Right, it was a movie day, in a way. There are some spoilers, I won't lie, but I give away no endings.

Watched Coraline with the little sis, and neither one of us was really impressed. Technically, it's awesome. The imagery and the animation are great. We couldn't figure out if it was just the movie, or if it was that we'd read the book it was based on, but it just didn't do much for either of us. Though feline Keith David was FANTASTIC. I will say that every time the "other mother" tapped her button eyes it was beyond creepy.

Next up was Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li which I would never have paid money for and only watched to pass the time while doing other things. The movie isn't only bad. I mean, it's bad, sure, but it's also...incomprehensible. The bad does not flow in any understandable fashion. Why is Bison white? And with an Irish accent on top of it all? Even though he supposedly grew up in Bangkok? It's random bad, all tossed together. Vega, who I remembered as something of a vain but badass jerk, is like, a flyweight. Michael Clark Duncan seems like he's just there for the nice Asian scenery, and because he enjoys laughing while other people try to kick his ass. Chris Klein and Moon Bloodgood are in a totally different movie, I swear, it just got pieced together with this one. I don't even know if their characters were IN the Street Fighter mythos. And then of course, there's Lana Lang from Smallville as our heroine, who must narrate EVERY MAJOR DECISION because OMG, we would be completely unable to guess why she is doing these things from what the movie has shown us. Did I mention the blood magic curse/blessing that Bison has going on? Yeah.

Last one was Knowing, Nicholas Cage's latest sci-fi flick. I oddly enjoyed this one, he's very hit-or-miss with me. Maybe I liked the realism running underneath the fiction. The child actors did a very good job of walking the line between all-knowing conduits to a greater knowledge and little kids who don't understand big things like death. I wish Rose Byrne would start doing movies where she got to do more than look tragic and cry, she's good, but really, she did this routine in Sunshine too. I also like that it's not our fault. I do love a science fiction movie that isn't trying to tell us that everything shitty happening to planet Earth is all our fault and that one day it will be our fault that the world ends. Sometimes shit happens, and no one's to blame, and that's a big theme in the movie, and I thought it was cool.

Been a bit since I posted the highlights of my job, so here's this week so far:

Saturday I manned Kid's World all by myself, since everyone else was at the American Library Association conference. It went well, I felt a little bad because things were slow up until I went to lunch, while I was gone my replacement from reference had to deal with a flow of kids looking for their summer reading prizes. She said she didn't have any problems though. I helped a few people and did some tidying, but overall it was a nice, easy day.

Sunday, on the other hand, was insane. INSANELY FABULOUS. I went to the conference myself, and it was amazing. Books everywhere. People who love books everywhere, it was a little bit like heaven I think. I got so much swag, between the galley copies and the free real editions and the posters, I took three trips to the car. I also did meet and greets with a lot of publishers who do graphic novels for kids, distributed my card (I HAVE CARDS!) and chatted up the audiobook places, as Graphic Novels and Audiobooks are sort of my job now.

Also? Met Charlaine Harris. Got her newest book for $5 and made her laugh when I told her that the Sookie Stackhouse books saved me after I read the Twilight series. I said I needed vampire books that didn't make me crazy. She cracked up, and in a very Southern way. Awesome. Then I met Margaret Weiss and got the new Dragonlance book signed (Wizards of the Coast handed them out for free). She was really sweet, and her assistant loved my story about my brother putting down one of the novels in disgust because the prologue was set in the real world. Katie from the library was cool and got a copy signed for my brother. I got free copies of a few other books signed by people I can't remember off the top of my head, but they were all very friendly.

THEN: Newberry Award Banquet. Technically Newberry, Caldecott, Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal banquet, but that's too long to say. Neil Gaiman won for The Graveyard Book and his speech was absolutely fabulous. The Caldecott winner won first, but she just talked about herself a lot with no grounding until the end, whereas every part of Gaiman's speech was along the lines of "This is how what happened in my life fits into the importance of books, reading and libraries." He's a good speaker. It would seem impossible to follow that, but 86-year-old Ashley Bryan (believe me, you know his books) knocked it out of the park. He started out by getting the whole crowd to recite a poem by Langston Hughes, rocked out for about 15 minutes, and ended it by having us sing a song. I cannot possibly convey how fantastic he was. So much energy and passion, and for children's literature. Some people act like it's not a big deal, but he KNOWS it is, and it shines through every aspect of his words.

