It’s not just a sub-par Moby lyric, IT’S ACTUALLY TRUE.

(That is an actual thought I had at Launchpad, while we were learning about the most common substances in the universe. It’s easy to dismiss Moby for everything after Play – not only easy, but probably a good idea – but the dude got some factual information about science at some point, that much is clear.)

Meanwhile, the Hubble, which is determined to show us how much we’ll regret letting it just fall apart in space, is taking pretty pictures just to spite us.

Dear Earth,

You know what? I am just taking pictures out here because it’s pretty and I feel like it. Don’t think this is about you, Earth, you hear me? Because I am over you. I don’t want you to worry about me, or feel guilty about just giving up on me forever, or anything like that, because I could not care less. You have fun with your James Webb Space Telescope, okay? Because I don’t even know what I ever saw in you, and I’ve got better things than you coming up.

No love,
HST

P.S. SEE ATTACHED, SUCKERS.

(Not pictured: filename “neenerneener.jpg”)

Also, yes, I have probably turned into one of Those Kids Who Won’t Shut Up About How Fun Camp Was*, and you’ll be regularly hearing about astronomy alongside movies and costuming. (Uh, fair warning for those who hate the night sky, I guess?)

As a kid I loved staring at whatever stars I could see (mmm, suburban light pollution), and I knew the mythology of the various constellations without having a sense of their real scope (or, let’s face it, knowing where many of them were). Launchpad really filled in some of the handwavey places in my brain and rekindled that little-kid love affair with the sky. It’s like I’m a kid again, only now I’m a really tall kid who knows terms like “visual binary” and pays taxes and has realized planes are not actually fun to be on like your parents always said they were!

* To be fair, I have not, nor will I ever, like an actual camp. I was out on Vedauwoo for less than three hours and I managed to wound myself and have an allergic reaction. The best thing about astronomy is that you can do it anywhere where you can look up, like penthouses with skylights. This will involve making new friends who have skylights in their penthouses, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

Okay. This is the big Eclipse post.

Ten Things About Eclipse has covered the bases.

Yesterday, my piece about The Decline and Fall of the Twilight Empire went up at Tor.com. There, I discussed the fact that as the fandom grows, the quality of actual filmmaking seems to sink like a stone.

(I will be honest, though, looking at my notes for New Moon, I’m not sure if endless music-video tracking shots are any worse than establishing shots with voiceover that then cut to a different location/scene entirely. Still, Eclipse had more to work with and did less with it, so it’s probably still the worst movie of the three. I’ll have to think about this.)

But first, as always, there was The Line.

The line for Eclipse was, in many ways, the smoothest this operation has been run.

Theatres are now aware of what can happen if you keep the long lines bunched up together for hours (STAMPEDE), and this was one of the multiplexes big enough to have it showing on at least seven screens, so they did what any smart theatre would do: they lined up everyone outside by theatre, three deep across the sidewalk, and wound around a city block by 9:30pm, when we did a fly-by and immediately ran away.

The good news is, unlike the first year I went there and it was the fucking Mines of Moria, there were actual plans in place. As soon as the final showing of that theatre’s normal movie was over, they let that theatre in. It was a foolproof plan to minimize crowds, normalize lines at concessions, and make this a smooth operation.

Then they turned off the air conditioning. Let me tell you, when they turn off the air conditioning in a two-story movie theatre full of pining women, it is not pretty.

Also not pretty: the Team Edward/Team Jacob fighting, which reached a fever pitch in our theatre, and proved that keeping everyone penned together outside would probably have led to a battle royale. (Have you ever seen the poster for The Warriors? It was like that.)

Apparently the thing to do this year was to wear an Eclipse Burger King crown with the image of your favorite dude on the front. I counted at least fifty in our theatre alone.

(Bella was also on the crown; no one ever, ever had her in front.)

Two girls had a fight just outside the bathrooms, with one pointing accusingly at the other’s crown: “Of COURSE Edward is the best for her! How can you be Team Jacob? I THOUGHT YOU WERE MY FRIEND.”

Teenagers: holy crap.

At one point on the way inside, two girls had a Team Edward/Jacob sing-off to “The Boy is Mine,” pointing to their crowns. They seemed to be friends, so it wasn’t particularly invested, and they sort of wandered past the theatre employee, who looked after them for a second, sighed, and said, “Just…what the shit.”

I still think the line winner was the girl in a Cullen crest shirt, looking very displeased with her friends: “I was here early IRONICALLY.”

These kids speak for all of us.

And then it was time for the movie. Oh, was it ever.
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Please note, I apparently don’t have time to write about anything in depth, but plenty of time to make graphics about what I’m doing. Mmm, logic!

1. Reference image for a story I’m working on; originally was used for a story I just finished, but this image had another purpose. (It’s a worker.)

2. If I am not writing a story about someone in a coat of some kind, then I am writing a story about a post-human singularity…in which robots wear coats.

3. This looks like a still from a fantastic movie. It is, in fact, a still from One Night with the King, which is an absolutely terrible movie you will be seeing more of shortly.

4. Ditto. This is from Bathory. Not pictured: Hans Matheson painting a portrait of a baby that’s been stored inside the block of ice. (Oh, it happens.)

