Well, there goes December along with 2019. I have another forthcoming post about the year planned, but for now I'll focus on my usual viewing/reading choices.
It was the year of Aladdin, as I ended up seeing four different versions of it, as well as the arrival of His Dark Materials on television (the final episodes have been released; I'll review them shortly).
There were plenty of books from my favourite authors which have been sitting in my TBR pile for a very long time, including Philip Pullman, Francis Hardinge and Leigh Bardugo, and plenty of mysteries starring plucky young women. I managed to finish a few (okay, two) of the shows that have been on my "finish what you started" list, and continued my viewing of Disney Princess films and Hitchcock's oeuvre.
It's also the year I've made some decisions about the sort of material I'll be consuming in the future... but we'll get to that in good time.
Aladdin (Isaac Theatre Royal)
I started this year with the Broadway production of Aladdin in Auckland, continued with the animated and live-action versions, and felt it was only fitting I ended with Aladdin as well - though in this case it was the end of year production for the Southern Ballet Company, which meant a lot of children dressed up as various Arabian Nights characters.
Last year I saw the same company performing Beauty and the Beast, and it's always fun to see young performers on the stage, especially the ones that are just beginners. There were six year olds as monkeys, twelve year olds as birds of paradise, and teenagers taking the roles of Aladdin, Jasmine, Jafar and the Genie (yes, they snatched the names from the Disney film).
With a ballet company this large, there were some rather clumsy attempts to give absolutely everyone a role, which lead to several dances involving rubies, sapphires and emeralds that Jafar tries to gift to Jasmine, though in other ways the limitations worked in their favour: this was the first time I've ever seen the Genie played by a woman.
The dancers also managed some nice character beats: Jasmine was suitably elegant and spirited, and the guy playing Jafar made the most of his long fingers, with plenty of creepy gestures. I think I might make these pageants a Christmas tradition for me, as there's something intrinsically relaxing about watching ballet.
The Wind in the Willows (Court Theatre)
As a late Christmas present I took my niece to see this at the Court Theatre, and despite a few wriggles towards the end of the first act, I think she really enjoyed it. Wind in the Willows is a strange tale to adapt for the stage, as the novel itself is a meandering affair, mostly made up of Ratty and Mole (as is famously said) mucking about on boats.
Towards the end a plot presents itself, with the incorrigible Mr Toad escaping from prison and the Weasels taking over Toad Hall, but a lot of the first act involves Ratty and Mole simply meeting and talking with other woodland creatures. But it's all done so charmingly: a revolving stage gave the illusion of a river, or of the characters wandering through the woods, and at different points there was snow, car crashes, caravans and trapdoors.
The cast was wonderful, and I'm sure that Mr Toad is up there with Hamlet and John Proctor as one of the Great Theatre Characters that all actors aspire to. Mole was suitably excitable and naive, Ratty laidback and protective, and Badger gruff and fatherly. It's difficult to describe, but they just felt like a Rat, Mole and Badger.
An ensemble of rabbits, hedgehogs and squirrels rounded out the cast, but the Weasels were especially good in their fur coats and dark glasses - so obviously shifty, but also rather intimidating (tiptoeing along in the background, sneaking about in the darkness, and at one point stealing a baby rabbit that never actually gets returned).
There were also some funny cameos from other stories, like Little Red Riding Hood skipping past, or the White Rabbit disappearing down a hole crying: "I'm late, I'm late!" It was all beautifully done, and captured the spirit of the book to perfection: that quintessential twee-ness of the 19th century English countryside.
Hilda by Luke Pearson
And by Hilda I mean all of the graphic novels, which currently total six in all. Hilda is a young blue-haired girl who loves exploring the countryside surrounding the settlement of Trolberg. Adventuresome and curious, Hilda takes her notebooks out into the wild and fills them with all sorts of sketches of the world around her.
This is especially true of the trolls in the area, who turn to stone during the day and are treated with suspicion by the villagers. Each book delves more and more into their culture and community, till the two most recent books (which form a two-parter) have Hilda and her mother journey underground to their hidden city, with some unexpected results.
All the books are quite gentle, with an emphasis on the comforts of home and family, as well as keeping an open mind and being curious about the world around you.
Luke Pearson’s illustrations become a little more polished in later books, in which Hilda’s design becomes more rounded and cute, but his colour palette of soft browns and faded orange is beautifully off-set by the blue of Hilda’s hair. You can see the care and attention that's gone into the artwork, and are deeply akin to the tone and atmosphere of a typical Hayao Miyazaki film.
