John Carter would eat the Hunger Games for a Snack

Hunger Games/John Carter:

Okay, just so you know I’m not really a diehard about keeping to a book or comic origin story. I don’t normally mind of you mess with it, as long as the heart of the story is there and it still makes a good movie. For example, I watched the X-Men First Class, and they borrowed characters from all over the X-Men time line, and even messed with how the two main characters met. I didn’t care, because the movie was fun, and it kind of created something neat, clever, and original.

With that being said I come to The Hunger Games, I know that this will fall on deaf ears because of what a tremendous success the Hunger Games movie has become in one week, but I believe they really failed to keep the heart of the story intact. I’m really happy for Suzanne Collins, seeing how this came from her amazing novel. It’s always great to see an author do really well, and she’s done extremely well. I know that she was even the screen-play writer, meaning she was responsible for paring down her novel for the big screen. I’m not sure how the editing process worked in this situation, meaning who was responsible for the final decision on the completed script. But I’m aware that for pacing and just trying to keep the movie from being three or four hours long things have to be taken out. But this is where I was kind of left hanging. There were characters taken out (the Avox, the governor’s daughter who really gave Katnip the Mocking Jay), there was a lot of back-story about Haymitch that I think you miss out on. You only got glimpses of Katniss’s mom and that she had checked out when her husband died. The movie skipped over details about Katniss’s transformation, and how petty her fashion team was. I could go on about how things were left out, cut short, or transformed a little, but that wasn’t even my chief complaint. Here is what drove me nuts, shaky camera for the opening scene of the movie, shaky camera for the hunting in the woods, and in EVERY FIGHT SCENE. I’ve watched Blair Witch Project, and I’ve seen Cloverfield, and even watched the Troll Hunter, so I’m very used to the effect, and enjoy it in limited use, but it was grossly misused and didn’t add anything to the movie, except for one scene with the Tracker Jackers. I could have easily overlooked the changes from the book, to the big screen had they found a director who didn’t rely on cheap camera tricks to try to impress an audience. I understand how fans of the book love the movie, but I think what we really got less than what we paid for, it could have been amazing, but what it felt like was a low budget film with great actors, and piss poor editing. My hats off to the cast and Suzanne Collins for great acting and creating an awesome story, but two thumbs down for the weak attempt of editing a film with so much potential. The movie felt cheap, but the one good thing they did, was advertised the heck out of it, which brings me to…John Carter.

John Carter the movie was taken from three books from Edgar Rice Burroughs written in between 1911- and 1918. Even though the small bit of press I researched said it was based on the first book A Princess of Mars, in all actuality bits and pieces are from the first book and The Gods of Mars, and The Warlord of Mars; which were the first three books in the Barsoom series. What the creators did was… they took characters from the books, most of the John Carter’s adventure to Mars, and how he met the Tharks, but changed quite a bit to make up their own story within the context of the books. It’s like seeing a classic from a different point of view using elements of John Carter and the world of Barsoom, and his love for Dejah Thoris.  I think if Edgar Rice Burroughs was alive today, he’d been excited about the changes they made, and what a great homage they paid him. However… it is a shame though to dishonor his memory with such bad promotion. I saw the name John Carter a couple of times at the theater on those standup advertisements, so I searched out what John Carter was. All I really found was a sneak peek trailer, but the trailer didn’t really inspire me to see much more. It would have been a shame if I hadn’t accidentally stumbled upon the books on my kindle reader. I would have missed this awesome world of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the God-Father of Sci-fi.

It seemed like the creators of the film must have thought, everyone knows who Edgar Rice Burroughs was, and that he wrote Tarzan, and they must have felt that just putting a couple trailers on TV would just inspire everyone to run to the theater to see a guy named JOHN CARTER. When in fact, I don’t think most of society even knows that he was from the book, A Princess of Mars, and that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote it. Or that he inspired many Sci-Fi writers and directors for a hundred years. Disney, you can’t just throw crap out there and expect that the audience will do the research themselves. You have to spoon feed them in this day and age. There should have been a re-release of the books, commercials advertising food at BK with Woola the cute dog thing. There should have been specials detailing the life of Edgar Rice Burroughs. If you’re going to drop 250 million, don’t you think you should equally pump it up? Make music videos, get a cool soundtrack, put the making up on YouTube, do something else then just make it, and hope the masses will come. It is truly a shame when something so great, and so majestic, gets such a horrible introduction into the world, just to be forgotten in a matter of weeks.

