Feminist Fiction Friday: Liza Cody

I am going to Bouchercon 2012 this year and am very excited. But I wish I'd been there last year when Liza Cody was there and taking part in panels like "Telling Women's Stories." (She refers to it as "the inevitable feminist panel.")
I love Liza Cody's series protagonist Anna Lee and her novel Dupe (which, according to Wikipedia introduced the professional female private detective to British Mystery fiction) was the first I ever read. Cody also has a series about professional female wrestler, Eva Wylie. I've not read any of those books because the backdrop doesn't interest me, but I'll get around to them at some  point.
I love that Anna Lee is smart and savvy and totally real. It's an ongoing complaint that there aren't enough female protagonists in crime fiction, and I always point people toward Liza Cody in response.

Smell Like Shakespeare--Black Phoenix Alchemy scents

I have loved perfume ever since I was a little girl playing with my grandmother's perfume bottles. (She had all those old lady scents of gardenia and musk rose and cut-glass atomizers for spritzing them on.)
I used to wear perfume to work every day, light citrusy scents like Chanel's Cristalle and Hermes Green Oranges. At night I favored darker, more Oriental scents like Halston's Night (now discontinued). Sadly, I now live with someone who is allergic to perfume, so I mostly smell like Dr. Bronner's Peppermint soap these days.
But I still like reading about perfume, and a few months ago I stumbled across the Black Phoenix Alchemical Lab's scents.''The company specalzes in formulating body and household blends with a dark, romantic tone.
Turns out their Illyria collection was inspired by Shakespeare's characters. Reading the descriptions of the various scents is in itself a sensual experience.The one that sounds most appealing o me is "Katharina," a blend of white musk, orange blossom and peach. Like the other scents in the collection--the masculine Iago and Antony, the severe Lady Macbeth (sweet Bordeaux wine, currants and wild berries), the perfume comes in an amber vial priced at $17.50 per 5 mil bottle.
If you want to indulge your senses, spend a few minutes on their site. And remember, "that which we call a rose would smell as sweet" if we called it something else...
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Review of Romeo & Juliet Sealed With a Kiss

I grew up on classic, Disney-style animation but I'm not really a fan of the genre, despite really loving Monsters, Inc. and the Toy Story series from Pixar. (I was put off by the character design in Brave, for instance, because I thought the princess looked like a red-headed troll doll.)
I'm not someone who ever sat around in my jammies on Saturday, eating cold cereal and watching cartoons. And so I find it hard to get past ugly animation and enjoy the story. (An exception was for the first season of the Ghostbusters animated series, which I found myself addicted to.)
My expectations for Romeo & Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss (2006) were pretty low.
the movie was clearly a labor of love and done on a budget. Phil Nibbelink was director, writer, animator and voice talent and a comic relief character called Kissing Fish was voiced by Chanelle Nibbelink (wife, daughter, sister?). The actors voicing Romeo and Juliet (who are, in this family-friendly re-imagining, seals) have the same surname, but whether they're related by affinity or consanguinity, I don't know.
Nibbelink has a lot of good ideas here--and his instincts for what will make good musical interludes are sharp--but the constraints of his budget are everywhere. The quality of the animation is so poor that at times, in the long shots, the seals look like cavorting brown and white sperm.

Romeo and Juliet are as big-eyed as Keane portraits, and drawn very small in relationship to the other seals (except for fat Benvolio, a sweet comic relief character who is genuinely amusing at times). The problem is that there's a kind of disconnect between the way the young seals look and the intensity of their love. That's of course the point of the story--the passion of the young lovers--but transposed to animation and it feels a little off-kilter.
Mercutio, Romeo's best friend, is a here a fun-loving seal with musical talent and a lot of chutzpah. Nibbelink salts his dialogue with tons of Shakespeare quotes, repurposed to fit his story. "All the world's a stage," he muses as Benvolio enthusiastically adds, "Let's act!" (Mercutio looks distractingly like Scooby Doo at times.)
I'm all for introducing kids to Shakespeare but am not sure that Romeo & Juliet is the play to start with.  This one has some scary stuff--when Friar Lawrence shows up with Juliet's body, she looks dead--but all it takes is the touch of a golden/rosy dawn and everything is all right.
When the movie came out, 54 percent of critics liked it but it made less than $500 thousand domestically.  (According to IMDB, the budget was around $2 million.)
You can get a pretty good idea of the movie from the trailer, which is here.
The movie didn't do much for me, but then, I'm not the target audience.

Kill Shakespeare

Kill Shakespeare is a 12-issue comic book that's a mash up of ideas and characters from the canon. for more info, check out the Wiki listing.

Dating Yourself...it's a problem

I'm not talking about having a close personal relationship with your hand here but writing in a way that makes your writing seem old-fashioned. Most writers are savvy enough not to use transient slang in their stories, but there are other, more subtle ways in which writers betray their age. For example, I have a friend whose "tell" is that she knows Yale University didn't start admitting women until 1970 because she entered college in 1969 and wanted to go to Yale. But if she mentions that, it immediately tells everyone that she's 61.
I have another friend who frequently makes reference to obscure movies that came out decades ago, and also makes extremely subtle jokes referencing vintage.  That would simply mark him as eccentric but then he attempts to explain the jokes while laughing heartily and it's just truly painful.
So there are ways to avoid the obvious things. But ... sometimes even when you're careful, you're blindsided.
I have a client who wanted his script read by one of my subcontractors, a smart guy in his early 20s.  The reader liked the script a lot but was puzzled by one thing. The main character's backstory included a reference to the "Oklahoma City Bombing" with no other explanation.
"The writer does not explain what happened to the protagonist's family," the reader wrote in his report.
He'd never heard of the Oklahoma City Bombing.
He was six years old when it happened.
The writer--like myself--just assumed that everyone would understand his reference.
It's easy to say -- "but everyone knows about the Oklahoma City Bombng," but my smart, young sub-contractor did not.
My client rewrote the script.

Review of Macbeth starring Sam Worthington

There are more than 60 different versions of Macbeth listed on IMDB, which is kind of amazing. This film, a modern-day adaptation set in Australia, is ... intriguing. It opens with three red-headed schoolgirls defacing the gravestones in a cemetery, a sequence that is disturbing and creepy, especially since the colors are so subdued that their red hair and the red paint they're using just pops out like ... blood.
The scene soon shifts to a neon-soaked waterfront meeting place where a drug deal goes sideways in an operatic, balletic orgy of violence that is equal parts Quentin Tarantino and Baz Luhrman.
Director Geoffrey Wright filmed the movie with more Dutch angles than an Amsterdam neighborhood, but the overall effect is incredibly stylish. There's real carnality in the scene where Macbeth is confronted by the Weird Sisters who hail him as the Thane of Cawdor and he who shall be king thereafter.
He has never really considered the idea--we get the impression he's really sort of a drone--but once he's considered the possibility of being the king, the idea will not leave him alone.
The adaptation maintains Shakespeare's dialogue but strips it down to the bare minimum. (That's good because sometimes the actors' Aussie accents get in the way, as in the line, "Takes the reason prisoner," which comes out "Take the raisin prisoner.")  A lot of dialogue is delivered as voiceover, which keeps it from sounding too melodramatic in the context.

Summer of Shakespeare continues!

From Star Trek: The Next Generation to Shakespeare. Michael Dorn is appearing in a production of As You Like It this summer in Los Angeles. (This month in fact.) It's a modern-dress version (it's often performed in modern dress) and directed by an associate of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Goldstar has cheap tickets, so I hope to go.