Immortals, Newfies, and Slackers

Ramirez: You cannot die, MacLeod. Accept it.
Connor: I hate you!
Ramirez: Good. That is a perfect way to start.
-Highlander

School doesn't start for another two weeks, and my campus job doesn't resume for one. I don't start babysitting again until after Laborday. All together, this means all I'm doing right now is working at the bar three days a week. So, that accounts for about twenty some hours a week which are already spoken for. Sheesh, compare that to my schedule for my last semester of my undergrad studies:

Monday, School 10:00-8:30
Tuesday, School 9:00-2:30, Bar 4:00-9:00 (or later)
Wednesday, School 10:00-3:00, Bar 4:00-9:00
Thursday, School 9:00-2:30, Bar 4:00-10:00 (usually)
Friday, School 10:00-3:00, Bar 4:00-9:00
Saturday, Bar 4:00-9:00

Counted in with the school hours are the ten hours a week I worked as a tutor in the Writing Room on campus. What all the above means is that I was working full time while also carrying eighteen credit hours. So, the fifty + hour "work" week was my norm. Now, to more than halve that... I don't quite know what to do with myself and I'm feeling a bit of slacker guilt. Fortunately, I only have a week before I start back up with having stuff to do all the time. Free time is all about that happy medium, it's good to have some, but once you hit a certain point, it starts to grate a bit.

Well, here's my entertainment updates: I've taken Hercules: The Legendary Journeys off my Netflix queue. The plots quickly got to the point of boring predictability and they had one too many villains laughing maniacally. Yeah, it's a peeve. I mean, come on, the good villains are the ones who, creepy as they are, you can actually understand where they're coming from. Take the Operative from Serenity who's all the more flesh-crawly because he's so sincere about how he's making the world a better place. I'm going to try Xena, because though it's the same ilk, I remember liking it more than Hercules. So, we'll see how that goes. It'll be a while, though, I'm going to do Futurama first. That, and Highlander-which has become my new TV series addiction. I mean, come on, Duncan MacLeod is totally badass and Tessa's no wimp, and Richie is wonderful because he's bad. It's the Jayne appeal, though Richie is far less hardcore. What is about "bad" characters that makes them so instantly likeable?

Movie Review: Highlander. I adore the show, so it made sense to check out the movie that started it all. The dialogue is good, the characters are too, and it scores extra points for having Sean Connery. Connor's nemesis, the Kurgan, is so over-the-top as to be almost too tacky for words, but the general groundedness of the rest is enough to keep the Kurgan menacing and not just comical. To compare the movie to the series, I was vastly entertained at how much they blatantly changed from one to the other. Namely, the movie ends the whole "There can be only one" idea, because there is only one at the end. So, what's the point about having a show about Duncan if he doesn't win the Prize? But, that's why they changed it, eh? The other one that sticks out is the movie implies more invincibility-stab an immortal in the heart and they just keep on going-whereas in the series if you stab an immortal in the heart, they would "die" for a while before they revived. I like the series approach better. Right, to sum it all up-the movie is fun, and the series is too, but they are different animals. Which makes the series pilot totally ludicrous (since "Connor" makes an appearance as Duncan's clansman), but hey, you can't win 'em all.

Movie Review: The Shipping News. Alan Doyle (of the band Great Big Sea) says the book didn't quite capture Newfoundland, but the movie nailed it. Given such an endorsement, how could I not watch? Especially given that both Julianne Moore and Judi Dench star, with Cate Blanchett as a minor (yet essential) role. As an added bonus, Rhys Ifans makes an appearance as one of the Gammy Bird reporters. He would be the same guy who played Danny in Danny Deckchair, though how he wound up in this flick is completely beyond me (not that I'm complaining, mind you). The movie itself was great, one of the few I'd go out of my way to watch twice, in fact. Kevin Spacey is the main character, a screwed up guy who moves to Newfoundland after his wife (Blanchett) abandons him. He does a good job of going through the character's journey. Trivia note: the actress who plays Spacey's daughter was actually three actresses-a set of triplets. My favorite aspect of the movie has to be how the Quoyle's history unfolds and how big a role the setting itself plays into the story.

Book Review: Duchess of Nothing, by Heather McGowan. It has great reviews, and very pretty prose, but I abandoned it anyway. I'm in the mood for story right now, not pretty prose. From skimming a bit here and there, I know all the essentials of the story, so why read the rest? It doesn't help, either, that there are pages of text without a single paragraph break, that McGowan refuses to use quotations to mark dialogue, or that she thinks nothing of starting sentences with "and" or "but." Minor things on their own, but pile them up and I want to take her aside and say, "Look, why are you making your prose intentionally hard to read? Clean up the prose or else you're going to irritate people, which means they won't read this." It's a style thing, I know, I just get frustrated when the style becomes more important than the story. I'm of a Hemingway frame of mind-keep it simple, tell us what we need to know as efficiently as possible so we can start paying attention to what the story's about vs. how it's written. So, I'm not saying it's a bad book, there's a great chance that you could absolutely love it. I just didn't.