Standing Tall: #1

There is a city-wide art project currently going on in the streets of Christchurch. Called Standing Tall, it involves the distribution of 99 fibreglass Giraffe sculptures, each symbolizing the strength and dignity of the city after the devastating 2010/2011 earthquakes.

Located on streets, parks and other public spaces, there are 49 large sculptures (reaching 2.5 metres high) and 50 small ones (standing about waist high). Businesses, community groups, charities, education establishments and individuals sponsored the blank Giraffe sculptures (provided by Wild in Art, which has already supplied gorillas to Norwich, rhinos to Southampton and lions to Northampton) and various artists were invited to submit their designs.

The sponsors chose their favourites and the selected artists got to work: adults on the larger Giraffes and school children on the smaller ones. Eventually they'll all be auctioned off in order to raise money for Christchurch charities.

Naturally, I've made it my mini-project to go and see them all, and I thought posting photographs here could be a nice way of keeping this blog active on its off-days.

So here's the first one: The Mosaic by Clare van der Plas, currently situated in front of what remains of the ChristChurch Cathedral.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Legend of Korra: Beyond the Wilds

We all survived last week's clip show, so let's get straight back to the important stuff: PLOT.

This felt like another transitional episode, a story in which nothing really gets resolved, but is mostly setup for later developments. By the end of this episode Korra has taken another step on the path to healing, Lin and Opal prepare for a rescue mission, and Varrick and Bolin return to Republic City, only to be almost instantly paired up with other characters in preparation for the next episode: Varrick with Asami and Bolin with Opal.

Sleepy Hollow: Magnum Opus

We're on the home stretch now, so I may as well hang in there till the finale.

It appears the show has well and truly found a formula: each episode opens with Ichabod making a portentous comment that ends up being in reference to something completely mundane, some American history is thrown in as part of a National Treasure-esque hunt for a random MacGuffin that nobody's ever heard of before, Ichabod is confounded by some aspect of modernity, a Monster of the Week rears its ugly head while Henry smirks and Katrina flails, and if we're lucky we'll get Ichabod/Abbie discussing how important they are to each other.

As such, most of the show seems stale now. Moloch is wandering around as a sullen teenager, the horsemen have been revealed as emotionally constipated man-children, and the Monsters of the Week are getting increasingly silly. Despite this being the first episode in the build-up to the season finale, I just don't feel particularly engaged.

It starts with Katrina ringing up the Witnesses on the mirror-phone to tell them that she's failed to kill Moloch. Abbie doesn't look remotely surprised, and to add insult to injury it transpires that Henry has bugged the mirror and can rewind events reflected in it to find out exactly what the Witnesses are up to. So not only is Katrina useless, she's now actively making matters worse.

By using last week's MacGuffin (Dixon's journal) Ichabod and Abbie discover the location of this week's MacGuffin (Methusalah's sword), and by interpreting a code in the journal that is too convoluted for me to even attempt to unpack, they learn it's something that can stop Moloch. Just go with it.

Benjamin Franklin, blah, Freemasons, blah, Knights Templar, blah blah blah, and they eventually end up at the ruins Abbie glimpsed in her dream (I wondered if they had some relevance). After the Headless Horseman is forced to retreat thanks to the dawn, the Witnesses dig in the ground and find some easily-displaced bricks that lead to a perfectly functional trapdoor. It's a wonder kids on school field trips don't stumble down there every week.

And then... look, I know this show has done some crazy stuff in the past, but its use of golems and tree demons and nightmare monsters had an internal logic and thematic consistency that made it all work despite itself. But now Ichabod and Abbie are forced to face-off against ... Medusa.

Despite the awesomeness of the above shot, it's still a jarring addition to the show's mythos. They refer to it as a gorgon and even mention Greek mythology, so it's not like its inclusion exists in a total void, but still – it's incredibly strange.

