Dreamworks Dragon Review

Another movie review! But I will have actual art news probably tomorrow. I just don't have time to upload the images tonight and it's silly to talk about them without having them on hand to, ya know, look at.

Anyway. How To Train Your Dragon was really really good. The visuals were stunning. The ads all claimed the 3D was more breathtaking than Avatar and it totally was. Of course there was almost nothing to Avatar besides the pretty phosphorescent veneer.

This movie was visually a lot of fun and the story was sweet. One of the reviews I read on Rotten Tomatoes praised it for being a film that advocated learning rather than violence.

I loved this movie right up until the end. But then... the end. It was the only problem I had with the whole movie and the more I think about it, the bigger it gets.

Fair warning, there will be Massive Spoilers Ahead!

See, the main character is a plucky little viking named Hiccup. Like all young vikings he aspires to be a great Dragon Killer. Until he actually has the opportunity to kill one and finds that he doesn't want to. Through the friendship he strikes up he learns that everything the vikings think they know about dragons is wrong. He learns how to handle them in a completely non violent way and uses that knowledge to do well in his dragon fighting class. As he does better in the class though, he gets more concerned that he'll be "rewarded" by being the first in the class to get to murder a dragon.

At the finale of the second act he tries to show everyone that the killing isn't necessary and that they have nothing to fear from the dragons. This goes predictably wrong and it all builds up to Hiccup showing his friends what he has learned about dragons so that they can save all the dragons and all the vikings.

All well and good, until, as I say, the end. The entire movie thus far has dedicated itself to showing us that dragons are intelligent and if treated properly, peaceful creatures. Not killing dragons is the entire thrust of the film. Hiccup has twice refused to kill dragons when presented with the opportunity and has tried to prevent others from killing them as well. In the end they have to fight a really really big dragon. Like, way bigger than all the other ones put together. And Hiccup uses his special skills that he has learned by being open minded and non violent to...kill it. The whole movie is about not killing dragons, but I guess that one has to die because it's too big? It's different from the other dragons? What?

You tell me Dreamworks. It was just so disappointing. I really enjoyed the entire film up to that moment. The message was so appropriate and timely. Except the end of the movie completely undoes that message.

It's still a good movie. It merits a second viewing even, and the 3D was gorgeous. I cannot emphasize that enough. But you'll walk away with a much more satisfying impression if you skip the last 10 minutes or so.

Captain Falcon!

So the adorable chicks I got last August? Captain Falcon is their Queen. As a baby she was the drabbest, but had a gutsy personality. She actually looked like a tiny bird of prey actually. And she was always the first one to jump onto the box, onto the stick, onto the edge of the box, out onto the floor. I estimated that she was at least a day or so older than the others because they were always just trying out the thing she'd mastered yesterday.

My little brother, assuming that she was a rooster because she was so tough and awesome, named her after this guy. He is a vaguely obscure video game character from the good people at Nintendo.

However, as the chicks developed and 7 out of 10 began to crow (to my lasting dismay), Captain Falcon failed to develop any masculine tendencies. She is a bantam Easter Egger, and she was the first of my flock to begin laying. Her eggs are tiny and blue. They look like robin eggs except slightly too large. I was delighted. Now she has gone broody. Just over two weeks ago I realized that she was trying to hatch one egg that did not belong to her (still not positive who laid it actually) and two golf balls that I put in the nesting box to show the hens where to lay.

I gave her some other assorted eggs (including one of her own, though I don't have high hopes for it as it spent a day in the fridge). They should, with any luck, hatch next week sometime.

Now to hopefully prevent the same karmic disaster that gave me 7 roosters last time, I need some macho names for the babies.

Two of them will be Captain Hammer and Dr. Horrible. If the one from the fridge, "Fridgey" as I currently call it, hatches I will name it Oracle.

I went to my brother for additional suggestions and he came up with Duke Nukem and Rooster Cogburn. I'll skip the last one because fully half the roosters in this country (the half not already called "Foghorn Leghorn" are already named Rooster Cogburn).

I may name one Spock, because I have been on a Star Trek kick lately. More than that I'm afraid to speculate on. She's sitting on nine eggs. It would have been ten, but I broke one while I was checking to make sure she wasn't sitting on extras stolen from other hens. She wasn't. Oops. But 9 eggs of various origins, and at least a few of them should hatch just in time for the Japanese exchange students we're having for two weeks. It is cool. My chickens are awesome.

Alice in Wonderland

I just saw Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland in 3D. It was interesting. Going into it I was expecting it to be a bit like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where he was making a movie of a well known story that was already a well known film, but not doing a remake of the film. If that run-on sentence makes sense.

