for Halloween, inflatable light saber and everything. We had books and comic books and read-a-long storybooks.

One of my last and favorite memories of my grandfather is Star Wars related. For Christmas in 1983, I was given (at last!) the two record soundtrack album for the first movie. My cousin (living with my grandparents at the time) was the only one I knew with a record player with an attached tape deck and I asked her to make a copy of it for me, so I wouldn’t risk scratching it. One afternoon, I walked into their house to the sounds of Star Wars blaring at top volume. It was my grandfather (redoing the recording my cousin had done), loving it every bit as much as I did. Even though I’ve got all the soundtracks on CDs and in my iPod, I still have the tape he made that day, just a few weeks before his unexpected death. I think about it on days like this, when my girls ask me if we can listen to Star Wars in the car.

I wrote Star Wars fan fiction in high school (though my sister claims the more complete work here…I’ll have to type it in some day and post it, just to embarrass her!). I crushed majorly on Mark Hamil and plastered my closet door with his picture. In college, a close friend and I all but worshiped George Lucas, only half-joking when we called him god. We had buttons made up once that just said “George” on them: they were great conversation starters. I imagined myself as part of the team that would, someday, bring the promised prequels to life.

Sadly, my faith in George was destroyed when the prequels finally did make it to the screen, and I have to admit to an absurd load of guilt for how poorly they turned out. If only I’d followed through on my dreams, what might George have wrought with my help? I’ll always wonder.

My adoration for the original trilogy remains undiminished; only The Lord of the Rings has come close to eclipsing the emotional response Star Wars is capable of creating in me. It’s not that I think they’re the best movies ever made: you can’t watch Star Wars as many times as I have and not know the flaws that are there. But there is something raw and powerful in it; at a very early age, it created a connection for me to the world of mythic storytelling that I have pursued ever since. It’s the standard by which I judge everything else I see and read — not the movies themselves, but my response to the movies. To recapture that moment of awe, to be able to create that moment of awe in someone else…that’s what it’s all about. That’s what I’m all about, why I continue this struggle with words and characters and concepts, trying to understand how it all works, trying to make it work for myself. Egads, what standards I have set for myself! Can anyone hope to live up to the expectations of their 8-year-old self? I guess I have no choice but to continue trying.