Not much to say today… the power went out for no reason, that was memorialable. Spent some time going through old video tapes and found some funny old home movies, those were memorialable.
According to film news websites, Pirates 3 failed to surpass its prequel in terms of opening weekend profits, and therefore of course failed to surpass Spider-Man 3‘s record. This is good, because Pirates 3 is a dumb movie! See my review from earlier…
Woohoo, I’ve finished “Broken Swords”! That didn’t take long. Nothing like the simple ABCBA format, eh? I don’t have time to say much else today, so enjoy the music… I’ll post a link to the MP3 download eventually on my MP3’s page, but in the meantime you can hear it in this fine YouTube video:
Last night I posted the score to my “Trio for Harp, Flute, and Oboe” on my MP3’s page (see Opus 21). People on YouTube have been asking to see it, it seems to be my most popular piece there.
I hope to start my Christmas piece for the “GPO Christmas 2007” album soon, but I just started a new piece this morning. I don’t think it will be a very long one, nothing like “Hour by Hour”, but instead short and sweet. I’m thinking about calling it “Broken Swords” or “The Broken Sword” … for some reason that’s just what I see when I composed the first melody. It’s in F minor, so it has that minor feel to it.
I did work on my book, The Game of Gynwig, a bit… I’m trudging through Chapter 12. Exciting, huh?
Horrible. 2 out of 10 stars. I really hate where all the characters ended up, and the ending is ridiculous. So, overall, these Pirates of the Caribbean movies have gone downhill. The first one was the best, which I’d probably rate an 8 out of 10. The second one wasn’t as good, but at least it had the prospect of setting up storylines for this film, Pirates 3. But this third one just stunk, with sudden pointless character deaths and a stupid ending. I fear they may have been setting up the ending in a way that would allow for more Pirate movies that don’t need all the characters, in which case, shame on them.
That said, the special effects were still spectacular, and it’s a shame they had to waste such computing power on such a dumb story. The music was also great, I look forward to getting the soundtrack in the mail.
I also saw The Good Shepherd a few days ago. I’d give it a 4 out of 10 stars. It was too choppy, I got the sense Robert De Niro was striving to be a less violent version of Scorsese, but failed. Scorsese’s choppy scenes work, Robert De Niro’s choppiness is pointless. But it did have some poetic dialogue (quite literally).
At Yahoo Movies, they’ve got a trailer for The Golden Compass up, which looks pretty bad. I’m so saddened. The special effects just look bland, especially compared to the standards set up by the Pirate movies and Lord of the Rings. Granted, the film is still in post production, so perhaps they’ll improve on some things, but in my opinion the entire style of the fantasy world in the film is too bland, too clean to feel real. Too bad. (And the mouth movements of the talking bear were ridiculous… they better work on that.)
I can’t say much tonight (again) because I’m off to see Pirates 3 tonight and I’m trying to catch up on the saga by watching Pirates 2… I’ll post a review of Pirates 3 tomorrow… maybe… if I feel like it.
I’m not going to dedicate a lot of time to this post because I’ve been up for over 24 hours and I’m feeling kind of… well… tired. However, I am working on the ending to my “Hour by Hour” piece, the longest piece of music I’ve ever written which has taken me about 3 months to compose. I’m excited to have reached the end and I’m putting the finishing touches on it now. Woohoo!
I ordered the new Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack and the book The Black Swan from Amazon.com today. Woohoo!
I saw the film Children of Men last night. I’d give it a 7 out of 10. In contrast to Copying Beethoven‘s horrible cinematography, this film had brilliant cinematography, with superb long single-shot takes (or at least seemingly single-shot takes). It is some of the best cinematography I have ever seen. That said, the story left me wanting a bit more. Although it had a good ending (well, a Pyrrhic victory ending at least), I still felt it was incomplete. I want to know what happens further on down the line, where are the characters five years or so down the road? How does the world get better? Overall though, good film, I liked it.
In other news, I just found out today that Lloyd Alexander died on May 17 at the age of 83. 🙁
I spent hours planting flowers today. I have outdoor allergies this season, so I was sniffing and wheezing the whole time, but I did catch up on some podcast listening. I also went to Blockbuster and got some movies, so perhaps I’ll blog some reviews to those movies eventually. Haven’t done much else today, those flowers took up all my time.
Oh, I did subscribe to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for a year, so I’m looking forward to my first edition of that arriving in the mail, but who knows how long that will take. I also thought up an idea for a fantasy short story. How many years do you think it will take me to get published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction? I have two rejections from them so far… there will hopefully be more to come… (“hopefully” because it implies that I actually finish more short stories).
I was listening to The Dragon Page podcast last night in which John Scalzi (an author I have never heard of before though his books look interesting) was interviewed. I’m going to paraphrase here, but if you listen to the original podcast you can hear his exact words. Basically Scalzi said that after he wrote a certain book, fans asked him why he did this and why he did that. Scalzi said in the podcast that there really was no reason, “I was lazy and that’s the way I decided to do it.” But that’s not what he told fans because he was working on a sequel. He told fans something to the effect of “ah, yes, there’s a reason for that…” and then he wrote in the reason to the sequel. And now when people ask him about reasons for things in the sequel, he says “oh, really?” with an open ear, for the readers are unknowingly encouraging him to write about reasons for certain things. I just thought that was funny.
One of the things that came up in the interview is how the readers gave authors way too much credit for things they might not necessarily have been thinking about when actually writing. Some authors probably try to make themselves appear smarter by pretending that such things certainly were the intent. I don’t think this is necessarily a harmful way of doing business, but it can get plain stupid when you have English teachers (*cough* Dr. Walker *cough*) who make you write essays on such things, as if prose has to be taught by analyzing the drivel the English department presents as literature.
I saw Shrek the Third last night and I’d give it a 6 out of 10 stars, the same rating I’d give Shrek 2, though I’d say this latest edition is better than Shrek 2. It is certainly hilarious, filled with all that good old Shrek humor, but when it comes to the sappy parts in which the characters have to talk about their feelings and the lessons they’ve learned and such, dialogue still comes across as far too forced, which for some reason I didn’t sense with the first film. I would much prefer the film to be twice as long (about 3 hours) and have that much more character and story development (and more orchestral music scoring and less pop music), but I guess most audiences wouldn’t much care for that! Still, I enjoyed it, and I would certainly recommend it if you enjoyed the first two films.
Shrek 4 is scheduled to come out in 2010, according to imdb.com, so we’ll have to wait a few years…
I really haven’t been up to much else worth mentioning… it is extremely nice to be out of school.
P.S. For movie ratings, 4 is average, so anything above a 4 is good and anything below a 4 is bad, while 4 itself is neutral.