THE GREAT WALL

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Asian, China, fantasy, films, Graphics, Matt Damon, movies, review, The Great Wall

The Great Wall

Comments have been made about a Caucasian taking part in a Chinese legend. The gist of the complaint questioned why a white guy is in the story at all. (Hello! Probably because the story is about a white guy, a thief and mercenary, who comes of age a bit late in life.) Matt Damon’s manner of understated acting is an added bonus in the fantasy-slash-action adventure film genre, where characters tend to gnaw every available inch of scenery. (Insert eye roll here.)

Another relief while watching was the judicious use of blood spatter. Typically, buckets of red are splashed everywhere. Injuries and dismemberments happened, but were quick and not gratuitously gruesome. (IMHO that’s a sign of poor screenwriting and direction. Can’t think of something original, so let’s throw some blood and gore at it. Yawn.)

China has the resources, dedication, and centuries of exquisite cultural artistry to create visual beauty. (Who can forget the magical bamboo forest scenes in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?) Asian films tend to overwhelm with their vast casting and equally massive production budgets. Sometimes it gets a bit much, but this film is a perfect example of controlled excess. American made fantasy and sci-fi films tend to compensate with over the top graphics. Sometimes it’s done well. For me, the best work in US productions are the Star Wars films. (I do not include Rogue One. The facial reconstruction at the end, and you know what I mean, was absolutely creepy!)

Keeping that in mind, some things can be overlooked and others can’t, such as blatantly sloppy production work. There is none of that silliness in The Great Wall. The costuming is gorgeous, lavish colors for the different military divisions in contrast to the utilitarian and coarse armor of the round-eyed mercenaries, which in subtext, illustrates the honorable character of the Chinese and the utter lack of elevated values in the white mercenaries. A nice touch, that.

In current fantasy filming, it often boils down to the graphics. The scenic design in this film was laid out on the sort of grand scale only Asian films are able to financially create. Large scale graphics require discipline and a monumental effort in teamwork, and this film did it well. Compare it to the childish and cheesy backgrounds in Gods of Egypt and the absolutely horrible mess of the chariot horse somehow landing up in the stadium seating and trampling the audience in the flimsy remake of Ben Hur.

There was only one weak point in the story and to explain it involves a major spoiler. It’s not worth the fuss since it comes near the end and doesn’t ruin the whole. Artistically, I came away satisfied and impressed, even encouraged. The protagonist followed through on the classic story arc of personal change. A nation’s resolve to protect itself, to sacrifice to save others, to stand with courage and determination in the face of impossible odds is a familiar theme in fantasy. This film brought it to life—showed the meaning of honor and integrity to oneself and others—attributes sadly absent in our present political climate and culture of films exemplifying antiheroes smashing up the scenery and crashing cars. The Great Wall gives us real heroes, men and women, Asian and Caucasian, who give all they have to protect others and do their duty, as our military does today—our last vestige of national honor. This film is a reminder that it still exists in some of us. I left refreshed.

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WHO LET THE DRAGONS OUT

Tags

Atlanitis, dragons, fantasy, romane, writing, YA

 

So, I’m toiling away on the last bits of Canticle of Destruction, the third installment of the Songs of Atlanitis YA fantasy series. I put dragons in my first fantasy series (called them fflorin) and figured, what the heck, might as well put dragons in this series. I like ‘em. So do others. In they go. But of course, they have to be part of a historical twist within the story arc and coincide with the previous books. Check. Check.

Anyway, the last six months have thrown my goals off track due to involvement with a friend’s estate and collaborating with her writing. Won’t do that again. Doing so proved painfully illustrative and validated a set of rules my critique partner, Judy Post, aka Judi Lynn, and I have learned to our cost. Rule Two—which comes after the sacred Rule One of writing one’s tushie off every day—is never, EVER let up on promoting your own work. I did for the last months, spending more time elsewhere, but always managing to get some writing done. Still, I dismally failed at Rule Two: promote and advertise your work until you die. Or lie bleeding out on the floor.

