☆❀☆

☆ New tea. It's minty and lemon-y. Nice. I've been on the lookout for something David's Tea had a while ago, can't remember what the name was, but was green with mint and lemongrass. This is... not quite it... but it's not bad. I will have to keep looking, though. (Argh, why are all the best teas seasonal, why!)

☆ I saw The Force Awakens with my father on New Year's Eve. That was nice. I have a lot of thoughts on it, but I'm not really prepared to throw them at you all just yet. Still digesting things, y'know. Though on a shallow note, I must admit, I never found myself attracted to Han Solo in the earlier films, but in this one... Yowza.

☆ Writing club today. It was nice to see everyone after being away for a while, even if the break was pretty brief. I finished a draft, and started on a self-indulgent thing. We'll see how this goes. I'm not looking forward to typing up and editing that draft, but I told Daéa that I'd try to have it done by February 14th, so... we'll see.

☆ Speaking of writing, I downloaded a wordtracker spreadsheet. I... don't know if I'm going to keep track of my wordcount, especially since I don't think I'll write every day (but then again, who knows). It's a fun tool to fiddle with, though. I've set the year goal at 50k words, which gives a nice 140-word-per-day minimum. That's doable.

☆ I am having so much trouble getting through the Jo Nesbø novel I'm reading. Police has been on my to-read list for a while, and I've been picking away at it for weeks, but I just... ugh. A lot of my complaints are kind of spoilery, so I'll save that until a weekly reading entry maybe, but needless to say, I'm not having fun with this one, even if it does have Katrine in it.

☆ Speaking of reading... I finally have a library card! And I checked books out with it! Wow. I've been kind of meaning to do this ever since I started spending more time at the library, but it's only now that I got over the jitters in order to actually get a card and check things out. (Don't ask me why. Brains are weird.) So far I have Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan, and The Man Who Spoke Snakish by Andrus Kiviräk. Anybody on my flist read either of these? I'm looking forward to them. ...Guess this means I'll have to bang my head through the last 100 pages of Police before I get to it. (I hate reading two books at the same time, unless one is fiction and the other is nonfiction, that kind of thing.)

Ugh. Snow shoveling! I'm sick of it! ... Too bad that this isn't the end of it. :| There'll be more where this came from.

Anyway. Finished watching Revenge of the Sith today. Overall impression: Definitely better than Attack of the Clones. Still didn't like it as much as Phantom Menace, but for the most part, it wasn't bad.

A few minor things - some parts (especially near the beginning) continued to do that annoying thing Clones had going on with its script, AKA "trying to be cool and funny and just falling flat". Score, again, didn't impress me as much as the original trilogy (seems to be a running theme with the prequel trilogy. But then again, it's hard to top the original trilogy's score). And basically all of the Anakin + Padme scenes continued to be cringe-worthy. I have no idea what was going on there, but everything just felt so awkward to me.

Not gonna lie, Yoda was my favourite thing about this film. Again. Seeing that little guy bounce around with his lightsaber was amazingly cool. And Obi-Wan certainly had his awesome moments too.

Previously, I'd had some trouble connecting "Anakin Skywalker" with "Darth Vader". I knew that's how he ended up, but I had a lot of problems visualizing that cute kid I remembered from Phantom Menace as the guy we later see in the original trilogy. And in Clones, Anakin was annoying as hell, and I kind of felt he needed a good smack upside the head, but he still seemed able to go either way. WELL... this movie is one big downward spiral into a worse and worse situation, and... yeahhh. Everything clicks together. Voila.

Though I still think a smack upside the head would have done Anakin good. Or at least it would make me feel better. I still find him obnoxious, but now I understand better what was going on with him.

Even though I have issues with the prequel trilogy that I didn't have with the original trilogy, overall, I'm glad that they exist. What we get in Anakin's story (even with all that awkward romance) makes what we get at the end of the original trilogy richer, I think.

So, this concludes my Star Wars watching, I think. At least, until The Force Awakens comes out. I just looked it up, and it's supposed to be set a few decades after Return of the Jedi. Must admit, I'm curious as to what they're going to do with that, but I don't think I'll poke around any more than that - I'll wait until it's in cinema to find out what it's actually about.

Continuing with my Star Wars watching, I attacked Attack of the Clones. I wasn't impressed.

I'd heard this film was awful, but since I couldn't remember anything about it even though I did see it in theatres, I thought that it was probably exaggeration. Not so.

This film couldn't even be saved by Yoda coming in with an army to save the day and then saving the day again by being a fucking badass in a lightsaber battle. It was really that awful.

I normally don't notice bad acting. It tends to just go over my head. But in this film it was... uh. Well. The dude playing Anakin was pretty bad.

