Reading/Watching Log #72

Much like a child stuffing their face at Christmas dinner, this month was all about cramming in as many of the things I’ve been meaning to watch/read as I could before the New Year. This led to a concentrated effort in staggering my viewing options, racing through several books and averaging at least two movies per week.

I naturally had to watch The Fellowship of the Ring for its twentieth anniversary, The Matrix in preparation for Resurrections, and another Robin Hood movie to finish things off, an ongoing project that just sort of happened this year.

Along the way, two distinct themes emerged: science-fiction and Christmas – that is, a specific type of Christmas: the cosy, cluttered, roasted chestnuts and sugarplum visions type of Christmas, in which magical adventures take place in the ordinary world.

For that reason, I also ended up reading some picture books featuring my favourite illustrators; I won’t cover them in this log, but they tapped into this particular type of Christmas aesthetic: Jan Brett’s The Nutcracker, Ruth Sanderson’s The Nativity, and Jane Ray’s Grace and the Christmas Angel.

And of course, two seminal touchstones from my childhood: Walter Wick’s I Spy Christmas and Do You See What I See: Night Before Christmas (the former more than the latter, as they were published over ten years apart). Just disappearing into these incredible photographs was a trip down memory lane, and I was surprised to find that I remembered where most of the stuff was – or maybe not so surprising even the hours I spent poring over these pages. And I finally found the stick of gum!

So I managed to get through a lot of material these last four weeks, and if it hadn’t been for me deliberately taking a break from these types of projects, I also would have had to contend with The Witcher, The Book of Boba Fett, Spider Man: No Way Home and the Hawkeye limited series. Whew. There is just too much stuff out there right now, though I still plan to get to The Wheel of Time and the new season of Star Trek Discovery in January.

I hope all your Christmases went well, and are sufficiently braced for the New Year...

The Legend of the Seeker: Fever

The one with the convenient amnesia...

The first writer to learn that amnesia was a thing that sometimes happened must have been over the moon at the possibilities it afforded, as Easy Amnesia has been a staple part of storytelling for centuries at this point. You can see why: a person who has no idea who they are is at their most vulnerable, is subject to effortless manipulation, and provides an opportunity to delve into who they are without that which defines them: their memories.

That said, the penultimate episode of season one isn’t providing a case study on Jennsen, who returns for her second appearance, but rather uses her as a plot-point to endanger her brother and get the location of the Boxes of Orden.

As was established when we saw her last, she’s living under the radar with a Resistance family, only for D’Haran soldiers to start house-by-house raids in search of her. The questionable fact that our protagonists have left two of the three Boxes of Orden with an adolescent girl (given the sheer power of these things, they needed to be in three separate locations, and kept in a better hiding place than under a loose stone in the fireplace) is mitigated somewhat by Jennsen being given a stone (or nut...?) that amounts to a suicide pill, just in case they try to take her alive.

Links and Updates

This is going to be the last Links and Updates of the year, so let’s also make it a brief retrospective of 2021. It sucked quite a lot. Covid-19 is still among us, and unfortunately my prior smugness over how well New Zealand was handling it over the rest of the world went down in smoke once the anti-vaxxers got their hooks in the general populace.

Thankfully there hasn’t been any violence yet, but plenty of protests against lockdowns, vaccines and special passes (those who haven’t been vaxxed don’t get a vaccine passport, and therefore are restricted from certain public buildings) led by various on-line nutters who believe in anything from microchips to communist takeovers to undercover lizard people. I’d feel sorry for them if they weren’t so painfully stupid.

I have to keep reminding myself that they’re the minority. 86% of the population have been vaccinated, and support the safety measures put in place to protect the vulnerable from those that aren’t. They’re the people I have to focus on.

On a personal level, this is the year that I became both a homeowner and an auntie, even though I still can’t afford to actually move into my new house, and my nephew is currently living in England. Ah well, good things take time.

I’ve also been thinking about a lot of films that celebrated their twentieth anniversaries this year, and wow – I didn’t realize at the time just how prolific 2001 was in giving us so many stories that are still significant (in terms of sequels and remakes and cultural relevance) all these years later: The Fellowship of the Ring, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Legally Blonde, Shrek, Spirited Away, A Knight’s Tale, Spy Kids, The Fast and the Furious, Monsters INC, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Moulin Rouge! – not all of them are good by any means, but these franchises – or at least their influence – are all still with us to one extent or another. What a year!

