Timothy Callahan

Will the force be with me?

You'd think, as a Science Fiction geek and someone who grew up with Star Wars, I would be more excited when I hear that they are getting all three of the main characters from the original Star Wars back for the 7^th one but, the truth is, I'm not. I mean, it's kind of neat, especially since none of them seem to even want to acknowledge that they were in a movie franchise that pretty much made their careers. But, when I heard the news I just kind of shrugged thinking to myself, "can't we just move on from that series? Can't we make the next three Star Wars movies something special without bringing them in?" Again, don't get me wrong, I'm sure once I see them on the screen I'll probably be giddy with geeky excitement, but right now I'm just sort of eh.

I think it has something to do with a trend I'm noticing, how newly rebooted franchise are aren't really rebooting as much as coping what the producers and writers think are the best things about the franchise they're rebooting. Not sure when it started but I noticed it with the reboot of Star Trek. I kept wondering, why did they bring Spock from the other franchise into this one? Sure, you can say it was a passing of the torch and I guess it sort of was but, at the same time, they're trying to distance themselves from the old series by making a new timeline, can you really do that while still referencing the old franchise? It's kind of like trying to be friends with an old girlfriend while you're with a new girlfriend. Yeah, it can work but it's going to be awkward.

I'm also worried about the new Superman and Star Trek movies. From what I've read Superman is going to have Zod as the main bad guy. Didn't we do that with Superman 2? Superman has a bunch of really cool bad guys, do we really need to bring back a bad guy from another movie? Wasn't that one of the main issues with Superman returns? That it was basically the same plot as Superman the motion picture, only with Superman son and Superman being all emo and stuff? (Yes, I have a lot of problems with Superman returns. Seriously, how did that movie get made?) Will the next Superman movie star Donald Glover and have a supercomputer as the main bad guy? (Dear god, I don't even want to think what a Superman 4 remake would be like. *Shudder*)

The same goes for Star Trek into darkness. I read the Kahn is going to be the bad guy and, again, I wonder why we need to bring a bad guy from another movie into this reboot. Can anyone beat Ricardo Montalban as Kahn? No matter how good the guy is going to be he'll always be compared to the first actor and, seeing as every actor in this movie is playing someone someone else played, do you want yet another comparison?

I will give Amazing Spiderman some credit, at least they went with a brand new bad guy instead of the Green Goblin. The Lizard might not be Spiderman's most popular bad guy but he's different and I liked what they did with him. I'm looking forward to the second Spiderman movie with Rhino and Electro as the bad guys. Norman and Harry Osborn will be in the movie but I haven't read anything that they'll be the Green Goblin. Kind of hope not, we've been there and we've done that.

So, back to Star Wars. I really hope they find a way to make these new movies different, make them something special and I hope Luke, Leia and Han are just cameo's and the plot finds its own legs. I don't want to see the trials of the Skywalker twins, don't want to see Luke building the Star Wars academy, don't want to see anything we've read in the books because this is a movie and we it needs to stand on its own as a movie. I won't mind some of the things they had in the books, maybe have Grand Admiral Thrawn as the bad guy or, hopefully they'll be able to come up with an even better bad guy.

In my mind I'd love to see the new Star Wars movie jump ahead a thousand years so we don't have to even worry about the old characters and we can start fresh with new ideas. It won't happen, there has to be some fan service I guess, but too much fan service could bring your movie down and do we really want another bad Star Wars movie to whine about?

The world is coming to an end. . .again. No, really, I mean it this time.

One day the world is going to end.  That’s a fact of life that we can’t avoid.  And, according to the chart  below sent to me by the hard working people at OnlinePsychologyDegree.net, a lot people have wanted it end in their lifetimes, which is a concept I could never understand.  

What I find interesting about the chart is how the gap between predictions has closed now that it's easier for us to get a message out into the real world.  I know the internet, e-mail, and television has a lot to do with it.  I guess the predictions are going keep on coming and every time a day passes without us being destroyed will another day for someone else to see when the world will end.

