My Complicated feelings about the 2014 TMNT Remake

So a few days ago I saw the first trailer for the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) film and I have to say it left me a little conflicted.

Here's the thing; I grew up with the Ninja Turtles, I read the classic comics, watched the show, owned the toys, played the role-playing game and felt solidly betrayed by TMNT III: Turtles in Time - so let's just say I've been there, I know of what I speak and I come from a place where I can say I'm a big fan, it holds a special place in my childhood and even through I may not have liked every iteration of TMNT, for the most part I'm on board.

Now we get the new trailer, promising us a sleeker, more up-to-date look at the turtles, and I ask myself - do we need this?  I mean, I'm a big fan of movies, and I dedicated a whole month to reimaginings of older movies a few years back so it's not like I feel that reexamining a title has no merit.

But the Turtles?  My heroes on a half shell?

I honestly don't know how to feel about this.  True, I was in a similar place back in 1990 when the first live-action TMNT film came out, and I left the theatre promising myself that I would have the lyrics to Turtle Power down by heart within the week, but I was 14-years-old when that movie came out.

I'm just not sure I have love for another iteration of Turtle film in me.

Last Day at my Library

So today I finished up the last little bits of my work (pictured left) at my current library in preparation for my new job which starts Monday. I’ve cleared my desk, my desktop and my email and am ready to move onto my fascinating new job working in Open Data. Having left three jobs since 2010, here is my advice for people in my position.

Start packing early, and get your home stuff home as soon as you have a concrete date of departure.
Although there are lots of reasons to push back tasks, remember that your last few days may be filled with things you didn’t plan for (meetings, last minute tasks, etc.), and if you want to make sure you bring home your fan, you photos, your rubik’s cube (everyone has one of those right?) and whatever else, they should all head home sooner than later.

Create a list of what must get done before you leave
Then print it out, tack it up on the wall, and cross each thing off as you do it – this will be a clear reminder of what needs to get done and a good way to ensure you cross all your T’s and dot all your I’s before you leave.

Figure out the best way to leave your office for the next person
If someone is coming in to do your old job, maybe leave a note – or as I often do, a list of things that were not very apparent to me when I started. Remember that even after your gone, you can still do a little good.

Get your coworkers contact info if they’re willing
Keeping track of friends tends to be easy, but coworkers sometimes fall into that bizarre space where you don’t exactly know if you want them connected to you on Facebook/LinkedIn/Google+ but believe me, it’s easier to ask in the weeks leading up to the end, rather than two weeks later (especially if some of them are retiring)

Take a moment
Regardless of whether your job change is a good or bad one, it is a transition period and it’s sometimes easy to lose track and forget that often the best way to figure out what is most important is to step back, take a breath, and then look around. Maybe you want to get a picture of the office you sat in for four years before your gone or maybe you just want to make sure you have that last latte from your favourite local coffee spot. Make sure to take a little time for you.

Getting Lost in S.

For the last few days I've been working my way through the book S. by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst.  Which is kind of strange, because the book is a story within a story (or better put - a story in the margins of a story), as the story exists on two levels: first a fictional 1949 novel called Ship of Theseus by a fictional author called V.M. Straka, and then a second story, written in notes left in the margins of the book by two university students.

As a soon-to-be librarian (2 weeks and counting!), I love a lot about this book, the fact that it practically begs to be re-read, the various letters, post cards and even a map written on a restaurant napkin slipped between various pages and the fact that even through the book is not yet a year old, it looks used, discoloured and works in a way that I don't believe could be replicated in an e-book format.

Also the book is a "stolen" copy from a high school library, so that's a little appalling, but with the compelling tale it includes I'll have to borrow a word from my friend Ron and simply call the story compalling.

A little reminiscent of Nick Bantock's Griffin & Sabine trilogy, or Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, S. is fascinating reading.

Movie Review: We Are What We Are

How important are family traditions to you?  Is there a specific way Christmas has to be celebrated or it just isn't Christmas?  Are there certain books that need to be read to the children each night?  In the 2013 film We Are What We Are (a remake of a 2010 Mexican film of the same name), questions of family tradition and responsibility are taken to an extreme and very unsettling level.

