Hanorah Words

So, I was on ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.Com recently and I saw there was a review for some movie called Devil's Carnival by Paw. Well, I checked it out and found that it was a very interesting-looking movie. In fact, I discovered it was a sort of spiritual sequel to Repo! The Genetic Opera  which was a movie/musical I quite enjoyed even if Paris Hilton was in it. The fact that it feels like she doesn't act so much as show up on set, attempt to sing, and lose her face really helps things though. So, after watching the review, I realized that I'd seen this on Netflix for quite some time. In fact, Netflix kept telling me to watch it, but I ignored the suggestions because I ignore most of the things Netflix tells me to do. I don't like watching movies computers tell me I'll like... or TV shows. Or really anything really. I don't like being told what to do. Hell, that's why I still won't read Lord of the Rings ... mostly. Also I just can't. I want to, ...

Raggedy Top Hats are cool! This past Christmas, we had the Doctor Who Christmas Special. From my point of view, it's the first on since the second Russel T. Davies season where the episode is genuinely part of the series and not just some little mini-side quest or part of a series of specials (I'm looking at you, End of Time  and the Specials Season). That whole period of time really upset me... Anyhow! The Snowmen  is not just a Christmas Special for Doctor Who , one of my favorite TV series of ALL TIME, but it is also the sixth episode of the seventh season (or series as they call it in Britain). It stars Matt Smith, as the Doctor (a madcap time traveler who changes his faces, but his transport ever remain the same: a blue police box) and Jenna-Louise Coleman and Clara Oswin Oswald, the mysterious new companion who died the last time she appeared on the show... after having been a Dalek (the series' big bad... most of the time) the whole time. ...

Some Christmases are... stranger than others... It's the most wonderful time of the year! Time for candies and trees and presents wrapped up in bows! It's the time for... Terry Pratchett? Well, if you know me, and let's face it, if you've read this blog at all, you know me, every time of the year is a time for Terry Pratchett.  Heck, my kids will probably know all the movies by heart before they learn proper sentences. I'll probably read them Tiffany Aching before trotting out nice, family-friendly stuff like The Wizard of Oz  or Little House on the Prairie . Though, seriously, I never understood why people would want to read Little House of the Prairie  when the Bible and Edward Eager exist. But... enough about this, it's CHRISTMAS! Or... on the Disc, it's HOGSWATCH! That is a very good thing for kids... most years, but this year (according to the book and the movie) The Auditors of Reality have decided to put a stop to all this Hogswatc...

So, I wanted to do something light and fluffy for my next review for the end of the world. So, I thought of a TV show from some years back about six friends (three boys and three girls) who hang out together in bars and coffee houses and their own homes, and talk about sex. A LOT.  In Britain! Ladies and Not Ladies, I present you with... Coupling ! That guy at the bottom? That's Commodore Norrington. So, all of you know about Doctor Who, right? Probably not. Which means you've never heard of Steve Moffat. If you have, you'll have heard of this gem of a TV Show which is one of the few good things I got from my ex-boyfriend. Coupling was a British Sitcom written by Steven Moffat and released in the UK between 2000 and 2004 about six friends in their thirties and their dating and sexual adventures. It starred Jack Davenport (Commodore Norrington from Pirates of the Caribbean ) and Richard Coyle (Mois...

Yup! There's a movie for everything! This past Friday, I was a very busy girl. I was at my grandma's house helping her clean her front room and decorate for Christmas. In the midst of that, Grandma had the news on and we learned of a terrible travesty against humanity. A psychopath killed his mother and then went to a school and shot twenty children between the ages of six and seven and seven teachers... or was it eighteen children and nine teachers? ... or was it twenty-one children and six teachers?... or was it twenty children and six teachers? The numbers kept changing and so did the information. It was ridiculous and it was one more chip in my ever-disappearing faith in humanity. Since then, you turn on the news and you hear more about the Sandy Hook shootings or how they're planning on upping gun control laws. So the last thing you want to do is watch a movie  about a school shooting, right? Well, if you said "No, I really want to get more depressed ab...