The year started off great with a fabulous bounce from an ad on BookBub for the regency series written as Julia Donner. Yes, I do the no-no of writing under more than one name. Here comes the whine: I gotta do more than one genre!

Fortunately, and blessedly, as writers in this day and present industry construct, we no longer have to line up under the sign that says writers MUST follow a formulaic code of composition. Of course, that outdated rule must be observed if one is signed with a traditional publisher. (Shoulder shrug here.) That’s a given, but writers now have a wide range of choices. Whether we go with the traditional publishing path or not, we all have to promote ourselves. The days of book junketing is pretty much dead and gone, unless your agent has signed you for a million buck deal with a clause that clearly states the publisher will provide this. Ergo, Rule Two (hence known as the Eleventh Commandment) is not to be forgotten, never ignored. I did to my cost, my sales sagged, and now I’ve got to get back on board the advertising express.

At the end of the month, I hope to have that new YA fantasy up and live on Amazon and two (yes, count them, two) campaigns running. This means (insert dramatic groan) I have to scour pages and pages of advertising ideas. As writer and playwright friend, Rachel Roberts has expressed, it’s not easy to toot one’s own horn. Can’t agree more. I’ve endured  the disappointment of three declines from BookBub in the last months. Have to wait for a while to resubmit, but in the interim, look out Twitter, here I come.

Wrapping up, publicizing one’s work is wicked heart-wrenching—a hair-pulling, out- loud wailing, and lying-on-the-floor-heel-kicking endeavor. But it’s the only way to sell the books we’ve sweated blood and rained tears on the keyboard to bring to life. So bring on the dragons and burn up the procrastination tactics. Your work and what you have to say is worth it.

While we’re on the subject of horn-tooting, Judi Lynn’s latest installment of the delicious Mill Pond Romance series, Love on Tap, is now available for presale. Please take a looksee on Amazon, Face Book or her webpage:

Judi Lynn

http://www.judithpostswritingmusings.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

Got a Rise Outta Moi

Tags

Bible, Easter, fantasy, Fiennes, film review, Passion Story, Risen, Scripture

It’s that time of year when religion theme movies come out to play. I was ready for some religious action and went with hope to see Risen.

Let’s start with what I loved. There’s only been one depiction of Christ that I’ve liked and that was in the Matthew Series. In this film, Cliff Curtis has a sweetness about his portrayal that drew me in. The film locations and sets take the viewer to the time period. I delighted in the correct use of Christ’s given name, not the twisted, Latin version we use today.

Joe Fiennes had the tough job of carrying the story along, and he accomplished this but just barely. He looked more comfortable in the battle scenes, which were well conceived, depicting how the Roman military conquered the known world. (China was thousands of years ahead of Western Civilization at this point in time, but that’s another story.) Poor Joe attempting to work his way through a mystery, and find his path after his discoveries, well…not so much. Joe sort of deflated as a regular guy.

I also loved the political aspects of the film, the showing of another perspective and backroom dealings, of how religious leaders plotted to get rid of a threat to their power structure and sleazy dealings in the Temple. (Recall the turning over the tables in the courtyard? Caiaphas and his family had control of that side of the business.)

The way the Pharisees used Pilot and Pilot hoped to use them to secure his own position was nicely rendered. Pilot was definitely under the gun with Tiberius about to visit the troubled Palestine. Tiberius was a vile man and worse emperor. He had no patience for inferiors bungling up the works. In this film version, Caiaphas is marvelously slimy and evil in contrast to the dignified and holy Joseph of Arimathea, a true servant of God. These character contrasts and Curtis’s depiction of Christ made the picture in my opinion.

The clinkers were the use of stirrups and saddles on military mounts. Nuh-uh. Don’t believe me. Look at the bas-reliefs that exist. Egyptians didn’t use stirrups either. They were used elsewhere in the world, but not like what we have today and used in this film. Then there was the funky scene where Joe gets a costume change all within the same time segment. Guess they had to keep the actors on horseback somehow.

There were a couple of other silly things but they didn’t bother me much. What really got to me is coming next, the Mary Magdalene bashing. It goes on and on, even though it has no scriptural verification.