Rules of the critique

I've not only been writing stories for many, many years I've also been reading and offering advice for stories for about as long as AOL has been around.  I was one of the first people to get AOL and one of the first forums I ever went too was the Writers forum on AOL.  It was the first time I was exposed to a place where I could get a true, unbiased view of what people thought about my work and how I could improve it.  

It was a very eye opening experience as one of the first stories I put on there, an alien invasion story I had spent months writing and tweeking, got tore apart line by line.  Oh, it was bad, bad enough that I still remember it today and I still bring it up cause it hurt so much!  

Well, okay, it hurt cause I was still in my early 20's, thought I was a pretty darn good writer, thought everyone would love my work, thought a publisher would read what I put on AOL and would sign me to a 30 book deal where I could make billions.  

I may have set my sites a bit high.

 It also hurt cause what he said was true.  In the story I had a large group of people, something like a million, leave the city cause the aliens had arrived.  Needless to say I hadn't thought it out that well and thought it would be easy to transport a million people from a city to a military base where they would all be taken care of.  The guy had a problem with that.  I love large scale stuff in my stories and when I was first writing them I didn't really take into account how large things actually are.  (Actually, it's still a problem in my work but one I've gotten a lot better at.)  Anyway, the point is, he pointed it out, not in a harsh way but in a way the made me rethink everything I had written and would write the next twenty years.  

My point is this: at the time I thought his advice was mean but as I really thought about it I realized it was a great advice and I shouldn't ignore it.  Good advice in writing is like that, it's what I strive for when I review a story, to give the writer that one piece of advice that breaks the story for them, that lets them see their story in a different light, that helps make their story better and publishible.  Have I ever accomplished that?  I don't know, not for sure anyway, I can only hope I did.

I've been lucky over the years to find several nice places to get my work critiqued.   The best is www.critters.org, if you're a writer and you're not a member there join right away. It's free, it's got some really good stories to read (and a few bad ones) and it's very well run.  It also has a feature where you can ask someone to read your novel and give you advice.  I've done three novels and I'm always looking for more.  

I've tried several over the years, some closed down (sniff, miss you www.rateyourwriting.com) and some make no sense to me (www.youwriteon.com) seriously, look at this site and tell me what the heck is going on.  

So, over the years I've sort of tried to create a set of rules I always use when I critique.  Rules I sometimes wish everyone would use when they read my stuff.    They're simple rules and a few I've broken, although I don't try too.  

1.) Be nice.  This one goes without saying I think, so I won't elaborate on it at all.  

2.) Don't call anything you read 'fan fiction' or say 'it reads like fan fiction'  The truth is, everyone is inspired by something and they're trying to write what they love to read or watch.  My Arwen series is full of Star Trek like stuff, it's a conscience chose, I wanted to write something like Star Trek but with my own twist and when someone said 'it reads like Star Trek fan fiction' I wanted to jump through the screen and slap the guy or girl I was so mad.  So yeah, don't say it's like fan fiction, you can bring up how it's similar to something but really, isn't everything similar to something out there already? 

3.) Pay attention to the story.  Sometimes, when I see something I don't understand, I always write something like "Maybe I just missed it but I thought-"  Sometimes the writer removes some piece of information when he's going through another draft.  Sometimes he never explains something.  Sometimes the reader just misses it and I find, most of the time, that's the case.  I recently had the second book in the Arwen series go through the Critter's process (someone read the entire book, which was nice.) but there were a few comments where he said "How does the person know this?"  or "I don't understand what's going on."  And, once again I'm glad you can't teleport through a monitor, I wanted to grab him with the manuscript yelling "look, right here, can't you read?!" 

