Around the throat of the one I love...

[greygirlbeast]

Yesterday, I did 1,265 words on the new werewolf vignette for Sirenia Digest #31, and finished it. It has a title now, "Unter den Augen des Mondes." And if there's some obvious error in my German, I hope someone here who is a native German speaker (I know we have several) will correct it. Thank you. I do like this piece. It is only 2,423 words long, but that's as long as it "wanted" to be, and feels a lot like the pieces in Frog Toes and Tentacles and Tales from the Woeful Platypus. It is the last piece of fiction I shall write in Atlanta. How weird is that?

Anyway, today will be my very last work day here, before the move to Providence next week. Counting today, we have eight days remaining until moving day. Well, except that eleven hours and forty-seven minutes of today have already passed. So, we have seven and a half days. About 180 hours. 10,800 minutes. Some 648,000 seconds. Except we lose tomorrow on a trip to Birmingham to see my doctor there. Six and a half days. The time has grown so short so quickly. Today, I'll work on getting Sirenia Digest #30 together, though I'm not precisely sure which day I'll be sending it out. I'm still waiting on Vince's artwork for "Rappaccini's Dragon." This month's issue will also include a new vignette by Sonya Taaffe (sovay), "The Mirror of Venus." Oh, and I probably haven't mentioned this, but Vince will also be providing interior illustrations for A is for Alien.

The packing is truly wearing us down. The house is a maze of boxes, a veritable labyrinth of cardboard. Now that all the books are packed, I've moved along to fossils and such. The truly tedious, time-consuming stuff. For example, last night I packed the Camarasaurus and Maiasaura peeblesorum skull casts. Tonight, many more fossils, my display trilobites and ammonites and Solnhofen specimens and such.

We got out of the maze yesterday evening long enough for a Thai dinner. And then, much later, we watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, in preparation for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which I hope we can take time to see on Friday. I'd not seen Temple of Doom since its initial theatrical release in 1984. Then I hated it, but I had some meager hope maybe it was not as bad as I recalled. But it is. There are a few good moments here and there, but, overall, it's a fairly ridiculous film. Somewhere after the plane's engines sputter and fail, the whole thing goes to crap. A huge part of it is the intolerably screechy Kate Capshaw. Gegh. But, though I could list many reasons this film fails as a "prequel" to Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), the most important is simply that Temple of Doom presents us with a Dr. Jones who can accept (and use) supernatural forces. Can we really buy that after using those stones to defeat Mola Ram, that he doesn't accept even the possibility that the Ark possesses supernatural abilities? No, we can't. Well, I can't. It's just an awful, awful movie, and it's a shame that the second film in this series could not have followed the example of its predecessor, instead of delivering something that feels like a parody of Raiders. It's an eyesore, and I was completely justified in dismissing it all those years ago.

Oh, someone on my FL was asking about favourite Speilberg films. Mine would be Jaws, with Close Encounters of the Third Kind in second place.

Very late, we read the first chapter of the book I'm reviewing for Publisher's Weekly.

Comments

[chris-walsh.livejournal.com]

And apparently the film wasn't written to be a prequel, but sometime in production the filmmakers changed that. The reason I heard (rumor!) was that they felt he wouldn't be as harsh post-Raiders as he was in Doom, that surviving the Ark business would've made him more humane.

His character arc definitely works better from Raiders to Last Crusade, where Jones is reacting to icons from his culture's religious history and in the process finds his spirtual side, especially when he must reach the knight in the cave and save his dad.

Doom's rehash of the "just shoot the son-of-a-bitch" gag from Raiders always kind of bugged me; "Why would he think to do that before Raiders?"

[greygirlbeast.livejournal.com]

And apparently the film wasn't written to be a prequel, but sometime in production the filmmakers changed that. The reason I heard (rumor!) was that they felt he wouldn't be as harsh post-Raiders as he was in Doom, that surviving the Ark business would've made him more humane.

This is so stupid it's probably true.

His character arc definitely works better from Raiders to Last Crusade, where Jones is reacting to icons from his culture's religious history and in the process finds his spirtual side, especially when he must reach the knight in the cave and save his dad.

Yep.

Doom's rehash of the "just shoot the son-of-a-bitch" gag from Raiders always kind of bugged me; "Why would he think to do that before Raiders?"

Agreed. So much of the film was, "Hey. This gag worked well in Raiders, so lets do it TWICE as big and it will be TWICE as cool!." Gagh.

[scarletboi.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how, but I never realized Temple of Doom was set before Raiders...


I did notice something interesting, this time through... The guy that ushers them onto the plane in the beginning of the film? I'd never noticed that it was Dan Aykroyd before.

[greygirlbeast.livejournal.com]

I'd never noticed that it was Dan Aykroyd before.

Did you notice "Club Obi Wan"?