I wanted to like this movie. I have such fond memories of the original TRON. It was ahead of its time in many ways back then, and probably a little cheesy too… It was wrapped up in religion a bit, which wasn’t bad— it gave programs a “culture,” a “faith.” TRON: Legacy has kept up with the digital explosion in movies and taken it to grand heights, but it abandoned good writing and good characters along the way. I found it hard not to roll my eyes, and even with such great visuals, found myself bored during the last quarter of the film. How did they fumble such a beautiful opportunity? I don’t know, but I have some ideas. I offer these up for consideration. I’m no Roger Ebert (but I’m a huge fan, Roger) but I think most critics have already agreed that the plot lacks something. The original TRON received 69% on the tomatometer from Rotten Tomatoes, the new Tron 49%. Though, oddly the audience seems to like the second one more. Critics agreed the light show and “glitter” are fun, and who can beat that soundtrack? I loved the light show, the competitions, the music, but the plot is an epic fail.
Author: jstueart
Longest Night features aliens, musicians, wacky fun, and lunar eclipse
Alien love songs, alien films, dances with aliens, UFO sighting highlights over the last fifty years, not to mention the sounds of the Longest Night Ensemble with Peggy Lee, Mary Margaret O’Hara and Daniel Janke (with a couple of Christmas songs in the mix)… I am truly thrilled to be a part of such an eclectic group of artists who have taken “alien” to new heights. This is fun, light-hearted, and thought-provoking.
I really love it when folks outside the science fiction genre take on the theme artistically—they see things I never thought of, things I’ve never seen anyone else do! They create ideas of “alien” that are truly alien. They invigorate the genre. I’m so honoured to be working with Celia McBride, Moira Sauer and Brian Fidler as they literally re-create the alien.
And as a science fiction writer forced to present only the facts of UFO sightings–without trying to convince–I too am stretching out of my comfort zone: embracing the real, putting on the skeptical hat, being a reporter not a missionary. Sticking with the facts, ma’am, and leaving the fiction at home. It made me do as much research as a term paper, and put it in such a way that a listener gets to choose what they want to believe.
At first I fought it, then I embraced it.
Eisenhower and Churchill: UFO cover up?
Released in a wave of declassified UFO documents in England comes this gem: that Eisenhower and Churchill purposely covered up UFOs. There was a short time in US history where talking about UFOs wasn’t censored–especially the military. People in the military left and right were commenting on “saucers” and technology from “Mars”–and then, it’s said that Eisenhower decided to hush the whole thing down.
This New York Daily News article talks about a letter declassified in England:
A letter sent in 1999 by an unnamed person from Leicester, England, relays a story he was told by his mother, which came from his grandfather, who claimed to have witnessed the alleged cover-up.
“It is claimed that my grandfather, [REDACTED] was present during a debate between Winston Churchill and Mr. Eisenhower during World War II involving making a decision about an unexpected incident,” the letter states, dated Sept. 20, 1999.
The incident in question took place off the English coast and involved a Royal Air Force bomber crew, which was returning from a “photographic mission” in either Germany or France.
“The aircraft was intercepted by an object of unknown origin,” the letter explains, “which matched course and speed with the aircraft for a time and then underwent an extremely rapid acceleration away.”
Photos and/or film were supposedly captured of the object, which “hovered noiselessly” and seemed metallic.
The incident sparked a discussion between Churchill and General Eisenhower, presumably via telephone, who commanded the Allied forces during the later period of the war.
According to the letter, the grandfather who witnessed the conversation heard Churchill state: “This event should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic amongst the general population and destroy one’s belief in the Church.”
The story is backed up in several other newspapers–the document is real. Now if the story is real, that’s another matter. But if it is, then it will go well with this 1952 UFO buzz of the White House.
You want the truth? We’ll get as close as we can. Come to Longest Night, Dec 20, 21, 8pm, Yukon Arts Centre.
We’ll be talking about visitation…. aliens, UFOs, and the sightings that started them all.
Researching for Longest Night (Dec 20, 21): We Are Not Alone
Researching for Longest Night, I was told that Daniel Janke wanted real reports of UFOs during my segments. Over the last week of researching, I’ve become a bit jittery. There’s a lot more than I really want to think about. Check out this footage from NASA.
Don’t know about you. But when I come across video footage from NASA, I start to believe. Don’t know if you already believe or not. But we’ll be looking at several high profile cases at the Longest Night performance this year–in between puppetry and music–since their theme is We Are Not Alone.
I’ll post more research here and let you know how it’s coming. But you can come see the finished product DEC 20th and 21st, 8pm. Yukon Arts Centre. Tickets available now.