This wasn't quite Burton's take on a classic tale though. It was more like a sequel.

Oh, this post will be full of spoilers BTW.

I expected it to be dark. Tim Burton is dark and Alice in Wonderland is pretty twisted subject matter. And it does make you wince. Quite a few creatures get stabbed in the eye, and at one point Alice has to enter the Red Queen's castle. A tiny Alice must cross the moat by jumping across the gray and bloated severed heads of the Queen's victims. But for all that there's nothing really subversive about the film. It's hard for me to even properly articulate.

I guess it was that the plot rolled along so straightforwardly (I hate that I just used that word). But with Alice you expect wandering and twists and turns and absurdities and tangents. And this movie put forward a standard Hollywood rescue mission/quest plot line right off the bat and then from that point on you know exactly how the story will play out.

Then there's the Hatter/Alice thing. They play them up like a romantic subplot and it's really really uncomfortable. It doesn't matter that it's Johnny Depp, it's still squicky, and not what I came to see. Fortunately at the end they ease off and kind of let you decide whether you want the story to go there or not.

I kind of liked Anne Hathaway as the White Queen, although she was so eerie I kept waiting for her to out to be evil. I don't really remember the book clearly, it's been years since I read it (except for Jabberwocky) but I vaguely recall the White and Red Queens (and their entire courts with the exception of the White Knight) being fairly equally self-absorbed and crazy.

I liked Alice in armor at the end. She made an excellent champion. I really liked the exchange of dialogue between the Jabberwock and the Vorpal Sword.

The very end I thought was sort of pat and goofy and anachronistic. Don't get me wrong, I liked the movie, but as an interpretation of the source material (which is obviously difficult to transpose into film) I was disappointed. I thought if anybody could do it Tim Burton could, but to me it left a bit to be desired.

Still though, if I ever have a 9 year old daughter, this would be a movie I would be comfortable having her obsess over. I think that Alice is a good female character. She was nervous and brave and intelligent (and mad). She was a typical misfit Burton hero but the moral at the end was that she could blaze her own path, rather than that she would have to be forever separate from the world (Edward Scissorhands anyone?). So I liked it. I just would have liked it better when I was 9.

Pi Day

First off, Beware The Ides of March!

There, glad we got that out of the way. As hopefully everyone knows, yesterday 3/14 was Pi Day (also the birthday of one Albert Einstein). To celebrate, I baked this delicious peach pie. It was (and continues to be) very good. I was quite please with the way that the lattice turned out.

I actually quite enjoyed Pi Day. It's a worthy holiday (like Talk Like a Pirate Day, Sept. 19) and you can't forget the date because it's 3.14. Imagine the Pi Day celebration in 2015. Eh?

Anywho, I plan to incorporate it into my personal roster of celebrated holidays. It can take the place of Easter.

In other news, Daylight Savings sucks. My current job starts at 5:30 in the morning. The worst part is this weekend I was starting on Sunday after coming off almost a week and a half of being out sick, so I'd been staying up and sleeping in later and my sleep schedule was already messed up. As far as I'm concerned, everyone has an excuse for being an ass for the next couple of days. I will attribute any cranky mood to Daylight Savings. Which is lucky for one of my coworkers because otherwise I would have been forced to ask who pissed in her cheerios this morning. It's been a couple days of this sullen attitude from her and I'm about done with it.

But maybe she'll cut loose on St. Patty's and calm down. So glad spring is here!

Postcards from the Deep

Back from my hiatus and I come bearing art. The local humane society is having an art auction and I decided to donate some work. I have a painting and an ink drawing in the works, but I'm also making a series of little 3x5 drawings that I call collectively "Postcards from the Deep."

This guy is the Nautilus. I've done a series of weird and awesome deep sea creatures. The best ones of course, are those that phosphoress. Spell check doesn't want to give me that word but I'm sure it's a verb and it looks correct to me. Spell check didn't want to give me siphonophore either. Another one of my pieces is a siphonophore. They are cool glowy things. They are listed as probably the longest animal in the world but they're kinda like coral in that they are actually a colony of small animals. So in the world record length sense that seems kind of like cheating. But they are really cool.

Anyway, the rest of my sea creatures can be found here.

Day Dreams

Whenever I'm on a long car trip and not the one driving I have the same fantasy. I imagine a horse running at breakneck speed alongside the car.

Not right alongside, further off in the distance, but it keeps pace with us. Leaping fences and creeks, weaving in between trees...

I've done it for as long as I can remember. Perhaps as a way to ease boredom. It's a bright sorrel (red, that is). Sometimes there are other horses but he's always out front. Next up behind him is a palomino paint mare, and the rest of the herd is brightly colored with paints and appys and buckskins all manes and tails flying.

