Good mood Wednesday

I just got spam offering me "Charity or Pamela?" I like there being charity in the world -- I think it's a good thing. But I'm also fond of pameladean. So it's another example of not letting Them sucker you into Their binary worldview. Screw you, spammer! I choose both!

Ahem.

I am in a good mood this morning. I'm still pretty dizzy, but I slept like the dead, and yesterday felt like progress on more than one front: I got some medical stuff handled and also managed to do some of the (very extensive) Sampo revisions while I was lying on the couch. Little stuff, but it's little stuff that's done now and wasn't before. And I like feeling useful, even if it's just a little bit. And I have horizontal-friendly projects in mind for today.

My mom continues to be immeasurable amounts of help. They have the bop with them again from last night, which again put my mind at ease extremely. So considering how crappy yesterday was in some ways (being put on a table that moves around for an X-ray, while your head is already spinning? not fun), it was a very good day. So I'm going to go lie down, as I mostly have been after posting for the last week and a half, but I will lie down in a good mood, and that makes all the difference, no matter what the man says about roads diverging in a yellow wood.

What Movie Did I Watch?

Here are the lessons I learned from it:

1. My grandpa the Marine says you can't polish a horse turd. This is apparently incorrect: you can polish a horse turd and sell viewings of it for $9/ticket in some parts of the country. It will, however, remain about as appealing as the unpolished kind.

2. If you are writing a movie, do not include a scene wherein the characters are forcing laughter at someone's pointless anecdote unless you are absolutely sure that the viewer will not think, "Oh, yeah, that's just like watching this movie!"

3. If you are an actress (or an actor, this is not a gendered thing), and if you have played a pretentious, self-absorbed, and emptily self-important character in the past, do not let those mannerisms and intonations slip into the character you are currently playing if she is not intended to be those things. We will begin to think that your part as the pretentious etc. role was perhaps not the acting tour de force it might have appeared.

4. Similarly, if you have played in an action scene before, try not to make movies where the exact scene is replicated by a different character, if no one seems to be aware of it. "He just does that thing she did in that other movie -- oh, yep, that's exactly what he did" is not so good.

5. It can be very good to undermine the viewer's expectations of a genre. However, if one of the viewer's expectations is "this will be interesting and/or fun," perhaps not such a good idea -- especially if you're not showing them why they shouldn't think the original is such a good time.

Hmmm. Perhaps this set of bad-movie traits is not as unique as it should be. Very well, then:
6. Remakes, possibly all right. Sequels, possibly all right. Sequels to remakes? Be very very careful.

And 7. If you are relying upon a previous movie or a previous segment of the current movie to make people care about the characters' relationships, you actually need to set it up so that they do care in the earlier work or portion of work.

Sigh. Back to the couch -- with a book this time, not a movie.