4.) Talk about the story in front of you, not the story you wished they had told.  Okay, this is one I break more often than not.  Mostly because I read the story as if it were my own and I always try to find ways to make the story different, to add things and well, that's wrong most of the time.  The story isn't mine, it's the authors and I need to read what they have written, not what I wished I had written.   A good example of this would be, once again, the comments I got for my second Arwen story.  It felt like the person was trying to take the story in a totally different direction than where I wanted it to go.   He always seemed to want to kill my characters!  Which was annoying.  It reached a crescendo in a comment about one of my main characters fighting a ships computer that went mad.  She was running through the ship trying to get to the main CPU, fighting next to a marine squad the entire way.  His comment basically was "why doesn't the ship just open all it's doors and blow everyone into space?"   To which I almost screamed "cause that would kill everyone and the story would be over!"  Now, if that's the story I wanted to tell (and actually, it would be a shocking development) I would have done it.  But, it wasn't the story that I was telling and thus, not the story that would have made it to paper. 

5.) If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything.  This one is one that I have mixed feelings about.  I only really comment on stories I like and ignore those that I don't.  My feeling is, if I don't like the story, if it doesn't hold any interest for me, then I won't give it 100% in the comments and that's not fair to the author.  I have mixed feelings about it because I should tell the author how to improve the story, how to make it so I would like it, but sometimes a story is just too poorly written or has a subject matter I'm not interested in and I just go to the next one.  I wonder how many people do this with my stories and if they do, I can't be mad cause I do the same thing.

6.) Limit your back and forth.  What I mean is, sometimes the person you critique will have questions about what you said, sometimes they'll try to defend what they said, sometimes they'll say you have no idea what they're trying to say.  In any case, if the conversation is going no where then leave it go, there's only so much you can say to try and help someone and sometimes you're wrong.  It's the writers work not yours so maybe you would kill the entire crew of a starship to make thing interesting, maybe you won't.  Whatever the case do your best then get out!

So, that's it.   Like I said, I've broken a few of these and I'm sure I'll break them again and again.  Some stories you just needd to.  When my stories go through the grinder I really hope for the best but expec the worst.  I had a story workshopped at Philcon and I left stunned and humiliated, it was a good story not ready for prime time so I never should have submitted it.  So, I continue to learn about how to deal with critiques of my work and I continue to work on making my own critiques as true and helpful as possible.

Story a week

I made a resolution to write one story every week for the year of 2013. Just finished my first one today. I want to post it but it's so raw it's an embarrassment. I'll post it when it's ready, just know that I got it done!

Imagine that

The human imagination is the most important renewable resource in the entire world. Every time I think that I'm out of ideas, that I won't be able to write another story because I've written all I could think of, I get another idea, another inspiration and my mind just creates and works, finding something out of nothing. How does that happen? How can I be sitting in my car driving along, not really thinking about anything, then suddenly I get a flash of an image, or I hear something in a song, and my brain creates a story around it? How can I sit in front of my computer with nothing then, in an hour, I find that I'd written 2,000 words to my novel? How is it that I'm writing this blog without any forethought, other than me thinking "you know, I should write about the imagination." While doing the morning dishes?

Seriously, is there anything better than the imagination? Remember when you were a kid and you played with a toy and your mind made that piece of plastic into something? I love that feeling, being lost in space battle with Darth Vader, leading an army of green army against the evil tan army men, sometimes on the moon, sometimes just in my backyard. Legos weren't just red blocks; they were X-wing fighters, cars with battering rams in the front, forts for the green army men to hold off the advancing tan army men. (BTW, I have no idea why the tan army men were always the bad guys.)

Imagination built the world. At one point in time someone looked at an empty space and saw four walls and a roof, next he or she built it. Someone else saw that and thought about adding a second story, afterwards they thought about how to do it, then did it. All in his or her head, using tools of the hand, a writing instrument, and his mind to figure it out and build it. Someone saw a pyramid and then built it. Einstein pictured massive bodies of matter in space and figured out how gravity works. Someone took that and imagined black holes. Right now, someone is looking at all that we've learned and is imagining what the smallest thing is and is then imaging how to find that things. Someone is closing their eyes and picturing in their mind what dark matter is, what a galaxy is, and how it all fits together.

