Reading/Watching Log #52

Well, if this lockdown has been good for anything (besides preventing the spread of a deadly disease) it’s in giving us plenty of time to binge-watch whatever we like and catch up on our extensive to-be-read lists. I hope everyone is managing well; here in New Zealand we’ve recently moved into Level 3, which means that fast foods places are back open, but other non-essential facilities (including libraries) are still closed.

Though I’ve largely stuck with my New Years’ Resolution of female-centric stories and creators, I loosened up a bit for the sake of stress-free viewing and just watched whatever I felt like in the moment. I’ll get back to my more rigorous screening process once this drama has wound down, but don’t be surprised if a few male-led films or shows are featured here.

I also managed to watch all the various takes on Emma (which I discuss in the post directly below this one) and the first two seasons of Killing Eve in preparation for season three. So glad that show is back!

I hope everyone's keeping safe out there.

Review: Emma (yes, all of them)

Over the last four weeks I’ve discovered the perfect combination of comforts for surviving lockdown: chocolate and Jane Austen – specifically Emma, her fourth published work and arguably her best novel. 

Yet even with nothing else to do, I didn’t have the time or energy to reread the book itself, so I made do with all five adaptations of the story, from the BBC’s miniseries in 1972, the Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle in 1996, the second BBC adaption to come out that same year, their third televised attempt in 2009, and Autumn de Wilde’s interpretation of early 2020.

The story certainly knows how to time itself, averaging one (nearly) every decade, at (rough) ten year intervals.

I’ve often believed that the reason Emma and Pride and Prejudice are over-represented in media is due to the fact Elizabeth and Emma are spirited in a way the ladies of Mansfield Park and Persuasion aren’t. Austen was saying something very different about social expectations and personal fortitude in her treatment of Anne Elliot and Fanny Price, which has inevitably led to screenwriters finding them “less fun”... but perhaps not entirely without reason. 

Elizabeth and Emma are more dynamic characters; they are different women at the end of their stories than they were at the beginning. It’s perhaps due to the internal change required of its main character that Emma is generally considered Austen’s finest work (even if Pride and Prejudice remains her most beloved) with a protagonist that is deeply flawed yet all the more lovable for it. 

According to Austen herself: "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like", and yet we do like Emma – not in spite of her faults, but because of them. Her snobbery, her meddling, her foolishness – it’s all so entertaining that it’s almost disappointing when she grows out of it.

Austen also deserves credit for taking the familiar beats of a romance novel and turning them inside out. In any other story it’s beautiful, impoverished and musically gifted Jane Fairfax who would be our protagonist, with Frank as the dashing, unpredictable love interest who promises to save her from a life of destitution if only she can endure the secrecy that’s required to survive his formidable aunt.

Emma stands in ignorance of the drama happening right under her nose, never doubting that she’s the main character but not realizing the point of her arc is to realize how wrong she is about everything, and that her true love isn’t the charming, enigmatic Frank but George Knightley: old family friend, next door neighbour and technical brother-in-law. 

All of Emma’s matchmaking attempts end in disaster, she completely misinterprets Mr Elton and Frank Churchill, and is completely wrong about everything. She’s… dare I say… clueless?

Emma Woodhouse is also unique for being the only one of Austen’s heroines who is under no familial, financial or even societal pressure to marry. She has no need to worry about her well-being or that of her family, and her father's desire to keep her close only increases her power. She can do whatever she likes, and so when she does eventually wed, it’s entirely because she wants to. 

It gives the book a lightness of spirit that’s missing from her other works, in which Elizabeth, Anne, Elinor and Marianne have to  actually worry about their futures and financial situations, and I suspect that’s another part of the reason why Emma has been adapted so often. So many readers – rightly or wrongly – look upon Austen as escapism, and as such Emma’s complete lack of poverty or long-term worry becomes the most appealing aspect of her story.

Review: Marvel Anime: X-Men

Before starting my rewatch of the animated X-Men adaptations, I had no idea this anime even existed. According to Wikipedia, the show was one of six animated collaborations between Marvel Entertainment and Madhouse studios (four series and two films in total). Airing between 2010 and 2012 in Japan and North America, the project also included Iron Man and Blade, as well as a solo Wolverine outing – which I'll get to next.