Howls and Hell Yeahs: The Celebration of the Life of Reid A. Parent
I just returned from a beautiful service honouring the life of Reid A. Parent, a 25 year old man who touched the lives of tons of people before his untimely death in a car accident.
Reid was the main speaker at the event. His words were all over the program–several of his journal entries revealed a creative, philosophical man who loved others and adored life. His Sweater Video gave a discussion of how most people will lie and tell you that your sweater is beautiful, even if it’s the ugliest thing on earth, but that his own mother sincerely believes any sweater on him becomes beautiful. I love the shock on his face when he realizes his mother honestly believes in the beauty. Other videos of him rapping and singing were played. Pictures of him showed a life of daring himself to be himself in all situations, and a life of making sure that he found “the goodness in other people,” as his stepdad, Darrell Hookey remarked. His family and friends had the funniest stories about him–stories where he turned life into a beautiful game, and made every moment count. Reid was there–all over the place–and he said his peace, and keeps saying his peace, through those who loved and knew him.
I am so glad there are celebrations of life–like participatory memoirs, we get a full picture of the life of a person, and get to celebrate what he gave that life. It was horribly short, but it was grandly full. And the proof was in the hundreds of people who showed up in Whitehorse, not to mention the hundreds that showed up in BC for the first memorial service.
His sister, Leah, another beautiful soul, said all she could do was howl–and so she invited us all to howl. And we did. All of us. Howled like a pack of wolves who had lost their leader. It seemed to me that Reid led a lot of people away from the brooding part of life into the happiness part. Darrell Hookey challenged the crowd to live lives that took in every moment. He didn’t accept our little silent nods. He said we should answer that challenge the way Reid always did, with a “Hell yeah!” And so he posed the question again, and pointed to us, and just like our earlier howl, we responded with a hearty “HELL YEAH” as we promised Reid, and ourselves, that time would not get away from us, that we would live full lives, and that we would love others as part of living full lives.
So many funerals can be much more final, more, shall I say, depressing, but this one was full of pain, yes, but was also full of celebration and promise–as Reid now inhabits all of us through his stories, his videos, his music, his writings, his friends, his family. Reid goes on in particle form, or as the emcee said, he goes on in “seed” form…planting a renewed, and vigorous, life-living plant inside of us.
Go out there and howl, and let your yesses be Hell Yeahs. And give people enough of yourself that when you leave this Earth, you leave behind a garden of goodness and good stories.
God bless you, Reid Parent. God bless you Darrell and Daisy, Leah, and all the relatives and all the friends who carry Reid’s seeds of joy.
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How to Get Published by James D. Macdonald–good advice
Well, I keep track of Making Light, the blog by Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden and all their friends and guests, and Jim Macdonald has a great post today: How to Get Published. You might have heard the advice a thousand times, but Macdonald gives it some fresh spin.
To be a writer, you must write.
Thinking about writing is not writing. Talking about writing is not writing. Pre-writing exercises are not writing. Only writing is writing.
Write every day. If you only write a page a day, at the end of a year you’ll have a novel. Read every day. If you want to be a writer, you must be a reader. If you are not a reader, perhaps being a writer is not in your future.
Write straight through to THE END.
The urge to give up, particularly in the dread Mid-Book, will be strong. The desire to go back and fix the beginning will be strong. Resist the urge. You won’t know what the beginning is until you reach the finish, and perhaps not even then.
Every synapse in your brain will be screaming “This Is Crud!” Perhaps it is. That’s okay. You can’t make a pot without clay. We’ll fix it all in the second draft. If you need permission to write badly, I grant it to you.
Note that while you will think that your writing is crud, and it may objectively be crud, you should still write to the very best of your ability.
Besides, if you give up in the middle, when and how will you learn to write endings?
The rest of this article, if you’re serious about writing, is worth your time to look over.
Last Day for Tesseracts 15 submissions
Just in case you needed the kick—you still have time to submit to Tesseracts 15 by midnight Calgary Standard Time (I think). We’re all doing that up here in the Yukon in a marathon run to 11pm. Good luck to everyone. Have fun! Be creative. But be quick about it…. tempis fugit and all that.
Desperate Times Call For Desperate Magic: A Review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pt 1. is a good film–a solid film, giving a good arc and screentime to all three of the main characters, and a host of others. There’s plenty of action, but this film also takes time to develop the story and the characters. I stood in line at the Yukon Cinema for two hours to get in to the first showing (-10 C)–so my standards had to go up for how good this film had to be. And I felt like, in the end, it was worth it.
You know the premise: Harry Potter and team are on the run from Voldemort. Nowhere is safe. Harry is out to find as many pieces of Voldemort’s soul as he can and destroy them. We aren’t at Hogwarts anymore. But the lessons, it seems, still go on–and the grades are worth more.