Monday, mercifully, I didn't have to work until 2, but my body got me up at 8:45. Stupid body. From 2-5 we were hopping, Tiffany was so glad to see me when I arrived. I had an amusing moment when two boys who were using the computers were standing at the desk watching me while I helped a girl who was having trouble with the volume on her computer. I was holding the headset attached to each machine In My Hand while I fixed it. I asked the boys what they needed and they said, "Can we have headphones?" I stared at them, gestured toward the headphones sitting on the towers of their two machines and said, "You mean like those?" "OOOHHHH!"

Things stayed busy, but I had so much to do, we needed a felt story for this week's storytime, so I had to think it up, get our super volunteer Beata to make me a felt cowboy, and then cull pieces from other stories to make one up about a cowboy who lost his hat. The trick was creating a story in which you could use 24 different pieces, as that is the maximum number of kids in the storytime, and I've run out before. But it worked out. Toward the end of the night, I was reshelving material, and I rounded a corner on the far side of the movies. A little girl and her mother had been on their way out, her trailing behind as she walked, and when she saw me, she stopped. I smiled and waved, and she stared at me, her hand by her face, as if I were something fascinating. Her mother called her name, and I pointed in the direction, but still she only looked at me. I walked over and held out my hand, and she took my four fingers in hers as if it was the most obvious thing to do, and we walked out together. When we got to her mother, then she looked up at me and smiled.

I love my job. More later, I's tired.

Dead Perfect - this is a romance novel. With vampires. And a good Christian girl, who turns into a good Christian vampire. No, I'm serious. No, REALLY. It was a sneaky, sneaky sledgehammer-to-the-skull book, that started out as something entirely different (and kinda cool) and morphed into this ridiculous PG-13 vampire love story worthy of sarcastic comparisons to Twilight. Seriously though, you're 400 years old and you're hanging onto some not-entirely-true-at-all version of morality in regards to sex? REALLY? Vampirefail.

PUSH - this movie was totally marketed wrong. I think they might also have gone into it with the wrong mindset. The trailers and ads focused on the superpowers, like it was an action-thriller, when in reality it's more like a Sam Spade story with superpowers. Imagine The Maltese Falcon, only every different group of people after the bird has someone with them who can see the future. The cast in it did a good job, but the tone was all wrong, and so it came across flat. I wish they'd played up the Pushing angle more. I mean, on top of the dueling precogs you have the added freakout of knowing that people with and against you can warp your perception of reality to the point where you could forget your own name. How do you know you're really even after something at all, with your fabulous drunk Dakota Fanning in tow, when you know at least two people could be screwing with your head?

My Sister's Keeper - not my usual fare when it comes to seeing movies in the theaters, but I went with my Godmother as a present for her birthday. She loved it, so the whole experience was a success, and it was hilarious listening to the teeny-boppers in front of me start to totally break down. I haven't read the book, so for all I know it could be a rotten adaptation, but it is a good idea for a story. Abigail Breslin is of course excellent, and the actress playing her dying sister does a fabulous job throughout, even though at times they give her some really lame things to do. The real trouble with this movie is not that it's deliberately playing on your heartstrings, it's that it doesn't do it well. The cast is fabulous, Alec Baldwin does a nice turn, but none of them are given anything meaty to work with, and melodrama is injected into everything. The worst part is the soundtrack. There are some moments in this movie that needed silence, because this is damn serious stuff, and instead it was always some meebling tune put there in case you didn't get that dying of cancer is hard and watching your family suffer is hard too. The sequence with Thomas Dekker as the fellow cancer patient works very well though, cause really what's worse? That you're sick and could die young, or that your girlfriend/boyfriend is also sick and might die first?