The Painted Dragon and The Midnight Peacock by Katherine Woodfine
These two stories involve a stolen painting and a haunted house respectively, but though the painting depicts one of several dragons in a set, the midnight peacock of the second title is just a perfume that doesn't really figure into the story much.
The stories themselves are a little predictable (you'll have the culprits pegged straightaway) but there is a real warmth and charm about these books, which involve a wide array of characters from different classes and with pronounced difficulties in life coming together to form a found family. Who doesn't love found families?
There's also a really strong sense of continuity throughout the books, not just in the main characters, but the periphery details. In the first book, Woodfine casually mentions a young man and woman who meet outside the opening of Sinclair's - they return in the last book, and it's revealed that they're engaged. Neither are given names or play any part in the story, but it definitely made me go "awww."
No Such Thing as Dragons by Philip Reeve
You all know I'm a huge fan of Philip Reeve's steampunk/dystopian Mortal Engines books, as he writes with so much clarity and imagination, so I was interested to see what a more fantasy-based story from him would be like.
During the Middle Ages in Germany, a young boy called Ansel is sold by his father into the service of a knight called Johannes Brock, who claims to be a dragon slayer. At first Ansel thinks that his inability to speak will cause trouble with his new master, but Brock finds Ansel's silence appealing - if the boy can't talk, then he can't spill any of his secrets.
The two set off into the mountainous regions, where dragons are said to lurk. But is Brock a real dragon slayer? Are there even such things as dragons at all? Ansel isn't sure what to believe.
Without giving the game away, the story is essentially a survival story in which Ansel and Brock attempt to negotiate not only the elemental dangers of the mountains and the the mob mentality of backwater villagers, but the question of whether or not there really ARE dragons.
At times it almost reads like a horror story, and there are some rather gruesome descriptions of animal carnage, so it's probably not for very young readers. But it's exciting and suspenseful throughout, with some memorable insights into human nature. His characters aren't perfect all the time, but they're also capable of forgiveness and compassion, and his prose is just impeccable: elegant and descriptive and clear throughout.
Strangers on a Train (1951)
Despite popularizing one of the most famous murder-mystery setups in the genre, I actually had very little idea of what Strangers on a Train was going to be about. Well, it's exactly what you might think: two men meet while on a train journey, and knowing that one would dearly love to be rid of a significant other in their life, the other proposes that they each do one another's murder. There'll be nothing to connect the two, and the police will have no leads.
In this case it's Bruno Anthony (clearly played as a coded gay man) who meets rising tennis star Guy Haines on a train. The former wants to get rid of his wealthy, demanding father, the latter has a cheating wife and a love affair with a senator's daughter. Bruno thinks the solution is obvious, but Guy doesn't take him remotely seriously - until the news comes in that his wife has been murdered.
Anyone sensible person would go immediately to the police, but where's the suspense in that? Guy now finds that Anthony is demanding he go through with the murder of his father, and has to play a very careful cat-and-mouse game to keep himself safe from the police, his would-be father-in-law and Anthony himself. It's classic Hitchcock, with plenty of clever shots and suspenseful sequences, and for my money the famous carousel scene still holds up pretty well.
Marnie (1964)
Yikes. It's hard to know what to say about this. Knowing what we now know about Alfred Hitchcock, the film's subject matter and content is overlaid with a deep sense of unpleasantness, which makes it difficult to watch at times. Marnie (Tippi Hedren) is a deeply troubled young woman who makes her living taking jobs under false pretenses, ingratiating herself with the staff, and stealing from the safe, all seemingly to win favour with a cold and distant mother.
Then she's caught by Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), who blackmails her into marrying him, agrees not to force himself on her after realizing she's terrified of sex, then rapes her anyway, after which she tries to drown herself in a swimming pool. Her fears are eventually explained when he takes her back to her childhood home and extracts a suppressed memory: as a child she was the victim of a rape attempt, which resulted in her killing one of her mother's clients.
Like I said, what do you say to all this? It's an exploration of a woman's deep-seated trauma, but in the hands of Hitchcock in the 1960s, it's conveyed almost entirely through Mark Rutland's perspective, who treats Marnie more as a case study or plaything rather than a human being worthy of respect or compassion.