My imagination has always been too large for me so when I see someone with an even greater imagination I get humbled. I see writers and directors who produce hundreds of pieces of material within a short lifetime and I wonder how they did it. Josh Whedon alone has produced some of the most creative works within the last twenty years, from Buffy to The Avengers his work is fun, creative, and full of great ideas. I would like to borrow his mind for a day just to see what it's like.

I hope my imagination never dies. There have been times when it's slowed, when I didn't have any new ideas, when every time I sit to write nothing comes out and I end up playing a game on my computer. But it always comes back, sometimes with a vengeance, other times just to let me know it's still there.

I hope when, on my death bed in 59 years (I plan on living to 100) I lay there breathing my last breath and a new idea comes into my head for a story and my last thoughts are of the story that I'll never be able to write.

Is this the end?

I considered my writing to be a little bit more than a hobby, yet not exactly a career.  Sure, I wanted to be good at it and I worked hard at being good at it but I never thought I worked harder than say, a person who works on his car on the weekends. Or someone who works hard at a local dinner theater.  I write because it’s something I enjoy doing and if I succeed at it or make money off it, all the better.   

There are times when I work hard to get something published, it never happens, but I try.  I have gone the self-publishing route but really, I don’t have the time to promote my work as I should.  Maybe if I quit my job and worked at it full time I could get some publishing deals, but the truth is I’m not really brave enough to just go off and do something like that. 

I missed some chances when I was unemployed but to be honest I was more worried about getting a job than publishing anything.  Besides, all I had was one short novel that was good, but not great.  I did send it to places, heck I still send it places every once in a while, but so far no one has touched it. I can’t blame them, I’m not a popular name and agents and publishers want people who can make them money. I might be able to make them money but who’s going to take that chance?  If I were an agent or a publisher I don’t think I’d buy my novels.  The writings good, but not strong.  Why spend money publishing something that only a few people might buy?  Agents and publishers tell you they like to take chances on new writers but the odd are I won’t be one of them.   That’s not putting myself down, that’s an honest truth. 

It sounds like I’m giving up or I’m a pessimist.  Trust me, most people around me think I’m too optimistic about things.  I guess when you’re a realist about things that automatically makes it sound pessimistic.  I have hope that if I keep sending my stuff out someone will bite.  It will probably never happen but I have hope.   

I know my work and it’s good.  I like my work.  I read stuff that I’ve written years ago and I like it. I can see its flaws of course but I see flaws in most of the stuff I read.  Are my flaws any worst?   Maybe but until a professional reads my work I’ll never know.  Of course, the only way to get a pro to read my work is to get published.  Or pay a lot of money. I don’t have a lot of money so I’ll have to wait for a pro to buy my stuff.  Which probably won’t ever happen. 

When I spend an hour or so writing something I stop and wonder why I’m doing it.  Who am I writing for?  I want to write for people other than me and a handful of people who might listen to my podcasted writings at podiobooks.com.  The truth is, I’m not sure who I’m writing for anymore. In my 20’s and 30’s I wrote to try to get published.  I wrote to tell people I did something that was interesting.   I wrote because it was a release from a life that, while not horrible, had a bunch of holes that needed to be filled.  I wrote because my imagination was so large it needed an outlet.  I haven’t felt the need to fill any holes in my soul for a while. I wrote the Arwen saga because I had an idea that wouldn’t go away.  Now that that saga is done and I have nothing else to say I wonder why I still write. 

I’m working on another novel and my heart isn’t really in it. Could it be because the novel isn’t good enough to hold my interest or is it something more?  Have I finally gotten sick of spending the limited hours I have in the day writing something that no one will read?  Has my mind finally stopped supplying me with ideas?  Have I gotten to the point in my life where I don’t need to write anymore?  Or, do I simply need to sit back and relax and not worry about all those things?  

 

My Christmas Wish

All I want for Christmas is a comment on my blog
a comment on my blog.
Oh a comment on my blog.
All I want for Christmas is a comment on my blog
So I can know if someone's reading.

