I am sick + movies
I am currently home from school sick. I caught something off my kids and it developed into a sinus infection and now it is starting to develop into bronchitis (yay, my old favourite). Yesterday all I could do was lay on the sofa and drift in and out of sleep for most of the day. But I started to feel a little better in the evening. When my boyfriend came home, we had dinner together and watched Total Recall before bedtime.
I watched Total Recall when I was a teenager and I didn't really appreciate it for what it was at the time. The same for Blade Runner and The Thing, both of which I later saw as an adult and fell completely in love with. I feel the same now about Total Recall. There is something very special about 70s/80s/early 90s Sci-Fi movies that more recent Sci-Fi moves are totally lacking. Maybe it's that the older movies either don't have, or have very little, CGI. I think the last Sci-Fi I really enjoyed was Life, which was pretty solid. Annihilation was enjoyable but I felt like I was missing part of the story, so I started reading the book and that was better. Haven't finished it yet, though.
I tried to gather a bunch of cool Fantasy movies to watch, but there is a serious lack of them in cinema. Once you've watched LotR and the other usual suspects, there's little else to explore. Even amongst the good ones, there are quite a few that fall short of being excellent, for example, The Seventh Son, which was very enjoyable but to me it felt like the lore and world-building was just missing something. One thing that did surprise me recently was sitting down to watch Eragon with my kids and actually enjoying it as a fun kids Fantasy. Still lacking in some areas, but then again I went into it with very low expectations. Maybe that is the problem. I am always comparing them to LotR.
I have Excalibur on my watch-list but haven't gotten round to actually seeing it. The flip-side is that I have attempted to watch Interstellar about 3 - 4 times now and I get about 30 minutes in and become so bored that I can't continue.
The same happened the other night when we started watching Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. The visuals were amazing and the level of detail in the environments and the aliens was superb, but the script wasn't great and the acting was even worse. The two main characters looked like children but we were supposed to believe that they were these super-talented secret agents, and Dane DeHaan has this weird voice where it sounds like he is trying to make his voice deeper than it really is (the whole time, all I could think about was Elizabeth Holmes and her fake voice, that's what he sounded like to me). What a serious miscast that ruined the whole film. (Yet I loved him in A Cure For Wellness, what a fantastic movie that was, 10/10).
I have come to realise that I am not a Luc Besson fan. I think he has a creepy obsession with young characters, and characters who are infantile in some way. I don't think I enjoy his style either. I saw that he has made a new Dracula movie and the trailer looked like a frame by frame copy of Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula so I think I will give it a miss. I am not a Guillermo del Toro fan either (not anymore, but I was when I was a teen) but his new Frankenstein movie looks fantastic and I can't wait to see it. Also watched a gratuitous trailer for Hyde starring Johnny Depp, which was, quite frankly, pretty awful. 5 long excruciating minutes of Depp pretending to be strange and quirky. I don't think I could sit through a whole movie of that.
I have thought about making a cinema blog and doing film critiques but I watch and have watched so many movies, I think I would never have time to write everything that I wanted to say. My IMDb list is almost 5000 titles, and I still haven't rated everything. Maybe I need to join a movie club or something. Or just write about the movies I really loved (or really hated).
A couple of days ago, I cleaned up my old laptop that I used to use to write on. It has been gathering dust for a couple of years and needed a new OS because the edition of Linux Mint that was on it was no longer receiving updates. Now it is fresh and ready to go. I have had an urge to start writing again but my problem now is that I don't know where to begin. The possibilities are too enormous that I feel paralysed by options. I know I should start somewhere small, but where is that?
I found out recently that my favourite author, J. V. Jones has finally completed the last installment of the Sword of Shadows series and I am so excited. I need to re-read the series before it releases so I can refresh my memory on everything that happened. I am so happy for her that she has returned to writing again. She deserves all the love and success. I totally understand how hard it is to return to writing again after taking a very long break from doing it, especially when the break is forced by hard life events.
I recently put two of my novels back up for sale after a little persuasion from a friend. I will put up the other two later on when I have time to format the manuscripts. It feels very weird to see them up for sale again. It has been a long time. I don't expect anyone to buy them, but one never knows.
Signing off, Nem.