Reading/Watching Log #118

This month can best be described as one-thing-leading-to-another month. I wanted to finish the second season of Atlantis, and that reminded me of 2012’s Sinbad. Having watched that, I naturally had to watch the animated movie of the same name from DreamWorks, which reminded me of their other early animated projects. This meant rewatching The Prince of Egypt, which then put me in mind of other Biblical retellings, like Samson and Delilah. And so on and so forth.

It reminded me of just how connected our multitude of stories are; how one can inform all the others; how it all trickles down. Superman’s origins are just a variation of Moses in the Bulrushes, while his superstrength is matched in that of Samson. Then there’s the progression of his story, in which he learns a devastating truth, runs away and returns a changed person, and is then charged with righting a great wrong. It forms the backbone of so many modern stories.

Meanwhile, so many of our Femme Fatales are the progeny of Delilah, while the star-crossed element of her love affair with Samson (she’s Philistine, he’s of the tribe of Dan) reminded me a little of what they’re going for in the upcoming Robin Hood, in which Robin and Marian are Saxon and Norman respectively. Atlantis is filled with ancient tropes that are all muddled up in order to create a new story, while Sinbad’s best episode involves a run-in with the personification of death, who has been promised a young woman as a bride, but can ultimately be outwitted out of his prize. How many times have we seen that one before?

Anyways, I just find it fascinating to connect everything, like there’s a giant fishing net inside my mind, and this was a good month for it. 

Links and Updates

I haven’t done one of these posts since June, so a lot of things under the cut have already been updated (or even released) while I was busy accumulating them over the intervening months.

The good news is that SPRING is here in the southern hemisphere, which means an end to the dark evenings and cold mornings (for the most part, anyway). I’m still super-busy and I’ll be working all the way through Christmas until I get some more annual leave in February, but hopefully I’ll be able to bump up the amount of posts for 2025, as so far it’s been at its lowest since I started this blog back in 2014.

Angela Barrett: The Orchard Book of Stories From the Ballet

That Angela Barrett would illustrate a book of ballet stories seems inevitable, as her style perfectly matches the nature of ballet: delicate, elegant, and with a fairy tale-like ambiance. The Orchard Book of Stories From the Ballet has no less than four original covers, so the publishers certainly got their money’s worth.

This compilation includes ten stories in all, from the most famous (Swan Lake, The Nutcracker) to the more obscure (La Sylphide, Petrouchka) and all those in-between (Giselle, Coppelia, The Firebird). Interestingly, Barrett makes the call to depict the events of these stories as non-diegetic – that is, real events – no matter how magical – as opposed to a ballet enacted on the stage. For a comparison, Francesca Crespi illustrated her firebird in A Little Box of Ballet Stories as a person dressed as the firebird, whereas Barrett depicts it as an actual bird. The title is Stories From the Ballet, not Ballet Stories.

Aside from the cover art, the frontispiece and a few tiny images of ballet shoes and masks and other paraphernalia strewn throughout the pages, these stories are illustrated in a rendering of the real world, not as a theatrical illusion. I’m making a point of this, because there’s one exception, and that’s naturally going to be the subject of this post...

Meta: Rebecca and Rowena; Part I: Introduction

Note: I have been working on this post for several months now, and it just keeps getting longer and longer. As such, I’ve decided to break it down into four parts: the introduction, the novel/parody novella, the films, and the television adaptations.

Every now and then I come back to this article in The Toast about The Unified Theory of Ophelia, in which the author half-jokingly claims that they once believed everything there was to know about womanhood could be discovered in the character of Ophelia.

I had a similar revelation last year on reading Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and watching its assorted film and television adaptations (plus, William Makepeace Thackery’s parody novella). Everything about how female characters are portrayed across media, how fandom responds to them, and even how Love Triangles and Fan-Preferred Couples form in the imaginations of readers/viewers, can arguably be found in media’s collective portrayal of Rowena and Rebecca across the centuries.

Source

I would go so far as to say that the genesis of all fandom’s discourse and harassment and cross-examination and hypersensitivity and preoccupation with female characters and the role they play in any given narrative can be traced back to these two fictional women. Is that too broad a claim? Yes, of course – but as the linked article points out, every now and then certain theories and concepts that interest you can occasionally seem to magically coalesce into a single, shining, straightforward example. It’s like discovering the unifying theory of the universe.