The script didn't help either. Natalie Portman was fine as Padme in The Phantom Menace; nothing wrong with her there. But there was something about the way her lines were delivered here that just... didn't work. In The Phantom Menace, she was convincing in her role as a queen - or as someone who is used to firmly relaying the queen's opinions, since a lot of the time she's playing as Padme rather than Amidala (the gal in the fancy Queen's clothes was often the handmaiden Sabe, played by Keira Knightly, rather than Portman herself). But in Clones, Padme doesn't have the air of authority that she had when she was a queen, and to me she doesn't sound like a Senator at all.

A lot of the lines were cheesy and not all that natural, which probably affects it. Those romance scenes between Padme and Anakin were just... awkward as hell. I normally don't fast-forward through scenes in films unless it's for violence, but I fast-forwarded through a lot of them after a while. They just didn't work. A lot of the time in the earlier parts, Padme seemed kind of creeped out by Anakin's attention, which certainly didn't help things for me.

"I don't like sand." ... Okay.

Ewan McGregor was fine as Obi-Wan in The Phantom Menace, but in Clones it's another case where the script is showing through. A lot of the lines are just... bad. And not entirely in keeping with his character, nor with the overall atmosphere of the film series.

In a way, something about the dialogue felt very dated to me, very early-2000s. There's a sort of attempt at forced humour there, at completely inappropriate moments. In some ways, it reminded me of the type of humour in Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, and it works in that film because it's very different movie from this one. The thing that I mean is scenes like-

Anakin: [Pulls a life-threatening move in the middle of an intense chase scene]
Obi-Wan: ... I hate it when he does that.

There's something very artificial about that kind of thing, and it doesn't suit the atmosphere, or the world it's delivered in, or the character delivering it, and it sounds very... American... and very "early 2000s film". And this happened a lot, with a bunch of different characters, so the only conclusion I can make is that it's a bad script. This wasn't so much a problem in The Phantom Menace; when there was a bad attempt at humour, it was usually Jar Jar Binks delivering it, and -- well, it's Jar Jar. He's an idiot, and isn't meant to be taken seriously.

(Actually, I'm surprised at how serious Jar Jar was in Clones; I found it rather... jarring. Pff. It's possible that he could have developed into an intelligent Gungan who carries himself well and acts responsibly, like Captain Tarpals, but we don't see that on-screen really - at the end of Phantom Menace, Jar Jar is still a clumsy idiot, so -- well, anyway)

And... everything surrounding Shmi's death upset me. I don't like the way it was done. At all.

Normally I wouldn't have so many thoughts on this, and I realize I'm not saying anything new at all (people have been talking about how much this movie sucked since it came out, really) but I so rarely notice when a film is done badly, rather than just not to my taste, so this is... interesting.

Anyway. All that aside... the only things I took from this movie were "Yoda was awesome, everything else was blah". Oh, though I did like that some of the Jedi knights in that big epic battle were women. Though it would have been better if they'd had speaking lines.

Finished Return of the Jedi last night. So, that's the original Star Wars trilogy done. And now to the 2000s trilogy! Which I'm really looking forward to - The Phantom Menace was the first Star Wars movie I'd ever seen, and it completely amazed me. Then again, I was a kid at the time, so I don't know how I'll feel upon watching it again. But we'll see.

Had mixed feelings about Lando in the second film, but now I love him (and I think the mixed thoughts helped with that; going from the whole "dude, you fucked up" to "dude, you were really helpful" thing... basically). Also, I found Han Solo less obnoxious than I had previously. The Ewoks... I've heard people either love 'em or hate 'em. Myself, I was okay with them, but those fight scenes on their moon should have been pruned a little, I think.

And of course, the score and the visuals were just as awesome as the previous two movies. And the best part, I'd say.

I've started watching the Star Wars films. Going in the order they were filmed, because why not. The film that's coming out in 2015 looks like something I might want to see in cinema, so I might as well... go through the backlog.

No, really! I haven't seen most of them! Except for The Phantom Menace (which I loved) and Attack of the Clones (which I didn't) when they were in cinema. Other than that... I just never got around to watching the older films, since they weren't A Thing in my parents' household when I was growing up, and there's so much stuff out there I haven't seen....

Anyway. The first one was all right. It's kind of strange to know all the references, but at the same time be seeing them for the first time. Mostly, what I'm impressed by is the fact that for the most part, the special effects and other visuals still look good. Old, yes, but not bad.

--

And then, there's another thing entirely that I have my eye on. Kampen om tungtvannet, AKA "The Heavy Water War". It's a Norwegian miniseries about the Norwegian heavy water sabotage during WWII, and obviously it's very relevant to my interests.

It's been picked up by the BBC, but it hasn't been subtitled yet. So here I am, trying to decide whether to go ahead and watch it or... not. My command of the Norwegian language is, frankly, terrible. But this looks so exciting and I'm impatient! And it would be good practice! At least if I could manage to understand anything. But I would prefer to watch a version that I can understand, first....

Kanskje jeg kan se først episoden, og efter bestemme seg hvis jeg vil se det full serie på norsk.