Links and Updates

 I usually wait for a while before posting these Links and Updates, because promos for all the stuff I’m interested in usually gets released over the course of several months or so. But just within the last few days (and in one case hours) there has been a deluge of new trailers, images and announcements that have made me sit up and say: “hey!”

So here’s what’s on the menu:

Links and Updates

Now that Halloween is over, Christmas seems closer than ever – and with that, the New Year. Let's face it: 2016 has been a bit of a disaster, and though I try to focus mostly on popular entertainment on this blog, that hasn't been particularly stellar either. If anything, 2016 will be remembered in fandom as the year of reboots, remakes, and killing off female characters.

There have been a few exceptions: Constance was granted unexpected clemency on The Musketeers, and the writers of Orphan Black backtracked on their decision to kill off Delphine. As well as that, two lights shine hopefully on the horizon: Princess Moana and Jyn Erso.

Links and Updates

Comic Con 2016 (or as I call it: Christmas for Geeks) has come and gone, and with it an array of new trailers, announcements and sneak peeks. If you compare this to my post on the subject last year, it's clear that there's not as much to share this time around – I'm not entirely sure why, but Comic Con only yielded a couple of previews that hold any interest to me.

Links and Updates

Well, Christmas Comic Con has come and gone, and my goodness did it leave a bonanza of interviews, previews and trailers in its wake. It's like all my birthdays came at once! Let's look at some of the highlights.

Links and Updates

Here it is, my End of Year Roundup. I was going to fill the intervening days between Christmas and the New Year with plenty of meta and reviews, but as it turned out, I overdosed on Korrasami reaction videos/tributes and ended up running out of broadband. So that's the main reason I've been so quiet this past week.

Trailer: Cinderella

Another day, another big screen fairy tale adaptation. Hollywood still hasn't relinquished its  fascination with the genre, for Cinderella follows on the heels of Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Sleeping Beauty (or rather, Maleficent) and not one but two takes on Snow White. But unlike those other adaptations, which strove to deconstruct or subvert the source material, this feel (and certainly looks) like a fairly straightforward rendering of the classic Rags To Riches story.

I'm rather amused that the trailer isn't even bothering to pretend that you don't know this entire story back to front. The whole plot is laid out on a platter for you: that our protagonist's mother dies, that her father remarries, that her step-family is cruel, that she's nicknamed Cinderella, that she's prevented from going to the ball, that her fairy godmother makes it happen, that a prince falls in love with her, and that there are glass slippers involved.

I mean, no surprises here. It's the familiarity of the tale that they're trying to sell, with a few design flourishes to catch your attention. There's a whimsical aesthetic going on, especially in the deliberate garishness of the step-families' outfits and the fairy godmother wearing something that appears modelled on Glinda the Good Witch's massive frock.

However, between the ooh-ahh music and Hayley Atwell's sound-bites, they certainly aren't shy about slathering on the sentimentality. It reaches maximum glurge at some points, so hopefully it's a side-effect of the trailer that'll be considerably toned down in the film itself.  

And then there's Lily James as Cinderella. I'm well aware that when it comes to acting ability young actresses are held to much higher standards than any other gender or age group in the industry (it's almost a given that if you're attractive, it's assumed you got by on your looks as opposed to any actual talent), and that playing the embodiment of sweetness and light is probably the most difficult role anyone could ever tackle.

That said, she does come across a little bland here. The problem with Cinderella is that (like most fairytale heroines) she's entirely passive, caught in a story that often boils down to: "women are bitches, so go find a nice man who will help you escape from them."

I'll admit, "my" version of Cinderella will always be Ever After, a film that I've come to appreciate more and more as the years go by. Drew Barrymore has made some questionable career choices (anything involving Adam Sandler), but Ever After proved that she was a solid actress, one who gave Danielle intelligence, kindness, spunk and vulnerability without ever tipping her too far in any one direction. You could see why the prince was smitten with her, but at the same time she never feels like anything other than an ordinary, sweet-natured, well-read young woman.  

The film did well in combining a sense of realism with an ornate fairy tale atmosphere, and it alleviated the underlying subtext of catty girls/honourable prince by surrounding Danielle with supportive female companions, including at least one pleasant step-sister. (Of course, they also turned the fairy godmother into Leonardo da Vinci, so perhaps it all evens out).

But one particular line in this trailer sticks out: "You have more kindness in your little finger than most people possess in their whole body." So says Cinderella's mother to her daughter on her deathbed.

