So, last night I dragged out a couple of Disney titles for fun and remembered how wonderful many of them are. Tell me…
What are your TOP FIVE Disney animated movies, and WHY?
Have you noticed that a disproportionate number of villains are classified as INTJ’s? Our “proud” collection contains everyone from Magneto to Hannibal Lecter. I can see why a simple overview of the type might cause other personalities to freak out a bit. The reason for this is that our tendency to be “distant emotionally” can, in the wrong person, shift from simple social deficiencies to psychopathic tendencies.
Psychopaths feel no compassion for anyone or anything, and no guilt for their actions. They tend to be manipulative, isolated, and focused… only in their case, it’s on evil. So, naturally, you can see why the “best villains” would be INTJ’s… smart, alienated, detached, logical (sometimes at the expense of compassion), and cold.
This doesn’t mean this type is predestined for evil; some of us go bad. So do some of the people in every other type, only their evil manifests in different ways than your typical INTJ villain. Our villain chooses to manipulate people; other villains go with violence. And many of our characters aren’t villains… after all we’re also the type that has Mr. Darcy, Edward Rochester, Mr. Thornton, Clarice Starling, and Gandalf the Gray in it.
As different as we can all be based on our environment, upbringing, levels of intensity, and many other factors, all INTJ’s have one thing in common: we admire intelligence, even if we can’t agree with where it leads. Watching a movie, I might not admire the result of an evil character’s intelligence, but I am drawn to the intelligence itself. Sheer intellect is like my own personal brand of catnip; it’s sexy to me, and it makes the person using it sexy, even if they have nothing else (such as common morality) going for them. (Hence why at thirteen while all my peers were crazy about Leonardo DiCaprio I was madly in love with Sherlock Holmes in the original books. Pretty is all well and good… but damn, his brain was super attractive!)
(Stop reading now if you don’t want to be spoiled for Star Trek into Darkness.) Continue Reading
(This is an editorial I wrote for the magazine I’m employed with — but I thought it beared sharing on the blog. And yes, I loved the new Star Trek movie — so much, I have absolutely nothing to really say about it other than “When is the Blu Ray coming out?” But my thoughts are forming, so I’ll have more to say about it by the end of the week.)
How well do you know your friends? If you go shopping, can you pick out exactly what they’ll buy? Can you order them lunch without asking what they want? Can you tell just from their face if they have a secret or are angry about something?
How many people, if any, do you know that well? Continue Reading
It’s that time again! Submissions are poring in for our May / June issue, which revolves around children’s literature! I must say, there’s a lot of books in here I know and love, some I haven’t read since childhood, and a few I’ve never heard of but would love to read as an adult!
But it’s up to you to choose our next cover, so… pull yourself away from fangirling over Star Trek for a minute (just one minute!) and vote!
My goodness, it’s been dead on this blog lately! Are you all finishing up with finals, or enjoying the gorgeous, spring-like weather outside?
I watched Beautiful Creatures the other day. I didn’t like the heavy anti-Christian elements but I LOVED the overall plot… the magic… the love story that manages to be charming instead of stupid… I’m torn between my annoyances that Christians are always depicted as book-banning, hypocritical jackasses, and my fondness for the awesomeness of the movie itself.
The fact is, books and movies with magic in them (or in this case, Casters … witches) are taboo in Christian circles for a reason, but it doesn’t stop me from loving them. I’d give my back teeth for a Christian alternative with magic in it that is just as cool as all these witch books are. (Which is why I wrote one… and so far 40+ agents have said no thanks. Which means, I now get to decide between my historical/religious fantasy epic and the Pratchett-fantasy epic, and decide which version of the story to print on demand.)
Anyway, it revisited my love of magical fiction, and got me to wondering (both in terms of book recommendations and in my own writing) – what’s missing in Christian fiction that you wish wasn’t? What kinds of stories would YOU like to read? Does magic enter into it at all? Would you prefer a historical-set magical adventure, or a modern one? What don’t Christian publishers publish that you would like to read?