Pope Gregory I took it upon himself to do some Biblical revisionism during a sermon wherein he set Mary M. down as a prostitute. And so the insult was born. The ugly lie has held on throughout the centuries, perpetuated by men, in text, art and repeatedly in film—yeah, that’s you Mel Gibson. This saddens me, especially since I otherwise liked this film. Even got teary-eyed in places. It’s still no excuse for trashing a woman Christ loved and relied on as confidant and friend. His own disciples griped about her, but they were men reared in a culture and religion that separated women and men in religious settings.

So what excuse do men (and sloppy screenwriters) have today for abusing a holy woman? I’m not even going to go there. Too sick, boring and wearying. Anyway, sans the stupid bit in the barracks asking soldiers for a show of hands to see how many men Mary had screwed, I would have really liked this film. If you don’t mind the toying with Biblical truth/ female bashing, go see it. Tis the season.
FYI: Prophecy Denied, the first book my fantasy series is free March 4 through 7.

Also check out Empty Altars by Judith Post, last day free!

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B007EW75Y6

M.L Rigdon (aka Julia Donner)
Follow on Twitter @RigdonML
Website http://www.MLRigdon.com
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Julia-Donner

OK, So I Lied

Tags

creativity, fantasy, horses, regency, Rob Roy, Scotland, Trossachs, Victorian, YA

I know, I know. The last blog post had me saying that I was going to return to fantasy. See me with my pants on fire. Can’t help it. Another story crowded its way into my head, hogged all the space, and now intends to rule until it has had its say. Another regency installment rules, not a cleansing of the creative palate with a YA fantasy, which are so much easier to construct. With fantasy, I can plug into whatever storyline weirdness comes into my bean. It’s the ultimate creative freebasing—the imagination on a bungee jump into a strangely familiar, alien world of our own making. (Insert a shiver here.)

With historical works, there are parameters and pesky restrictions, like actual historical sites and events. So why do I do it? Mostly because I’m addicted to history and can mentally immerse myself into any time period with an eighteen-hundred in it. Blame it on Aunt Marie, who had me working in her museum. She called it a “Step Into the Past” and being there was really like being there.

Yes, I’m an anglophile, but when it comes to GB, I’m a real nut about Scotland. Fell head over heels with the place the one time I visited for research. This is why the setting for the next regency is in an area bordering Rob Roy country and the Trossachs. Photographs can’t capture what the landscape is like, in my opinion. Haunted, wild and lovely all at once.

Add to the mix that I’m a horse freak. Loved riding and playing with my two mares, now happy in knee-deep grass in heaven. The Arabian proverb says that the horse is God’s gift to man. In the past, Englishmen felt the same. A gentleman was either riding, driving or betting on them. It wasn’t unusual to put a child in a saddle at the age of two. Many women were competent riders because it was the only respectable sport in which they could participate.

My WIP, The Dandy and the Flirt, won’t have horses as an integral aspect of the storyline, as in the last work. This work has two mischievous boys, a sloppy mutt, a forceful, enigmatic prig and a woman who is open about her enjoyment of sex. Remember, this book is set in the time period before Victoria ruined everybody’s fun because her Albert passed on without her. In other words, if she wasn’t getting any, the rest of the nation could do without. Not so forty years earlier when country parties were an excuse to bed-hop up and down the hallways, wife-swapping in comic overdrive. There must have been more door slamming than a French farce.

Let the games begin. I’ve got some feisty characters waiting to let loose.

M.L Rigdon (aka Julia Donner)

Follow on Twitter @RigdonML

Website http://www.MLRigdon.com

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

STRANGER THAN FICTION

Tags

Atlantis, Cayce, fantasy, giants, inspiration, romance

It’s been too long for me to remember where or when my curiosity about Atlantis began. My clearest recollection of reading about it was when I attended a cast party forty years ago, and my first exposure was a cheesy, worse than B-grade movie from the early sixties.