Also thrown into the mix is the symbol of Ouroboros (why not?) and the Shofur Horn (that Henry just had lying around somewhere?) and even a little bit of Indiana Jones/Arthurian Legend when it comes to Abbie being forced to pull the right sword out of the stone and facing dire snake-related consequences if she fails (I was waiting for someone to say "she chose...poorly" but it never happened).

Abbie comes up with the idea to lure the Horseman down into the cave to fight the gorgon, arguing that it can't affect him since he doesn't have eyes to see with, but soon enough Abraham turns his attention to Ichabod. He finally gets the chance to say something halfway interesting, namely that he was meant to be the hero of this tale, not its villain, and though it soon dissolves into a pissing contest over Katrina, the close proximity and intense staring of the sword-fighting that ensues no doubt made a million slash-fans perk up in newfound interest.

There is some neat editing here, in which their battle is intercut with previous fights between the two of them (though oddly, not the definitive one that ended both their lives) but there just hasn't been enough tension built-up between the two of them for any of this to have any real resonance. Ichabod is finally at Abraham's mercy, but Henry sounds the shofur and Abraham just trots out of there. It's so contrived that it wraps all the way back around from "painful" to "eh, there's only three minutes left", and Ichabod and Abbie turn their attention to finding the sword.  

At this point I should say that throughout all this Ichabod has been haunted by the phrase "know thyself", which feels like an attempt to provide something insightful and profound about his characterization, but is the sort of self-indulgent navel gazing that can best be summed up (as ever) by Abbie's face:

The problem is not only that Abbie is completely left out of this "know thyself" narrative, but that it feels too heavy handed. From the opening game of "guess who?" between the Witnesses, to the myriad of flashbacks that are presumably meant to track Ichabod's path toward his destiny, to the lengthy monologues on Who He Really Is, you could feel the authorial fiat at work. The whole thing didn't really feel like anything that Ichabod would internally explore on his own; instead it was just something he had to comment on because it was in that week's script.

They eventually discover the sword's hiding place, but since extracting it involves teamwork it feels rather odd that only Ichabod gets to reach into the pillar and Excalibur it out of there. Shouldn't there be two swords? Or one sword that could be split into two? (see Da Vinci's Demons for an example).

Still, it's a fairly stirring moment, ruined only by Tom Mison's choice of expression:

Dude, it's just a sword.

Meanwhile, the B-plot has dealt with Jenny and Irving trying to make it to the Canadian border. Nothing much happens except when they reach a police stop-point and there's an hilarious moment in which Irving decides to bail out and Jenny patiently informs him that she can't slow down or it'll look suspicious so he'll just have to dive out of a moving vehicle.

Then he foregoes meeting up with her and instead opts to go bush – though I was left wondering if that was really him on the phone or if the forces of darkness are playing some other game.

Miscellaneous Observations:

We did at least learn that demons in this world are – as according to Biblical lore – fallen angels. A lot of shows (Buffy and Charmed spring to mind) present demons more like a destructive and dangerous species rather than an army of spirits that rebelled against the Almighty.

As disappointing as Abraham is without his head, I loved the shot in which Henry turns from the mirror (which reflects Abraham's face) to the door (where he stands headless).

Katrina is so much more interesting in the opening credits: raising the trees, running through the mist, glancing shifty-eyed off-screen. Why can't we have THAT character?

And she just left that bottle of poison lying around for Henry to find it? Worst spy EVER.

Abbie, you could rope in the Horseman to kill the gorgon for you, or you could just take a cue from mythology and take down a large mirror. The Ancient Greeks had this conundrum sorted out.

And hey, Pestilence is back! After being missing since last season, he's now back in the back. Who will he turn out to be? Abbie's long-lost father? Ichabod's disinherited nephew? Some guy who was fined for not returning his library books and is now really bitter about it?
And when's the fourth one turning up? Famine? Can't have an apocalypse without four Horsemen.
 

Review: A Christmas Carol

On Friday night I took my first sip of Christmas spirit by attending the Royal New Zealand Ballet's performance of A Christmas Carol at the Isaac Theatre Royal. This made it quite an emotional experience as the theatre was all but destroyed in the 2011 earthquake, and has been painstakingly rebuilt and restored in the intervening years. Walking in for the first time, I could still smell the fresh paint on the walls.