So... Last night I was surfing Netflix not really sure what I wanted to watch. I have a list of movies I want to watch on Netflix, but none of them appealed at the moment. I wanted... a period piece... maybe a romance? No. I didn't want a romance. Maybe something more... fantasy-ish? No. No fantasy. Maybe... funny? ....Okay. Funny works. I wanted a funny period piece.  Well, most of those seem to be romances as well. What's with history and it's romantic comedies? I mean, I know the best kind of comedies involve confusion and illusion and a lot of people angry at each other for not reason and romance really  lends itself to that because how often have you been in a relationship where you don't understand why the other party is mad at you and the other party doesn't know why you're mad at them and it's just a big mess? But... I didn't want romance. Well... wait, what's that weird looking one with the half red picture. Is Richard Dreyf...

We don't think we're too old to be teenagers... So, I finally found my stupid, forgettable show. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I hereby introduce you to: Secret Circle . This American supernatural teen drama based on a book series with the same name written by L.J. Smith appeared on the CW in September of 2011.  After one season of being fairly interesting, it was cancelled. Many teen-aged girls cried at the loss of Thomas Dekker on television yet again. Apparently there's a campaign to put this series and Thomas Dekker back on air. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. On one hand, I never read the books this was based on, unlike Vampire Diaries , which me and my friend Gretchen wasted considerable energy tracking down. On the other hand, this seems to have gotten the same treatment. The story is about Cassie Blake (played by Britt Robertson), a girl who moves to Chance Harbor after her mom dies in a tragic accident caused by some mal...

What are you  looking at? So, to take a break from Game of Thrones which I swear to God is basically Dune in a High Fantasy setting, I decided to watch American Horror Story . There are two reasons for this. First, Game of Thrones was too heavy and I really want to read the book version of the first season before I even begin to write about the second season. Then I want to read the second book as well. Second, I have had two people I trust with having good taste tell me it’s a good series: the cousin I’m visiting and one of my besties back home (Hey Cynthia! I’ll get around to HtTT when I think up what happens next and get to writing it down!). Cynthia’s been on my ass about watching it since we became friends. Steph… just told me she had the first season and said that I wouldn’t be wasting my time by watching it. Obviously, my cousin recognizes the fact that I’m too lazy to actually go looking for something someone tells me to read/watch. She also handed me a book ser...

German Style! Game of Thrones: The TV Series So… I’m currently in Germany. You would think a month in Germany would be full of endless adventure, but my cousin who I’m staying with works for a living. This means from early in the morning until around five o’clock at night, I’m left to my own devices with only my legs for transportation and my natural inclination to avoid people at its peak. So, I’m in Germany… watching U.S. TV shows that my cousin happens to have. I know I can’t be the first tourist to do this. Good thing I’m here for a month and I already have plans to visit Switzerland, Norway and Castles. Speaking of castles, one of the shows I’ve watched while I was here was the first season of Game of Thrones , an HBO TV series based on the series A Song of Fire and Ice by George R.R. Martin starring a number of big name actors and actresses from a number of well-known movies and TV Series. The most notable of these actors is Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister. ...

Only I write tolerable romance. When I was in my late teens, I went through a romance novel phase. I call it a phase because it didn't last long, only a year or two and now I only read romance novels when my grandma gives them to me and I don't have that much else to read.  I think I just got sick of the formula to be honest. Some of the stories weren't so formulaic, but read the same romance author more than once and you're lucky if you don't feel like you're looking at the exact same novel with the names changed. Thank you, if I want that stuff, I'll read Harry Potter  fanfiction. At least then, the characters' names don't change, but the plots generally do. However, there is one author of romance novels that I could never give up ever in my life. I really like her six books... well, the four of the six that I've read.  I even have a favorite. I am a Jane Austen fan.  Now, there are several different types of Jane Austen fans. It dep...

Soap Opera Fairy Tales! So... last year, there were two new shows available to watch on two big channels that heavily featured fairy tales as part of their plot.  The first one I heard of and saw commercials for was Grimm  which was created by the some of the people who helped write Buffy the Vampire Slayer  and Angel .  In fact, it sort of looked like a detective show (a la Angel ) about a person from a long line of monster hunters (a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer ).  It wasn't too far off the mark from what was promised and I figured I'd like it more than the other  fairy tale-based TV show that was also being made that year. That other show turned out to be Once Upon a Time...  or as my friend and I call it OUaT or as I think I'll call it from now on... OUT.  Seems fitting for some reason. So, OUT is a fantasy-drama series created by the guys who created  TRON:Legacy  and Lost , Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz.  It's about...

