Fantasy authors: support local!

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GENERAL BLOG NOTE: I've made a small but important change to my blog, in that I have moved the post labels (tags) to under the post title, instead of at the bottom near the comments link. That way, those who are more interested in comic/movie reviews won't get halfway into a make-up related post and want to cry. And vice versa ;)

Onto the actual post:
Have you ever been surprised to know that an author, musician or artist used to live in your area? Because of the huge amount of American and English media that Australia gets, I'm always excited when I find something Australian. It's just nice to know that we can get our toes into the global talent pool as well. I especially like finding authors who still live in Australia. It gives me hope that, should I decide to pursue novel writing, I wouldn't have to move countries to succeed professionally. This is almost definitely the case in areas like film and music.

Getting to know (and like) the work of local creative types means you have better chances of meeting your icons in person. Two Australian authors I can always count to be at Perth Supanova are Marianne de Pierres and Jennifer Fallon. I'm a little bit embarassed to say I haven't read Jennifer's work. I have read Marianne's Parrish Plessiss series and was bowled over by the pacing, and the gritty, violent and complex  post-apocalyptic universe she's created. Marianne went to a university in my area, something that always cheers me up when I hear derogatory comments about arts degrees (since I'm doing one alongside my major in media studies, and my minor in journalism). I am still eyeing off her more recent series whenever I pass a bookstore.

After news of another Supanova cancellation reached my ears (rather, eyes, as it was on Facebook) I decided to have a look at the current activity and guest information for Perth. I clicked into the author section and saw two unfamiliar names - Rob Kaay and Christian Tamblyn. These two Aussie guys have very recently published their first novels, and both are science fiction/fantasy, which is pretty much my favourite genre. I went into my local Borders, but they didn't have either in stock, so I'm just going to order them off the authors' websites (linked above). Rob Kaay's book is actually avaible in audio and soft-copy format off his website, but I'm a traditionalist, and I like paper books :)

I'll write up a review of both of these books for the blog, but if I like them (which I'm fairly sure I will) what will be most exciting is meeting these guys in person and (fingers crossed!) getting my book signed. I also hope to attend Jennifer Fallon's World Building class, which I've sadly missed in the last two years of Supanova.

There are a few other Aussie authors I love and would reccommend (I have linked to their offiicial websites so you can check them out):

• Kylie Chan, author of the incredible Dark Heavens Trilogy and in-the-works Wudang series. These series are rich in Chinese mythology - I shudder to think of the amount of research Kylie had to do, but it certainly adds a wonderful depth and mystery to the books. They may be fantasy, but all the human characters are wonderfully, well, human.

• K.E. Mills, author of the Rogue Agent series (both of these wonderful women are avid convention attendees, unfortunately neither of them have been to Perth yet). K.E. Mills is actually a pseudonym for Karen Miller, who has written several other successful series under that name. The Rogue Agent series basically takes all the tropes and elements of 'magic'-based fiction and straight crime/detective fiction and turns it on its head. I am re-reading all of the three current books and writing a review which will go up as soon as I finish it.

• Sophie Masson, author of Cold Iron, an absolutely spellbinding novella inspired by Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. I found this in my local library years ago, and borrowed it about twelve times, reading and re-reading constantly until I found it in a secondhand bookstore. It now sits happily on my shelf. I didn't realise until this post that she continued writing and amassed quite a long list of both YA and adult fiction! I will have to hit the library and eBay to play catch-up.

• Ian Irvine, author of The View From the Mirror series (I'm having a bit of trouble tracking down book 4, which is a pain, because I neeeeeed to know what happens!) it's an adventure story spanning two worlds. Like most epic fantasy, it has a vast amount of characters and locations, but everything is wonderfully lush and 3-D. No 'description swamps', though!

• Sara Douglass, author of the Axis trilogy, a dark and twisted web of mythology, love, betrayal and politics. Beautiful in parts, disturbing in others. As I said to my boyfriend, "she is certainly not afraid to make a character SUFFER! A LOT!"

These are just what I've read so far! I have many other authors on my Aussie reading list: Jennifer Fallon (of course), Trudi Canavan, Cecilia Dart-Thornton, Fiona McIntosh, and Garth Nix are at the top. I have a few other miscellanious bits of fiction knocking around, now that I've finished uni for the semester (yay!). I'm seeking to expand my literary horizons so I'm not just reading fantasy all the time. I'm starting with A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, and the collected works and letters of Emily Dickinson. I'll probably review most of what I read, hoping it will help me not tear through them as fast as I normally do, and keep my brain from turning into slush over the uni break. I haven't got an awful lot of shifts, even with two jobs (I got the one at that upmarket handbag place, by the way! Total freak-out fluke, and now I'm learning to sell brands I've never heard of and could only afford if I saved for a month).
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Many more posts coming up! I have 4 drafts at the moment, including the long-ago promised banana bread recipe and the Concrete Minerals primer review. And there will of course be occasional spontaneous discuss-y posts, like my Foundation Day one and this one.

