I’d like to thank Movie Reviews and Other Stuff for nominating my blog for this award! It’s been a few weeks since it occurred, and now that I’m on vacation, I finally have time to properly thank him and respond.
Here are the rules:
Post the award on your blog.
Acknowledge the blogger who nominated you.
Answer the 11 questions that have been assigned to you.
Nominate 11 deserving bloggers for the award.
Ask 11 questions to your nominees.
Question #1 – What made you want to start your blog/website? I think I might have answered this in another blog nomination, but I’ll try to reiterate. There may be some copying and pasting if I can’t think through my brain fog. I find it exceedingly difficult (especially now that I’m dealing with some unknown health issues that cause fore mentioned brain fog and other things) to fully express myself verbally sometimes even though I’m told quite often that I speak eloquently. I suffer from l’espirit d’escalier more often than not, but I have a great deal to say about a variety of topics. I wanted to use this blog as both my sounding board and soap box for my essays and writing, the latter or which is the most important thing to me. I’ve been through the rigors of publication submission and rejection and am currently in the extended latter phase of that now. With this blog I don’t have to worry about any threshold guardians to what I want to put out into the zeitgeist even if it may initially reach only a limited audience.
TL;DR I started this blog so I’d have my own place to say what I wanted.
I’ve been wanting to do this post for quite a while; the list has been sitting in my notes for several months now. Oddly enough it came from a blogger I used to follow until they revealed in a post like this that they were not a fan of Final Fantasy (though they did have the Buster Sword from there…and some derisive comments grrr. Well to each their own), and as they’d gotten the idea from yet another blog post, I don’t feel too bad doing my own especially since the five swords will be different. They are presented in countdown order so #1 is my favorite fictional sword (three guesses what it is and what fandom it’s from. If you’ve been following this blog for, oh, ten seconds, it should pretty plain to see).
I’m a fan of fantastic swords. My paranormal romance novel The Serpent’s Tale features one with its name actually hidden in the title. The sword, the Serpent’s Tail, is holy in nature and wielded by a dark angel/assassin. All of the swords on the below list (save #2 since I wrote the story before I knew major details about that weapon) were great inspirations for this magical and slightly sentient weapon.
“We write by the light of every story we have ever read.” -Richard Peck
I hope you enjoy the list and please feel free to comment what your favorite picks would be. Also feel free to tag me if you do your own Top 5 (or Top 10 or Top 17. I don’t judge) post as I’d love to see that, too!
Dyrnwyn is one of the Thirteen Treasures of the Island of Britain and is also was one of the first magical swords I came across. I read The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander when I was quite young, and the idea of the sentient sword was still fresh and new in my adolescent head. I absolutely loved the idea of a weapon that could tell what lay in your heart of hearts and would treat you accordingly. It seemed a far finer system of justice than any concocted by humanity.
In the Chronicles Dyrnwyn is found by the Princess Eilonwy in the barrows of Spiral Castle when she, Taran, and the rest were escaping. She took it due it being “the best sword” there, though at the time, she could not know how “best” it was. Attempting to draw it seemed futile though the companions were able to discern there was an inscription upon the blade, and part of it had been scratched out.
It’s not until the short story The Sword from The Foundling and Other Tales of Prydainthat Drynwyn’s origin is discovered. The sword was originally owned by King Rhitta whose own greed and avarice caused the weapon to kill its owner for written upon the blade are the words:
“Draw Dyrnwyn, only those of noble worth [sometimes mistranslated as “royal blood”], to rule with justice, to strike down evil. Who wields it in good cause shall slay even the lord of death.”
There is such a dearth of justice in our world, and having a sword that would judge a king as equally as a cobbler is something very appealing indeed. Dyrnwyn does indeed slay the lord of death, but that’s a tale you’ll have to read yourself.
The Question of the Week is posted every Sunday and will consist of a question followed by my answer and explanation to the same. Some questions will only require a simple answer that could potentially be followed by an explanation. Many questions will be writer oriented, but not all. Everyone is encouraged to answer in the comments and discussions/follow up questions are more than welcome!
