2012 King of the Hill: Weird December

The Theme Idea Lasted Only So Long...
Somewhere on my computer, or perhaps in the ether of this universe is the unfinished post of my first attempt to write my December summary.  I had partially written the first two movies in epic battle format.  Alas, the post is gone and I'm ready to start over.  The month started out with a theme, I watched two Christmas movies.  Then, well, everything got weird.  So, this month is the final month of my 2012 King of the Hill challenge.  Starting tomorrow, I'll begin the epic show down between the top monthly contenders to determine which movie is ultimate movie of 2012.

For those who do not know, the 2012 King of the Hill Movie Challenge is my system for determining the best movie of year that I saw. One movie from each month will be selected and, at the end of the year, I will do a tournament style showdown where they will take each other on until the final movie has been selected. Bracket placement will be determined by the number of movies the monthly movie faced and won.

Home Alone v Rare Exports:  A Christmas Tale
Kevin (Macaulay Culkin)  is a kid who must stand up to be an unlikely hero to protect his home from burglars who would destroy Christmas.  Pietari (Onni Tommila) is a kid who must stand up to be an unlikely hero to protect his home from Santa Clause who would destroy Christmas.  And that is where the comparisons between the two movies come to an end.

Home Alone is a bit of a classic these days.  It is about a boy, Kevin, who is left behind by his family on Christmas vacation.  Kevin, thinks that this is from a wish he made and enjoys the life of living on his own.  Unfortunately for him, he discovers that there are two burglars who are trying to rob his home.  He is the last line of defense and must overcome his fears to fight back.  Despite the fact that this movie is remembered as a wacky, slapstick comedy, the battle between the burglars and Kevin doesn't even begin until the last thirty minutes of the movie.  Most of the movie is about Kevin, his family, and his adventures alone.  After having rewatched this movie from 1990, I was surprised to find how well written it was.  The movie even has a deeper moral story, which was a bit touching.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is a horror flick.  From what I can tell, it is based around the folk-lore creature known as Krampus.  In this movie, a group of Americans are digging up an old burial ground looking for the body of Santa Clause.  As it happens, Santa Clause is not the nice man everyone thinks he is.    He, in fact, abducts naughty children and torments and tortures them for being such monsters.

As much as I'd love to give a Finnish language movie the title, Home Alone is just a better film.  It is, if you can believe this, less campy.  The story is also stronger.  I'd still recommend catching Rare Exports:  A Christmas Tale.

Winner:  Home Alone

Whip It v Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Whip It is not a Christmas movie.  It is a movie about a high school girl who sneaks off behind her parents back and joins a Roller Derby league.  Bliss (Ellen Page) comes from a home where her father hides his football watching, her mother hides her smoking, and Bliss is expected to do pageants because her mother tells her to.  When she discovers the brutal sport of Roller Derby, she signs up and joins the team.  The movie is a phenomenal story about family, growing up, and finding who you are.

If you do not know what the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are, I feel sorry for you.  Stop, look them up, watch a few episodes.  This movie was the first live action film staring the four turtles, Splinter, and April O'Neil (Judith Hoag) as the fight the mysterious Footclan.  The film is a classic in my eyes and I actually have the entire movie, line-for-line, memorized.

Though I would love to award THIS movie to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I must recognize the fact that Whip It is a better movie on just about every front.  It has an amazing story, a wonderful cast of characters, and will most definitely survive the test of time.

Winner:  Whip It

Home Alone v Whip It
Interesting enough, both of these movies are about the power of family and the struggles that families face.  And while it is difficult to compare these two movies together, it is Whip It that has the stronger showing.  Home Alone is a comedy and while the movie is definitely a great film, you have to forgive some of the absurdity of the film.  With Whip It, you don't need to overlook the absurd and can let yourself fall into the movie.

Winner:  Whip It

Cultivating Ideas Through Research

I won't be talking about the fact I finished my fifth draft of The Rose and the Crown today. I'll talk about that in a future blog.

Instead, I'm going to talk about the importance of writing research and reading. I have several stories that I'm working on in one phase or another. Regardless of what project I'm working on, I'm always looking for ideas that can help develop my stories. I look for ideas everywhere. I've had ideas for improving stories come while running, while on my morning commute, and even from conversations overheard at a doctor's office. However, the best ideas I've come up with have come from conducting research or reading lots of books.

To provide you with an example, I'm reading The Kalevala. The Kalevala is the national epic poet of Finland as collected and written down by Elias Lönnrot. I'm not very far into the epic and I've already gotten a few great ideas for my “paranormal romance” project.

