Tikatu's Travels Through Time

We rented four movies and watched them over Saturday night and today. Here are the movies we watched, in order of watching them.

Detective Dee -- a Chinese action/detective movie set in China's past. We've heard recordings of the "Judge Dee" stories, which were based on a historical figure named Di Renjie from the Tang dynasty. So, to some extent, we were familiar with the character, though this took a lot of liberties with him. The sets were fantastic and the fight scenes were choreographed by Sammo Hung, who had an American TV detective show of his own some years back. The funniest part was the disconnect between the English subtitles (which we had on so my husband could understand the dialog) and the English dubbing. The subtitles were probably a more faithful translation of the Chinese, especially since the word "beetles" in the subtitles (referring to "fire beetles") was translated into the English dialog as "turtles"! (Believe me, when you finally saw these things, you knew they weren't turtles at all!) Lots of fun for us.

The Three Musketeers -- This was the most recent one, with airships and martial-arts style fight sequences. The dialog could be terribly corny with the French nobility sounding like a whole lot of modern-day Americans. Even Cardinal Richelieu says something as crass as, "Yep." Hubby was particularly affronted by Richelieu's swordplay in the movie, though he never uses it against the Musketeers. Not a bad romp, but horribly unfaithful to the story. Of interest: D'Artagnan's horse is named Buttercup, and Athos quotes from The Princess Bride.

Kung Fu Panda 2 -- Loved this film. So much I could say about it, but I'll just stick to this one thing: Po finds out about himself and who he is (and may actually be reunited with his father in the next one. There better be a next one.)

Finally, Tintin -- We saved the best for last here. We have a huge selection of these books thanks to my BIL from Hong Kong (who knows what his brother likes). This script merges three different books: The Crab with Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn, and Red Rackham's Treasure. The motion-capture and CGI are really good here and the characterization is spot-on. I love Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock! Lots of action, adventure, flying bullets, and spunky dog sidekicks. I think one of the best scenes occurs near the end when Haddock and Sakharine (the villain) basically duel with dockside loading cranes.

Finally finished a bit of stuff that I didn't know was supposed to be part of Moonstrike! The more I post it at FanNation, the more I want to post it at ff.net. The files are there; I've uploaded them to ff.net to use their HTML capacity, which I've copied to FanNation as well as to my website files. I've had a couple of reviews, which have made me really happy (also got one for The White Winds today at FanNation - a bit of a shock, that!)


I just want this story to work, to be right, before I post it to ff.net. I want Rhea to be real, and to be part of the Tracy family without warping it too much. I've gone to the length of rewriting some of the family background, using ideas that aren't contradicted by canon (Jeff has siblings; Lucy has a part in planning IR before her death.) as well as bringing things out that are found in comics canon (John and Brains going to college together.) So far, I've got five chapters, and only one scene with Rhea!


So, I'm asking for feedback. The story allows for anonymous reviews, and you can find it here: Moonstrike! I'd post it here, but I've always found live journal awkward for just about anything other than short stuff. However, if people would like to see it here, I'm game to do it. I could also post it at devART for thems what wants it.


FanFiction.net is the site that gets the most traffic of all for Thunderbirds fanfiction. It's also the one glutted with the Tracy sister fics. As much as I crave the reviews, I want the story to be worth it.


Thanks for listening to my ramblings...