What’s your favorite movie genre?
This is a question I don’t really have an answer for since my favorite movies are across multiple genres. I love a good story, and good stories are not genre bound.
It would probably be easier to give some of my favorite movies and see what genres they encompass. For many years I considered Constantinemy favorite movie.
It’s still up there, but I have so many favorites that I can’t just considering one movie the One (…just realized this is hilarious because of Keanu Reeves). I of course love Advent Children as a side effect of loving/being obsessed with Final Fantasy VII,
and many other animated movies have my heart. Pixar’s RatatouilleI can claim as a favorite: my favorite Pixar movie,
and I’m a bit torn between which (just) Disney movie I love more: Frozenor Big Hero 6.
I still think I lean slightly towards Frozen because sisterly power and female representation, but they both made me cry.
Then there are the Marvel movies (which is also Disney let’s not forget lol). I love all of the Phase One films, though oddly Thoris probably my least favorite. It’s not a bad movie, but I prefer Thor: The Dark World, and of course I love Avengersfor various reasons.
Various reasons
Though, like Big Hero 6 and Frozen, I don’t know if I could decide between it and Guardians of the Galaxy.
Avengers has the indisputable Big Damn Hero’s, but Guardians (which I’ve reviewed) speaks to universal and ubiquitous pain no matter where you might be in the universe.
So looking at this list, I’d say I like dramas with sci-fi and/or fantasy elements.
What’s your favorite movie genre? Is it more of a mixed bag like mine or you can definite pinpoint one specifically?
A thousand thank yous to the Well-Red Mage on their titular blog for nominating me for the Liebster Award! I only recently started following them (how could I not with a name that not only pays homage to my favorite series, but also shoehorns in a clever pun/turn of phrase?), but our love our old school games is eternal. I’ve met so many wonderful people in my year or so of blogging who focus on a variety of things, and I love perusing award posts even if I, myself, am not a recipient, as it still gives me the chance to scout out like minded folk. Regardless, the Liebster Award is a great networking tool and a wonderful way to support other bloggers. It works as follows:
Thank the person who nominated you (see above) and answer their 11 questions.
Nominate 11 other people and give them 11 questions to answer.
Here are the questions I was nominated to answer. I have to tell you when I saw some of them, I squeed with joy, because not only would the answers be easy, but many also would allow me to gush about my favorite obsessions. So without further ado!
1.DC or Marvel – This particular question is very important from what I’ve been told. Hm, okay, well my second favorite villain is Loki as portrayed by my beloved Tom Hiddleston,
Attempts to breathe. Fails.
which pretty much makes me a Marvel girl, but while I do believe that Marvel has the monopoly on the movies, I’ve heard nothing but good things about DC’s shows. Now since I haven’t read the comics, I have only the visual media to go off of. There are number of DC shows on my to-watch list including, but not limited to The Flash, Supergirl, and Daredevil. I have seen quite a bit of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and had some issues with it. So long answer shorter, I’m more of a Marvel fan, but I don’t detest DC. It’s kind of how I like both Algebra and Geometry, but I like Algebra a bit more since I’ve done more with it.
The Question of the Week is posted every Sunday and will consist of a question followed by my answer and explanation to the same. Some questions will only require a simple answer that could potentially be followed by an explanation. Many questions will be writer oriented, but not all. Everyone is encouraged to answer in the comments and discussions/follow up questions are more than welcome!
What’s your favorite animated Disney movie?
This is the first question I don’t have a direct and definitive answer to. I’ve been chatting with the lovely writer of The Ink Garden, and among other things the topic turned to Disney movies. After considering this in our last correspondence, I realized I had my QOTW 🙂
I almost feel as though this one needs to be broken up into time periods or even animation styles (traditional 2D or CGI), because Disney has made a lot of animated movies. This is not even considering the Pixar branch off, which I will be.