The film follows the Parker family in the wake of a massive loss.  While attempting to deal with this, the question of tradition becomes massively important, and although the film slowly builds to explain exactly what those traditions are, the build-up, for me, was one of the best parts of the film.

Although the family is dealing with aspects related to horror (and specifically Gothic Horror) in the story, the question of who will host Thanksgiving after the death of a parent is something anyone cane related to, which is a really big part of what makes the film so accessible, because even though the audience doesn't have the same traditions as the Parkers (I hope), the basic issue is one to which anyone can relate.

If you've never seen it, the film is definitely worth a watch, but it is not kid friendly (even through there are kids in it), and it may be uncomfortable viewing for the squeamish. 

Things I've Noticed: My PVR is becoming more selective

I've had a PVR for the last few years and overall I'd definitely say it is worth it.  Not since VCR technology became popular has a piece of technology so dramatically changed how I watch television.

Before the VCR I watched what was on or I made my own fun - movies were seen at theatres or during special times of the year (my personal favourite childhood film - Star Wars, but in the original (to me) cut, with the station logo on the bottom right-hand corner and the commercials - why can't the new special edition of Star Wars smell like my Grandparent's living room carpet? - now that would be special!)

Once VCRs showed up, I could do two things:
1) As you could record stuff, you were no longer limited to watching things when they aired - also you could take late-night movies and watch them whenever!
2) You could watch things more than once a year.  Once I recorded Star Wars, I could watch it every weekend (which, in my own 9-year-old way, was probably my introduction to true fandom)

But now PVRs allow you to record one thing while watching another - also you can pause live TV and  can ask the machine to tape shows for you in series recordings - meaning you no longer have to know when your show is coming back, as the machine will tape it for you.

Unfortunately, leaving all this power up to the machine (or at least to my machine), means that sometimes it simply decides not to tape things for you - maybe it thinks these shows are not really worth your time or perhaps it believes you need to see the same repeat of Murdoch Mysteries again rather than watch that new show you've been waiting for - I'm sure a lot of you are thinking perhaps it's just a glitch, or maybe the schedule was off, but I'm pretty sure that the more I use this tool, the more it's starting to make suggestions, suggestions which will lead me to watching only PVR-approved materials in the not-to-distant future…

Waiting on the Governor

I knew it had a release date of February 17, 2014, so rather than try to push through it at the end of February, I scheduled it for my March horror selection.

The latest book in The Walking Dead, The Fall of the Governor Part II.  I special ordered it from my local comic book store and waited.  Now here I am, March 19 (over a month later), and I'm still living without the book.

Not that I need the book to live - actually I read these and then they get re-gifted to a friend, so it doesn't even get added to my own collection, I just really enjoy reading them.

They take the story I know (based on the comics, rather than the TV series - which I'm also digging!), of the small town of Woodbury, and its leader The Governor, and tells it from another point of view.

On the positive(?) side, my local library still lists the book as "On Order" so at least no one else around here is reading it ahead of me - but as March begins to slip by, I'm becoming more and more sure that this story will end up being my April Horror selection and I'll end up picking something else out to scare me this month.

Book Review: The Riddle of the Wren

The first novel by Charles de Lint, The Riddle of the Wren (1984) follows a teenaged girl, Minda Sealy, who begins the novel suffering from a series of terrifying nightmares and after the appearance of a strange man crying for help in one of her dreams, attempts to rescue him on an adventure that takes her to many strange worlds and places.

To me, the book felt liked it borrowed a lot from both The Hobbit(1937) and The Chronicles of Narnia (1949 – 1954), as the book has much of the structure of The Hobbit and the large talking animals from The Chronicles of Narnia (although I’m sure large talking animals have been around in fiction for a long time in lots of places). What actually surprised me was (sorry for the mild thirty-year-old spoiler) the world-travelling that Minda does throughout the book, wherein she uses henges travel between various worlds on her quest to stop the book’s villain, Ildran the Dream Master.

The book feels a lot like Young Adult (YA) fiction, and the world descriptions are really fantastic – my personal favourite, Darkruin, seems to be less a fantasy setting and more one in my favourite subgenre. The story, although fairly familiar to those who have read a lot of fantasy, involves a quest, terrifying armies and some magical items.

Well worth the read, and although I wish Minda was a little more developed as a character, it left me looking forward to my next book by the author, Moonheart: A Romance.