5. This is a picture of a juggler. Technically, he’s from an Anthropologie catalog, and he’s probably just a juggler because Hans Matheson found another stand-in. In my imagination, he’s my imaginary circus boyfriend. His name is Ben. You will probably see him again.

6. The novel currently with my agent takes place in a river city. This picture was from , and the time between me seeing it and me right-click-saving cannot be measured with modern instruments.

7. My next novel is set in the 1920s. Researching dance crazes of the time is repellent, grueling work that I absolutely do not enjoy whatsoever, but it has to be done.

8. Because it’s never the wrong time to watch Gleaming the Cube.

9. Inception. I have a piece about this movie lined up for Tor.com; in the meantime, just know that Joseph Gordon-Levitt must have signed an extra wire-work clause or something.

(You have to use all the ‘o’s. Everyone in the movie does.)

Over the weekend, as ordered, I actually told a ticket taker “Jonah Hex, please!” and saw it.

We all knew it was going to be bad. But I honestly could not have predicted the scope of awfulness here. This was no ordinary awful. It was almost magically bad. I snickered uncontrollably pretty much nonstop.

I also made this face a lot.

(Michael Fassbender, you put this movie down RIGHT NOW.)

Check out the details at Tor.com, but be warned that the written word cannot do justice to how sublimely, accidentally hilarious this movie is.

So, this weekend I saw Splice. I will be talking about it tomorrow, but it’s just not the sort of blog entry I want to face on a Monday. Especially since I also saw Dhoom 2 this weekend.

Dhoom 2 stars Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai, who had been paired to great effect in Jodhaa Akbar (despite Aishwarya’s lack of actual acting ability). I thought, “Well, they did well in the other one. Let’s check out Dhoom 2!”

Do you guys remember the first Mission: Impossible movie, when everyone had latex masks on all the time and they spent four hours just double-crossing each other and jumping around pulling off latex masks to reveal other latex masks and shooting bullets in an arc and running around and pulling off other people’s latex masks, and you spent the whole movie thinking, “What is wrong with these awful people in this movie I don’t understand?”

The maker of Dhoom 2 looked at that movie and said, “This is missing two things: dance numbers, and a man dressed up to look like the Queen. I can fix this.”

And so, Dhoom 2 was born, and the opening scene of Dhoom 2 is Hrithik Roshan parachuting down to a desert-crossing train (without being seen), dressing as the Queen Mother, stealing the Crown, and sandboarding to safety.

Then, he has a musical number in a nightclub telling you what the themes of the movie are. (Bollywood, don’t ever change.)

The plot swiftly becomes one of those movies where the Cop on a Mission and the Thief on a Mission do a lot of homoerotic fixating on one another and put a woman in the middle just so it doesn’t look too gay – in this case, the double-agent thief played by Aishwarya. It almost works!

…almost.

(And please note that in the video below, half the time he’s staring longingly off-camera, Abhishek Bachchan is there. Just saying.)

There’s also a comedy-relief cop, and a pregnant harpy wife, and a fun-loving tropical lady, and a lady cop who’s been tracking the thief dude for years but immediately gets the case taken off her hands by Cop on a Mission, and is never heard from again, and Hrithik and Aishwarya do a lot of looking at each other in slow motion, and one of the heist scenes involves a lucky placement of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. It’s just that kind of movie.

A lot of it, I admit, goes beyond fun-cheeseball and into painful-cheeseball, so if you’re looking to save time and wince-hours then you should probably just skip to Hrithik’s scenes all the time. His cheese is at least hilarious. (You’ll notice in the video below that sometimes he has a goatee and long hair – this is considered one of his many disguises. When he finally shows up on the mountainside with the short hair, she’s completely bowled over at who it is, even though all he really did was shave.)

Seriously, after this she talks to him when he has a fake goatee and some long hair on – they have an entire game of basketball together! – and when he shows up with the short hair she’s like, “OH MY GOD IT’S YOU.” She’s not the sharpest sandwich at the picnic.

Hrithik really impressed me in Jodhaa Akbar (which I swear I will talk about this week, I promise!), which was a Super Serious Drama that I straight-up enjoyed and thought was a quality film, so this was…a change. But he sells it the way any good movie star sells whatever movie they’re in, and his scenes are far and away better than any of the rest of that movie.

Fun fact: this movie has a kiss between Aishwarya and Hrithik (a Bollywood no-no), and it landed the movie in court under charges of indecency and being derogatory to women. Don’t know how that turned out; I do know that in Jodhaa Akbar there is a semi-kiss that seemed like a very intentionally choreographed “kiss my ass,” and I’m guessing this is where that came from.

I cannot recommend this movie, as it is so painfully cheeseball that it is largely unwatchable. It is, however, no worse than Octopussy. (What could be?) So if you are in the mood to laugh at an action movie and hum along to the occasional musical number, this might fit the bill.

I do know that, if anything DOES make this movie worth watching, cracking up at how much the camera loves Hrithik Roshan is that thing. It happens early, it happens often, and it happens to be hilarious.

Best part: I was thinking about writing this up, and I thought, “Well, it won’t be the same without a compilation of Hrithik Roshan walking in slow-motion towards the camera with his shirt unbuttoned and his scarf fluttering in the wind, but where the hell am I going to find that?”

Turns out someone made it, and put it to a love song. Thank you, internet. Thank you for everything.