Amy C. Shaw

Mini Movie Reviews: Divergent and Guardians of the Galaxy

August 13, 2014 • 18 Comments

I enjoyed the Divergent trilogy, but I have often said I liked it but didn’t love it, and this is true of all three books. It seems to me those who were most passionate about the first book hated the way it ended, but for me, my feelings for the books are mostly consistent. So when I say I liked but didn’t love the movie, I’m saying it was a pretty good adaptation of a pretty good book. It hit all the high points (that I remembered) and also explained itself well to those who have not read the books (like my husband).

I do have one complaint about the movie, though, and that is I did not like the way Caleb was portrayed. I’m not sure if it was the writing or Ansel Elgort’s portrayal of him or both, but he came off so flat and dull, and I really liked him a lot in the books (yes, even during Insurgent, though I am still upset we don’t get a full explanation of his motives in Allegiant).

One thing I did like about the movie more than the book is that the Tris and Four romance was less prominent (though it still existed, so don’t freak out if that’s something you can’t stand to lose!). Though because of the pacing of the movie their interest seems a little sudden, but I was relieved we didn’t get multiple make-out scenes.

I think most of the actors/actresses did a great job portraying their characters, and would recommend the movie to fans of the book or to anyone who’s interested.

Guardians of the Galaxy

I have to say, I was wary of Guardians of the Galaxy. The movie looked like it was directly aimed at 10 year old boys (maybe it was?) and it just looked too different from the Marvel cinematic universe I have come to know and love as the various Avengers’ films have rolled out. Thankfully, it turned out better than expected. It is different from the others, and the humor primarily used is not necessarily my favorite brand of humor, but it has funny moments and even tender moments. I also appreciated the fact that the characters started out as unlikable misfits that somehow turned out to be more likable misfits.

As far as its weak points go, Guardians was pretty formulaic, and I found myself guessing correctly on a few things before they were revealed. It’s no Winter Soldier, and don’t let anyone else tell you any differently.

The villain, Ronan, also left something to be desired. We are told he’s a bad dude, and he seems like a bad dude, and when given such a powerful weapon you know things can get really, really bad, but it all ended up a bit forgettable at the end. I even momentarily forgot who the villain of the movie was a few hours later. Oops.

If you’re a fan of Marvel, I would recommend it. It’s fun and a unique addition to the universe’s mythology.

Also check out:

Matt says it’s fun back lacks a little on heart

What are your thoughts on Divergent and/or Guardians of the Galaxy?

Always Learning

August 8, 2014 • 6 Comments

In a Microsoft Word document I wrote up some personal thoughts running through my mind lately. Here’s part of it, in relation to writing specifically, plus some added elaboration.

I wanted to enter a contest called Pitch Wars. The entry for it is in a week and a half, and for this contest you need a query letter and a finished manuscript. I have the latter, but I still think it’s too rough. I still really need to do a lot with it. But the mentor I gain from the contest could help me, right? (This is presuming someone picked me; the chances are decent they wouldn’t.) So, I thought, if I really buckle down, I can get this polished enough.

Look, goals and deadlines are good for me, and I don’t believe in quitting before starting, but I realized after a day or two that this was not realistic. Right now, if I had to rate my own story, I’d give it 3 out of 5 stars, which is good, solid. Better than some published books I’ve read, but of course I’m biased, and that’s just my opinion. But I want it to be, and I know it can be, more and better than that. I know I can’t achieve a perfect version of it before I pitch it (or even if/when it goes to print with a major publishing company), but I can do better.

Why pitch something sub-par to the potential I know it has even just in my hands?

And two weeks is not enough. Not unless I devote every free moment to it and quite frankly, I don’t want to stress myself out like that.

This contest happens once a year. There’s a similar contest that happens every year as well, in March. I have passed up bidding in silent auctions to get query/manuscript critiques that were super affordable. I know there are people who critique professionally for not a ton of money. I WILL HAVE OTHER OPPORTUNITIES. And I will use them when the time is right.

But that time is not now. Almost a year ago I hoped I would be ready by now. I’m not. But that’s not failure. I’m still in the process. I haven’t thrown in the towel, even if I’m not as actively writing as I want to be or ought to be. I still have goals in mind. I have not given up.

It’s OK if the timetable is longer than the one I originally envisioned. Theoretically and hopefully, I have several decades left on this Earth and I have time to learn and grow and become a better writer. I can’t compare myself to people who published awesome books when they were 22. It’s OK if it takes me more time. I wish their career longevity, but just because they started early it doesn’t mean their career will last. I was recently reading about George R. R. Martin’s career, who as who may know, is both not young and extremely successful as a writer these days. But there was a time he wrote a novel that was such a flop, he said it “essentially destroyed my career as a novelist at the time.” At the time. He moved on and did other things. Slowly and surely, building his writing up to become the author you know today.