To say it's a product of its time is one thing, but knowing that Hitchcock was sexually harassing Tippi Hedren behind the scenes gives Marnie's ordeal an extra layer of horror. Just as the character couldn't escape Mark Rutland, neither could the actress escape her director, and the results are grotesquely compelling. I don't regret watching it, even if I probably never will again.
Ghost (1990)
This is SUCH A GREAT MOVIE. I've seen it twice before and enjoyed it, but this time around I really grasped why it's so great. Every scene is important, every dynamic has chemistry, and it manages to satisfy on pretty much every level.
I'm a sucker for stories about murdered people trying to find their killer from the afterlife, and this is probably the ur-example. After Sam Wheat's seemingly random death at the hands of a mugger in an alleyway, he can't bring himself to go into the light and leave his girlfriend Molly. As she struggles to carry on with her life, Sam begins to realize that his death wasn't an accident, and enlists the help of Oda Mae, a psychic who isn't as phoney as even she thought.
I mean, that's a winning premise right there. What's even more astounding is that despite several drastic shifts in genre, the film not only excels at all of them, but makes the combination of them work. It's a spooky ghost story, it's an hilarious comedy, it's a beautiful love story, it's a genuinely suspenseful thriller. It's not only all these things seamlessly, but it does all these things incredibly well, and in such a way that they don't clash with each other at all.
Obviously Whoopi Goldberg steals the show as Oda Mae, but this was a great movie for Demi Moore as well. Despite not being a character with much agency, Molly is still a three-dimensional character with depth and complexity, and her journey from skepticism to belief is beautifully done.
And it hits all the emotional notes. When Sam finds out the truth about his friend's betrayal, it really hurts. We feel Molly's loss and confusion when Sam leaves her life and Oda Mae enters it. The subway ghost is simultaneously scary and pitiable. The fates of Carl and Willy Lopez are terrifying enough to make you feel a twinge of pity for them. And that final scene, when Sam walks towards the luminous figures waiting for him? I cry every single time.
Such a great movie.
Home Alone (1990)
My Christmas movie of choice for 2019. Watching this movie as an adult is a profoundly different experience than as a child. As a kid, it's all about the escapist fantasy of having the house to yourself and turning your home into one giant mouse trap to torture burglars with.
As an adult, being home alone is hardly a big deal, and most of the violence done against Harry and Marv are cringy instead of empowering (let's face it, they'd both be dead after sustaining all that head trauma). Watching through adult eyes, the film instead belongs to Kate, who goes through every parent's worst nightmare: not only misplacing her child, but having to grapple with the reality that it's her fault.
Also, as kids we all underestimated Catherine O'Hara's performance. We took for granted that any mother would move heaven and earth to rescue her child, but as an adult there's something a little awe-inspiring about when she declares: "if I have to sell my soul to the devil himself, I am going to get home to my son". I don't know about you, but I believed her.
I was also impressed regarding how much work goes into justifying the central premise, which is pretty rare for children's movies (I mean, it wasn't until I was older that I realized how profoundly horrific the premise for The Parent Trap was. Two people divorce and hate each other so much that they separate their daughters and raise them without informing them of either their missing parent or their twin sister? The fuck??)
Yet though the idea of a family totally forgetting one of their children seems insane, the film puts a lot of work in to make it feasible. Between the fact Kevin was put in the attic for punishment the night before, the chaos of having eleven kids in the house, a power cut that creates a mad rush to the airport, that they took vans instead of cars (so Kate assumes Kevin was in the other van) and a headcount mistakenly included the neighbour's kid - it actually all hangs together. If you squint, you could see something like this happening in real life.
Then there are the little details: the running gag of the outside statue getting knocked over, the fun musical cues (as when Kevin realizes the clock is striking eight), and the little dashes of kindness strewn throughout, from the old couple who give up their plane seats to Kate, the Santa who gives Kevin a handful of tic-tacs, the conversations with Old Man Marley, and of course, John Candy offering Kate a ride.
And Marv's scream when the tarantula is put on his face is truly one of the greatest on-screen screams of all time.
Mulan (1998)
My last Disney Princess movie of the year, even though Mulan is the least princess-like of the line-up (neither marrying a prince or being a princess by birth). Nevertheless, she's classified as a Disney Princess, and I was looking forward to revisiting.