I had trouble for a while just recently. My interest and background in animation has had me analyzing the way things move. The animators in Jurassic Park used cheats to make the T-Rex move at 25 mph because it didn't look right. The same with my horse that used to run 60+ mph easily. Now he still runs, but pushed back in the distance in a kind of never ending cinematic pan.

I will share something that very few people get to see. When I was small, about ten, I drew a mare, bright red with a black mane and tail. Her head was too small, and her legs had too many joints, but I thought it was the best drawing I had ever done. I'm still rather proud of her actually. I named her Hurricane Janet, and she formed the foundation for a new breed of racehorses. I called them "Superior Breds," a weak pun on thoroughbred. The first few were pretty thoroughbredy, but I brought in Appaloosas and paints to create a super flashy brightly colored horse. Then I decided began bringing in draft horses to give them feathering and bulk. I kept track of their bloodlines and made crosses back and forth to make sure that the breed stayed pure to itself but could still continue to improve.

I have two notebooks full of hundreds of drawings that (in general) get progressively better. Each one is labeled with its name, gender, and parentage. I kept the thing up for years, well into college. I haven't added to it for a couple years now, but that doesn't mean I'm done.

Mostly I'm glad that I've kept them all. Some of the drawings are pretty awful, and there are a couple that I decided were bad enough that they should be removed from the gene pool, and this is noted on their pages, but I never got rid of a single drawing. I don't have very much of my early artwork, but I'm glad I've held on to my horses.

All Together Now

I have been a neglectful blogger this past month. It's shameful. But things have been rather crazy.

Basically, my time limit for finding a job in Portland ran out. I don't even really feel bad about it because I tried really hard, and I've heard that there are plenty of other people there in the same boat. There just aren't any jobs in Portland right now. Last I heard, Oregon had the second worst unemployment rate in the country. So, not my fault.

So that precipitated a mad scramble to move before my savings ran out entirely. I didn't want to leave my roommate high and dry. Now I'm fixing up a little house in Walla Walla, home of world famous sweet onions, and Bugs Bunny. Also my hometown.

I have very mixed feelings about moving back here. But it does have a good job market (or as good as any job market currently) and I'll have my own house with its own washer and dryer and yard and everything. It's got a great kitchen.

Or it will once I'm finished cleaning and painting. The lady who lived there for the last two decades was a paranoid chain smoker. She never left the house and was terrified of anyone seeing in so she nailed bars (and junk) across all the windows. She also had two dogs that she never let outside. To say that it was gross in there would be the understatement of the year. We scrubbed the walls and ripped up the floors and painted everything with Killz to prevent the stains and smells from coming back. I just finished painting the living room yesterday and I only have the trim in the bedroom, and that'll be half the house done.

I need to paint in the kitchen and figure out what to do with the cupboards. They are a beautiful dark wood, but they still need to be scrubbed thoroughly. We've doen a few tests and the cleaning products seem to be taking off the finish as well. Plus the dogs scratched up some of the bottom ones. I think the wood is beautiful, but painting them would be a lot easier than refinishing them. On the other hand since the electrics and heating system need more work than we anticipated, I'll have plenty of time to work on everything, so I've got time for more complicated projects.

The bathroom is also ripped apart and needs more ripping frankly. The tub surround is completely rotten. Fortunately most of the subflooring is in good shape. I was afraid we'd have to replace some that looked particularly pet stained, but since we pulled out the carpet the urine smells have vanished.

I've painted the living room a creamy pale orange color and the trim is a darker orange called "Tangerine Dream." My grandmother hates the color scheme, but I like it a lot. I'm excited to pull down all the painter's tape in the living room tomorrow. The kitchen will be a pale leaf green with turquoise trim. I think it will set off the dark cabinets nicely. Assuming they stay dark that is. If I paint them they may end up a honey yellow which I think will lighten up the kitchen a lot. It's very dark right now with the dark cabinets and a huge tree that is pretty but blocks any light from getting in.

It's a tiny little house, with just the three rooms (plus bathroom) but it's a good size for me. It has a little yard that is about as gross as the house was, but we'll get it fixed up too. There's also a little garage for my car and another bigger garage that is full of crap right now, but could be emptied out and used as studio space. That would be beyond awesome.

I've got a job interview tomorrow and possibly another one next week. So all in all, things are looking up. I will be glad not to have a roommate anymore and my house is in a nice little neighborhood, that also in the dead center of town so nothing is far away. It's also a short walk from the park and just down the block from my grandmother (not the one who hates the paint). So all in all, things are looking up.