I had made some comment about Atlantis to the party host, who to this day has a gi-normous book collection. He handed me a book about Edgar Cayce and his readings regarding Atlantis. I hadn’t known anything about the “Sleeping Prophet” until that book. My interest was in Atlantis. From the moment I opened the book, I was lost, sat down, and read throughout the duration of the party.

Cayce is now something of a cult figure, and were he alive today, I would think it would cause him more than a little discomfort. A devoutly religious man, he must have struggled on many levels with his naps when instructors from beyond replied to petitioner questions. Cayce must have found some comfort in helping so many with health issues and that his readings, although often far from conservative Christian doctrines, spoke reverently about God, Christ, and the Bible. The library of his dictated readings is boggling in scope, most of his predictions have happened, and his future predictions are becoming closer to fruition as every day passes.

Since my next WIP will be a return to the YA fantasy series Songs of Atlantis, I keep the Atlantis portions of his readings handy. The plot for the next book is laid out in my head, but scanning his works helps me transfer or articulate those ideas to the page. It used to freak me out when I’d write something I thought was way out there and find out it was being scientifically corroborated.

In the romantic action/adventure The Atlantis Crystal, Phil Hafeldt believes Native Americans are the descendants of Atlantis. DNA studies are starting to point to this as being probable and provable. When I write spooky stuff like that it gives me the willies. Same with this YA fantasy WIP, where red-headed giants play a role. I did research recently—written about in a previous blog post—about giants, but these beings were in my head long before I read about Cayce or went digging around on the web. That’s the fun-freaky thing about being a writer. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Of course, I could have been influenced by the Old Testament’s talk of there being giants in the land. Who knows? I just go where my bean leads me.

I have many writer friends who read fiction to learn from the writing processes of others and activate their creativity. The opposite works for me. When I feel like what I’m putting on the page is getting flat, I pick up a history book, and presto-chango, the creativity section of my brain is energized. The only thing that works better is a movie, an action flick is like a mental fire accelerant.

Another reason for a genre change up is that a character for the next book in the regency series remains elusive. This is really odd for me. My characters come to me whole, born in their completeness—plot is my struggle—but this guy, Lord Carnall, is a mystery. My critique partner, Judith Post, gave me a deserved scolding and told me to move on to something else. So I had to leap over him and move to different characters and story.

No matter what I’m writing, the underlying theme and end result is always the same, the finding of that one person in the world, whether we see them from across the musically proverbial crowded room (this happened to me) or connect with them by accident, and come together to make a hole into a whole. No matter what genre, for most of us, the lifelong search for that one person or thing has no genre.

M.L Rigdon (aka Julia Donner)

Follow on Twitter @RigdonML

Website http://www.MLRigdon.com

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

THERE BE DRAGONS

Tags

Cayce, dragons, fantasy, legend, myth, research

Just finishing up the last chapter of a regency historical, the fifth in the Friendship series, and need a break from the confinement of historical fiction. The titles and outlines for the next two books are inside my bean, but I need something—a break, a spoonful of lemon sorbet to cleanse the palette. Don’t get me wrong. I love regency with a capitol L, but after a while, I worry about the staleness that can creep in from writing too much of the same thing. So, it’s back to fantasy for a while.

I admit to a fixation on dragons. I doubt they ever existed, certainly not the way I think of them, but in my head, they live. My first published works were epic fantasy. Winged creatures called fflorin were in each installment of the trilogy, dragons with a strong affinity to humans, which they considered a lower life from. Fflorin believed it their duty—like angels with crosses to bear—to assist feeble humans, while humans were in equal parts fascinated and terrified of the clever creatures.

Fantasy allows imagination to fly. For me, a much needed sense of freedom from the confines of creating inside the box of historical facts. So…up next on the writing docket, Canticle of Destruction, the third book of the YA fantasy series Songs of Atlantis, stories about a girl who can manipulate nature, kidnapped from her homeland, and sold on the auction block in Atlantis. The Vital, first in the series, is the discovery of her talents. The second, Masters of the Dark, its uses, and the third is about her ability to change the world. This time, there be dragons in it. Not the usual dragon either. Mine are always a bit edgier, a bit different from the run of the mill sort that spew fire.