Like Pocahontas, this is Disney's rather ill-advised attempt to adapt a story from another culture by giving it the Disney treatment: animal sidekicks, catchy songs, the theme of following your dreams and believing in yourself, which is only slightly mitigated by the fact that at least Mulan was not a real person.
Still, there's some contention to be had. This film was not popular in China, as one of my friends (who is married to a Chinese husband) informed me, as Mulan's search for identity and self-realization goes completely against the Chinese ideal of working towards the greater good. She feels so strongly about this that her half-Chinese daughter won't be watching this (though she's keeping an open mind when it comes to the live-action version).
Looking at the film through Western eyes, it's a fairly standard coming-of-age story wrapped up in a Chinese setting with copious use of the word "honour" strewn throughout. Most striking is its drastic switches in tone, which sometimes works (the jaunty marching song suddenly coming to an end when the troops reach a destroyed village) and sometimes really don't (the final moments leading into the credits are set to a modern pop song about being true to yourself).
The villain is one of Disney's weakest, the comic relief characters can get a bit much, and the film never quite nails a dynamic that really makes you invest. What exactly is the heart of the film? Mulan and her father? Mulan and Mushu? Mulan and Shang? Though it's nice Mulan and Shang never kiss, it's probably because Disney executives were twitchy about the fact the latter thinks the former is a boy for most of the film, and although Mushu initially lies to Mulan about his guardian status, this has no dramatic pay-off later on. By the time the truth comes out, she doesn't care.
But some of the humour is genuinely funny, and there are two montages that are truly stunning: the silent musical sequence when Mulan makes her decision to take her father's place (that second when she braces herself before cutting her hair is sublime) and the amazingly catchy I'll Make a Man Out of You, which is all the better for it being directed (mostly) at Mulan, the woman who saves China.
Reign: Season 4 (2017)
So that's it, I finally completed the entirety of Reign. It was quite a ride all things considered, and one was never entirely sure what the showrunners were trying to achieve with it. I think it was most interested in the relationship between women and power (with men largely interchangable with the concept of "power") as well as the importance of female friendships (or at least alliances) and how the more power you accumulate, the more compromised (and therefore less womanly) you become.
Or something like that. Every now and then a ghost or witch or serial killer would turn up and you would realize just how bonkers this show was. Season four finally has Mary in Scotland, surely the most interesting period of her life, which is sadly truncated by a shortened amount of episodes and an apparent lack of awareness by the writers that this would be the final season. Right up to the finish line they're introducing new plotlines and characters, and the last minutes of the last episode have a tacked-on epilogue that depicts Mary's fate, but absolutely no one else's.
By this point the cast has been gutted, with only three original cast members left (Catherine, Greer and Mary herself) and nobody gets a satisfactory send-off. Castleroy leaves Greer because he's fallen in love with someone else off-screen. Claude's marriage to a genuinely good man fails because Leith is still alive, though he promptly leaves and marries someone else (again) off-screen. Bash is mentioned, but never returns. What a weird coda for those characters.
Catherine and Narcisse don't get much to do besides swanning around, and it's only Elizabeth and Mary who get truly juicy material. I actually like what they did with Darnley, who here is characterized less as a true villain than as simply feckless and greedy, whose baser instincts take over once he's "in the game". Bothwell, although staggeringly handsome, doesn't make much of an impression.
But then it all comes to an abrupt close, and the lack of conviction in whatever it was the writers were trying to convey is captured neatly in Mary's idea of heaven: waking up next to Francis who immediately shushes her. That's Reign for you.
Pennyworth: Season 1 (2019)
I wasn't sure what to expect from a prequel series delving into the early years of Alfred Pennyworth, best known as the butler and confidante of Bruce Wayne, a.k.a. Batman, but it certainly wasn't this.
Set in a stylish and stylized 1960s England in an alternative history where Germany apparently won the war and gruesome public executions are televised, Alfred (better known as Alfie) is a twenty-six year old bouncer that's been discharged from the army and trying to set up a security firm with two war buddies.
He meets three people across the course of the first season: Thomas Wayne, a wealthy American that's working for the CIA, Martha Kane, a woman in cahoots with a socialist league, and Esme Winikus, a pretty young actress whose purpose is all too predictable. In the first episode she has a squabble with Alfred which leaves her vulnerable to a kidnapping that's staged so the bad guys can coerce Alfred into doing their bidding (a scenario that's so remarkably similar to the plot of Eagle Strike, an Alex Rider book that I was reading concurrently to this show, that it soured my enjoyment of both).