Some small spoilers follow—but nothing major. Read later after you’ve seen the movie. It’s just me talking about the really cool character arcs–but I do a bit of telling what characters do.
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I was pleased at how much this film is about Hermoine. The opening sequence has her erasing the memories of her from her parents’ minds, and also from every picture in the house. She has, in effect, erased her existence in the Muggle world. The film highlights the extreme displacement the kids feel by not being in Hogwarts, and you feel it too. The camera shots from above the various geographies, rotate just slightly, giving you the feeling of being lost. And these students are lost, very lost. They are on the run, and no place is safe. Hermoine guides them through past memories of her childhood, and the movie plays out as a backwards rendition of those memories she has erased. Each place they disparate to, or jump to, is a place she alone remembers from her past. When she is tortured in the film, we realize how much she has always been in potential danger at Hogwarts, especially because she is Muggle born. While Draco Malfoy always carried the racism and bigotry into Hogwarts, because he was a child–he had no power to enforce that bigotry, and we assumed that it would be knocked out of him. Hogwarts has obviously failed a few times to instill responsible and compassion in its students. Voldemort carries this much farther. On a purity spree, he is trying to subjugate the world of Muggles under wizardry control. Hermoine represents muggles on the run, Muggles fighting back. She even helps save another Muggle-born woman who has been stripped of her wand in a courtroom scene straight from the Inquisition. We know that the imperative for the wizards getting back in control of Voldemort is to save mankind, not just themselves. And we realize that the last six books were about Hogwarts, a school that taught morality and self-control to people who had great, destructive and constructive powers. Hogwarts is what stands between wizards and witches taking over the world–young wizards’ and witches’ education is paramount to our safety.
Ron has a great arc as well, as his whole family is left fighting against Voldemort while he and Harry and Hermoine are trying to find the horcruxes. Every day he listens to the radio to see if his family is okay. And every day they don’t find a horcrux is another day that he isn’t doing something to stop the war. He feels guilty that he’s “doing nothing” and doubly guilty because he gets to be with the woman he loves all the time. This turns in him, and with the help of an evil horcrux which amplifies those feelings of betraying his family, it causes him to rage against his friends, and make a big decision. It’s a huge move for a major character. We know part of is the horcrux, but part of it stems from six books of Ron Weasley being seen as less than all of his siblings, and standing in the shadows of Harry Potter. He now has to play the hero–and while he wants to so badly, there’s a fear that it’s always just “playing” and that this playing is actually taking away from a larger duty he owes his family back home. His arc represents, to me at least, the wizarding families and the freedom they are likely to lose if Voldemort wins, and the sacrifices they make to keep people safe.
Harry, though frustrated as a leader, has a lot of moments to make good and bad decisions as he goes. I like that he learns that his friends are doing the best they can. They are counting on him to know what he’s doing–and sometimes he does and sometimes he’s just an 18 year old who is figuring things out as he goes. I like that he’s learning to be a leader here under trying circumstances and there are moments in the film that he shows how good of a leader he can be. We know the final film will explore even more of Harry’s character, and Dumbledore’s. I wonder how much they’ll bring out the relationship between Grindewald and Dumbledore. I’m very excited to see how Harry reaches what he has to reach in the next film.
Even though this film deviates from its normal Hogwarts school year–I was pleased to see that the way the earlier films marked the passing of time was kept in this one: holidays. So even though you are on the run, Harry, you still mark time the same.
Deathly Hallows does have some overtones of Lord of the Rings, as Harry searches for multiple objects, so that he can destroy them. The scene interrogating Creature about a locket gave me Gollum, Frodo, Samwise feelings all over the place. And the dream sequences of seeing Voldemort closing in on various people acted like Sauron’s eye in reverse.
And then come to the middle of the film, I was surprised and charmed to find such a finely animated film inside. When the story of the “Three Brothers” is read aloud by Hermoine, the film indulges in a beautiful moment of cinema. I was entranced. The short segment is worth its own short film status–and I would definitely be interested in seeing a film like this made from the stories in Beetle the Bard. If this was the director’s way of seeing if we’re interested in seeing that film–let me be the first to say, yes.
Overall, the film far exceeded my expectations, in that it brought out threads that resonated with the first six films, and managed to find humor in the darkest book of the HP series. It also gave such meaty character building parts to Ron, Hermoine and Harry–just when you thought you knew them, now you see them grow again. This is the perfect culmination movie.
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Kudos to the folks at the Yukon Cinemas for decorating the theatre, keeping peace, for filming the line, and asking us trivia questions for prizes. Thank you for threatening any person who had cellphone nonsense during the movie with immediate expulsion. Please do this for every movie! 🙂 I’m very proud of our how well Yukon Theatre did with the massive crowds, and regulating traffic. And they were all dressed in Hogwarts robes! Priceless.