I mostly think the King of Pop was something of a creepy weirdo who put out some great music and changed the face of music videos. However, I have one particularly awesome personal memory of Michael Jackson.

In 1989, when my mom was pregnant with Rosie (like, just-before-you-have-to-stop-flying big), my parents took us to Florida for a vacation. We went to Disneyworld and Epcot and one of the big shows at the latter was the 3-D spectacle Captain Eo. This was before the radical changes to his appearance had made him sort of frightening to behold, and before the public was really aware of the scope of the weirdness surrounding Michael Jackson.

I remember being totally blown away by the show. It was so cool, aliens and music and transforming robots, there was nothing in there that was not to love. It was all so cool and Disneyfied, it was perfect when I was a kid. I walked out of the show thinking Michael Jackson was the coolest thing ever. More than a decade later in college I would get all excited to see the movie on video, and be surprised at how short it was (and silly, goodness me silly, wonderfully silly) Only later would I marvel at the presence of Angelica Huston and think that mayhaps that lady had a little crush on the science fiction genre, since this was so close to Ice Pirates for her.

If anything comes of his death, I hope it's a compilation of all those great music videos that put him head and shoulders above the crowd. And Captain Eo. I'd like to have that in my collection.

I caught a marathon of this show on "chiller" tonight and was totally depressed. While the storytelling is decent, and I liked the idea of the devil's advocate basically letting all the good guys screw up enough to do his job for him, I'm getting a little tired of hopeless stories.

It makes me think of the new The Day the Earth Stood Still movie. There's a bit where Klateanu is talking to another, older alien. The older one tells him that humanity will never change, and that the tragic thing is that we know we're doomed. I wonder if that's why so many stories lately have that downer element. It happened in the British series Hex too.

I don't necessarily need all stories to end happily, but I dislike the hopelessness lately. Maybe it was because of the recession and the build-up to it and 9/11 and the war.

Makes me long for the days of Buffy when Xander talked Willow off the Armageddon ledge.

We have little traditions in our family. Playing Neil Diamond at weddings, never missing a chance to sing at parties, watching holiday-themed movies when those holidays roll around.

At the Fourth of July, it's always 1776. God, it took me years to really appreciate this movie beyond just thinking, "Hey! John Adams is Mr. Feeney! Mr. Feeney can sing!"

Looking at it now, I see so many different things that make it awesome. The three-dimensional characters, even those with just a few lines. The balanced presentation of opinions, even if they are being shouted at the top of the characters' lungs. This time around I noticed the costuming.

The "good" guys: Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, etc, are all in simple clothing. They might all be dressed appropriately to their station in life, but the fabrics and style are very basic, not a lot of frills - though Franklin gets more colors. The loyalist John Dickinson is wearing fabric that is clearly richer, with a bit more lace and shinier buttons. The cut of his clothes might be similar to Adams, but he's wearing silk. Almost the entire Southern contingent...well, they look a bit foppish. Edward Rutledge (OMG Northern Exposure guy!) struts into his first scene looking like Liberace. The exception is of course Dr. Lyman Hall, the late arrival from Georgia who votes for Independence even though he knows the people of his state might disagree. He's attired very modestly.

One of the most striking moments comes when Rutledge falls out over the paragraph in the Declaration referencing slavery. It's a hot day, and everyone's taken off their coats, and he and Jefferson - his fellow slave owner, are both attired entirely in whites and off-whites, even the design of their waistcoats is similar. The little things like that, showing how similar these men were, I never noticed them before.

It's such a good movie, I can only imagine how awesome it must have been as a theater production. Even though I know most of the best bits by heart, it still makes me laugh.

will post later, promise. No really, I swears.

Maryfest and the Cubs/Sox game, so much fun. GAH TIRED.

Have to work. Need food before I do that. Should have slept more.

Farrah Fawcett died.

IT SCARES ME!

KILL IT BUFFY! KILL IT HARD!


http://blip.tv/file/2261825/

My boss found out tomorrow was my birthday and told me I could have the day off. Her logic being no one should have to work on their birthday. I love my boss and her wonderful logic.

This means my Dad is taking me out to dinner!