A few episodes later, once the couple have sorted things out and become engaged, she's fridged. Of course she is.
The show is very much a mixed bag when it comes to its content. The production values can't be denied, with a vivid sense of time and place when it comes to the public houses, stately manors and manicured gardens, and also a few clever references here and there, such as a field trip taken by Alfred and Martha to a small village straight out of the Dunwich Horror.
Bet Sykes (no doubt named after the Dickens villain) is an incredible character, played with such an innocent enjoyment of violence and complete unawareness of how terrifying she is that she leapt straight into my top ten favourite female villains of all time. I also appreciated that a happy ending is given to the Alan Turing inspired character, who gets away on a plane with his lover.
But there's a nasty side as well. Along with Esme, the show isn't particularly kind to its female characters, which also include the wonderful (and totally wasted) Polly Walker, a young bartender who Alfie has sex with a couple of times and then drops like a rotten egg, and Martha herself, who is dragged to a party by Thomas's wastrel sister and sexually assaulted.
Of course, we don't see this assault, which takes place at the home of a Satanist, and Martha herself later insists to Thomas that nothing sexual happened - presumably because the writers felt deeply uncomfortable about making Bruce Wayne's mother a rape victim. Except that she is, because if you black out at a party and wake up naked in a field three days later, then you HAVE been sexually assaulted. Somebody took your clothes off and dumped you in a field without your knowledge and certainly without your permission.
Then there's the fact that Alfie is desensitized by his experiences in the war to such an extent that I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea that he ends up raising an orphaned Bruce Wayne. On the other hand, Bruce ends up a vigilante dressed as a giant bat, so maybe it all tracks.
It's a strange, compelling, often frustrating show that has no visible connection to anything Batman-related beyond the fact that three of the characters are called Alfred Pennyworth, Thomas Wayne and Martha Kane (which at least clued me in on how Kate Kane was related to Bruce). I'm not sure I'll tune in for the second season, but we'll see.
How To Train Your Dragon: Homecoming (2019)
This is a quick little short about the events that transpired just before the concluding scene in The Hidden World (the third and final film in the franchise) which end up inspiring Hiccup and Astrid to take their children to see the dragons they've told so many stories about.
We get names for those kids that were only briefly glimpsed at the end of the last film: the girl is called Zephyr, who takes after her father in her imaginative inventions, and the boy is Nuffink, whose defining traits seems to be taking a hit. I feel there's perhaps some favouritism in this family...
In any case, Hiccup is horrified to discover that his children are actually terrified at the thought of dragons, and decides to throw a pageant for them to express what Berk was actually like during their years of dragon training. It all goes horribly wrong of course, and events end up contradicting what happens at the end of the third film, but given that we only got a small glimpse of Hiccup and Astrid as parents in the film, it's nice to see two characters that we've watched grow from child to young adults actually enjoy their marriage and their children.
The Dragon Prince: Season 3 (2019)
I actually watched this last month and forgot to include it in my last post, not because it isn't memorable... okay, maybe because it isn't all that memorable. But that's not to say it isn't bad either. It's just a little difficult to recall what exactly happens in a standard fantasy-quest story, teeming with the usual suspects (elves, dragons and wizards), plus binge-watching any show isn't exactly conductive to remembering it well.
The best characters are still Soren and Claudia, the children of the main villain, whose true depths aren't quite known to them yet, though his sense of ruthlessness is certainly apparent in Claudia, whose spellcrafting often requires a heavy moral price. They both get a strong arc this season, with Claudia becoming more like her father while Soren frees himself from his influence, though the bond between the siblings themselves has yet to be truly tested.
Based on comments made by various writers (especially Aaron Ehasz) I suspect that Claudia is the show's Azula, who will eventually walk a redemptive arc that reconciles her to her brother, and so far it's working nicely.
Oh, and there are other characters too. Mage-in-training Callum and warrior-elf Kayla make it official, though a far more interesting couple is the deaf general Amaya and another warrior elf called Janai. Isn't it an awesome feeling when you notice a vibe between two characters and it pays off later?
As for the rest, this season is made up of a lot of travelling from place to place. Heck, Ezran travels all the way from the dragon kingdom to his own, and then all the way back again. It's as slowly paced as always, but there's still something appealing about its simplicity.
No comments:
Post a Comment