Reading/Watching Log #85

This month was all about spending my Christmas break in front of the television, gorging myself on all the delicious content that I’d been saving for the end of the year, which essentially amounted to a bunch of fantasy and sci-fi shows from the world’s biggest franchises: Star Trek, Star Wars, Game of Thrones and The Lord of the Rings. I even watched a bit more of the MCU's She Hulk and Lucasfilm’s Willow, though you won’t find the latter on this list since I haven’t finished it yet (still two more episodes to go).

I didn’t make as large a dent in the pile of movies I wanted to watch though, but managed a few I desperately wanted to squeeze in before the end of the year: Glass Onion, the original West Side Story, a third Hayao Miyazaki film, The Two Towers (to coincide with its twentieth anniversary) and a ton of leftover Halloween movies. I’ll tackle the rest in January.

I also got to see a ballet for the first time in years, which is always a great feeling, and made very slight progress on the massive pile of library books I’ve been renewing for the past three or so months. Oh, and graphic novels. A lot of graphic novels.

Review: Ten Pilots, One Day

Last Saturday I went over to my friend’s house, who has a massive home entertainment system, and spent the day watching the pilot episodes of ten different shows. Why? Because it sounded like fun. There was just so much stuff coming out under the wide umbrella of speculative fiction that I thought it would be cool to marathon the pilots of it all at once.

In alphabetic order, they were Andor, House of the Dragon, Interview with the Vampire, The Midnight Club, The Rings of Power, The Sandman, She Hulk, Wednesday, Willow and Vampire Academy. 

Here’s an interesting side-effect of such a project: a subconscious part of your brain believes it’s actually watching ten episodes of the same show, which leads to musings such as: “how are the vampires going to handle the dragons?” and “it’s a shame the hobbits don’t have access to blasters” and “maybe Wednesday is Elora Danan.”

It was also fascinating to see how many similarities arose between so many seemingly different genre shows. Just off the top of my head, this collection of pilots involved at least two examples of: wolves on the loose, mysterious naked men, tragic car accidents, succession crises hinged upon women being next in line for the throne, New Zealand scenery, reveals that happened so quickly I suspect they’re red herrings, a lost sibling, whispers in a character’s ear that the audience is not immediately privy to, hidden identities, impending death heralded by a pronounced cough, actresses cast as in-jokes by dint of their previous roles in earlier projects, and Bill Paterson (you know him, he’s the guy who played Fleabag’s dad).

It got a little dizzying at times, noticing the echoes of various tropes and concepts, but interesting too, in seeing just how reliant we are on certain storytelling tools.

And watching so many shows in quick succession brought up another question: what exactly makes a good show? Or a good story in general? Because it became obvious very quickly that some of these pilots were of substantially better quality than others. It’s a question I’ll try to answer at the end of this post...

Reading/Watching Log #84

I had to post this later than usual, as I simply ran out of time. Between full-time work and all the other errands I have to do during the day, my allotted time for writing has been significantly whittled down.

This month was a desperate rush to watch as much stuff as possible and get it all deleted from my hard-drive before December kicks in and Christmas viewing begins. And by “Christmas” viewing, I mean all the stuff I’ve been saving for the end of the year: The Rings of Power, Interview with the Vampire, Andor, The Sandman, The Midnight Club, Willow, Wednesday, My Father’s Dragon, Rosaline, Enola Holmes, Wednesday – this Christmas, I FEAST.

But first I have to get through all of this...

Woman of the Month: Maid Marian

Maid Marian from countless Robin Hood films, shows, books and other assorted stories

As it happens, this is my one-hundredth Women of the Month entry, so even though I try to choose someone particularly iconic for the end of the year anyway, this post deserved to feature a character even more special than usual. Thankfully, I’ve had someone in mind for a while.

This is going to be a long one, so you can read on under the cut...