Elijah David

I (finally) got around to seeing the live action Disney Cinderella remake from 2015 a few weeks ago. (Hey, I never said I was up-to-date on pop culture. Ever.) I'd been planning to do a review because (like Pete's Dragon ) it impressed me more than I'd anticipated. Then Mirriam and Arielle both posted about villains and their thoughts on the matter coincided with my main praise for the film: the way it handles its villains (and its heroes). One of the main detractions I have seen lobbied against this film is that it's "just the animated film with live actors." Well, it isn't. Aside from the fact that the new film drops the songs and has a significantly different script, it also adds motivation for Cinderella and Lady Tremaine. First, Cinderella. In this version, her parents are given screen time, and a good portion, too. We see their happy life together before Cinderella is orphaned. The key elements of this opening sequence are twofold: first ar...

I'm a sucker for a good redemption arc. Heck, I'm a sucker for a redemption arc, period. There's something thrilling about a character turning from bad to good, from being a villain to being a hero (or at least on the side of the hero). It gets my story-loving soul stirred up in ways few other tropes can. I've been thinking about what makes a redemption arc powerful (and what makes a good one). My friend Mirriam has posted recently about good and bad character deaths and what makes a good story  and she's even shared her hopes for Hive to be redeemed on Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Another friend shared the news that Benedict Cumberbatch is voicing the Grinch in a new animated movie and that turned into a conversation about how the live action film basically destroyed the Grinch's redemption arc by making him the victim of the materialistic Whos. While there's nothing wrong with multiple redemption arcs in the same story, in that case, they jus...

What I'm Writing:  Merlin Book 2 (first draft; planned to be finished by November)                                 Oz retelling (pre-writing and outlining; planned for NaNoWriMo 2015) What I'm Reading: The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien (reread)                                 The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater                                 Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb (Kindle)                                 Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography                                 They Have Not Seen the Stars: The Collected Poetry of Ray Bradbury     ...

Recently, a friend of mine posted that about a revision of The Hobbit in which Bilbo was gender swapped. One of her main issues with this is that instead of creating a new female hero, the reviser simply did damage to one of the few true male heroes in existence*. She listed the three true male heroes she has encountered as Bilbo Baggins (of The Hobbit ), the Doctor (of Doctor Who ), and Agent Coulson (from the Marvel Cinematic Universe). Obviously these are all fictional characters, but the conversation seemed to be concerned mainly with fictional characters rather than real-life heroes. This post will be following in the same vein. In reading her post and the ensuing discussion, I started to think about heroes I had watched or read. I also began to wonder about my own characters and whether I had written any true heroes of either gender. That thought led me back to something I had written in a previous discussion on heroism with another friend: Heroism is a)...

Current Reads: Inkheart by Cornelia Funke                         The View from the Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier                         Mountain of Black Glass by Tad Williams Current Writing Projects: Thesis material, currently a story titled "A Young Man with Grassy Arms" Ray Bradbury passed away this week. This is probably the second or third time I can remember an author whose works I love to read passing away (the last was Brian Jacques, and if I remember correctly Madeleine L'Engle was in there somewhere as well). What makes this even more sad, scary or possibly frightening is the fact that in my large stack of thesis reading material this summer there sit four books of his short stories for me to read, study and subsume. I don't believe in coincidences, especially where authors are concerned. I sat on my couch for a good fifteen minutes trying to ...

Current Reads:  Orsinian Tales by Ursula K. Le Guin                          Attack of the Copula Spiders by Douglas Glover                          Sabriel by Garth Nix Current writing projects: Same as last time This weekend I watched the film The Legend of Zorro  with Antonio Banderas for the first time. I have not seen the first film with Banderas as Zorro, but I enjoyed watching the old black-and-white Disney series Zorro  in reruns when I was a kid and I thought I would give this newer version of Zorro a try. What I found was unsurprisingly a fun action movie with lots of sword fighting and acrobatics and a decent storyline. My issue with the film was its secondary villain, the one who opens the film: Jacob McGivens (whose name I had to look up because I don't ever remember hearing it in the film itself). This man appears at...