To spark ideas about Atlantis world building, I read Cayce. Then, like a nimnoo (Holy shades of Mork from Ork), I started to research—a habit and a mistake on more than one level. Don’t know how bright it was to delve into dragon mythology when my original intent was to stay away from research. Regency requires trotting off to the bookshelf every other paragraph to verify a fact or detail.

While sifting through dragon legend, I come upon an interesting historical note and off I go on an entirely different thread. I am habitually stuck in research mode, and it must stop. There are pages and websites and endless kinds of dragons. I merely wanted to check out a few things and got lured into bottomless wells of information.

Scads of countries are awash with varied legendary dragons—serpent-like, winged, wormy, sea-going and cave-dwelling. The variety is endless. I kept reading and reading, sucked into the lore and myths, the hoaxes and possibilities. What was I thinking? Too much research in this case is a very bad thing. I know what my dragon is going to look like, its purpose, and its part in the story arc. My problem is letting go of the research addiction and allowing imagination take the controls.

My dragon awaits. Scratch that. My dragon lurks. Now it’s time to fly.

M.L Rigdon (aka Julia Donner for regency)

Follow on Twitter @RigdonML

Website http://www.MLRigdon.com

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

Time for a Changeup

Tags

Channing Tatum, dragons, Eddie Redmanye, fantasy, Jupiter Ascending, Mila Kunis, movie review, sci-fi, space opera, Wachowski

Usually there’s a dearth of good films at this time of year, but lots of interesting themes and flicks are popping up prior to the summer movie blitz. The one I’ve been waiting for FOREVER is Jupiter Ascending. I love fantasy and sci-fi when well done. Guardians of the Galaxy was a hoot, but the JA space opera is being brought to us by the Wachowski sibs. I admit up front that I’ve not seen all of their works, but the ones I have seen, I’ve enjoyed, especially their knack for production design and the world order themes they tend to like and do so well.

Not for the Wachowskis is the one-dimensional storyline typical of many sci-fi fantasy works. Their scripts are loaded with subplot, allegory, and analogy. Cloud Atlas had the difficult task of creating many world settings. V for Vendetta was soaked in shadows and bleak settings to match the mood of the oppressed. The Matrix required the same settings each time but the stakes intensified with every installment. The Wachowski’s have very specific thematic designs for every film. While watching their films, your brain whispers familiarity, yet there’s no blatant visual stamp, such those seen in Kurosawa, Huston, or Hitchcock films. There’s an almost palpable sense of restraint. The theme shapes the visual result, not the vision of the writer, director, or producer. Happily, in most of the Wachowski films, those three jobs are done by the sibs.

No spoilers but I can pass along impressions. I expected Jupiter Ascending to dish up an artistic canvas on film and it succeeded. The storyline follows the often-used plot of a downtrodden or misfit protagonist, who discovers a world-saving talent-slash-ability-slash-gift. (I guess it’s more appropriate to say universe-saving when referring to this movie.) I liked the impressive costuming, conservative and elegant when necessary. Lizard-dragon soldiers were amusing. The music was a pleasant surprise. No nasal, atonal rap. No ear-numbing metallica. The musical score is intelligently written and not heavy-handed. If you stay for the credits, you’ll hear a vocalise reminiscent of the 60’s Star Trek with a twist of Sondheim. Nice touch. And Eddie Redmayne, ooh-la-la, what a delicious villain.

All in all, I give it a four. I can’t make it a five star, because I tend to get bored with the digital mayhem of constant smashing and blowing up stuff. As a matter of personal choice, I think it would have made for a tighter flick after a bit of editing.

There were a few questions never answered/completed, perhaps because there’s a sequel in the creative minds of the Wachowskis. Either way, it could be a stand-alone or the beginning of more good things to come. Who would have thought it—an artsy sci-fi. It hit the spot after a long, hairy week.

M.L Rigdon (aka Julia Donner)

Follow on Twitter @RigdonML

Website http://www.MLRigdon.com

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