23 May 2011

Con, movie, book

I went to Gaylaxicon @ Outlantacon two weekends ago. A friend drove here from Boston, then we drove down to Atlanta together. The con is small, but it was fun, and I ate way too much in the consuite. Every other time I went up to get some food, there was cake or cookies or chocolate, and, well. I love those things. Saved me from spending much money, though. (The hotel's restaurant was good and delightfully inexpensive. A room service omelet was only $6.)

This weekend I went to a tai chi push hands workshop at one of my teachers' home. It's in a very rural area, and he's got this pavilion (looks like a carport for the roof with nice wood flooring and roll-down sides) set up. He's a former Marine, and one of his children is in the service, so his entire house is full of USMC and other military paraphernalia as well as Chinese and tai chi-related things. It's kind of surreal. Anyway, the workshop was cool, and there may be future Saturday seminars, but they tend to be in the morning, and Saturday mornings are bad for me, because that's when we go grocery shopping. (And from August-May, there's Bundesliga football...) So I may start going to the Monday night push hands class, since my Tuesday class is going on hiatus for summer.

I'm literary chair for a new convention here in Chapel Hill, and I have a guest of honor, which is exciting. Once she signs the contract (I'm not in charge of that end of things, just of figuring out whom to invite, panels, and the like) and it's on our website, I'll be sharing the heck out of it. I persuaded Ben to be on staff, too, and he's the comics/media chair. I'll promote more later :)

We went to see Thor Friday night. I enjoyed it! Lots of people have said they didn't like it, or were underwhelmed, or whatever, but I had a great time watching this piece of blond beefcake with a cheeky grin being hilarious alongside Natalie Portman and her cute assistant. Kenneth Branagh directed it, and he's known for his Shakespeare movies. If you view Thor as Shakespeare in modern English, the movie makes a lot more sense.

I've agreed to review a book for Bull Spec. It's Germline by TC McCarthy. It's dense and gritty, told by a protagonist who's not a very nice guy but you kind of like him anyway. If the cover shown there and the blurb on that blog post make it look like the kind of book you'd like, you probably will. I really like that cover. I'm looking forward to the second book, and I'm only halfway through the first!

I won't be able to post that review here, but I'll let you know when that issue of Bull Spec is available. Also, props to the author, because in the extras section at the back of the ARC, they ask who his favorite authors are, and he breaks it down by country, including Russia and Kazakhstan. I couldn't even name a Kazakh author if you asked, and my Russian knowledge is limited to the big 19th century guys, Nabokov, and Sergey Lukanyenko (Night Watch).

08 May 2011

Movie review: Hanna

After yesterday's review of something I didn't like, I'll talk about something I did like.

I'd heard a little bit about this movie about a girl (Saoirse Ronan) who was raised in remote Finland to be a super killer, because as soon as Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett) finds out, she'll stop at nothing until Hanna's dead. It got some good reviews, but the thing that made me perk up was that the last act was set in Berlin, including a frantic chase through the Spreepark. (There's a set of photos here accompanying an article about punks in the GDR. It's an interesting article, but only in German.)

So. It could have been a gratuitously violent flick like Kick-ass (the one about the little potty-mouthed killer superhero(?) girl, which I never saw) or anything in Quentin Tarantino's repertoire. There was definitely violence, I won't lie. The fight scenes are interestingly choreographed and set to music by the Chemical Brothers. There's also some spinning, dizzying cinematography, and the first time it was OK, but the second time it kind of dragged on.

Hanna has lived in the forest with her father (Eric Bana) her whole life. She's never met another person than Erik Heller, or heard music, or used a computer, or seen a car. She encounters people for the first time, and she doesn't quite know how to react to them. The scenes where Hanna's trying to figure out how people work are a delight, because they're realistic.

It's a good movie, not for the squeamish, and worth catching before it leaves theaters.