And the performance itself was wonderful. The RNZB is filled with extremely talented dancers, but everything – the lighting, costumes, music – was brilliant, all the more so because you could sense the crew's joy at having a proper venue to work in once again.

A Christmas Carol is indisputably the most famous fictional Christmas story of them all, adapted and updated dozens of times. Its potency is based in its simplicity: a stingy miser learns the error of his ways when confronted by three spirits who show him glimpses of past, present and future. All the best stories have very simple hearts, and the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge is as straightforward a redemption tale as they come.

What's more, the story is very short. This ballet was divided by two intervals and the whole thing just flew by, even with a significant amount of what can best be described as padding (though without the negative connotations). On the way home from work, Bob Cratchit stops to dance with a few locals in a scene that had no real purpose beyond giving the dancers a chance to play around on a makeshift slide.

The highlight of the production was the depiction of the three spirits: Past as a white-clad girl (just eerie enough to come across as ethereal rather than angelic), Present as a flamboyant, glitter-throwing cross between Rum Tum Tugger from Cats and Anne Rice's Lestat, and Yet To Come as a truly terrifying spectre of death. I was expecting the skull-face, but not the large ragged wings, the result of which left me shocked that no child in the audience started crying.

I took this from the programme. Just imagine
it dancing around the stage.

The choreography for the spirits was a little strange, for in order to convey otherworldliness they each frequently favoured a movement that looked a little like the "fake drowning" manoeuvre (you know, when a dancer holds their nose and wriggles down to the floor – only in this case, without the nose-holding) or a child waving their arms and swaying back and forth like a ghost. You can see Past doing it in the trailer below at 0.16:

(It's very brief, but there was a lot of it going on).

It was an interesting technique, one that I wasn't entirely sold on, but they were otherwise the highpoint of the show. In particular, Past's dramatic appearance in Scrooge's window earned an audible "ooh" from the audience.

There were lots of little details that I appreciated: the ringing of the single bell that starts the haunting, the clinking of chains as Marley approaches, the nice bit of prop-work as Scrooge's tombstone emerges from his bed during the climactic scene. They were all small but evocative bits featured in the novel, and including them here made it feel like a really thoughtful adaptation.

Other highlights involved the clumsy antics of the Fezziwigs as they tried to keep up with the younger members of their dance party (it must be so difficult for a dancer to convey clumsiness when you've been trained in the art of gracefulness), and Tiny Tim who sings How Far Is It To Bethlehem? without being nauseating (Dickens was notorious for his love of the Littlest Cancer Patient).

The writhing agony of the restless spirits looked like something out of a zombie uprising/rave (again, I'm surprised there was no crying children in the audience) and a lovely sequence in which Scrooge tries to implore his younger self to reconcile with his fiancée, only for the opportunity to pass him by.

So it was a great night out. One of my favourite landmark buildings is back, the Christmas spirit is welling up (next I take my nephew to the Santa Parade) and I got to revisit an old Christmas favourite.

The famous domed roof

The inevitable red curtains

My terrible attempt at a selfie on the main staircase

 

The Legend of Korra: Remembrance

A clip show? Really?

My initial irritation was somewhat tempered when I became aware of Bryan Konietzko's explanation, as posted on his Tumblr:

Sometime around a year and a half ago we were similarly duped on a large scale. We got the news from the higher-ups that our Book 4 budget was getting slashed, almost to the tune of an entire episode’s budget. We had two options: 1) let go a significant number of crew members several weeks early, or 2) make a clips episode. We never considered the first option. We weren’t going to do that to our crew, and even if we were callous enough to do so, we never would have been able to finish the season without them.

Given that they had little choice in the matter, I concede that this episode was a necessary evil. Being placed at the mid-point of the season even helped re-establish some of the characters, their positions and their short/long terms goals, setting us up for the final stretch.

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...