It was also the release of some of my personal favourites, such as The Others starring Nicole Kidman, and Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, which very much served as the spiritual precursor to Downton Abbey.

And Zoolander. Can’t forget that one.

Woman of the Month: The Sugar Plum Fairy

Woman of the Month: The Sugar Plum Fairy from The Nutcracker

I usually try to pick someone particularly iconic for the end of each year, and I’ve also decided to go a little festive this time around. But would you say that the Sugar Plum Fairy is really iconic? I think so.

Most people would be able to pick her out of a line-up, associating her with The Nutcracker (or at least with ballet) and her tinkling music-box melody is surely recognizable to everyone, even if they can’t place the context.

But as a character she’s essentially a non-entity. She’s given no name (only a title made up of a combination of the three most delectable words in the English language) and naturally doesn't speak a word of dialogue. She's not the main character of Tchaikovsky’s ballet, not showing up until the second act, and doesn't even exist in E.T.A. Hoffman's original story. 

Yet to me, it’s what the Sugar Plum Fairy embodies that makes her so memorable. Like Father Christmas or Glinda the Good Witch or Yoda, she’s a character that we intrinsically associate with goodness and benevolence. She's the pinnacle of elegance and beauty and sweetness; she doesn’t have to be anything more than that; her very name conjures up everything we need to know about her.

(That’s why I disliked The Nutcracker and the Four Realms so much, as that movie turns her into one of Disney’s patented Hidden Villains. It was awful).

Antonietta Dell’Era first danced the Sugar Plum Fairy at the Marinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in the December of 1892, with the role having been deliberately created in order to showcase a prima ballerina in the performance (considering the leads Clara and the Nutcracker Prince have always been played by children).

Her performance is also notable due to the use of the celesta (or bell piano) in her solo, an instrument which uses felt hammers to hit its bells (its inventor called it a celesta after its heavenly or “celestial” sound, and the ballet’s original choreographer Marius Petipa wanted the Sugar Plum Fairy’s music to sound like “drops of water shooting from a fountain”).

Tchaikovsky wasn’t the first composer to use the instrument in an orchestral piece, but was the first to give it a prolonged solo – and it’s been a favourite ever since, perhaps most recognizable to modern audiences as the instrument used for Hedwig’s Theme in the Harry Potter films. But everyone knows those delicate first few notes of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.

There have been plenty of variations on her character over the years: she was originally the ruler of the Land of Sweets, but some productions have Clara herself transform into the Fairy for the third act, and about ten years ago the New Zealand Royal Ballet reimagined her as the night-nurse of the children’s ward, where Clara was convalescing after an illness.

Since then she’s also become a symbol of Christmas itself – specifically a child’s view of Christmas: think sweets and presents and toyshop windows and trips to the pantomime (there’s a reason Clement Clarke Moore used the phrase: “visions of sugarplums danced in their heads” in The Night Before Christmas).

I was going to make this December a science-fiction month, but now I’m leaning more towards... folksy Christmas fantasy? There’s not really a recognized term for what I’m talking about, only a vibe: think talking dolls, clockwork toys, warm clutter, candlelit Victorian Christmas trees, delicate ornaments, stop-motion animation, I Spy books, Shirley Hughes’s illustrations, paper stars, gingerbread men, television holiday specials from the eighties... the Sugar Plum Fairy fits right into this aesthetic.

She’s not like any female character I’ve showcased on this blog before, simply because she’s not a character but a symbol. For those who celebrate Christmas, she embodies our collective childhood understanding of the holiday – Christmas not as it was, but as it existed in our imaginations. As ephemeral as a snowflake or candy floss, she’s nevertheless still as immortal and eternal as the man in red.

(What IS a sugar plum anyway? A plum infused with sugar? Coated with it? How can I get one? Will it turn out to be a disappointment like Turkish Delight, or is it as incredible as it sounds?)

Reading/Watching Log #71

This month was all about spies and espionage, which not only meant three James Bond films, but also two television shows – one for adults and one for children – that first aired back in 2001, which I’m shocked to say was twenty years ago.

I also found out that three similarly-themed children’s books from various series I’ve read in the past have all released new instalments... pretty much at the same time! Enola Holmes, Wells and Wong and Sophie and Lil have all had unexpected continuations of their stories when I assumed they had come to a close. So that was a nice surprise.