The story I'm still peculating in my head will involve a great deal of the supernatural, including numerous animal mythologies, alchemy, and magical enchantments. I've done a lot of research so far towards this world, many pieces I may never use. However, last night while reading The Kalevala, I came across this gem:

Who then took a bough

took eternal happiness

and who then broke off the top

broke off eternal magic;

who cut off a leafy twig

he cut off eternal love.

A few lines later we also have this:

She saw a sliver floating

gathered it into her bag

in the bag carried it home

in the long-strapped to the yard

to make her witch's arrows

her weapon of enchantment.

Both passages are talking about the destruction of a particular oak tree. These two passages, each six lines in length, give me a few ideas to file away. I have a bough that grants happiness, a top of this tree that grants eternal magic, a twig that grants eternal love, and slivers that can be used as enchantments for arrows. This gives me for potential plot items I could bring into the story. I might use all of them, or none of them. What matters is that in my arsenal of ideas, I now have Arrows of Kalevala that could be fired at my protagonist.

Options are an important part of the writing process. You need to be able to look at your story and determine what works best for the situation. It might not be the oak tree, but the oak tree is there for consideration. It logically follows that you need to spend time reading and researching to give yourself more options. A few hours at your local library in the reference section can give you hundreds of new ideas. I've done this a dozen times, just flipping through, reading and learning the names and stories of mythological creatures I've never been able to find online.

I know I talk about cliches a lot, but I wanted to point this out. Proper research can give you a way to avoid commonly used cliches. If I wanted my protagonist to be magically forced into falling in love with the antagonist, I could use the common cliche of a love potion. Alternatively, because of my research, I can have my antagonist walk up to the protagonist and whack him in the head with an oak twig. It adds a bit of comedy and takes at least one cliche out of the story.

No, I will not be having my protagonist forced into love with anyone else. That was just a hypothetical. You'll have to wait and read to see what evil plans I have in store with him.

2012 King of the Hill Movie Challenge

During 2012, I'll be pitting the movies I watch against each other to determine the top movies of the year. Each month, I will compare every movie I watch to the defending champion. The top movie at the end of the month will be that month's pick of that month. At the end of the year, I'll be comparing the twelve movies together to determine my movie of the year.

So far, I've seen exactly one movie for the year. Hanna was a movie I wanted desperately to see in theaters but never got a chance to until now.

Hanna

Director: Joe Wright

Writers: Seth Lochhead and David Farr

Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett, and Eric Bana

This movie sets a very, very high bar for January. I loved just about everything that this movie had to offer. The story follows a young girl, Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) who has been raised by her father, Erik (Eric Bana) in the arctic tundra of Finland. Convinced that she is ready, Hanna is intentionally captured by CIA special forces so that she can get close to Marissa (Cate Blanchett) and assassinate her.

The movie is a hard movie to categorize. I can't truly call it an action flick, but it isn't drama either. It's refreshing to have a movie that defies categories. Notably, the movie has strong character development in Hanna, something I rarely see in the action genre. Another aspect of the movie that makes it impossible to call it an action flick is its use of imagery. The imagery is subtle, enough to hint upon your subconscious. The movie opens with Finland and a world of pure white and it is a significant amount of time before more than one or two colors become common place on the screen. This color shift is, clearly the imagery of Hanna's state of innocence. Additionally, the movie makes multiple references to fairy tales. At one particularly important scene, Hanna is confronted by Marissa who has just stepped out from the jaws of a wolf at an amusement park.

None of the above is to say that the movie is perfect. There are issues with this film. In Morocco, Hanna is on her own for the first time. She finds herself quickly overwhelmed by the many sounds in her room. The television, which had been on a piece of music seconds before is suddenly making war noises. The phone happens to ring at that moment. There are gunshots in the street. It was forced far too much and pulled me out of the story. Another issue with the movie, and this is a minor complain, is the languages presented in the film. The movie has five languages used in the film I could identify. The characters all speak English. German comes up in a few scenes. Arabic is used for one of the Morocco scenes. Italian and Spanish are both used once. Five languages, and they couldn't bother to use the native language for the country of the opening scene, Finland.

For those of you reading this who do not know me yet, I happen to love Finland. I was looking forward to watching a movie that might have a few scenes of characters speaking in a foreign language I know. This was disappointing.

Summary:

With no movies to compare this to yet, Hanna is the top dog. Woe be to the next few movies that try and knock this movie off of the hill.