Those who missed the movie missed something that was spectacular, fun, and that really pay homage to a creator of Sci-Fi who wrote these characters, and created this world of Barsoom, and Dejah Thoris one of the most loved women in literature just about a 100 years ago.  RIP John Carter, I’ll miss not seeing you in another movie.

Julie A Lindsey guest blog April 6th

Blog: Julie A Lindsey

April 6^th I’ve got Julie A Lindsey, writer, blogger, and mother of three guest blogging on my blog site. She has several books already penned with two of her books, one called Bloom (already available), and the other Death by Chocolate is available for Pre-Order on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Check out her site Http://julieannelindsey.com for details and a trailer for her book Death by Chocolate. She is doing a Blog Tour, and my site is fortunately one of her stops on her tour.

I’m more of a horror, action, Sci-Fi, Thriller kind of guy, and I believe she’s more of a romance type of author but her Death by Chocolate does seem intriguing, watch the trailer and you’ll see why. Also… just because someone doesn’t necessarily fit within your genre doesn’t mean you can’t learn a lot from them.

She’s asked what I wanted her to write about for my blog. I gave her a pretty open ended group of ideas.  

I think what we’ll get is some insight into how she’s created her stories, unsuspected journey’s that lead her to where she’s at  in story writing and life. And… maybe she’ll share about how she scored a book deal. I’m looking forward to reading it myself.

She’s also a very giving Twitter tweeter, become her friend, and she may hook you up with a big group of her followers. 

Two for one deal on Blogs!

Since it's been a while I'm giving you a short two for one blog. Yay!

Man, it’s been a while, I’ve grown so much as a writer, but I still have so far to go. As a new writer I had read some critiques of other writer’s work from literary agents. It seemed the thing they said most was the writer needs to read more, so instead of waiting to hear that myself I went on a binge of reading. I haven’t read so much in my life. I actually went from a couple books a year to well over a crap load this year. My most intriguing find was Edgar Rice Burroughs. Funny story, I was just going through my Kindle Reader App and found a free book called A Princess of Mars. The cover is what caught my interest and it was free so I downloaded it and began to read. Within the first couple pages I saw the name John Carter, yes of the movie John Carter. I’m sure Kindle put it up in the list because of the movie but I was pleasantly surprised with it, and began to read. I have not seen the movie yet, and I hear that it was changed drastically, but it doesn’t ruin my excitement. I just wish Disney would have done a better job promoting it. I saw like three commercials. Anyway, I loved the first book, even though it was written in a time (1913) where most people had to be told in detail what something looked like, because there’s wasn’t a plethora of movies in the day featuring stories of green aliens flying spaceships. Unlike now when I say, “A zombie attacked me,” everyone’s pretty sure what one would look like without me going into details. If you can get past the long descriptions, there’s a fun story to be told. The second book, The Gods of Mars is also a wonderfully creative story that any action, Sci-Fi fan would eat up. You can also see where people like George Lucas and James Cameron got a lot of ideas from.

Part 2: Write the way you want. I’ve been reading a lot of books, and one thing I found out was that format played an important role in my enjoyment of a book. Anyone can drudge through a 30 page chapter, but when it’s broken up into smaller bite sized chunks, it makes the reading (for me), more fun. I had read a James Patterson story (co-authored) and then read The Hobbit. The second book I read in the James Patterson series of Witch and Wizard was dismal, and lacked what its predecessor had to offer, but I was still able to read it, and do it rather quickly because of the short chapters. The Hobbit, which I did enjoy, was a bit of a chore for me, even though it was a shorter book, but the chapters were so long, I got in the habit of saying, “When will this chapter ever end?”  Not that I think it’s right or wrong to have long, short, or no chapters, but it really helps me enjoy a book when I get just get a couple pages in when I have a chance, and not feel like I have to read forever to get to another natural break point.