I've no idea how familiar the creators were with its direct predecessor Wolverine and the X-Men, but coincidentally or not, X-Men Anime also begins with the apparent death of Jean Grey and revolves around a mystery involving the trustworthiness of Emma Frost. It's also something of an inversion of X-Men Evolution, for whereas that show ended with a brief glimpse of Jean turning into the Phoenix, this one starts with it.  

In a short flashback, Phoenix-possessed Jean self-destructs in front of her teammates as a desperate last resort, leaving Cyclops devastated and the X-Men disbanded. It's a strong opening, and one that really captures the destruction and chaos the Phoenix wrought in a way no other adaptation has – but as it turns out, this series has virtually nothing to do with The Phoenix Saga. All that matters is that Jean is dead and Cyclops is heartbroken, and believe it or not, she doesn't return to life by the final episode.

The plot starts properly when the core members of the X-Men – Cyclops, Storm, Beast and Wolverine – are contacted by Professor X and asked to return to the mansion. He has a new mission for them, one that involves a trip to an isolated area of Japan that he finds impossible to scan with Cerebro. Something is blocking his efforts, and on arriving in the Tohoku region it becomes clear that something is very wrong: not only are there deformed fish in the streams and dead trees on the riverbank, but twenty young mutant children have gone missing.

Naturally, mutants are copping the blame for the trouble (and local police aren’t pursing the case for this precise reason), though the team is surprised to find such a large percentage of mutants amidst what is such a small population – especially since Cerebro is unable to penetrate the area. And so the investigation begins...

There are twelve episodes in all, each only about twenty minutes long, so things whizz by pretty quickly, with all the staples of anime that you’ve come to expect: gravity-defying boobs for the women, a tendency for men to get their shirts shredded to reveal six-pack abs, prolonged montages of reaction shots from characters (usually punctuated with gasps or grunts), and lots of uncomfortable butt poses.

Faerie Tale Theatre: Little Red Riding Hood

Looking back over my blog, I can see that I haven’t done one of these in two years. But if this pandemic is good for anything, it’s in forcing me to finish what I started… back in 2016.

For those not in the know, Faerie Tale Theatre was a pet project of Shelley Duvall that aired back in the eighties, covering most of the traditional tales in a sincere attempt to bring them to a young audience. I missed these while I was growing up, but they certainly feel like something I would have enjoyed at the time, and in to revisit as an adult for all that eighties kitsch.

The premise was that each fifty-minute episode would dramatize a familiar fairy tale (usually with some modern comedy and plenty of filler to plump up the run-time) within the scope of an actual theatre. The sets and props are very stagey, and the actors perform has though they’re in a pantomime theatre, with a live audience watching.

A lot of the stories are pretty hit-or-miss, with a general goofiness that offsets the surprising level of talents that Shelley Duvall managed to rope into this production, but I’d say it all holds up pretty well.

Though this instalment, Little Red Riding Hood, poses a challenge. How do you convert a story that can be rattled off to a child in under two minutes into an hour-long episode? Well, you throw in a love story between the main character (now called Mary) and her father’s apprentice, give plenty of screen-time to the wolf talking to himself (he’s been kicked out of his pack because he killed a boy – the one who cried wolf?) and construct a shaky character-arc in which Mary’s wish to be treated like an adult is tied to her parents’ overprotectiveness – though this peters out as it becomes more about her love interest proving himself to her father.

That’s a lot of padding for a pretty simple story about stranger danger, but it’s not the first time I’ve seen it done: I grew up with the Cannon Movie Tales, whose take on this story involves Red Riding Hood’s father’s evil twin taking over his brother’s position in the community while he’s away at some unspecified war, and terrorizes the people with his werewolf-for-hire. Yeah, suffice to say that adaptations struggle with this story… 

Review: Doctor Who: Season 12

For Jodi Whittaker’s maiden voyage as the Doctor’s thirteenth incarnation I reviewed each episode of season eleven, only to find that this time around I simply didn’t have time for that kind of commitment. But I certainly want to keep appreciating the work she’s doing (I’m the proud owner of a Thirteenth Doctor Rock Candy figurine) and so am continuing my ten-point template for Doctor Who related reviews – though in this case, it’s for the entire season and not per episode.

So, here are ten observations about season twelve of Doctor Who…

Xena Warrior Princess: The Price, Lost Mariner, A Comedy of Eros

And we’re back with another three Xena Warrior Princess episodes to take us to the end of season two! Episodes usually improve the nearer one gets to the close of a season, since this is the time in which all the stops are pulled out in order to end things on a bang, but Xena opts for three rather low-key and standalone stories that emphasis the characters’ relationships rather any long-term story arcs.