And then there is Cristin Terrill, author of All Our Yesterdays, who recently explained why there wouldn’t be a sequel to her book. In case you haven’t heard about this, it’s because she couldn’t make it work. Period. Draft after draft, working with others, nothing could help it. She probably felt like a failure, so frustrated she couldn’t bring her ideas to life. But she learned. The experience will help her as a writer. She can and will grow from this. It was a really neat thing to read about, even if it was a little scary to think about it happening to me!

We are all always learning.

I am always learning.

Bookish Wedding Inspiration: The Grisha Trilogy

August 5, 2014 • 9 Comments

*WARNING!* This post does contain spoilers for Ruin and Rising.

After finishing Ruin and Rising, I got pretty excited about doing a new bookish wedding inspiration post for it. And of course, since there is an actual wedding described in the epilogue, it made it both easier (I know what to look for!) and harder (limitations!) to gather pictures for this post.

The hard part was finding suitable attire for this bookish wedding inspiration. I wanted to draw from the book as much as possible and make it feel like this could be the wedding in the book, and yet, the setting of the book versus the world we live in can make this difficult. I tried various searches on different types of dresses and attire that could work for a slightly more casual wedding, and also focused mostly on the season of winter, because for some reason I think Alina and Mal’s wedding took place in the winter. So first, let me get some of those pictures out there, just in case you were curious what I found.

Sources: red couple, bride and groom with cap, cardigan over dress, groomsmen with sweaters, and blue bride with coat

I almost went with the coat over the dress in the top right corner as the look for Alina. After all…

The bride wore no kokochnik, no dress of gold.

So with that in mind, I figured she didn’t have the chance to properly go dress shopping. But guys, GUYS, I found the most amazingly perfect Grisha-looking wedding dress (at least in my opinion) that I think also fits well with modern sentiment. So with that it mind, I present…

Bridal Look

The Dress

When I saw this Temperly London dress, there was really no turning back. It may not fit the sentiment of the simple wedding Alina and Mal shared, but STILL! It just screamed Grisha to me. I could not NOT share it.

The Hair

I presume Alina’s hair was back to white by the time she and Mal tied the knot, and since Mal mentioned very specifically wanting to see a white veil in her hair, I thought combining the white hair updo with this simple veil might be a look worn by Alina on her big day.

The Accessories

I honestly don’t know what the deal with the driftwood crown is, but it was mentioned in the book (“He had to stand on a chair to hold the driftwood crows above their heads as the blessings were said”), so I Googled for one and found the image on the bottom right. For Alina’s bridal accessories, I decided to go with a simplistic sun theme as a reminder of her recent past, including this sun-inspired ring and sun charm necklace.

The Groom

I don’t know what Mal would wear, and it probably wouldn’t even be this, but I was looking for something nice but laid back and not black. This guy also looks a little bit like I picture Mal (though Mal is probably a little more muscular?), so there was also that. It’s hard to follow up that dress.

The Location

A chapel stood on the coast of West Ravka, south of Os Kervo, on the shores of the True Sea. It was a quiet place, where the waves came nearly to the door. The whitewashed walls were laden with shells, and the dome that floated above the altar looked less like the heavens than the deep blue well of the sea.

When I first started looking for images for the proper white chapel for this wedding, I immediately thought of the Interfaith Chapel in Seaside, FL, which I saw (the outside, not the inside) when I visited there. It seems like just the right size, and I love the way the way it is decorated in the left photo, because it makes me think of the stag’s antlers and just the trilogy in general. But then I reread this part of the epilogue and looked for some more chapel pictures that might be slightly more fitting.

Photo source for top picture

These three pictures are not actually of the same place, but we’ll pretend they are. 🙂

The Cake

Even the smallest of weddings deserve a little cake. This is the sort of simple cake that I imagine Alina and Mal might have celebrated their marriage with.

What would you expect from the Ruin and Rising wedding, or at one inspired by it?

Mini Movie Reviews: Nonstop, Tron, The Lego Movie, and Mansfield Park

July 30, 2014 • 13 Comments

I’ve been watching new (to me, anyhow) movies and been slacking on the reviews! Here’s my one paragraph thoughts on four films…

Non-Stop

Non-Stop was pretty much a non-stop adrenaline rush, other than its slow beginning and then somewhat wrapped-up-with-a-tidy-bow-on-top ending. This, like Taken, is a Liam Nesson movie that really makes you think twice about traveling. It’s an interesting idea and I was really invested in what was happening, but the reveal was a little disappointing for reasons I can’t fully explain (not because of spoilers so much as I just don’t know to explain it!), and then the ending was kind of like, “OK, yay Liam Nesson saved the day, movie over.” I don’t know, I just would have liked to have been thought through a little more after an intriguing premise. Other than the suspense, another upside to this film was actually the characters.