Up until a few years ago, if you asked me this question, my answer would have been unequivocally Frozen.
It fell into that strange niche of something I had no interest in initially that I loved upon experiencing (it has good company in FFVII, Harry Potter, and ASOIAF among others). From the opening song “Vuelie” I had chills running down my spine, which is a brilliant meta on their part.
But though I still absolutely adore Frozen, time tends to lend itself to retrospection. In the grand scheme of my Disney movie watching, I don’t know it it’s my Number 1, though it’s up there in the count.
Picking a 2D animated Disney film is just as difficult, but I can say without impunity that The Hunchback of Notre Dameis high on that list and may very well be my favorite.
I think this was the first time a Disney movie used the term “eternal damnation,” (though Sleeping Beauty did have Maleficent deliver the exquisite line of “Now you shall deal with me, oh prince, and all the powers of Hell), and if you haven’t been paying attention, religious symbolism and imagery is kind of my thing.
Hunchback is about a self-righteous, overly sanctimonious official who abuses his adopted, physically disabled son and eventually attempts to use him to commit genocide against an ethnic minority, one of whom he lusts after. Oh, and the only reason he has an adopted, physically disabled son is because he murdered his mother on the steps of Notre Dame, and the high deacon saw him and called him out by putting the fear of the very God he claims to worship into him.
Not even mentioning that fact that everything I love is ultra messed up, Hunchback has that very dark undertone at its foundation in addition to the religious aspect, and that’s always been appealing.
Also I love the song “God Help the Outcasts;” it was an inspiration for the church scene in Chapter 4 of Northern Lights.
Just to assure you that I don’t just like Disney movies because of the music (though that is a big part…I love musicals), when it comes to one subset of them, I have a definitive answer, and it has nothing to do with music since there are no official musical numbers. My favorite Pixar movie is without a doubt Ratatouille.
I can relate the idea of the protagonist who’s been told all his life that he can’t do something because of what he is regardless of his skill level, and Gusteau’s proclamation of “Anyone can cook” is the perfect analogue to so many things. I’m not the idealist I once was two decades ago, and I know that there are uncontrollable and often insurmountable barriers that stand in the way of success. The fact that there is a movie with a seemingly absurd concept of a rat cook (and I don’t mean the Rat Cook from ASOIAF *shivers* there are no horror motifs in Ratatouille) and make it believable in its way shows that what’s really absurd is our restrictions on what people can do based on what they are alone. It’s an important metaphor to portray and Pixar pulled it off perfectly.
So I have a newer CGI film, an late 00s Pixar movie, and a mid 90s traditionally animated one. I’ll have to think about my favorite early Disney movie, but that will be another story for another time.
What is/are your favorite animated Disney movie(s)? What do you love about them?
I consider myself to be a skeptic and a cynic (along with holding the lofty title of Shameful Narcissist), but I still secretly carry an ember of gullibility in my heart. The former means it is quite hard to surprise me, where the latter can still light my way to delightful shock. In real life I abhor surprises, as I always wish to be prepared for any contingency, but in the world of fantasy and fiction I revel in it.
Here I give you the times I was surprised by a story in the various types of media I have consumed. I’m just going to use the one paragon example in each medium I present. Obviously as I am showcasing times I was shocked by a narrative, there are spoilers galore for everything mentioned/tagged in this post. I’ll still throw up an official warning and give anyone who needs it time to skedaddle.
***UNMARKED SPOILERS FOR FROZEN, ASOIAF/GOT, FFVII AND HARRY POTTER***
Film Frozen
I had no idea how they were going to resolve the fact that the heroine had two love interests (more on how you take care of that particular paradigm in the next entry. At least Hans gets to live…even if he might not deserve it.) Throughout the entire movie he gave no overt displays of devious ambition, but like any well told story, they were most certainly there. The fact that he always wears gloves (conceal don’t feel…) and only takes them off once after he reveals his true nature to Anna in the heartbreaking scene used above, and them almost immediately puts them back on while declaring “I’m the hero that’s going to save Arendelle” to once again don the mask and hide his true nature, but the movie had been giving hints to it all along.