Happy reading!
Jade.

P.S. if you've met one of your favourite artists or writers, tell me in the comments! Or tell me about someone you found out used to live, work or go to school near you. I'm also very, very open to book reccommendations.

Movie review: Prince of Persia

I haven't played the video game, but my boyfriend has, so I'm at least familiar with the aesthetic and the quirks of this franchise. It was with mixed feelings we went to see the movie. I had already decided that Jake Gyllenhaal was the wrong choice for Dastan. He's got such a baby face, and Dastan is supposed to be this brawny, street-smart thug-with-honor. It just didn't work for me! I nearly cringed whenever I saw a poster advertising the movie.

Well, walking out after the movie, I said "if I had the opportunity, I would apologise to Jake for doubting him". My boyfriend laughed, but I meant it. Gyllenhaal bulked up, grew his hair and a bit of a beard, and the make-up department adorned him with a few choice scars. The overall effect was fantastic in terms of character, and really broke him out of the boyish mold I'd mentally stuck him in. The costumes suited him and the stunt-work was magnificient. I don't know how much of it he did himself, some of it was wire work and a lot of it looked like actual base jumping. He had some really great non-verbal moments - he has a very expressive face, and the director played on it a lot, using face-focused medium close-up shots during action scenes to convey little things that would normally have been communicated to the audience by voiced comments. I personally am not a fan of those - who takes time to talk out loud to themselves when there's something alarming/surprising happening? - so I really appreciated that.

The stunts in this movie were dazzling. The game features a lot of almost-physically-impossible jumping, climbing and feats of ingenuity and physical prowess. As I said, I don't know the game very well, but I do think it delivered. There was some amazing work, mostly done by Dastan, but there were some nice bits done by minor characters as well. There's a knife-throwing scene right near the end of the movie that was awesomely done - mostly CG, but still good. I really loved all the wire-work done by Gyllenhaal, it was really unrealistic but so awesome you just didn't care. The beginning of the movie featured a very, very cool wall-climbing piece.

The sets and costumes were lushly gorgeous. I can't speak the historical accuracy, but it does have a fantasy element to it which lends it some leeway. Really lovely deep colour palette, textured fabrics, great amour and weaponry. I especially liked the design of the dagger which is the focal point of the movie. The blend of CGI and live action, and the skipping between set-work and on-location stuff was seamlessly blended. There were barely any points during the movie where I saw a backdrop or a stunt move and thought "oh, this is CGI". I didn't even find myself evaluating the obiously-CGI-bits (the fantasy elements) like I usually do in movies.

Gemma Arterton had the role of the princess Tamina. I really don't know what to say about her. First of all, the accent was freaking weird. It clashed with all the other plain American ones that are native to Hollywood. Faking a good American accent is pretty much a given, even for Australian actors, isn't it? And then there was the fact that the princess was apparently the sole ruler of her city. Maybe this is game lore I don't know about, but it really didn't fit the time period of the movie. It allowed her to be headstrong and devious, though, which was something this character needed to be able to keep up with Gyllenhaaal. She still kind of annoyed me - and this is no reflection on Arterton. I've seen some of her other stuff and I've always liked her. Tamina didn't feel like a properly fleshed out, rounded character, though. She fell a little flat. As a ruler and priestess with a solemn, sacred duty, she seemed a little too flighty and sarcastic. Maybe it's just me. I like my female characters to be more than flirty arm/eye candy. Again, I don't really know if her character features much in the actual game. It's called Prince of Persia, so her character might have been 'coloured in', so to speak, just for the movie, in which case the director wouldn't have wanted her to steal too much focus from Gyllenhaal. At any rate, her costumes were lovely, she put in a really good performance with all the nuances I know she delivers, and she looked stunning. Very different to what she normally looks like, though - I'd say her appearance was quite heavily altered for the role.

Overall, the storyline was pretty good - not complex, but not overly simple. There were a few twists, and a few 'just-for-lulz' type moments courtesy of the minor characters. It had kind of a cop-out ending. But they set it up so nicely, it's hard to complain. You have a certain margin for the impossible in fantasy genres, and they utilised it. Not everything was perfect, either - without spoiling it, there was a small price to pay for the happy ending.

Between Gyllenhaal's performance, the stunt work and the magnificent CGI, I would absolutey reccommend this movie. For both fans and non-gamers.