(Note: This is the same director as the Liam Nesson film Unknown, which I have similar complaints about, though I liked Nonstop more.)

Tron

If you go into Tron expecting it to be 80tastic, you’ll get exactly that. It was a little confusing too, especially in the beginning, and I would have been much more lost had it not been for my familiarity with Tron: Legacy. But the idea is interesting, and I really liked how these initial ideas were further developed in Tron: Legacy.

The Lego Movie

I had zero interest in this movie, but I had many friends who insisted it was great, and more of an adult movie than a kid movie. Well, these friends of mine have kids, and I think maybe their opinion has been somewhat diluted by this. I enjoyed it pretty well at the moment, and it made me laugh, but with a heavy-handed message to parents and the crazy fast pacing, it didn’t quite reach “everything is awesome” level for me, and ended up more on the forgettable side. (P.S. Unikitty is awesome though. Hands down my favorite character.)

Mansfield Park

Finally! This was the last Jane Austen novel I had zero exposure to, and I was finally introduced to Mansfield Park via the 2007 adaptation. I enjoyed it, but it felt so short, and I really want to see the slightly older version that has Jonny Lee Miller. But the actors and actresses in this adaptation were really good, and Hayley Atwell was the evil Mary Crawford! As a big Peggy Carter fan that broke my heart!

What movies have you seen lately? Have you seen any of these?

Review: The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet

July 27, 2014 • 8 Comments

(Note: I think it goes without saying that there will be Lizzie Bennet Diaries GIFs below…)

When I found out that The Lizzie Bennet Diaries web series was turning into a book, this was my reaction:

But I admit, I was also slightly skeptical, because can you really write a solid book based on a web series based on a classic novel. Well, I think The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet pulled it off pretty well.

There were a few things that prevented this from getting a 5-star rating from me, and I’ll list those up front.

First: this feels like a companion to the web series. I don’t think you should really go into reading this without knowing The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, or at the very least Pride and Prejudice (but even then… it’s better to know the series). I would have liked to have seen it stand on it’s own a little better. Also, I was disappointed in some character moments that weren’t in the web series that felt unnecessary in the book. I’m not going to go into details, but some of it just didn’t really ring true for me.

Lastly, while it felt mostly consistent with the web series, it didn’t ALWAYS. There’s at least one instance that became really obvious when I decided to watch one of the episodes (I watched a few as I read the book, just to see how they played out in both and because I felt like it :)), in which Lizzie got her new phone. In the book, it’s emphasized that her phone started acting up after it was dropped on the marina pier on her day with Darcy and Gigi, but in the web series it sounded like her phone had been acting up for a while and she finally got a new one when her contract came up for renewal. Maybe it shouldn’t have bothered me so much, but considering that in the Q&A in the back the authors emphasized the importance of consistency between the two, I found that to be a little too inconsistent.

However, I hate that that bothered me so much because the day where she hung out with Darcy and Gigi in the book (and was not described in the web series) was so cute and left me wanting more of those interactions! But then, of course, things got crazy with the whole Lydia thing. And thankfully, “the Lydia instance” felt a lot more balanced in the book. In the web series I think they dragged it out for weeks, which felt really disproportionate to other plot points in the series, so I appreciated less emphasis on it, yet still making the important points of what everyone learned from it.

This book made me chuckle out loud a lot, which is also a definite high point for any book. (Though there wasn’t enough Lydia-isms or Fitz for me!) I think Lizzie venting about Catherine de Bourgh amused me the most.

And of course anything that showed more of Darcy was a plus, like the aforementioned day out with him and Gigi, as well as his letter to Lizzie. I do wish we had gotten more than just a couple of video transcripts about Lizzie and Darcy’s big moments on camera, and got more of her elaboration on them, though.

I did feel like there was some additional insight and characterization to Lizzie, which I liked. I learned that she prefers a classic wardrobe over trends (which I think is obvious in the videos), that she drives a Honda Civic (me too!), that she majored in English for her undergraduate degree, and why she chose new media communications as her course of study for graduate school. Of course, I related to a lot of this which was largely why I liked these new tidbits! 🙂

Though both the web series and the novel have a couple of low points for me, overall, the novel is just as totes adorbs as the series overall! If you’re a fan, it’s definitely worth checking out!

Content advisory: A few instances of mild/moderate language, and mentions of sex but nothing graphic and no sex scenes.

What are your thoughts of The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet?

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