These are intended to be brief analysis of characters from some of my favorite narratives, but as you all should know by know I can be quite long-winded or rather long-worded so I cannot guarantee a short read. They will more than likely spoil whatever story/series they come from so be wary of that if you have not read, seen, or played whatever that might be.
Javert is the main antagonist of Victor Hugo’s classic novel Les Misérable. Born in a prison, it is very likely this mean beginning that shapes his life’s perspective. He becomes a police inspector and has an absolute and unshakable belief in the law. It is firm, resolute, and cannot be bent or mocked, a rock to cling to in the turbulent sea of a chaotic world. This is his fervor and his zeal, and it is the reason he becomes Jean Valjean’s adversary.
*******Major spoilers will be marked. There are some mild ones in analysis********
I’ll be honest up front; me and my fellow fangirl Amanda (who writes for Nerd-Base) really only saw this because our fictional husband (one of our many, not all the same) Tom Hiddleston was in it. You may remember him from a little film called Avengers where he played the sexiest God of Mischief ever, Loki.
Seriously, who could forget this?
We planned this six months in advance and went yesterday. Neither of us had any idea what the movie was even about. We just knew it was Tom looking sexy and dark doing dark, sexy things. I knew it was directed by Guillermo del Toro who has also done such fantastic films as Hellboy I and II, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Pacific Rim, which I don’t detest as much as some. While I generally like movies with more depth, PR gave you exactly what you’d expect from a story about robots fighting giant monsters, and it had Idris Elba who’s fantastic. Going back to the flick at hand, I knew regardless of anything else, the cinematography would be amazing, because del Toro does nothing involved with that by halves.
Del Toro’s skill with color scheme and vibrancy is unrivaled
By now we’ve all heard about the amazing Christopher Lee’s death. It’s funny how you don’t know how fantastic someone is until they die. When Leonard Nimoy went where no one has gone before (and returned) how much more awesome he was spilled out into the public discourse. This is not normally something I would blog about. Of course I love the Lord of the Rings movies, and LN was Spock so, um, epic, but not really something I’d find the need to write about, but then I ran across this on my tumblr dashboard.
And I was overcome with feels. Memory…is a huge thing for me. Being remembered, not being forgotten. I think about this all the time. It’s the thread that runs through my most treasured narratives: the paradigm of remembrance. So long as people remember you, you’ll never truly die. Shakespeare has been dead for half a millennium, but his name will go on through the ages. Antiquity will never leave him behind. The earth will become a cold, black stone when all that is living has turned to dust, but those who remain to carry forth stories will know the works of the Bard.
But for us poor and grieving who have no great deeds, who shall remember our names? In John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars Hazel and Gus have the following conversation.
“How many dead people do you think there are?”
“Like, how many fictional people died in that fictional movie? Not enough,” he joked.
“No, I mean, like, ever. Like how many people do you think have ever died?” “I happen to know the answer to the question,” he said. “There are seven billion living people, and about ninety-eight billion dead people.”
“Oh,” I said. I’d thought that maybe since population growth had been so fast, there were more people alive than all the dead combined. “There are about fourteen dead people for every living person,” he said. The credits continued rolling. It took a long time to identify all those corpses, I guess. My head was still on his shoulder. “I did some research on this a couple of years,” Augustus continued. “I was wondering if everybody could be remembered. Like, if we got organized, and assigned a certain number of corpses to each living person, would there be enough living people to remember all the dead people?”
“And are there?”
“Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we’re disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare, and no one remembers the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about.”
I think of the “fourteen people” conversation all the time. If we all remembered fourteen people than no one would ever have to be forgotten. This paradigm is also implemented in the animated film The Book of Life, which features La Muerte whom I absolutely adore. Her look is just exquisite.
I wish to be half as cool.