Woman of the Month: Eris

Eris from Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas

For this month, I am allowing myself one semi-obscure female villain.

Of course, the goddess Eris is hardly unknown: she’s a major player in Greek mythology and the deity who kicked off the Trojan War when she threw the Golden Apple of Discord into the crowd at Peleus and Thetis’s wedding (and by doing so, making herself the progenitor of the evil fairy that curses Sleeping Beauty at her Christening, for whether she’s called Maleficent, Carabosse or the Fairy of Red, that character also sows discord after not being invited to a party).

But this particular take on Eris might count as obscure, as she’s from an animated movie released in 2003 that bombed badly at the box office. Yet for all that, she is easily its highlight, and reason enough to watch Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas at least once.

Michelle Pfeiffer lent her silky voice to the manipulative, chaos-loving goddess who has an elaborate plan to strew havoc throughout the known world, but what really gets your attention is the stunning animation that brings her to life. She slinks and glides across the screen, shifting in and out of ink-black smoke, with serpentine hair that undulates around her with an underwater fluidity. Sometimes she’s the size of a mortal woman; other times she expands to frighteningly large proportions, with glowing eyes and elongating fingers. You can’t take your eyes off her whenever she’s onscreen

Truly, she’s a marvel of animation; demonstrating that even a not-great movie can be elevated by a truly great villain.

Reading/Watching Log #117

It is the first day of spring in the southern hemisphere, and I reach it like a castaway onto an island full of fresh water and fruit. Damn, that was a gruelling winter. I hate the cold and the dark at the best of times, but there was something in the air this year that made absolutely everyone sick – continuously and relentlessly.

I suspect I caught more than one thing at once, which ended up playing havoc on my immune system, and after five whole weeks of feeling like absolute crap, my doctor finally prescribed me some antibiotics just to help fight whatever the hell was going on in my Petrie dish of a body.

My blog has been so quiet lately because I honestly haven’t had the energy to write anything. By the time I got home from work, I just wanted to crawl into bed and fall unconscious, but now – well, hopefully I can start plumping up these entries again.

And yes, I will eventually post my reading/watching list for July.

This month’s theme: PIRATES!

Woman of the Month

 

Debbie Jellinski from Addams Family Values

It’s time to showcase a comedic villainess.

I was surprised to discover that Addams Family Values was a flop when it was released back in 1993, as in my opinion it’s far better than the first film, and Joan Cusack damn near steals the show as its villain. She plays Debbie Jellinski, a woman engaged in that noble profession of marrying rich guys and then killing them to inherit their fortunes. She’s been doing it for a while, successfully offing her unfortunate string of husbands and evading law enforcement, but what elevates her from being another run-of-the-mill black widow is Cusack’s performance.

There is truly nothing more fun than watching her go from the wide-eyed, earnest, virginal (yet still aggressively sexual) Debbie in the first half of the film to the cruel, materialistic, vindicative monster-bitch (who remains aggressively sexual) in the second. Joan Cusack just oozes malevolence from every pore, her facial expressions and body language so completely predatory and over-the-top.

Her incredulous “you?” when Fester admits he’s a virgin, her wriggling glee when she watches the Nightline exposé on herself, the look of dark intent when she preps the bomb to take out her latest husband – all done in an array of colourful sundresses. Her manipulations even get Wednesday and Pugsley sent to summer camp.

The craziest thing is that if Debbie had just been upfront about her intentions, the Addams family probably would have welcomed her as one of their own (Morticia is cool with her scheming, it’s the pastels she objects to). They even wish her good luck as she’s about to murder them and make her escape.

What was a pretty clichéd villain is elevated entirely by Joan Cusack’s deliciously evil performance. She practically slithers her way through the role, and is the larger-than-life villain that the previous film lacked; the perfect dark foil not only to the Addams family, but also the obnoxiously chipper camp leaders. Not everyone can paraphrase the Wicked Witch of the West (“I’ll get you, and your little hand too!”) and own it.