Feminist Friday Discussion Topic: #YesAllWomen

This week’s Feminist Friday discussion will be hosted at Part Time Monster. The topic will be #YesAllWomen and the post will be written by the Monster-In-Chief herself.

I’ve wanted to have one of these at PTM since we started. I’m glad it’s happening for the first time this week. PTM will have a post from a contributor on this topic tomorrow, so be sure to stop by and check it out. If you’re looking for a #YesAllWomen post right this minute, try this one by Gretchen of Drifting Though.

I’m making a minor change to the way I do things this week. Rather than reblog the post early, I’ll run my Follow Friday post first and reblog it after it’s been up for a few hours. Two reasons for this. First, I’m so closely-affiliated with PTM, it doesn’t make sense to reblog this post as soon as it  publishes, because that will put the reblog in the news feeds at the same time as the post. Second, if we have  good discussion going by the time I reblog it, I can talk about the discussion in the comment.

Here’s what we have for the rest of the week:

• A post from David of Comparative Geeks here tomorrow with summer reading recommendations for Marvel Comics fans.
• A Tolkien post from me at PTM by week’s end, probably tomorrow afternoon. It’s done except for the art and the editing.
• At least one real post from me at The Writing Catalog.
• Probably at least one random music video and one random photo just to round things out (you know me).
• At some point in the near future, I’m adding a few people to the blogroll and doing a “New to the Blogroll” post. That may have to wait for the weekend, but it’s coming soon.

Happy Wednesday, and have a fabulous rest-of-the-week!

Wordless Wednesday

© 2014.

Review: Tim Burton’s Batman

by Jeremy DeFatta

Happy new book day, everyone! I’m taking a break from looking at real people through the lens of Batman for a couple of posts. Instead, I want to lay out some of my notes and thoughts on the 1989 Batman and 1992 Batman Returns films, which I recently reacquired and watched again for the first time in nearly a decade. This week, I’ll look at 1989’s Batman, directed by Tim Burton and starring Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton, and Kim Basinger.

For many fans in my generation, this film was our first exposure to the character and world of Batman. I’m pleased to say I don’t feel as negatively toward this movie as I did just a few years ago (for whatever reasons). Some aspects of it have not aged well, but it is not a bad film. I could do with a little less Prince, though.

Here are some of my revised and expanded notes that I took as I re-watched the movie, grouped around a few themes and characters:

The Aesthetic

The opening shot of Gotham City looks great; it’s awe-inspiring and massive, its precise time period indefinite, which is what Gotham should look like. I like that the film maintains the dirty 1970s/1980s New York look that Gotham had embodied in the comics for awhile, but I also like the 1940s noir feel that some of the sets and costumes have.
This movie contains one of the best-looking versions of Wayne Manor — it actually resembles a castle.

Side Characters

The decision to cast Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent was a great one. I wish Burton and Keaton had stuck around for a third film about Two-Face with Williams reprising his role.

Michael Gough is wonderful as Alfred. He definitely deserved the four-movie deal he eventually ended up with. I really enjoyed the scene where Bruce and Vicki eat in the kitchen with Alfred rather than yell at each other from opposite ends of the manor’s gigantic dining room table.

The Joker

Jack Nicholson’s performance is still nearly perfect. He is one of a very small number of actors who could have pulled off the slapstick humor and horrifying psychopathy simultaneously as well as he did.

I find the scene where the Joker defaces the paintings and statues in the museum oddly satisfying, and I’m not sure why. Soon after, it is made clear he gets pleasure out of mutilating women’s faces, which complicates the art defacement scene.

Nicholson has some of the best lines in the entire film, including “This town needs an enema!”, “Never rub another man’s rhubarb,” and (of course) “Ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?”

10 Memorable Fantasy Books and Series: Top Ten Tuesday

The great folks at The Broke and The Bookish have a feature they call Top Ten Tuesdays. I’ve wanted to join in for a couple of weeks, and since today’s theme is “Choose Your Own Topic,” I decided to whip something up. These are the ten fantasy books/series that I find most memorable.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. Hands-down my favorite fantasy book of all time.  It’s packed with beauty, tragedy, altruism, and hubris. It’s the book that made me want to write fantasy.

Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series.  It’s a series of stories about Dream of the Endless, known to some cultures as Morpheus 😉 Dream has six siblings: Destiny, Death, Destruction, Despair, Desire and Delirium. Destiny’s as old as the universe, and the rest are only slightly younger. As you might imagine, their family dramas can be intense.

George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire doesn’t need much of an introduction. I’m eagerly awaiting the next installment. I like the intrigue and the elements of realism he brings in, such as having a lot of maimed and disfigured characters. You’d totally expect that in a world that’s wracked by war and plague, but not all fantasy is this well-drawn.