In the movie the dead people with loved ones still alive to honor them on the Day of the Dead dwell in the Land of the Remembered while those who have no one wither away in the Land of the Forgotten. But…once all those who love you are dead, will you not fade into the Land of the Forgotten? When no one is left to remember you, who will light candles on your behalf so you don’t become one of them? When all are gone and dead as dust, then no one will even be memory.
If I wanted to be morbid and nihilistic I would continue along this vein. In the end when there is nothing left and only dust shall spin in the silence, there will be no memories. There will be nothing, as it was before so shall it be forever. No one will be a memory and I remain in this existential crisis. It’s something we all must face: eternal oblivion. So long as there’s consciousness left to remember, then some will not be forgotten, but once consciousness blinks out into the darkness, then there will be nothing left. There is a name that means “memory,” or more so “remembered by God.” Zachary. FFVII is literally about memory.
Finally, Homer’s Iliad comes to mind because of what Achilles was told. It was the choice of every man. Stay home, be safe, raise a family, and be forgotten. Your children will remember you and perhaps your grandchildren, but after that, no one will. Live the safe but long life and be lost to the ages, but paint yourself with glory, (more than likely) die young, and everyone will know your name. Achilles wanted the glorious life and so choose to go with Agamemnon to Troy because though the warrior knew by prophecy that he would die, he also knew he would not be forgotten. Death is an empty door. Once you’re gone, you’re gone.
“Who has choices need not choose,
We don’t who have none,
We can love, but what we lose,
What is gone is gone.”
-Peter S Beagle “The Last Unicorn”
Asking me my beliefs about continued existence is as empty a door as death so seems. I don’t know. I want to believe something. I want to think we become more than mere memories (not that memory is a mean thing). I want Augustus’s words from The Fault In Our Stars “I don’t believe we return to haunt or comfort the living or anything, but I think something becomes of us” to be true.
As awful as the world of FFVII is in its dystopian gloom, at the very least you know what happens to you after you die. I believe this was what first endeared me to the story, but currently it is John Green who has had the most comforting and profound things to say about the subject. His Looking for Alaska has the gorgeous line that I return to for its hopeful resonance.
“Thomas Edison’s last words were ‘It’s very beautiful over there.’ I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful.”
I’m not ashamed to step out of my ivory tower, dismount from my high horse and review a car chase and explosions action movie. I have seen a few of the films in the Fast and Furious series, but not all in their entirety. I believe the only one I actually sat through was Fast Five, the one where The Rock is chasing them down. I’m a fan of The Rock; he’s a fellow Taurus.
He’s welcoming us all to the gun show.
He manged to make the not that easy transition from the world of pro wrestling to film acting, so much respect, and Fast 5 was a really good film. Some people scoff and poo poo the action genre as being vapid, meaningless violence, but I have a few arguments against that. One, you know what you’re getting into when you see a movie like this. I wasn’t expecting Pacific Rim to present some high transcendent ideas about existence, and whatever, it had Idris Elba in it! He was Heimdall in Thor and was considered for the Doctor and possibly James Bond (not without some controversy *rolls eyes*). Crap…thought train derailed. My second point is that the F&F franchise has always been about a lot more than just the car chases and explosions, which I’ll get into once I start the review proper.
I’d been interested in seeing this movie from the first trailers as I’d enjoyed the prior ones I’d seen. I’d also been told by many people that I HAD to see it because “FF7 Adrienne!”
My face
Yeah…I made many a Facebook scroll stop when I saw THAT abbreviation and was very glad they started using the ampersand in between the two F’s to help alleviate the confusion.
The plot is nothing complicated, no GRRM intricacies here, although I had to ask my husband to clear up a few things I didn’t know. Quick note if you haven’t seen all of the movies, you will still be able to enjoy this installment. There are a couple of things that might have you raising your brows, but they are fairly easy to figure out just by paying attention and using some common sense.