It seems so long since I could say
OMG I have comment to approve.
Gosh oh gee how happy I'd be
To see no spam to remove (click, click, click)

All I want for Christmas is a comment on my blog
a comment on my blog.
Oh a comment on my blog.
All I want for Christmas is a comment on my blog
I can know if someone's reading.


See ,if I only had
a comment on my blog
then I could wish you
"Merry Christmas!"

My quibids.com experience

First off, don't believe the hype about Qbuids.com, a penny auction site that seems to be pretty popular. Second, don't believe all the people who are dissing the site, calling it a rip off and to avoid it at all cost. The truth is the site falls somewhere in between, it's not all that great but if you do some research and follow some simple rules you'll see that it's not exactly a rip off either.

First off, what is a Penny auction site? Basically it's an auction site sort of like Ebay (in the same way a slot machine is sort of like a PS3.) where you pay 60 cents for every bid you make. You bid against other's for the product which is on a timer. If the timer reaches 0 and you're the last person to bid you win the auction. If someone else bids the timer resets, normally it resets to 10 seconds but I've seen it reset to 20 and even 30 a few times. Each bid adds a penny to the price of the product which normally starts at 0 dollars.

I think that's the first thing most people get right away, that each bid cost 60 cents, which means if you see a product that's a dollar and 100 bids have been made on it, at 60 cents apiece that's 60 dollars for Quidids' bottom line. Not a bad business strategy if you can get away with it. It also means if you and someone else gets into a bidding war on something and each of you spend 50 bids on a product and you lose, you're not only out the product but out 30 dollars and 50 bids. So, only bid on things you want and accept the fact you might not win and, if you don't win, don't get mad cause that's just how this site works. A read a lot of reviews and most people seemed upset at this point, that they spend 100+ bids on something and lost. So, keep in mind that if you lose you will lose your bids and your money but Quibids is pretty upfront with all that so I'm not sure how people feel they've been ripped off. To get ripped off I feel you need someone to take your money in a way that you didn't know about, or sell you a product that's not worth what you spend on it.

The real appeal to the site is the fact that you can get some really good things really cheap. I saw a PS3 sell for about 5 bucks (500 bids @ 60 cents a bid, do the math cause I don't feel like it.) Saw some Gift Cards sell for about 90% of what they're worth so you do get some really good deals if you win. In fact, I got two 10 dollar gift cards for Walmart, a 50 dollar gift card for Fandango and I won about 200 free bids, all for less than five dollars so that's good.

Before placing any bid, heck before signing up I looked carefully at the site and discovered a few thing that I found, well, interesting. As you can image the site really wants you to bid a lot and they make that very, very easy with an autobid feature that is very dangerous for you and I feel it's something that, if you sign up for the site, you need to be careful with. Of all the things I saw on the site this is the one thing that I can honestly say I didn't really like and the one thing that made me uncomfortable using. Basically, you can set an autobid to bid for you if you're away from the computer of if you don't feel like clicking the button. There is a cap, 20 bids, and you can start bidding when the price gets to a certain point, but if you think about it you can see how this system favors Quibids and not the bidder. Think about it, what if you get into a bidding war with two other people who are using Autobid up to the cap? The computer will just bid and bid and bid until the other computer runs out of bids or until you do. It just seems too random, too stacked against the bidder. I hated when I went against an autobidder cause I knew I was going to have to outbid a dumb computer. In fact, if I saw a bunch of autobids for an auction I just left without bidding.

When you sign up you do need to buy at least 100 bids at 60 bucks so that's what I started with. It didn't take long for me to win a about 200 more bids (there are always auctions for more bids, another way for Quibids to get some free money.) so it's easy to get them if you want, it's always easy to lose all your bids the first day if you're not lucky or careful.