As it happens, I think kindness is the single most important attribute any human being can possess. It's also one of the most difficult things in the world to portray on screen or in writing, all the more so since the rise of the anti-hero has resulted in goodness being equated with dullness or self-righteousness in the minds of an audience.

For example, throughout Snow White and the Huntsman a variety of characters speak ad nauseam about the abundance of inner kindness that Snow White has.  Yet what appears on-screen is a just reasonably nice young woman. Not a bad person by any means, but hardly a paragon of goodness, and what acts of kindness she does render aren't anything that any other half-way decent human being wouldn't be capable of achieving.

Depictions of kindness on-screen usually have to be conjoined with acts of bravery if they're to have any sort of impact. Little gestures and pleasant words are basic indicators of good manners, but they're not difficult to perform, and they can just as easily be used by manipulative people toward evil ends. It's only when compassion spurs a person to take risks or endanger themselves or extract some sort of personal toll that an audience can be properly impressed by the trait of kindness.

Kindness is also something that can't happen in isolation, even though loneliness is an essential part of what makes the Cinderella story possible (there are no other relations to take her in). But kindness involves at least two participants: one to give and one to receive. This is something the Disney film resolved by making Cinderella's mouse friends anthropomorphic, complete with clothes and speech, so that she might have companions to extend her friendship to.

There's also the trouble of equating kindness with passivity, for most depictions of Cinderella show her suffering nobly under the yoke of her stepmother, quietly absorbing her verbal abuse, too good to raise her voice or fight back. And that runs the risk of making her a pushover, especially since she takes no real affirmative action throughout the course of the story. Ever After recognised that being angry was not the same thing as being bad, and added a scene in which Danielle is finally pushed to the brink of tolerance and delivers a well-deserved punch to her step-sister's face.

Where am I going with all this babbling? Only that in having made a statement that Cinderella is kindness personified, I hope the film finds a way to a) depict this in a way that goes beyond feeding pet mice, and b) makes it one facet of a much more nuanced personality. For as harmlessly sweet as Lily James is as Rose MacClare in Downton Abbey, she doesn't seem to do much in this trailer besides cry and gasp.

PROVE ME WRONG, movie.

P.S. If you want a story in which a girl's active and consistent kindness impacts the plot in extraordinary ways; kindness that is a challenge to extend but born out of genuine empathy toward others, please track down Meredith Anne Pierce's The Darkangel. It's a problematic book in a number of ways, and one day I'll write that giant meta I've always been meaning to do, but in terms of how to use kindness as a character virtue that has a deep and abiding effect on the plot, no other novel I've read has done it better.

P.P.S. Wow, this post ended in a very different place from where it started. I was just going to briefly comment on a trailer...

Trailers: Into the Woods and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Trailers are movies unto themselves. Okay not really, but they can be fascinating things. An editor has about three minutes to convince a viewer to spend ten dollars on seeing a film, and by this point there's a definite technique behind how they present their material.

Count on seeing an atmospheric beginning, a brief introduction to the film's main characters, the establishment of its general premise, scenery porn of the big set pieces, a few lines that were written especially for the trailer (and may not even make it into the film's final cut), focus on the best-looking/most famous actors, BIG LOUD ACTION SEQUENCES, all the best gags, a faint gist of the ensuing plot, and then the title appearing slowly/spectacularly/perfunctorily in an appropriately-themed font.  

In the last twenty years, trailers have changed totally. Back in the Nineties (which wasn't that long ago, little 'uns) film trailers were remarkably different, often with voiceover narration from some random guy to explain the plot and introduce all the characters. Don't believe me? Here's the original trailer for Interview With The Vampire:

These days we're given a tad more benefit of the doubt when it comes to figuring out what's going on; furthermore, someone somewhere also twigged to the idea that it probably wasn't such a good idea to give absolutely everything away in a trailer, months before the movie is actually released.

Of course, there are some that would argue that trailers have become more spoilerific in recent years, casually giving away major plot-points or assuming that the audience has already read the book (it's bemusing that The Two Towers initially tries to hide the fact that Ian McKellan is in it, since the trailer sure as hell didn't bother).

What I'm trying to say here is that trailers are mini-movies in themselves. They have something important to tell you (watch my big sister when she's released!) but they have to be very careful about what it is they want you to see.