Foundation Day, Australia

I've been seeing a lot of posts and sales recently about Memorial Day, an upcoming (or past? not entirely sure) holiday in America. I see this a lot, with Labour Day and Thanksgiving and such. It got me thinking a little - maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but I don't think I've ever seen similar attention by bloggers for Australian holidays. We do have them! In fact, there's one tomorrow - Foundation Day. It's actually an exclusively West Australian holiday: Australian holidays can get a bit confusing because each state was (and still is) quite seperate, and the same holidays will happen on different dates in each state. Foundation Day (info taken from here) "1 June, marks a significant date in the history of Western Australia for on this day in 1829 the State’s first European settlers, men, women and children, completed their long sea journey from Britain to the Swan River Colony.  They arrived on board the Parmelia under the command of Captain James Stirling and had their first view of mainland Western Australia."

Foundation Day actually changes date each year, it is celebrated on the first Monday in June. Thus, this year it takes place on June 6.

Public holidays aren't huge in Australia, not in my circle anyway. I don't ever remember having a big sit-down, here's-the-history in class or anything like that. This got me thinking. Australian history is quite chequered. There has been a huge upsurge of negative feeling towards Australia Day in the last twenty or so years. Australia Day in particular is one of the more 'contraversial' holidays - a bit like Thanksgiving in the U.S., I suppose. Though where you have white Americans and Indian Americans, we have white Australians and Indiginous Australians. Australia day pretty much celebrates the arrival and colonisation of the first white settlers, making Australia into the country that it is today. However, this country has a rather shoved-under-the-rug segment of its past (and sadly, the present also) which involves some truly shocking and inhumane treatment of Indiginous Australians. Slavery, no legal rights whatsoever, and the Stolen Generation, a horrible and racist act by the white Australian government which continues to have repercussions to this day. It was only two years ago that the government made a decisive move considering the utter wrongness of this act and the neglient modern response to it. Primer Minister Kevin Rudd made a public apology, which was recieved with mixed feelings. Sorry Day takes place on May 26, but is still hardly recognised by the public due to the controversy surrounding the whole thing.


Is this the bottom line? That we are too ashamed and confused about our past to be able to really celebrate our country? I don't know what the current state of relations are between American Indians and white Americans, so I can't make any comparisons there.

Another issue which is, I believe, a strongly contributing factor, would certainly have to be the extreme Americanisation of Australian media. I don't know how aware other nations are of this. My small forays into international media culture for my univeristy degree have shown the situation to be quite different from country to country. I'll summarise for you: on Australian TVs, 8/10 of programs are American. Movies? 9/10. Music? Probably closer to 7/10.

We know American culture inside out. We know the names of all your holidays. The average Australian probably knows more about American products than they do about any other country besides their own. Australian culure has become saturated with American terminology and products. It's quite confronting when you think about it. Australian media is making a slow comeback, with movies like commedian Peter Helliar's I Love You Too being released to good opinion, artists like John Butler Trio, and... well, I don't watch an awful lot of TV, so the only Aussie show I can direct you to that isn't an absolutely ridiculous soapie is The Chaser's War On Everything, which I don't think I've actually ever watched. A few of their more extreme stunts were on the news, which is how I know about them. (Please don't even mention the propaganda fest that was the Australia movie. I don't even know why they bothered showing it here, everyone thought it was lame as a one-legged sheep).

The majority of Australians (and probably nearly every television owner on the planet) know who Barack Obama is. How many Americans, U.K-ers, or Canadians, when reading this post, would not have known that Kevin Rudd was the current P.M of Australia? There's another point - Australians know that Canada is not a part of America. Most Americans I know, bless their little hearts, think that New Zealand is a part of Australia. Um, it's not. We may share ANZAC day, but we're neighbors, not roomies.

I'll admit, it does bug me a little when I'm on a forum or blog and the poster wishes everyone a "happy insert-American-holiday here" day. Or someone new posts "is there anyone from the U.K on this board?" I get that, even in English-speaking countries, there is a different culture. There will be things you can only discuss with someone living in the same environment. But it always makes me want to say "Hi, I'm from Australia and I have a brain! THE INTERNET IS INTERNATIONAL!" And sentances like "there has never been in the history of the world a better place for opportunity than here in the US" just make me gag. Sorry (yes, in case you were wondering, that was an actual verbatim quote taken from one of the forums I visit).

I don't mean any offense to Americans by this post. I was genuinely curious about the disparity I see in the view of American and Australian cultures, particularly online, where one might assume that the global nature of the medium would preclude such (arguably) blinkered views. Writing has always helped me think things through, and I thought this subject might interest people, especially since there seem to be so many common misconceptions about Australian culture. Like the New Zealand thing. No matter how many times I hear that, it still makes me laugh.

Until next I write,
Jade.