Movie Review: Quarantine 2: Terminal

Dark Things Quarterly, the magazine I was going to do movie reviews for has been closed down. So I thought I would just post the reviews I had done on here over the next few weeks. Here we go...

Quarantine 2: Terminal

The 2008 film Quarantine was remarkable in its…well, unremarkableness. I can tell you that I watched the movie, that I didn’t hate it, and that I didn’t like it. I think the movie was about a plague. That is about all I remember. The movie was neither good enough nor bad enough to for me to remember a single thing about it.

When I heard there was a sequel Quarantine 2: Terminal, I almost didn’t pick it up, mediocre horror just isn't my thing, but part of the product description pulled me in. This is what got me:

“…Now, aboard Flight 318, the first symptoms begin to show. As the infection begins to take root, innocent passengers suddenly transform into terrifying, bloodthirsty killers…”

It is pretty hard to resist terrifying, bloodthirsty killers. So I gave it a shot. To be honest I wasn’t expecting much but I was pleasantly surprised. Here is the how the movie graded out.

PLOT

The plot was entertaining but was nothing extraordinary and can be completely summarized in those two lines of product description. A disease gets loose on a plane, the infected become crazy zombie-like killers. There were a couple of good scares and just enough action and gore to keep me entertained and watching. Grade: C+

DIRECTING

Another thing that kept me watching was the filming of the movie. Director, John Pogue, did a nice job filming this one. So many directors these days are trying to be "unique" or "edgy" that it is nearly impossible to watch their movies. Quarantine 2 did not suffer from this problem. Grade: B

ACTING

Finally no movie review is complete with mentioning the acting, the biggest pitfall of horror movies. I didn't recognize a single name but I did recognize a few faces, and my Google-fu tells me that many of the actors have also been in an episode or two of TV shows that I watch. No on in this movie is going to win the Oscar for best actor, but they all did a good job. I thought most of the characters were believable and Mercedes Masohn has an awesome performance playing the freaked out, but determined, flight attendant, Jenny. Grade: B-

Overall Grade: B-

Summary: Quarantine 2: Terminal is no masterpiece but it is a fun and entertaining movie. See this one if you have nothing else to watch.

Not a Pro

Well it has officially been one year since I signed my contract with Faepublishing to have them publish my short story, The Last Dragon. It was my first pro paying sale, but I am assuming the story will never get published now. Their website is gone and has been for months and I have found numerous blogs from authors who were accepted and never published.

Here is the weird part, at least in my opinion, I signed a contract, they did edits and sent me them to look at, and I got paid. I understand running out of money and going under, but they had at least one story paid for and ready to go. Weird.

The contract says that the rights to my story are mine once again, since the story had not been published in the one year since I signed the contract.

Oh, well I guess I have the rights to an unpublished story and $125. I just can't say that I have had a professional sale anymore. It is still the most money I have made off of any one piece of writing, but I really wanted to have a pro sale in my cover letter to other publishers.

As far as writing goes I am playing around with different ways of outlining and starting all kinds of novels just to see if I like them. I am still writing one main novel, which I really need to find a title for. My new years resolution is going well 400 words a day is a lot easier than any other quota I have given myself in the past, I have actually met this one so far and it is almost a month into the new year!

A New Year

Happy New Year!

Hello, everybody. Sorry I haven’t posted sooner but it has been a busy new year. As some of you have probably read over at the PHP website, over Christmas my wife and I discovered that we are going to have twins in August. We are both really excited, but I have a bunch of stuff to do around the house before August, and with the Summer Reading program in June and July I really need to try to get everything done by May.

I have to make the spare bedroom into a nursery, move the spare bedroom to my office, move office down the stairs and across the house into a room we were using for storage, move my wife’s office into another room we were using for storage, make her old office into a new living room(we picked the smallest room in the entire house to be our living room and we are going to need more room where we hang out), move the stuff from the storage rooms out to the shed or out to the dumpster, paint the old living room…anyway there’s more stuff but I’m sure you get the idea.

Basically “We” decided to rearrange the entire house, I put the quotes around we because while technically I was there, I just said things like “yes honey” and “that’s good idea”. In short I have had a pretty busy few weeks, but I am not minding it at all because I am so excited about the twins.

On the writing front I started yet another new project. It kind of seems like that is all I did in 2011. Every month or so I would start something new. But I made a new year’s resolution to finish writing something before I start anything else and to write at least 400 words a day. I figure 400 words a day is easy, takes me about thirty minutes or so, and I can finish a novel in a little over six months. Plus it is a little slower than the nanowrimo pass so my writing should be a little more intelligible.

I better get to writing.

Oh, and I won the super bowl in one of my fantasy football leagues.

Yet another post on not writing...

As you may know from following this blog, I have a habit of finding odd hobbies to distract me from writing. I have decided that this is okay. Writing is not my job, at least not yet and having a lot of hobbies makes me a well rounded person…See how I did that? I can totally justify my procrastination with that argument no matter how unimportant or pointless said procrastination is.

My most current form of procrastination is fantasy football. I always thought it was weird, and I didn’t really get it, but my brother-in-law wanted to join an espn league to see what it was like and I figured hey why not try it, its free and I already watch the Vikings every week.