And some Alex Rider, because you can’t have a spy-themed month without him.

Meta: The Problem With Witches

Yikes, it’s been dead around here, but real life has an annoying way of cutting into one’s blog-time. Have some random musings on witches in pop-culture...

This post doesn’t have any sort of profound conclusions to be drawn from it, rather it’s more of a series of observations that I noticed while knee-deep in my October viewing of witch-related media.

Woman of the Month: Jennifer Pierce

Jennifer Pierce from Black Lightning 

I know you’re all surprised that of the two Pierce sisters, I’m going with Jennifer instead of Anissa as November’s Woman of the Month. After all, Anissa is the fierce, ass-kicking lesbian who embraces her preternatural abilities and goes out to fight crime every night. Jennifer... is a teenage girl who mostly just wants to be left alone.

And yet, as I make my way through the four seasons of Black Lightning, I find myself relating more to Jen. Even without the eventual lightning powers, the show gives her an interesting setup: as the daughter of the high school principal, she’s a target of attention and speculation (anathema to a teenage girl) that culminates in her getting the nickname “Queen of Garfield.”

On top of that, she’s shouldering her parents’ expectations that she’ll behave as a model student, setting an example for her peers. Most teenagers go through their rebellious phase, but Jennifer is living under too close a scrutiny for her to try anything too drastic.

When her abilities do start to kick in, she’s more realistically reticent about them than her older sister. In her eyes, they’re just another thing in her life that separates her from her friends and classmates, though she’s also concerned about the biological and ethical implications: how are they affecting her body? Will they prevent her from having children one day? Does this mean she’s morally obligated to join the family business of crime-fighting?

It’s an angle that’s not usually taken in superhero dramas, in which most protagonists can’t wait to get out there and start beating up bank robbers. That Jennifer’s arc takes a longer route through the metaphorical forest makes it all the more rewarding when she finally dons the suit – and even then, she’s still in the midst of figuring things out.

As I’m currently at the halfway point of season three, I’ve yet to find out if there are going to be any changes to the timeline post-Crisis, or how the situation with Odell (a sinister government agent manipulating her for his own ends) will resolve itself. But China Anne McClain nails the teenage girl vibe: somewhere between having a deep emotional investment in the world around her, and no small degree of pertness when it comes to getting her own way.

Reading/Watching Log #70

This is the spooky season, so obviously we’re dealing with witches. It was an easy enough theme to pick for the month, and it provided me with a wealth of material to choose from: modern witches, old school witches, monstrous witches, superhero witches – but mostly nineties witches.

It was actually fascinating to watch the progression of how witchcraft has been perceived by humankind across the decades, from the servants of a male devil, to enigmatic (though not unwelcome) seductresses, to glamourous evil-fighters with an empowerment angle. The subject also brought into stark relief the way in which women and power are portrayed across the media landscape, and it’s been fascinating to see how it changes across the years – or in many cases, doesn’t change.

I won’t delve too deeply into it now, though there’s enough content here for me to write a whole other post about the topic and how it’s been received by increasingly feminist-leaning audiences, for good or bad. Stay tuned.

Review: The Craft and The Craft Legacy

SPOILERS FOR BOTH MOVIES

If you were an adolescent girl who came of age in the nineties, then it’s safe to assume you went through a witch phase. I’m not entirely sure what it was about that specific decade that kickstarted such a heightened interest in witchcraft, but it gave us Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Charmed, Practical Magic and The Craft, as well as a range of paperbacks ranging in quality from L.J. Smith’s The Secret Circle to Cate Tiernan’s Sweep, Silver Ravenwolf’s Witches' Chillers to Isobel Bird’s Circle of Three. Even Hocus Pocus.

Okay, so a few of those were technically released in the very early noughts, but nearly all of these properties have had a long shelf-life. Most of them are now considered cult classics, and since then there have been two prequels to Practical Magic, a short-lived television adaptation of The Secret Circle, Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, a reboot to Charmed with a race-lifted cast, and again – even Hocus Pocus has a sequel coming out.

Then there’s what we’re here to talk about today: The Craft Legacy, the 2020 sequel to the original Craft film.