I did find a few things odd that I want to talk about here. Well, only one thing actually. It seemed that I won a lot of little auctions when I first signed up then it got harder and harder to win even the little ones. Now, I could have just gotten lucky, which is probably the case, but it did seem odd. The some kind of odd that would happen to me when I went on dating sites, wouldn't get any hits for months, then just as my membership was up I'd start getting hits again. That kind of odd, as if the site were saying "See how easy it is to win? Now, get more bids and you'll win just as easy!" I'm suspicious but without any evidence and with nothing more than a few samples I can't say exactly what I'm talking about. Like I said, it could have been dumb luck that I won all those things the first week then couldn't even sniff a win in the two weeks that followed.

So, in conclusion, I enjoyed the three weeks I played around on Quibids but I'd never go back to it. In actually it's more of a gambling site and less of an auction site. It's easy to get absorbed in it, just like it's easy to get absorbed into pushing a button on a slot machine. I did get more out of it then I put in by about 10 bucks (that 50 dollar gift card put me over the top) but, like I said, either I got lucky or the system was rigged to pull me in. That's something you'll have to figure out yourself if you ever choose to check the site out.

Characters are people too.

I love the fact I have Netflix and Netflix is now showing a lot of the stuff I used to watch as I was growing up. Over the course of a week I was able to cherry pick some of my favorite Star Trek Next Generation episodes, a few Buffy and Angle shows, and some Arrested Development. I'm eagerly waiting for them to get Deep Space Nine so I can watch those as well. TV was a huge part of forming my imagination, more so than books or movies, although they also played a huge roll, just as big as Television.

What I found interesting as I was watching Next Gen was just how much that show did influence me. Story structure, characters, situations, all the things that show did well I can see in my work today. The Arwen, my very own Star Ship series, can easily trace its roots back to Episodes like Best of Both worlds, Cause and Effect, and The Inner light. It's no coincidence I guess that those are my favorite episodes and, on some level, I wanted to re-write them in some way with my own characters. It wasn't really a conscience choice, it just sort of happened.

Another show that really influenced me, more as a young kid than a teenager, was Star Blazers or, if you were in Japan, Space battleship Yamato. I loved that show so much. I used to race home after school to watch it. I would then try to draw the episode and when I figured out I have no artistic ability I used to write stories about the show, using my own characters in place of the ones on TV. Of course, the stories I wrote were just mirroring the stories on the TV by that really was my first attempts to write a story, all because of that show.

One of the odd things that struck me at that early age were characters. I felt like I was giving people life! If I thought of a character and I wrote about that character I was sort of creating a new life form in my mind and that life form could only act if I let them act, could only do what I wanted them to do. As an 11 year old that was a pretty powerful concept and one that I held on to even as I was learning how to write and how to build story and structure. I would create a character and in my eye the person was alive, not just a figment of my imagination but a real, live being. Which is way I always feel bad when I kill someone in a story.

I also hate it when I just remove a character completely. To me I not only killed someone but he or she no longer existed! That's kind of dark.

In my one novel, Ida, I had to do that. I killed a character half way through the book for impact not realizing I would need him later in the story. I had created another character to take his place but as I wrote it I thought, "why did I just create this new guy when I had a perfectly good guy that I killed?" So, I went back and unkilled the guy and totally wrote out the new guy. I felt bad for the new guy so if I ever do a sequel maybe I'll give him a part. I also think the guy I killed was pretty happy to be alive again, especially since his death was kind of painful to begin with.

I also did that with another character in my Arwen books. I was going to kill him in book two but decided not to but then I killed him in book three for no good reason really. Come to think of it he should have died in the second story cause his death then would have meant more than his death in the third. Oh well, if I could do it over again I would but I can't so he lived to see another story. . .where he died.

When writers talk about how the characters tell them what to do most people who don't write have a hard time understanding that. I understand it. More than once my characters have told me what they want and what they want to do in a situation. I find it hard to get anything past my characters, if they need to act dumb for some sort of plot point to happen I have a hard time making them dumb and I feel I need to trick them into going for the plot point before going forward. Smart characters who act dumb really annoy me so I think it's more that I don't want someone to read my work and go, 'wow, that character is normally on the ball, how does she not know what's going to happen?'