Talk to me. I’m starving for intelligent conversation … but I’ll take ANY conversation at this point!
Modern audiences might find this movie boring, since it’s less of an action film and more of a character-driven piece, about “Family” in all its forms, but more specifically, a mob family.
The Italian mafia fascinates me, because they’re such a bundle of contradictions; it’s “not personal, it’s business,” even when it comes to Family matters – and I’m not talking about mafia so much as literal, blood-relation family! The Godfather is art revolving around total moral disconnections, and it asks us (and causes us) to root for completely terrible people.
Unsurprisingly, I like that about it. I like getting up the next morning having watched it, and not being able to stop thinking about it. That, to me, is the mark of an excellent film. But here’s a few of the other things I like pondering in its two plus hours. Continue Reading
What is the story of Ben-Hur actually about?
The main character is Judah Ben-Hur, a wealthy Jewish man in Jerusalem, whose friendship with his childhood best friend is destroyed when an accident endangers the new governor of Judea. Judah is condemned to prison and hard labor, while his sister and mother are thrown into prison and (he assumes) killed. Judah winds up in Rome after a long sequence of events and finally returns to Jerusalem, newly wealthy and with a different identity, to fulfill his desire for revenge against his former friend. Yet, all of that changes through the intervention of the Messiah, who heals Judah’s mother and sister from leprosy on the cross.
Fundamentally, the story is about the Messiah’s influence on their lives. It’s a story of redemption and forgiveness. Continue Reading
Recently, a friend asked me my opinion on movie ratings and whether or not they’ve been permitted to “slide” over the years.
The answer is yes, but the main problem goes much deeper than that.
When movies first became possible, there was no censorship which naturally led to pornographic material. In order to “preserve American morality,” a censorship board was formed in Hollywood that included pastors. To gain a national release, a movie had to pass this censorship board. This was a positive thing for many movies and a determent to a few (one famous case is the altered ending to Hitchcock’s Rebecca, since it was against censorship policy to let a murder go free). Continue Reading
Right now, I’m in writing / editing mode on one of my manuscripts, which means I’m thinking about ancient Israel and Rome 24/7 and don’t have a lot of other things to talk about. This makes coming up with blog posts challenging. So… is there anything you, my audience, would like me to blog about? If so, sound off below (writing? symbolism in movies? INTJ-stuff?). Give me an idea, you might get a blog post this week. Don’t, and you probably won’t. Either way have a nice week.
It’s kind of a bummer when you reach the end of a decade, and don’t feel like you’ve accomplished much. It’s a bit worse when you realize you’ve passed up all the ages of your favorite literary characters and then some.
I turn 30 this week.
It’s a different feeling than when I turned 20. I feel older. I feel wiser. I feel like the skin on my eyelids is looser!
Being 29 was… good and bad.
The bad stuff included depression and rejection.
The good stuff included The Hobbit, a brand new sexy pixie haircut, going down to a size four pants, and trying out dating for awhile.
It’s tempting to be melancholy this week. It’s the end of an era, a decade, my twenties. I can either see what lies ahead of me as lined with anti-wrinkle cream, or I can decide that my thirties are going to be the best decade of my life.
The other day, a motivational speaker said something that resonated with me: there’s no such thing as victims, just volunteers. People treat us how we let them treat us. We see our circumstances the way we want to see them.
So yes, I’m getting older. I’ll have crow’s feet by my eyes sooner rather than later. But it’s not the end of the world. My life will change at 30. I’ll publish some e-books. I’ll write awesome posts! I’ll discover new obsessions, read new books, and find new movies I can’t live without.
I’ll figure out how to do things just for me, and not for the approval of others. I’ll choose to have that meaningless, purposeless thing known as fun. I’ll decide to do things not because they’re logical, but because I want to do them. I may even change my personality a bit.
So bring on 30! I won’t go down without a fight!