Those were different times! But it’s been fun revisiting this crazy, funny, tonally schizophrenic show. Now I can start looking forward to season three, where everything really hit its stride.

Woman of the Month: Mulan

Hua Mulan 花木蘭 from The Ballad of Mulan

Mulan might well be the oldest female character I’ve featured on this blog considering The Ballad of Mulan dates back to the 5th century and is set during the Northern Wei Empire, a dynasty which ruled northern China from 386 to 534 AD.

The story itself is fairly straightforward: out of filial piety to her father, and with the blessing of both her parents, Mulan disguises herself in her father’s armour and rides to war against Rouran invaders. There she wins herself great renown through her prowess in battle, and after twelve years of fighting she returns home, returning to her feminine appearance and shocking her visiting comrades, who in all their years together never realized who she truly was.

It’s a story ripe for expansion and adaptation, and there certainly have been many over the centuries. Some, like the Romance of the Sui and Tang (1675) come to a tragic end, in which Mulan teams up with another warrior woman, the king’s daughter Xianniang, but eventually kills herself to avoid becoming a concubine (I may pass on that one).

For better or worse Western audiences weren’t introduced to Mulan in mainstream entertainment until Disney’s take on the material in 1998 (I actually recall the film's tagline being "soon the world will know her name", which probably confused thousands of Chinese students who had to study the ballad in school). Their adaptation gives the traditional tale an overtly feminist angle, exploring the cultural expectations and gender roles placed upon women in a way the ancient ballad didn’t (in which Mulan not only went to war with her father’s permission, but without suffering any punishment for her subterfuge).

It’s also a movie filled with queer subtext and commentary on gender performance at a level that hasn’t been seen before or since in a Disney animated film, from both male and female characters partaking in what’s explicitly called cross-dressing, Shang presumably being attracted to “Ping”, Mulan’s male persona, and Mulan’s uncertainty and discomfort in her own skin (conveyed in her Reflection song), which has often been interpreted through a gay or transgender lens.

But due to a number of reasons (including but not limited to cultural/historical inaccuracies, the annoying animal sidekicks, and Mulan being more on a journey of self-discovery rather than one motivated by duty to her family and country) it wasn’t very well received in China, who went on to make their own version in 2009.

Mulan: Rise of a Warrior adhered closer to the events of the original ballad, while also including more themes of self-sacrifice and serving the greater good. This Mulan (played by Zhao Wei) is forced to give up the man she loves twice, first when he fakes his own death to force her into letting go of personal attachments, and then by her own volition so that he might marry the Rouran princess and secure a lasting peace between their people.

The character has popped up plenty of times since then, only a few of which I'm familiar with: Disney released a direct-to-video sequel in 2005, Cameron Dokey penned Wild Orchid, a retelling as part of the Once Upon a Time series, and of course Jamie Chung played the character in that other Once Upon a Time, in which she was a closeted bi who fell in love with Princess Aurora and never got the chance to tell her. Man, that show was so frustrating.

And hey, apparently The Secret of Mulan is a thing that exists, in which she’s depicted as a caterpillar who eventually transforms into a warrior-butterfly. Okay.

Oh, and let’s not forget her cameo appearance in Wreck-It Ralph: Ralph Breaks the Internet, where she’s setting off even more gay vibes.

Across all these versions of Mulan, you can’t imagine more profound differences in characterization. The original is intellectual and duty-bound, Disney’s is awkward and uncertain, Zhao Wei’s is stoic but sensitive. And as for the new Mulan, played by Yifei Liu – who knows? Her film is going to be delayed for a while longer, but it’s guaranteed to be a hit anyway.

Every version of Mulan goes to war to serve her country, but I think the reason she’s such an iconic and lasting figure is because her driving motivation is the love of her father. None of the adaptations really get into why China needs defending, or even if doing so is the right thing to do (hey, what if the Rourans or Huns had a justified reason for invading?) because Mulan’s decision is more about her deep love for the man who raised her.

And this may seem like an odd reference, but I’m reminded of a quote by Ziauddin Yousafzai, father of Malala: “Why is my daughter strong? I didn’t clip her wings. Malala used to be known as my daughter, but now I'm known as her father - and proud of it.”

The same could be said of Mulan.