That drives me nuts when I see it on a TV show or a movie. I'll give you an example of a show that I liked a lot but had a hard time watching because the characters acted way dumber than they were supposed to be.

One of the news shows I enjoyed, before it was canceled, was No Ordinary Family. In this show you had a bunch of really smart people. It was a show about people with super powers and how they adjusted to those powers. In fact, one kid had the powers of super-duper smartness.

In one of the episodes they meet a shape shifter who could make herself look like anyone in the family. Now, I can see that fooling people the first time and it made that episode kind of fun. Eventually they find out she's a shape shifter and beat her, she escapes and they hope they've seen the last of her, only they don't know if she'll be back or not.

A few episodes later she does return and does the same thing, taking the shape of family members to get information out of them. Now, as I'm watching that show I can't help but think, "boy, these guys are dumb. They know someone is out there after them who can look like any member of the family wouldn't it be smart to, oh I don't know, come up with code words to ask someone a question only they know when they first meet?"

That's just one example from one show, there are lots of other shows with lots of other examples I can think of. I personally think it takes a lot of imagination to come up with a way to fool your characters without them being dumb.

Like I learned in improv, play up to your characters intelligence, don't make him a dumb guy cause the audience can see right through that.

Captain America, I salute you!

One of the key elements to any good Super Hero movie is this, does the movie hold true to the character? One of the issues I had with the Fantastic Four movies was that they didn't seem to hold true to the comic renditions of the Fantastic Four. There were some elements but for the most part what you saw on the big screen was only a shadow of what was in the comic. One of the things that made the first two Spider-man movies a success was the Spider-manness of the movies. I also think that's what made the third movie a bit of a letdown, it didn't feel like a Spider-man comic through most of its running time. In fact, the times it felt like a Spider-man comic were the best moments in the movie to me. Sandman's transformation, Spider-man and Sandman's first fight, and when Peter Finally got rid of the costume, those felt like Spider-man moments and I enjoyed them. Dancing Peter Parker? Emo Parker? Peter hitting MJ, even by accident, the final fight? Those didn't feel genuine, they didn't feel like Spider-man and I think people picked up on that.

This all brings me to Captain America. They could not have put a more perfect Captain America movie on the screen, not now, not ever. This felt like a Captain America movie, this felt as if they took all the World War 2 Captain America stories, studied then, then placed them on the big screen. Captain America has always been a better character when they focused on his World War 2 days, he was a superhero born in the 40's when it was okay to publish comic books with the main superhero punching Hitler on the jaw and when they place him in the era it's a perfect fit. When I first heard they were making a Captain America movie I thought to myself, "I hope they set it in the second world war" cause that's where we need to be to be introduced to this man. When I found out that's what they were doing I was sold on the movie and looked forward to seeing it.

Personally I think they should set all Captain America movies in the Second World war, I understand they can't cause of the Avengers movie but how cool would that have been?

If I had one complaint about the movie, and this really did kind of bother me, was the it didn't really have a plot. It seemed to be just a series of scenes strung together to get more action, which isn't a bad thing for a superhero movie, but I wanted a little more depth. We had events, things that happened, but the plot was pretty much "go to this location and destroy this base, fight this cool bad guy, talk about it later, rinse and repeat." The acts were really easy to see: Act one: Steve gets his powers. Act two: Steve learns how to be Captain America by going on tour. Act Three: Steve Rogers becomes Captain America, war hero, selfless defender of the American Way. As a writer this structure bothered me, but not enough not to love the movie.

As for everything else I loved it. Chris Pine, an actor I thought was great in Fantastic Four and his cameo in Scott Pilgrim VS the World, was pitch perfect as Steve Rogers.

The Red Skull, Hugo Weaving, perfect, just how I pictured him.

Action was perfect as well. Loved the shield effect, especially the sound it made when being thrown.

I'm looking forward to the Avengers movie, and the trailer at the end of Captain America made me want to see it even more. I can only hope it feels like and Avengers movie cause if it does it'll be one of the best Super Hero movies of all time.