Sleepy Hollow: Mama

I said last week that I'd review this episode for the sake of the Mills girls, but given that the promo for next week announced it as the fall finale, I guess I'll hang in there for that one as well. This show has been skating on thin ice for a while now, but Mama helped raise the calibre a tad.

It's the long-awaited Mama Mills episode, in which light is finally shone on Abbie and Jenny's mysterious mother. It's been established in a previous episode that she committed suicide, but as far back as season one the audience knew that there was something pertinent to be discovered concerning Lori Mills's fate.

Horror and madness have always been bedfellows, no doubt born out of several thousand years of undiagnosed mental illnesses being interpreted as demonic possession. Gothic literature rests on the thin line between insanity and unexplained phenomena, and the Bedlam House is a staple part of any long-running supernaturally-themed TV show. Heck, I'm currently re-watching Penny Dreadful and an entire episode is devoted to a character's stint in a madhouse as she struggles with her very real brush with the demonic.

One thing is for certain: there is no such thing as mental illness in the horror genre. It is always the work of demons. That crazy lady whispering about monsters and dangers and ensuing death? BELIEVE HER.

So it's no surprise that Tarrytown Psychiatric has been a recurring location in Sleepy Hollow, and in this episode Sheriff Reyes puts Abbie in charge of an investigation into a string of suicides at the facility.

Abbie enlists Jenny, which is great. After all, her sister spent several years there. Unfortunately, Ichabod is put on comic-relief duty by wandering in and out of frame with a terrible head-cold. Which means that instead of replacing Jenny, you-know-who is called in to replace Ichabod. Why make Hawley a witness (no pun intended) to the sisters' trauma instead of the co-lead that has deeply established ties with both of them? No idea. Hawley is like fetch. Stop trying to make fetch happen, writers.

As it happens, Lori Mills killed herself in this hospital, and it doesn't take too much digging for the sisters to discover her presence on one of the security videos, apparently goading one a patient into hanging himself.

So the question that lies at the heart of this episode is: what's really going on here? Jenny is considerably more unsettled by the reappearance of their mother's spirit than Abbie is, and flashbacks soon demonstrate why. Growing up with her was a fraught experience in which the girls were ordered to repeat a mantra: "eyes open, head up, trust no one," which in turn explains so much about their current-day attitudes. Abbie took her mother's words to heart and lied about the incident in the woods; Jenny reached out for help by telling the truth and got thrown in Tarrytown Psychiatric as a result.  

Ironically, the fact that Abbie fully believed her mother's words about not trusting anyone means that she later got to be pleasantly surprised by the presence of people in her life that she can trust. On the other hand, Jenny got burned by trusting, and has a much more standoffish personality as a result.

Furthermore, Abbie grew up honestly believing that her mother was suffering from a mental illness and living in terror that she too would be thrown in the psychiatric ward. Jenny believed that her mother was being tormented by very-real demons and tried to share that truth with others. And all this informs their behaviour when Lori's spirit reappears: Abbie is eager and curious; Jenny is point-blank terrified.

Of course, we also learn that the last time Jenny saw her mother she was being dragged away by orderlies and that she's got a suppressed memory of Lori trying to kill them both in the car. So between Abbie's commitment to the greater good and Jenny's awareness of a side to Lori that even Abbie isn't fully cognisant of, both sisters quickly come to the conclusion that if Lori is behind these suicides, she needs to be stopped.

Taking notes, Ichabod?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, she isn't responsible for the deaths, but is in fact trying to help. Instead the Villain of the Week is a fairly superficial and obviously red-flagged nurse who hovers conspicuously on the edges of the story before being identified as a long-dead "angel of death" who would goad her patients into killing themselves out of a misguided sense of mercy. Lori Mills appears to guide her daughters toward yet another MacGuffin that will banish the ghost/spirit/demon/whatever. In this case it's a journal of spells that's been passed down from generation to generation – you know the drill.

