OF SUBSTANCE AND BEAUTY

Tags

adventure, cinematography, dvd, feminism, hunting, inspiration, Mongolia, movies, review

High in the Mongolian mountains, a girl name Aisholpan breaks a tradition centuries old. With the help of supportive parents, an especially patient and loving father, this thirteen-year-old girl demonstrates courage, diligence, and a character we can only hope our own children will emulate.

The dynamic cover of THE EAGLE HUNTRESS caught my eye at the library. Took it home, watched it, and was utterly entranced throughout. I next bought it and sent it to my sister, whose background is in political science, American government, and Asian studies. This documentary would appeal to her, due to her understanding of the social challenges Asian girls endure, its unique story, and the spectacular cinematography. The entire film is a masterpiece of filmmaking achieved under difficult environmental and financial circumstances.

Yes, it’s a documentary, (swallow that derisive yawn), but it’s more exciting and spellbinding than any action feature film I’ve seen in years. Today’s action/ adventure movies are overburdened by graphics. Audiences are becoming inured to the mayhem. Millions are spent on saturating/ bombarding the viewer, and yet none of them—and I’ve seen almost all of them—evoked the excitement of this story. There was no big money backing this work. No options for a second take. A drone, a crane and a few cameras and almost all of it done in one-shot filming. The landscape, action, storyline, all of it, is breath-catching in its beauty, simplicity, and most especially the bravery of a girl who would not give up on her dream.

Societies and cultures are crumbling, values such as honesty and integrity negated and ignored. This film soars above all the unpleasantness of our present failings, the vulgarity, apathy and overindulgence, illustrating the substance of honor and the determination to excel in the face of all opposition.

https://www.amazon.com/Eagle-Huntress-Otto-Bell/dp/B01MU34PJC/ref=sr_1_2?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1498466724&sr=1-2&keywords=the+eagle+huntress

 

M.L Rigdon (aka Julia Donner)

Follow on Twitter @RigdonML

Blog: https://historyfanforever.wordpress.com/

Website http://www.MLRigdon.com

 

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Scuba Dude Saves Writer

Tags

adventure, artifact, Bermuda, Marianas, ocean, Pacific, Plot, research, ROV, Scuba Diving

The gear shift from one genre to another can be tricky. A different writing voice is required for each, and the span between contemporary and regency is daunting. Contemporary is snappy, the use of adverbs and adjectives minimal, while regency is the opposite. Historical regency is frou-frou and contemporary as uncompromising as a sharp blade. Both require research, for me at least, and my problem is getting sucked into history research. (Lead-in to this theme.)

In a few months, I need to finish the third book in a contemporary romantic action series. (Another Phil Hafeldt Adventure.) Two glitches came up and have kept me stalled. One is tied to the previous confession of spending too much time in the past and not enough time in the present. An integral aspect of the next Phil book is the search for an artifact that begins in the Bermuda Triangle area and moves to the Western Pacific. Problems and conflicts revolve around Phil’s phobia’s—enclosed spaces, anything underwater and getting trapped in either, lying guys, her fiancé’s mother, the possibility of never eating another cheeseburger—to name a few.

The glitch in the plot came with a huge deficit in my personal experience. I love being by the ocean, standing at its edge, smelling the brine. After more than one encounter with rip tide, I do not go in the ocean and have no understanding of scuba diving. The closest I’ve gotten to it was watching Sea Hunt as a kid.

Help, I’m drowning in a literary sense. “Go to an expert,” my brain hysterically screams.

Enter Ali, Alistair Dunnett, scuba diver dude. Ten minutes into a discussion with Ali uncovers my ignorance and saves me from writer ignominy and every scribbler’s horror: The Honking Huge Mistake In Print. While Ali patiently answers questions, one of the main action portions of my plot plummets to a horrible death. Diving won’t work, is totally out of the question, but in the next breath, Ali, herein to be known as SDD, supplies my feeble dues ex machina with an even better idea: Phil gets to watch her fiancé via a ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) camera when he gets sucked over the edge of the Marianas Trench. Oh, yeah, the brain is flying now, boys and girls. Give Phil some bad guy’s head to crack, piece o’cake, but freaks when she’s forced to watch her guy disappear from the viewer into the deepest underwater hole on earth.

What’s she going to do to fix this? Don’t know. Haven’t gotten there yet, but will.

So thanks to SDD, I (hopefully) won’t be humiliating myself in print and have been given an idea for a fantastic action sequence. See photo of my hero, a la scuba in Cozumel.

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Thanks again, Ali!

M.L Rigdon (aka Julia Donner)

Follow on Twitter @RigdonML

Website http://www.MLRigdon.com

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Julia-Donner

 

My Secret Sin

Tags

adventure, ancient history, Egypt, Stonehenge, temptation, y

Sometimes temptation sucks me in. OK, so it’s more often than sometimes. In this instance, I was lured by a stack of magazines. They’d been set out for anyone to read, not take home. But I couldn’t resist and didn’t.

I promise to return it tomorrow. Or the next day. If I’m done.

You see, it’s a subject I can’t resist, archaeology. The glossy cover is a delicious photo of the pharaoh Amenhotep III rendered in quartzite, serene and smiling. This article is about a new find in the Valley of the Kings that doesn’t pertain to kings or queens, but about less elevated people. Historical detritus of every day folks, like us, isn’t usually hashed over with the same amount of glee as the finds that yield the treasures of the rich and famous. But for me, archaeology is a form of controlled substance, and here’s an article that gives a peek into the lives of every day Egyptians. These are the people who thousands of years ago used honey on bone fractures, which is starting to catch on today. Skulls are found with trepanning holes, brain surgery folks, and they’ve unearthed a battery that worked. Didn’t you ever wonder how they painted all those murals with no smoke smudges on the tomb ceilings?

Yeah, I’ll admit to being a bit loony about ancient history. There’s so much we don’t know and so much that we believed to be true and are now discovering it’s wrong.

I love reading about archeology so much that I made up a character for one of my books, Philadelphia Hafeldt, spoofing Indy Jones. I’m hooked on it because it’s the investigation of the mysteries of history contemplated, studied, and on occasion, figured out with accuracy.

Fossilized history can be tricky. Relics unearthed have provided educated types with opportunities to proclaim their discoveries as definitive. History’s joke is that often down the road, the facts turn out to be not so true. (Did George really chop down that cherry tree?) Some overlooked piece of the grand puzzle gets tweaked into place, and poof, up goes the definitive fact. So what is real? Will these discoveries change our lives?

In this issue, there are the top ten discoveries of 2014. I drool during the reading of that article. There are pictures of misty, mystical jungles, shipwrecks found, and perhaps the juiciest bit of all, we learn that the Stonehenge we see is only the tip of a vast site. More structures are found underground. Nowadays, buried history is having a hard time staying buried with the onset of ground-penetrating radar, aerial laser scanning, and other remote sensing, hi-tech equipment.

On the other hand, I have a lot of faith in oral history, the stories told by aboriginals and pooh-poohed by accepted experts because it can’t be authenticated with physical evidence. I was entranced by the ending of Enemy Mine, the part about coming of age and reciting one’s entire family ancestry.

One of the purposes of history, for me, is seeing how we don’t change much as people, especially when one considers that the same mistakes keep being made, over and over, down through the ages. On the upside, there’s always a chance to learn, since history never ends.