F&F7 is the first film to take place after Tokyo Drift with the older brother, Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), of the previous bad guy seeking vengeance on Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his gang for his younger sibling’s comatose condition. Back in the states, the crew is trying to adjust to normal lives after securing amnesty from Luke Hobbs (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson). Unfortunately, nothing wanted is ever easily gained. Shaw manages to break into the secure office where Hobbs works to extract profiles about his targets. A fight ensues ending with a bomb severely injuring Hobbs and putting him the hospital and (supposedly) out of commission.
Meanwhile, Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker RIP ;_;) is attempting to accustom himself to the mundane life of husband to Mia (Jordana Brewster), Dom’s sister, and father to their son. Mia is not an un-astute woman though and realizes that Brian is feeling the drain of banality, “missing the bullets” of his formerly faster life. She is reluctant to tell him that she is pregnant again, and Dom tries to convince her that Brian loves her more than he loved his former life and that she obviously needs to impart this information. Before this can happen though, the package on their front porch explodes, destroying the house, but thankfully leaving Dom, the newly pregnant Mia, Brian, and their son unharmed. It becomes quickly clear that they’re being hunted, and things get more complicated when the gang becomes involved with a Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) who promises Dom assistance if him and his crew will help him rescue a hacker named Ramsey from terrorists.
There are a couple of interesting surprises with the film such as the identity (or rather appearance) of Ramsey. There’s a scene where they drop cars out of an airplane, jump a car between three towers, and use the eye of God. The laws of physics are utterly obliterated, but you enjoy every minute of the break.
What really sets the Fast and Furious franchise apart for me is the message that lies at its heart: family. Dom Toretto says, “I don’t have friends; I have family,” and that’s what he’s all about. His crew is his family. It doesn’t matter the distance (Han in Tokyo), their backgrounds (Brian used to be a cop), or blood ties; family is family. I loved the message of intercultural and international bonds and made an observation that I’m sure many of you might have already picked up. Paul Walker’s character Brian is the only white protagonist. We do have Jason Statham, but he’s an antagonist alongside of Djimon Hounsou, who I’d honestly love to see in a non-bad guy role (Guardians of Galaxy had him as a secondary villain, too). The F&F films show that you can have a successful film franchise where the majority of the main/hero characters aren’t white. I think that is insanely important to show that such diversity can exist, and the way the characters interact with each solidifies this concept. Brian is just as much a part of the group as Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), Dom’s “Mrs. Alpha.”
This is not to say there weren’t some issues with the film. Like most action movies, there was some serious female objectification, and sad to say, it’s just something you come to expect from the genre. It becomes a complicated issue, because F&F7 also has women in good positions (which is a problematic statement in and of itself, but something I don’t want to get into here). Bit of a spoiler, but…
This is Ramsey.
Roman (Tyrese Gibson) remarks that he would never put that kind of body behind a computer screen in reference to Ramsey’s (Nathalie Emmanuel who also plays Missandei on GoT) status as both female and hacker. I was glad to see Tej (Chris “Ludicrous” Parker) set him straight by challenging him on what exactly a hacker should look like. Now granted a few scenes later, we have her in a bikini *sigh* but baby steps.
I can’t finish up this review without mentioning the ending, which arguably bolsters this movie from 4 to 5 stars. If you don’t want to know about the tribute to Paul Walker, you’ll want to stop reading, otherwise let me just tell you there were invisible ninjas cutting onions in the theater near me.
Just listening to it here brings tears to my eyes. Now that I’m thinking about it…I’m not going to give away the tribute. It will have much more resonance if you see it for yourself. Let me just say that it was one of the best tributes to someone I have ever seen, and while it was obvious that that’s what they were doing, I felt it fit seamlessly into the movie. Both Brian and Paul deserved to have that kind of happy ending.
Well it appears I didn’t have to leave my ivory tower after all. F&F7 will definitely go down in the annals as one of my favorite action movies if just for that ending alone. Highly recommend seeing it in the theater just to witness some of the more action-y bits in silver screen format. It was well worth the money.
The Shameful Narcissist Speaks 
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