Talking Dog gives Gay Christian Resources: my other project
Talking Dog is one of my other blogs, hopefully a good resource for gay Christians. There are a lot of good gay christian websites out there, and so I decided merely to become a portal so that you could find resources. Mostly I wanted to provide all the information that anyone might need to investigate the whole issue for themselves. Debates swirl about and people need to know the truth. It was websites like the one I created that helped me when I needed information. I needed resources. I couldn’t ask anyone out loud about them, and I didn’t know a gay Christian.
Many of you might recognize the Talking Dog in my title–it comes from “Believing in the Dog” which was the short story that I entered into PSAC’s Anti-Homophobia Week’s contest over two years ago. In the story, I had a man go out into the woods in January at night to kill himself–just sit out under a tree and freeze. There was a talking dog in there–and as the author, I knew I couldn’t save the man’s life without making the black lab into a talking dog. That I had to bend reality into fantasy to save the character. I had wished that there were more talking dogs in the world–or that we would become the talking dogs in someone’s life. The story won the contest, and Darrell Hookey, always encouraging me forward, helped me (i.e. pulled me off the floor crying) when it came time to print my name beside it in What’s Up Yukon.
It’s my way of giving back to the community what it gave me. Maybe there’s someone else out there who’s questioning their faith and their sexuality. Who knows? They might just need a Talking Dog.
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For more on the blog, I have this page.
Solidarity in Purple: Supporting Gay Teens After Spirit Day
As millions are wearing purple today, Wednesday, I found myself trying to imagine what this might mean to a closeted man or woman. Walking down the street are all the people who would support you coming out.
When I was struggling with coming out–I didn’t know who might be supportive and who wouldn’t. I grew up in a culture that would designate a day, “If you wear Purple on Fridays, you’re gay.” So it was a color to avoid–for fear of being outcast. Today, it is THE color–not to show you are weird or different, or even “in” or “cool”–but to help others come out, and know that it’s safe.
That you support and love them and are waiting for the day when they feel comfortable, and pushing for the day when there is no more bullying about anything.
So in the Spirit of Spirit Day, let’s keep the purple flowing–as long as we can, in concerted efforts. Let’s celebrate the color purple. (All of these photos were found on Flickr and are part of the Creative Commons distribution license.)
Purple has a long history of being associated with royalty, kings, priests, and even with Christ. Lydia, famous for her purple cloths, was one of the first leaders of bible studies in the early Christian era. Purple is a rare color in nature–but when it happens, you notice.
Right now, the climate for gay people is getting better. However, there are still large pockets where gay and lesbian people are not affirmed for who they are, and what they bring to their communities, and society in general. We’ve built up a long tradition of pushing men and women back for their sexual orientation, and it’s entrenched in our churches, our military, our governments, our city councils, and it finds its way into schools where kids–who can’t hide a prejudice–act on it. We punish the kids, but they learn it from the adults.
So, go out there and get your purple on. Show your kids that you stand in solidarity with those who are in the LGBT community, and that you want to assure them that not only 
does it get better, but we–every day–are making it better for them. Slipping on a hat or a shirt or some purple shoes is the simplest start.
What are the next steps–the day after Spirit Day, the week after Spirit Day? The next steps may be harder, but we can do those too.
Get a group of you to wear purple in your churches. Ask to speak from the podium announcing something, address everyone, but specifically those gay people who may be present in your congregations–out or not–and tell them that they have someone in your church (or a group of you wearing purple) that they can count on to be supportive no matter what your church’s theology might say. Your purple shows them that you support them right now.
Get a group of people to wear purple and show up during a city council meeting and ask to speak in honor of gay teens.
As a gay man, I would look for any, any sign that someone might be friendly, supportive, and understanding– the weight of our secret–our fear that being different makes us less than–is
sometimes a lot, especially when we come from communities where there is active discrimination towards gay people. This can take many forms: a theology which doesn’t treat gay and lesbian people as equals in the church, a simple understanding that something “gay” is wrong or weird, or a belief that being a gay man is somehow not masculine enough.
Our military values each soldier, but currently doesn’t value the gay ones if they say they are gay. The soldier at the right here is receiving a purple heart–and that’s why I have him in the post. We value what we give Purple to: kings, deities, soldiers, priests–purple is considered one of the rarest colors, hard to create, and therefore highly prized.
When we wear purple today–we say, “We highly prize gay teens. We value you. We know you have something worth giving and sharing with us. We value what you have to say and the point of view you have. You are loved and appreciated. We want to see what you’ll become. Our country is changing. Our governments are changing. Our churches are changing. And it starts today. It starts with me.”
Bear Witness 