movie: House at the End of the Street

 

Not to be confused with Last House on the Left.  Can we get some more interesting titles, please?

Description from IMDB: “A mother and daughter move to a new town and find themselves living next door to a house where a young girl murdered her parents. When the daughter befriends the surviving son, she learns the story is far from over.”

Yes. I don’t have a lot to say on this one. Ryan, the boy who lives at the end of the street, has a nice kind of Norman Bates vibe about him. Other than that, nothing about this movie really stands out. It’s pretty much the standard, cookie cutter horror-thriller fare. This probably comes off like I didn’t like the movie. I did like it. The acting was well done. It has suspenseful parts. It was definitely worth the watch.

Points off for a lack of originality, House at the End of the Street gets a C+.

Random updates

We survived the crazy storm, mostly because there wasn’t one. I’m not complaining about that in the least.

I cleared 50,000 words on the rough draft work in progress. In my warped little brain, even though it isn’t finished, I consider it officially book length. Woo!!!

Character concept illustration status 2.8 of 4 complete. I’ve become increasingly fascinated by concept art in general. I’ve spent a lot of time gawking at it on Deviant Art and Pinterest and thinking about how adding that level of visuals to my marketing efforts could really draw people into the stories.

A picture is worth a thousand words. I believe that.

Aside from the realization of what this kind of art could do for my books, I also feel myself settling into a new method of drawing. Part of the delay with the illustrations has been in pushing through the feelings of suckishness to establish a new process.

The new drawing process goes like this. Rough sketch, probably on the ipad. Import it to fireworks to make it a vector so I can nitpick the layout and make initial color selections (which are not final). Send it over to photoshop so I can rough up the lines again to make it look more organic and paint the thing.
If it isn’t freakishly detailed, I could probably do one now, start to finish, in about 6-8 hours. Maybe less if I’m not indecisive.

Unrelated image of the day : scene from the front yard. I don’t know why the background is so hazy. I didn’t alter the image and I don’t live in Silent Hill. The sun wasn’t even over there.

movies: Mama and Magic Mike

Hi! I hear tell we’re in for some crazy weather, 100mph winds and storms and such. I will be hanging out in the basement this evening. But before we batten down the hatches, I have movies!

Mama

Description from imdb: “Annabel and Lucas are faced with the challenge of raising his young nieces that were left alone in the forest for 5 years…. but how alone were they?”

Wow this movie is creepy. It has kick ass special effects and an especially hideous ghost. Not only that, the story is good. Anyone can make a slasher flick. True horror movie making skill is in the plot.

This movie also did a very good job with characters. Everyone is unique. Even the two little girls, the sisters raised by mama, have distinct personalities. And mama herself isn’t just an enraged poltergeist.

Mama gets an A.

 

 

Magic Mike

Description from imdb: “A male stripper teaches a younger performer how to party, pick up women, and make easy money.”

Hmmmm….where to start. I’m not really into guys stripping because I think it’s kind of weird and unnatural. So, some of that level of appeal with this movie is lost on me. The eye candy was still pretty good, regardless.

Mike is played by Channing Tatum and holy crap can that guy dance. He’s like a dancing genius. He’s funny and cute and charming pretty much throughout the movie. He’s also tragic in some ways because of the stripper lifestyle, the people he has to interact with and the fact that despite the fact he’s working his ass off, he can’t quite get to where he needs to be. He makes the movie worth watching.

The same cannot be said for the primary female character, Brooke (cody horne). While she does have some decent dialog, the girl never smiles. She is the grumpy cat of people. It got kind of annoying, like emotional monotone.

Another, more significant complaint is that the movie just abruptly ends. There’s no solid conclusion, like the writers got bored, tossed the script aside and skipped on their merry way.

Magic Mike gets a C.

 

nerd rant: the xbox one devil

I know, I know, today is supposed to be the movie post. I have one written, but I decided to talk about something else today because it’s bothering me.

I’m a gamer. I’ve been a gamer since the dawn of Commodore 64. I still play on an almost daily basis, not the 64, of course. I currently have a wii, a ps3 and an xbox 360. PS3 is my preference.

I was reading about the xbox one today and the direction they’re going has royally pissed me off. I wish I could find the article I read earlier today so I could share the link, but I can’t find it now. I think it was on Yahoo.

So, the used game thing is what everyone is talking about the most, it seems. Obviously, this is about corporate greed. I buy most of my games used. I do not buy all of my games used. Some games, I buy used and then, if I like the series well enough, I buy the subsequent releases new.

Apparently the powers that be have decided that buying used games is akin to shady business. I have a newsflash for them. Those games I bought used? I wouldn’t have purchased them new. Or else I would’ve done that in the beginning.

That aside, this new thing. This new thing has my hackles up, for real. Apparently, the xbox one needs an internet connection every day or so or the game function of the console is deactivated.

Sorry anyone who doesn’t have constant access to an internet connection. For you, the xbox one is an over-priced DVD player, but hey, you have that going for you.

If this is real (and I sincerely hope it isn’t), it’s a move in a very wrong direction. Tell me, Microsoft. What are the advantages of dropping $400 or whatever you plan to charge to have my content so tightly controlled that it’s rendered useless if my connection goes down for a few days? Why exactly would I want this product?

This is one of those times where we get to decide how our culture moves forward. There will be people who will buy this system only because it’s an xbox. They have fans like that.

Gamers need to reject this product with enthusiasm. Vote with your dollars.

If enough people buy the xbox one under these circumstances, that’s a vote for this new system, the iron grip on games we did actually pay money for. It’s an invitation for them to find out how much farther they can push us. Hey, why not charge us an hourly rate? Hell, maybe we can pay a monthly bill just for the honor of having an xbox in our house.

I vote no. Microsoft will not receive one penny from me for xbox anything if this is how they plan to treat their customers.

Done.

I am alive

I swear I am. I have no movie post this week, mostly because I have had no time to watch a movie. Isn’t that horrible? I think it is. We’ve been moving our junk to the new place, and the amount of it is overwhelming. I don’t understand how we fit it all in that tiny house.

The new house is bigger, thank God. Living somewhere new after so long (10 years) feels very awkward. The distribution of space is different. Like, the bathroom cabinet, for example. The new one is bigger but it’s divided into so many drawers and tiny cabinets that I can’t fit as much in there.

I haven’t written squat in the last 5 days or so. Maybe a few paragraphs? And the character concept drawings? Honey, fuggettaboutit. I haven’t slapped down line 1. There has also been no tv watching, no working out, very little video gaming, and very little sitting down in general. My life has become an endless series of boxes. I grow weary of this business.

The house will be awesome once we settle in. I know this. And I’ll get back to my regularly scheduled shenanigans soon enough. Blog attendance will be sporadic for the next week or two.

As for Max, he has already found a new sun beam. His work is done.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Handwritten Manuscript for the First Page of Gatsby

Reblogged from biblioklept:

(Via/more).

Very cool.

movie: The Dictator

 

Movie: The Dictator

Description from IMDB:  “The heroic story of a dictator who risks his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed.”

This one is quick because I have stuff to do.

Oh my. Where to begin. First, this was better than Borat. I freaking hated Borat.

Aladeen, the main character, has zero redeeming qualities, which is what makes him both amusing and incredibly obnoxious at the same time. Anna Faris is in it, too. Not her best work. Her character, while better than Aladeen, was pretty brainless.

For the most part, the movie was funny with the same kind of humor as Borat, that ha ha let’s laugh at the foreign guy. It was absurd, lots of sex jokes, etc. Most of this probably sounds like complaining, but I did actually like the movie. The Dictator gets a B+.