New Formats, Movies, and Movie Trailers

Finals week approaches, and with it, I must turn my writing skills from constructing fantasy stories to churnings out essays. I've had a relatively easy time of it so far, but crunch time is approaching. Still, once that's over, I'm home free. Creative Writing doesn't have a final exam, two of my classes' finals are take-home essays, and studying isn't necessary for English finals.

Still, the final research essay writing is going to be strenuous. At least I get to use films for some of my source materials. For my Canadian Lit class, my prof allowed me to pursue a topic in how Americans portray Canadians comically in film - so I got to watch South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Canadian Bacon, and Dudley Do-Right. Okay, so only one of those films could actually be considered good (that would be South Park, which has had me staying up to watch actual episodes now at 10:30 on the Comedy Network), but they all had something to say about the film. But I can't tell you guys that! I have to write it into my essay!

Also - I discovered the Blogger has a new format which allows for tags, which is excellent, in my opinion. I'm going to see if I can edit previous posts to do this as well. There are tons of posts that would have been a million times easier to find if they had tags.

The past couple of weeks have been generally uneventful, except for a few choice moments. Camilla Gibb is my Univeristy's Writer-In-Residence for the fall semester, and I gave her a copy of "Parasite: A Love Story" when she came to lecture at my Creative Writing class. Well, a few weeks later, we had a meeting, where she basically told me how much she loved it. Really! She had good critical comments, of course (like chopping off the last few paragraphs - which has helped more than few of my stories become better), but she actually said, "I'm sorry this meeting's so brief. There just isn't enough wrong with [your story]!"

*fangirlsqueal*Eeeeeeee!*squeal*

Once I get marked on it in Creative Writing, I'm submitting it, and because it has a sci-fi bent, I might try Asimov's, or Analog...or maybe something smaller. ^_^;; I still haven't heard back from On Spec, and they're situated in my city! And I sent my story in months ago! Argh. Camilla Gibb once said she had to wait three years before an accepted story got published. Short-story writing doesn't seem to be the best way to make a living, but right now I don't think I'm ready to write novels yet. I have trouble managing groups of characters, and subplots, and setting--so of course, writing stories with a more limited scope is much simpler.

And as for movie news - I saw the new Spider-Man 3 trailer! Well, actually, I saw both the trailers - the official one, and the leaked one with Venom footage that got pulled off YouTube and Ain't It Cool News by Sony's henchman. The first one, while revealing some good scenes, was altogether disappointing (read: no Venom, little Topher, no Gwen). The second one was much better--even though the special effects scenes in that one weren't finished yet. It was altogether more dramatic and cohesive, I felt. And the Venom footage was completely awesome! Teeth, voice, look - perfect. I have the feeling that while the official one will be shown with Casino Royale, this second one (once it's finished) will be the second trailer shown when Ghostrider comes out in February. I can't wait.

Also, I'm trying very hard to like the upcoming Dax Shepard movies. He was excellent, excellent in Zathura - and the trailers for Employee of the Month and Let's Go to Prison looked funny. And, from what limited reviews there are, he's considered one of the funnier characters in Mike Judge's criminally undermarketed Idiocracy. So I'm trying to be optimistic. Employee of the Month had several good points about it - although most of them were due to Dane Cook (not entirely offensive, as I assumed he would be) and Shepard. But the reviews for Prison look deadly, and worst of all, lots of the reviewers are saying, "Well, it's a Dax Shepard movie. What did you expect?"

What? No! Watch Zathura, people! Argh!

Someone cast him in a good movie - it's bad enough that 70% of Patrick Dempsey's movies are absolute crap (although Enchanted looks to be fantastic - if a long way off)

Ah well, I guess even if that doesn't pan out, I still have Tobey Maguire (Spider-Man 3, The Good German) and Topher Grace (Spider-Man 3, The Crusaders) to star in movies worth spending money on.