June Meeting & Movies

New Guy: “When can I submit?”
Jayne: “Next meeting, but it better not suck.”

Granted, Jayne’s comment might seem a bit rude out of context, but last night everyone was rather entertained by it. The new guy is, I'm guessing, about seventeen-ish and a bit of a punk, so he took her comment in stride. I was looking forward to the Writer’s Group meeting for a while. It’s always nice to go to the meetings, but especially to go to dinner afterward. Almost inevitably, it comes down to Jayne, Sean, Debra, and I after the others have gone home.

Besides gossip, we also talk shop-like how Debra met Jayne’s three rejection slip challenge, or how Jayne’s working on a short story collection. Jayne’s challenge, by the way, was that each person in the group should submit their work to magazines, agents, etc. Everyone who gets at least three rejection slips within the year wins baked goods. The idea isn’t that rejection is what we strive for, but rather to get our stuff out in the world. A rejection slip at least proves that you submitted something. Of course, any acceptance counts as two rejections.

My status in the challenge is as a slacker, I did my first submission and have yet to get moving on others. First, though, I’d best get my financial aid paperwork in order because no student loan means having to drop a class for fall so tuition’s not so expensive, and I really don’t want to do that.

Movie Review: Pulp Fiction. It’s a pretty famous/infamous movie so I decided it was time for me to watch it. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but this flick surpassed it. Let me preface by saying I haven’t been overly impressed with other Quentin Tarantino work I’ve seen, so to watch the snappy dialogue and clever plotting of Pulp Fiction impressed me. I like the knot-work of it, all the separate threads meeting up together, and it was very well done with respect to not getting confusing. My only criticism is that the story titles did nothing for the movie.

Movie Review: Perfect Blue. My pen pal recommended this one to me a while back and, after being on hold in my Netflix queue for quite a long time, it finally arrived in my mail box. Now, it’s Anime and generally, I’m not too interested in the genre. However, I thought this one was pretty good. Granted, most of the gore is cheesy and superfluous, but the suspense worked well. The story gets a little muddled toward the end, and the twist didn’t satisfy all of the questions that crop up about the main character’s perception of reality. So, while it was pretty good with some elements, others left me hanging.

Movie Review: Bettie Page: Dark Angel. I came across an article about the other movie, The Notorious Bettie Page, and thought I’d look at this one while I waited on the other. Oh boy, I should have saved myself the trouble. The script is poorly written, the lighting and camera angles make it look like a home video and the “videos” of Page doing her thing are much more boring than “risqué.” Sure, a minute or two of “Whip Dance” might have been interesting as a look into the life, but when it goes on and on for ten minutes of nothing but her shuffling about with a whip it gets really tedious really fast. There were two good points in the movie though, the costumes and the music. Even so, I found myself skipping ahead a great deal, trying to find the interesting part. Sadly, there was none.