When I was a little girl, I watched this movie called A Little Princess .  You probably read that in my post about blue people.  Besides sparking my interest in the idea that a person's skin color could be blue, it also sparked my interest in India.  To my young mind, India became this magical place with old statues, monkeys that ate out of your hand, demons, blue people, gods that walked on earth, and the ability of animals to give their life force to humans.  My brain was captivated for a time. Then, I got distracted by school, life, France, and just everything else.  Mostly because we did a project on India and I found out that most of the things I thought existed in India were... very wrong. And the food tasted funny.  I was a very self-centered child. Then, as a teenager, I picked up books by Christopher Pike.  He was a young adult horror author of the 80s and early 90s. I mostly got his books from the library, thrift stores, and us...

One of us is only in your head. So, I was hanging out with my friend Cynthia and her new boyfriend last night when we all decided to hunker down and watch the TV miniseries Battlestar Galactica.  Now, I had seen it before... years ago. I came in on the tale-end of that show. I started watching mid-season three and I couldn't stop even though I'd never seen most of the other episodes.  I learned the highlights from looking the series up on Wikipedia.com every time I came up with something I didn't exactly understand.  I also looked at the TVtropes page and anything else I could get my hands on to explain what I was missing, catching up on the old episodes when they were on TV. Unfortunately, the show had one fatal flaw: it suffered from the same problems as Lost and Heroes .  For every question you were meant to ask... there just weren't that many answers.  Even the series finale has you asking yourself what in the nine hells you just watched and why shoul...

So... while I'm crazy about The Matter of Britain (or part of it), I have one other point that really, really makes me happy when I see it used in new ways in books and movies.  Yup, it's Greek Mythology.  Now, a lot of people just look at Greek Mythology and go, "Those crazy pagans..." others look at it and think, "Such nice and interesting archetypes..." I look at Greek Mythology and I think, "WOW! Look at all the stories! This shit is crazy awesome! What if you applied the story of Artemis and Orion to a modern setting? Or Zeus and his philandering ways to Victorian England?  Or what if Jesus was a child of Zeus? Wouldn't that be awesome ?" Yeah... I get really excited by Greek Mythology. Don't get me wrong, I get the whole archetype thing too. Sometimes I want to use archetypes mined from Greek Mythology in stories, like do a story about Muses reborn or something. I think it'd be really neat.  But the meat  of Greek Mythology...

I like mythology.  I like stories that have been around for ages to the point where they've become part of the human consciousness for certain cultures.  One of my favorites that has always sparked my imagination is the Arthurian myths and legends which, with the stories of other legendary kings of Britain is know as "The Matter of Britain".  Ever since I was little and I saw Disney's The Sword in the Stone , I've loved  the stories of King Arthur, his knights of the round table, Guinevere and Lancelot, and the fall of Camelot.  The magic, the mystery, the possibility that there is some truth in the story... it all fascinates and absorbs me.  However, the Sword in the Stone  just piqued my interest a little bit. In fact, I was disappointed by the way it quite suddenly ended  without a further by-your-leave.  You don't even see the way things go after Arthur becomes king! How silly is that?  That's not the whole story ! So, I read up o...

Why isn't his hair red? Did they run out of dye? Did they use it all on Tamzin Merchant? What happened? I have a confession to make. I got Netflix. And I've been catching up on all the shows on it that I never really got to watch due to time, not having the channel they were on, or general disinterest. The Tudors, a historical drama written by Michael Hirst and aired on Showtime between 2007 and 2010, is one of them.  Now, I will warn you, I'm a bit of a British history buff.  My knowledge is generally related to the royal families, more specifically to the Plantagenet dynasty that ruled between 1154 and 1485.  However, that did not make me enjoy the show any less.  I understand with historically based things that they can't always stick to history as it happened because what happened isn't usually as dramatic as people would like. Is every day of your life a whirlwind of adventure?  Does Barack Obama do something exciting every day? George Bush? ...

So, recently I rewatched Dollhouse, a series created by Joss Whedon aired on Fox between 2009 and 2010.  I had watched the original run of the first season and stopped midway through the second season because life got a tad bit hectic and I didn't really have time for it.  I remember having mixed feelings about it when it originally aired because supposedly feminist Joss Whedon created a show about people who are brainwashed into essentially being the perfect whores.  For some reason that didn't sit well with me, what do you think? The story itself is a bit  deeper than that because it's Joss Whedon and he's pretty good about adding depth and layers to stories though I think this one had the most depth which made it difficult for the average audience to really latch onto and love it.  In another person's hands they could've probably handled it better to get the audience to connect with the story more , but so much of the story would've been sacrificed t...