A couple of notes about why I’ve been off the LJ for a few days:
1) Too shagged. ‘Star Wars: Battlefront’ for the XBox is really addictive. And mostly, I just watch
2) Too full of Uli’s delicious breaded sweet & sour chicken “Thanksgiving” dinner. And carrot cake! Yum!
3) The New Job is apparently an 8am-8pm sort of deal. At least, those were my hours yesterday. Looking like it’s going to take that long today. Feeling a little worn down, but still gung-ho about improved salary, responsibility, ability to get here at 8:50am (as per today) and not be chastised by *anyone*.
4) On way home from work in taxicab, driver told me his wife was at the gym “trying to lose weight”. He informed me in heavily accented English that “his weight was already lost”. This spawned hilarious visions in my head of globulous clumps of cellulite blubbering around in the woods with a broken compass. My mind is odd sometimes.
5) Also odd was the completely out-of-the-blue idea I had last night to get creative with pastry and bake a chicken pot pie, decorated in the manner of cherry pie with pastry cut-out cherries on the crust, except with marijuana-shaped pastry leaves on the crust. Because then it would really *be* a chicken pot pie! Yes? Yes. Odd.
6) On the book front – WOW. I just finished reading a book I stole from
WARNING: Lengthy babble about casting Mazer, Graff & Anderson for ‘Ender’s Game’ movie ahead!
All I know is that Wolfgang Petersen better do a damn good job of casting, because I have some pretty vivid images in my mind that he needs to live up to. If it were me, I would pick a new batch of child actors for Ender, Peter and Valentine, and focus on headliners for the older male roles.
Mazer Rackham is supposed to look like he’s a 60-year-old New Zealander, so I don’t know why they don’t just use Harvey Keitel, since he’s already proven he can play that role perfectly in ‘The Piano’. My other choices would be Viggo Mortensen with make-up, since he does intensity, war commander and mild insanity well. And frankly, it seems like the perfect opportunity to reunite a large portion of the ‘Firefly’ cast – Nathon Fillion could be one of Ender’s teachers, Adam Baldwin might do well as Bonzo (although he’s a little old), Jewel Straite has such a baby face she might get away with Petra Arkanian (or at least Ender’s mother).
Colonel Graff, in my mind, is epitomized by William L. Petersen, who plays Gil Grissom on ‘CSI’. He can remain dignified and respectable while both fat and skinny, he’s good at looking for the greater justice in the face of other atrocities being committed, he can be gruff, caring, fatherly. I think he has what it takes to be the man who molds and shapes Ender into a commander.
Alternately, the role could be done by Gene Hackman, who certainly has military experience under his belt, and who has been a negligent yet caring father figure in ‘The Royal Tannenbaums’. Graff’s counterpart, Major Anderson, could be Mark Harmon (again, good military roles in the past), or hilariously, Hugo Weaving, who would have a good face for the part, expressive eyebrows, lots of experience in fantasy military command roles, father-figure roles, and more specifically, roles wherein he says ‘Mr. Anderson’. A lot.
That’s all for now. Have to go back to planning a tour. Hope everyone’s doing well, and I’ll try to finish my BC story soon. There are lots and lots of photos (about 160), but many of them are artsy scenery shots of ridiculously huge trees and pebbled beaches, so I’m not sure how many of you want to see that sort of thing. Maybe the artsy stuff can become a photo essay of Cathedral Grove for
Wanna give me a ring at home this evening? Any time after 6pm…?
I can’t believe you’ve never read “Ender’s Game” before. A true classic. However, I remain optimistic that you may yet have a shot at producing the movie yourself, as it’s been in development hell for almost a decade now. Terrifying!
Many friends recommended it to me, but I think I was put off by the military aspect. Generally speaking, I don’t like warfare, and I figured it would be more Tom Clancy-ish than it was.
Amusingly, I took a whole course in Sci-fi in my undergrad, second year, which I had completely forgotten about until just now. So I guess I lied when I said it’s been a decade. Still, at least six or seven years. Anyhow, in the class, we read Orson Scott Card’s ‘Pastwatch’, because the teacher just assumed everyone taking the class had already read ‘Ender’s Game’. I liked that book a lot, as well, and I still think of the characters and the plot to this day. The man has a knack of writing books that stick with you.
Oh, and I don’t know why I think you might know this, but where would be the best place in Toronto for me to get staff t-shirts made for folks employed at the Silver Snail? Any good ideas?
For some reason, someone like the kid in Love Actually seems to be a good pick to be Bean, or possibly Ender. The problem with this book is that you have ten-thirteen year olds playing these roles, but they need to have the maturity of adults because they are geniuses. And getting so many actors of that caliber at that age is just hard. I offer up as an example of casting gone wrong: Jake Lloyd. There needs to be depth to it.
For more info on the movie: http://www.frescopictures.com/movies/ender/endersgame_update.html
But yea, a fantastic book, hey? Check out Ender’s Shadow too. It’s the second best book in the series, as it is told from Bean’s POV. Freaking awesome. I love Scott Card.
wtf’s with having the link to amazon, huh? 😛
Favourite book *ever*…
You might be interested to know that there are several sequels, starting with Speaker for the Dead. I didn’t enjoy Speaker all that much, but the rest of the series are well worth a read.
(Alas, for them to make sense, you do have to slog through Speaker first)
Be warned though that there are two sets of sequels. One is the Speaker for the Dead-Xenocide-Children of the Mind trilogy, which follows Ender like 1000 years later. The other follows immediately after the war with Peter, Petra, and Bean, and those include: Shadow of the Hegemon and Shadow Puppets.
I still hold that you can read Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow together as a whole and still be satisfied.
Actually that’s very true! Thanks for correcting me.
I like Card, but I think he’s gotten lazy over the years. Having read Ender’s Game when it first came out (as a short story in an anthology edited by Jerry Pournelle), I’ve followed the series in order of release date, and the whole thing just gets more over-the-top. Unlike most people, I really disliked “Ender’s Shadow” – the whole series of “telling the story from Bean’s perspective” seems like the Sandman spin-off releases that Vertigo has been doing, where the goal is less to enrich the mythology than milk a popular book for all you can.
“Speaker for the Dead” is actually my favorite in the series, next to the original short story (where the characters are a bit older and less perfected).
Shirts: I’m really not sure, at least not where to get them done for a decent price. There’s a place on Queen West near Brock (past Dufferin) that would probably be cheaper, but other than that… try asking Cameron S. where he got the Apocalypstick shirts done up?
Sorry, muffin! I will correct my faulty link eeeeemediately!
*smooch*
M