Two new trailers were released today, for movies that I'm almost certainly going to see on the big screen, so just for fun I thought I'd break them down. First up is Into The Woods:

I know very little about Into the Woods beyond the fact it was a Broadway show in the Eighties that deliberately subverted the "happily ever after" of most fairy tales: the first act was all about characters finding their traditional happy endings; the second act had everything fall to pieces. And it was a musical.  

So this trailer, first and foremost, wants you to know that Meryl Strepp is in this movie. MERYL STREPP IS HERE AND SHE SINGS.

As for the rest, it's a bit of a jumbled mess. The focus is on the ensemble cast, in which Anna Kendrick looks the most interesting, James Cordon is somehow married to Emily Blunt, and Johnny Depp appears to be playing himself playing all his roles of the last decade simultaneously.

Storywise, you'd be hard-pressed to figure out just what's going on here, beyond the fact that everyone goes into the woods. The opening sequence (characters whispering "I wish" to varying degrees of acting talent; side-eying you Jack) and the tag-line ("be careful what you wish for") provides a clue as to the subversive nature of the story, but the only real evidence we get of this is in Anna Kendrick's Cinderella scenes.

Between the sight of her fleeing from the palace, admitting to Emily Blunt that "it wasn't quite what I expected" and her exchange with Prince Charming: "if you love me, why did you stray?"/"I was raised to be charming, not sincere", she emerges as the film's protagonist (even though it stars Meryl Strepp) by dint of having the most interesting lines.

And this film might just make me warm up to Chris Pine. I can only just tolerate him as Captain Kirk – though that's partly the fault of the scripts – but if you're going to play a douche, you can at least be a self-aware douche. Such seems to be the case here.

It's obviously a musical, though there's little indication that it's a dark comedy. The fact that it's coming out at Christmas time means they're pushing a family-oriented tone (I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the line "if we're going to get through this, we're going to do it together!" is nowhere to be found in the original screenplay) so whatever teeth or claws the show once had will almost certainly have been filed right back.  

So the atmosphere isn't quite what I expected. It's like they're going for lightweight and spooky at the same time, to the point where it's a little surprising that Tim Burton's name isn't splashed all over it, and a few of these actors appear to be performing in a totally different film from the others (okay, just the one: Johnny, of course).

And then there's that ending. Treating Meryl Strepp in the same manner that our following trailer treats Bilbo putting on the One Ring (as the big draw-card), it fades out on a decidedly vague note, with the Witch singing to Rapunzel about being a child. Er, okay. Perhaps this scene has familiarity-with-the-source-material significance that I don't know about yet.

(Minor fun fact that I couldn't fit in anywhere else: this is the third time in her career that Lucy Punch has played Cinderella's wicked stepsister.)

Then there's The Hobbit: There And Back Again The Battle of the Five Armies:

Now this trailer definitely knows what it's doing, even if what it's doing has very little in common with Tolkien's book (but hey, it's the third instalment, we know that by now).

I found it interesting that the introductory sequence focuses almost solely on Thorin's pride and failings as a leader, suggesting that his choices are going to be a major turning point in the film itself. And sure, in the book this aspect was there and it was important, but because Tolkien stuck so closely to Bilbo's narrative, we never really felt its full impact.

Speaking of whom, would you believe that Bilbo is meant to be the protagonist of this trilogy? If the change in title hadn't clued you in, this trailer would have, though they at least give him the dignity of the opening voiceover and the closing shot.

What the trailer really wants us to focus on is the fact that this is the very last instalment in The Hobbit trilogy, the very very last instalment in The Lord of the Rings franchise, and it's going to be an all-out, no-holds-barred, CGI slugfest.

Tauriel's tearful face tells me that they're sticking with the book deaths (c'mon, you knew there was a reason they made Kili and Fili the cute ones) and that Tauriel herself may not make it out alive. Actually, scratch that, I think she'll be okay. The shot of her being flung by an orc into a stone wall felt too calculatedly present to be fatal.

Disappointingly little Galadriel (please tell me they're pre-emptively letting her destroy Dol Guldur) and Elrond manages to unsheathe his sword before disappearing entirely, leaving it to Thranduil and Legolas to represent the elves. I'm going to get lambasted for this, but between the damn moose and the dramatic posing, Lee Pace is only just managing to tiptoe along my suspension of disbelief.  

