The other day I stepped into a certain chain of stationery stores for the first time in a really long while. I bought myself an A5 sketch pad. A5 is a good portable size, not too big and easily bending like A4 and bigger, yet not too small. It just happened to occur to me a few moments earlier that I should start drawing again. By drawings I mean graphics that stand boldly in the middle of the page between other pages of drawings, rather than the guerrilla doodles that have to hide at the corners of my lecture notes and occasionally pop out to surprise people.
I think that if I ever have kids, I'm going to make them carry A5 sketch pads so they can draw while waiting for me to come pick them up, while sitting on the bus or between things. Then maybe they'll become really good at drawing, if not I might at least have a better idea of what they might be thinking about.
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Another other day, I also happened to step into a cinema for the first time since watching Warlords in 2007. How to Train Your Dragon was watched. After watching, I went home googled it, and read up the wikipedia article. Much of the plot was changed, leaving little similarity between the movie and the book series save for a few names of characters.
It made me wonder if they had reduced their potential earnings by having a single movie rather than one for each book in the series, like Harry Potter. Then again as a children's book, maybe it had insufficient content per book that the people at DreamWorks would rather just pick apart the original thing but keep just enough likeliness to keep the title, and put it all in a single movie.
Oh, How to Train Your Dragon was delayed so we were given the chance to catch another movie for free within the next 2 weeks. A few suggested Clash of the Titans, which I think I'd rather miss. In the trailer I saw a lot of big CGI monsters, actors on the landing half of a leap with weapons raised above their heads and that’s about it. If I want to see a show with fighting, I want to see good fight scenes, with people attacking, and defending, and best of all, following up their attacks to make sure their opponent is downed. One good example would be Jason Bourne fighting Desh in the Bourne Ultimatum.
But I don't absolutely like everything in what some consider a good fight scene. One thing I don't like about some fight scenes is the kick (usually a side kick) that pushes a random henchman away. Somehow when the henchman gets pushed away, he is immediately defeated. I think this happens a lot in kungfu movies where the hero happens to fight many people at once.