The draft was a learning experience. I ended up drafting seven teams before I was happy with what I got. I did keep up with all of my teams. I rarely watched games but I played very close attention to the bottom little banner thing during the Vikings games.

It was actually a lot of fun. I dealt with injuries and picked up new players, some booms and some busts. I spent a few hours a week trying to figure out who I could add to make the perfect team. I picked up and dropped more players than anyone else in any of my leagues.

In the end only one of my teams sucked. Three of them were one game from making the playoffs and the other three of them actually made it.

Now that the first match up of the playoffs is almost over and I find myself in a weird spot as I wait for Monday Night Football. All three of my teams are in precarious spots.

The Roberts Raiders need Mike Wallace of the Pittsburg Steelers to score less than 10 fantasy points so that they can beat Team Scoregasm.

The Prairie Pirates need Mike’s team mate Antonio Brown to score a whopping 55 points, which I don’t think is very likely. (Scoring break down 10 yards receiving = 1 point & touchdown = 6 points) So he only needs a 310 yard four touchdown game….

Finally team NE Roberts needs the same Antonio Brown to score 19 points, which is doable he had 21 last week, but it also needs Frank Gore the 49ers running back, to score nothing and the Steelers defense to score nothing.

So my best bet is hoping Mike Wallace has an off night while at the same time his team mate Antonio Brown has the best game of his life.

I don't even like the Steelers.

Sometimes I think writing would be easier than procrastinating.

Nano Musings

“How did Nanowrimo go?” You ask with a smile, smile which could be seen as friendly but seems somehow mocking.

“Not good,” I reply, “not good at all.”

Yes, this year’s nanowrimo can be considered a fail, and a big one. I made it to just over half way to my word goal of 50,000 words. I do not consider it an epic fail, I did learn a few things and I have the beginning of what I think will be my best novel to date.

Things I learned

1. I cannot write with the stomach flu

2. I can write with the regular flu, but I am very slow

3. I have lost a bit of my motivation that I had when I started writing

The first two point are pretty self explanatory. I did spend most of November(2 weeks) sick. I also had some fairly busy weekends and a lot to do at work.

But that brings me to my third point. I am just not as motivated as I was when I started writing. The other stuff wouldn’t have mattered last year or the year before. I would have just gotten Nano done. Don’t get me wrong there were some flashes of it. I had three different writing sessions where I wrote 5000+ words in a couple of hours. Of course that means that the other 27 days I got about 10,000 words written, about 400 words a day or so.

So as I sit and reflect on what has changed a few things come to mind. For one instead of organically letting the story come, I am planning out a plot and this novel is much better for it. There are no instances of characters appearing for a chapter and then disappearing. The plot is fairly consistent and I didn’t decided to add a couple of dragons on page 70 to spice it up. In short I am writing a better quality story.

The other problem is a little harder to express. I really want to write a great novel, one that will have wide spread appeal. While writing my first few novels I was positive they were good enough to be published the whole time I was writing them, and only saw the flaws when I went back through to edit. This time I see all the flaws in my novel right after I am done writing. But I know if I go back and fix them now that I will never finish.

This novel  is better than any of my other novels, I am sure of that, but right now I don’t think that is good enough to be published and that is making it hard to motivate myself to write it.

Of course I did get 25,000 words done in a month which really is a step up from the pace I was going at, so maybe I can keep it up and put out a couple of novels a year.

NaNoWriMo and Dark Things

Thought I would give an update since I won't be posting much in November. I have decided to once more give NaNoWriMo a shot. I finished two years ago and last year I lost my flash drive at 30,000 words and wrote 20,000 words in short stories.

I wasn't going to participate this year. To be honest the novels I write when I am taking my time are much, much cleaner and easier to edit. Plus my lupus is advancing and while it is still a mild case (the disease is not attacking my organs), I am beginning to feel the joy of arthritis at the ripe old age of 32. A cold front moving in, not uncommon in Nebraska in November, or a lupus flare up could start my knuckles throbbing and take away days of writing time and the last two NaNoWriMos I came right down to the wire.

But I am hosting a few Write Ins at the library, which got me real interested this year and so far I have made it a point to not let my lupus stop me from doing anything. I just do it a little slower or with gobs and gobs of sunscreen.

So NaNo here I come. Don't expect any more blog posts in November except one saying I am done. In Pill Hill Press news my wife is starting a new horror magazine Dark Things Quarterly. I have taken it upon myself to become the Dark Things Quarterly movie reviewer. I am thinking about taking on a persona, maybe calling myself The Dark Professor and then grading the movies or something like that. Dark Things Quarterly is still in the planning stages but it should be a lot of fun. I am thinking about starting a separate website for my movie review persona. I should know more by the next time I post, towards the end of the month.

Sorry for any typos in this blog, don't have time to reread, must nano.

I'm a Winner!

To quote thier website: Our Annual Readers' Choice Awards highlights the best stories in each issue of The Bards and Sages Quarterly as chosen by our readers.  Upon the release of the October issue, we start polling our readers for their votes. 

My story won the Best Story of the April issue. I am very honored to win, there were some really great stories in this issue. HERE is the offical announcement. A big thank you to everyone who voted!