Jenny reads the incantation and Nurse Lambert is duly destroyed just before she completes her usual methods of persuasion on Abbie. It's...rather perfunctory. Honestly, was hoping that this would end up being a pivotal episode in regards to the show's underlying mythology, and though I'm happy that the Mills sisters' got some long-overdue focus, it still feels like a standalone episode.

Questions remain about how much Lori actually knew about Abbie's role as a Witness and what exactly the demons were attempting to make her do (the scene with her and Jenny in the car was perhaps the most harrowing sequence of the episode – but how much was that Lori's plan and how much was it the demons whispering in her ear?)

So it's best to focus on what Mama reveals about Abbie and Jenny; their strengths and weaknesses, and their give and take with each other. Jenny for example, can barely bring herself to watch the recording of her mother's session, and yet in other ways she's the stronger of the two. I suspect that Nurse Lambert targeted Abbie as her victim was because Jenny has already faced down so many demons that she would be impervious to persuasion.

After all, Abbie coped in her adult life because she didn't believe in the supernatural. All this is still new to her, which in turn makes her more vulnerable.

But of course, the sisters come out on top, with a bonus séance to say goodbye to their mother properly. The scene in which they tear down the wall together (symbolism!) to reveal the pictures their mother had drawn of them was beautiful, and I'm glad the director devoted so much time to it.

***

Meanwhile, over in OH WHO CARES ville, Henry introduces Katrina to a newborn baby that he apparently just ... found ... somewhere? Seriously, he pretty much says: "What, this baby? Oh, I just found him and brought him here. For reasons." Super-spy Katrina is tricked into holding him, and he chows down on her shoulder (???) which later tips her off as to its demonic nature. She comes up with a potion of some kind (I thought Fredericks Manor was spelled to prevent her from doing magic) only to find that the newborn is now a seven year old.

In theory, there's plenty of potential to be mined in a story involving a mother attempting to draw her twisted adult son back to the side of good, but everything to do with Henry/Katrina isn't a plot born out of the characters, but a plot that involves the characters doing whatever's required of them.

And then, in what I'm going to pretend was the final scene because it was so much better than what was actually the final scene, Irving literally busts himself out of his terrible subplot (and the woods) to stash himself in the boot of Abbie's car. It's awesome.

Miscellaneous Observations:

Despite the subject matter, there were still a few glitches here and there. The cold opening, which ends with Abbie and Jenny seeing their mother's image on the security tape, felt too casual and quick. They needed more than a jump-cut to the opening credits to really absorb that moment.

The fact that Abbie has been dreaming of Purgatory for a week, wandering around some ruins and being confronted by her mother, makes me wish for the umpteenth time that the season premiere had paced itself and allowed for more of Abbie's experiences in Purgatory. If this interaction with Lori Mills had happened in "real time", there would have been more of a satisfying build-up to this episode.  

This show used to be quite good at adding bits of realism to weigh down the supernatural hijinks – and so it was all the more grating that there appeared to be no added security measures taken at the hospital after a string of suicides. Come on!

Anyone else find it odd that in a story involving a villain forcing her victims to swallow psychotropic drugs, there was a joke based on Hawley spiking Ichabod's food to make him sleep? I'm not sure how self-aware this was, or what we're meant to take from it.

 

Odd that Jenny didn't recognise – or rather, not recognise – Nurse Lambert. Perhaps she just assumed she was a new staff member.

A nice bit of continuity concerning Katrina still being a point of contention between the two Witnesses. Ichabod immediately got shirty when Abbie questioned her.

It was a shame that the set designers didn't think to put that old doll house in the flashback with the Mills sisters as little girls. I was actually peering over their shoulders, looking for it.

 

In all, a pretty good episode, though it doesn't feel as integral as I had hoped it would be. There was a lot of dark stuff here (suicide, drug abuse, the ambiguous relationship between medication and demonic forces), but also plenty of juicy backstory to unpack in regards to Jenny's devotion to the truth and Abbie's until-recent emotional walls. There was also a subtle commentary on the difference between giving up and fighting on – that is, one does not necessarily negate the other.