And of course, the portentous trailer lines set to blaring music and panning shots of CGI armies. I honestly think the actors themselves must know on receiving their scripts that these are the sound bites that'll end up in the promotional material, leading them to up their game accordingly. Which was your favourite?

This was the last move in a master plan; a plan long in the making.

These bats are bred for one purpose: for war.

You started this. You will forgive me if I finish it.

When faced with death, what can anyone do?

I will not hide while others fight our battles for us!

You have but one question to answer: how shall this day end?

 

***

 

Despite my snark, I'm looking forward to both films. Fairy tales and Tolkien, what more could a girl ask for? Although Peter Jackson's take on The Hobbit was never going to be the cultural milestone that the original trilogy was, I've enjoyed it as a prequel to The Lord of the Rings rather than an adaptation of the book, and however Into the Woods turns out, it's at least galvanized me to track down recordings of the original stage production. I'll sit on them for now, but comparisons will be imminent come the Christmas Day release.

Trailer: The Legend of Korra

The strangeness of The Legend of Korra’s airing schedule continues, as Book Four: Balance is apparently all set to run in a matter of weeks. But who am I to complain?

According to the titles we’re skipping forward three years, which makes the final shot of Book Three all the more painful considering Korra has presumably been grappling with PTSD for some time. But it looks as though she’s ready to lop off her locks and get back in the game. Short haired heroine? Fantastic.

All the people who thought that Kuvira’s Last Episode New Character introduction at the end of Book Three was a little too blatant to be a coincidence were on the money, as she’s all over this trailer. And not as one of the good guys, or so it would seem.

In regards to the colour palette, there was plenty of green and yellow, which suggests that a lot of the action is going to take place in the Earth Kingdom. Hopefully they’ll continue to explore the political turmoil left in the wake of the Earth Queen’s death.

Calling it now – the young-ish woman sitting between Zuko and President Raiko is the current Fire Lady and Zuko’s daughter Honora. She’s definitely Mai’s daughter; just look at that chin!

Pretty light on Mako, Bolin and Asami.

I spotted Kai, Opal and Tenzin’s kids sporting brand new flying-squirrel outfits, which will no doubt allow for a lot of fun new bending techniques.

Varrick!

And of course, that final scene – Korra in a cave, looking on in amazement and exclaiming: “Toph!” Call me a killjoy, but this type of fan-baiting has always got on my nerves. The best part about Iroh’s surprise visit in the spirit world was that it was a surprise, and using the name “Toph” as a climactic reveal reminds me a bit of the ship-teasing they did in the final trailer for Avatar: The Last Airbender. Plus I’ve always had a couple of issues with the characters from the previous series popping up in this one – but that’s another rant.

And it’s the final season! It may have gotten off to a shaky start, but I’ve really grown fond of these characters and it’ll be sad to see them go. (But then, I might get my longed-for “Lives of the Previous Avatars” show that I’ve been dreaming about since the end of The Last Airbender).

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

The Hobbit teaser trailer was finally released at Comic Con, and though I still have issues with the fact it’s been renamed The Battle of the Five Armies, there’s a lot of neat stuff to look forward to here.

Bilbo is still the least-interesting character to me; I don’t know whether it’s because of Martin Freeman overload or because The Desolation of Smaug more-or-less made him a supporting character amidst a ton of more compelling ones, but I’m most looking forward to Bard and Galadriel (the former because of what the book promises, and the latter because of what the film franchise hints at).

A big surprise was the trailer’s use of the song Billy Boyd performed in The Return of the King; it’s a poignant way of linking the prequels with the original trilogy.

Galadriel’s feet! Has Peter Jackson been watching Firefly?  

Other people have reservations with the whole Tauriel/Kili quasi-romance, but I’ll admit that I’m looking forward to seeing how it’ll all pan out. Kili’s fate is pretty much set in stone thanks to the book, but what about Tauriel? I can’t help but feel that she’ll die in battle (it’s the only way to explain her absence in The Lord of the Rings), which will also have an inevitable bearing on Legolas and his attitude toward dwarfs.

The mounts that the elves are riding look rather like something out of Hayao Miyazaki. Yakul the red elk from Princess Mononoke, anyone? It’s not just me?

Loved the shot of the dwarfs marching out to battle, flanked by Bilbo and Thorin.

I spotted Thranduil a couple of times, but there was no Radagast to be seen. Do you think he’s been Jar Jarred? (Because honestly, I quite liked the guy!)