Released in 1996, The Craft is one of those rare examples of a cult classic that was reasonably well-received by critics and a box-office success at the time of its release. In fact, you could make a case for it being the source of the nineties witch-craze, particularly when it comes to the subgenre’s modern connotations with sisterhood and girl-power.

Of course, that subtext was always there to some extent, as it’s impossible to extract the subject of witchcraft from that of a. womankind, b. the wielding of power, and c. the societal fear of combining those two things: women with power. From the term “witch” naturally emerges themes of persecution and ostracization from society, particularly the subjugation of women at the hands of the patriarchy across the course of human history.

Links and Updates

It’s the season of the witch, which means that my Tumblr dashboard is filled with photos and images of autumn, despite the fact that here in New Zealand, we’re heading into summer.

The spectre of Covid-19 is still hanging over all of us, and much of the team spirit that defined our first experience with the pandemic last year is on the wane. The anti-vaxxer crowd are making their voices heard, and plenty of selfish assholes are flouting lockdown rules in order to exercise their right to “freedom”, even though their behaviour is only going to limit freedom in the long run.

If there was any justice in the world, they’d be the ones that catch the Delta strain and spend the next few weeks gasping for breath, though they’ll probably just pass it on to others. What I wouldn’t give to see a certain religious leader/nutter hooked up to a ventilator.

But I got my second jab this morning from a walk-in centre so I can tick that off my to-do list. And there’s some interesting stuff coming up...

Standing Tall #31

I haven’t done one of these in a while!

This giraffe, called The Best of Times, was one of the best sculptures on display. It was beautifully located outside Riccarton House, which is a heritage site comprised of two of the earliest buildings constructed by European settlers in Christchurch, and a native bush area containing kahikatea trees up to six hundred years old. It’s also where my uncle and aunt got married, though that’s neither here nor there.

Sponsored by Kidicorp (a childcare organization) the artist is Penny Cameron, herself a preschool teacher. According to my guidebook, it took over 170 hours to create, with thousands of pieces of coloured tile making up the mosaic surface of the giraffe, portraying a variety of places, seasons and activities to be found in Christchurch. I can see depictions of the Chinese lantern festival, the daffodils at the Botanic Gardens, and the Ferrier Fountains outside the Town Hall to identify but three.

I ended up visiting this one twice, as Riccarton House and its weekend markets are one of my favourite places to visit at the best of times (see what I did there?) and it was ultimately one of the most popular giraffes put to auction.

Woman of the Month: Prue Halliwell

Prue Halliwell from Charmed

This month I plan to watch the first season of the original Charmed, a quintessential part of my early adolescence and perfect viewing for the month of October.

Whenever there’s a trio of fictional sisters (or even just a duo), it’s inevitably the eldest one I’ll relate to most since – well, I’m the eldest one. To be the firstborn of the family means being the most responsible, the de facto leader, the homebody, the one with the most expectations placed upon your shoulders – at least, that’s the characterization this type usually gets.

Prue embodies all these attributes, and in many ways her role as the oldest Halliwell sister informs her entire story-arc. She’s the one most reluctant to embrace her witch heritage, the one imbued with the most power, and the one burdened with juggling a full-time job, maintenance of the family home, the awakening of her telekinesis gift, and the arrival of an old flame...

If you could sum the character up with one word, it would be “duality”, as despite her very name (Prudence) implying cautiousness and common sense, the fact that she can move objects with her mind – or throw them, fling them, hurl them – is a reflection of her true inner self. That is, there’s a storm of emotions beneath her brisk, professional exterior, and after a later episode reveals that her power is triggered by anger, a new context is brought to the way the gradual mastery of her abilities is staggered across the course of the season. She’s tapping into her long-suppressed emotions, and her newfound telekinesis is their outlet.

I have pretty much memory-holed everything that came after the first season of Charmed: I recall the plots got dumber, the outfits got uglier, and Prue... died. (Though I read her character page on the wiki, and apparently she eventually gets reincarnated in another witch’s body? Then goes missing? And then gets reunited with Piper and Phoebe before ascending to the afterlife? Man, I missed a lot!)

But as far as I’m concerned, the first season’s twenty-two episodes, with its solid arc and decent characterization, is all I need from this particular franchise. The witches of the nineties – the Charmed Ones, Willow and Tara, Sabrina Spellman, the Owens sisters, and the coven from The Craft – will always be remembered fondly by me, as they are the characters that kept me company as I transitioned from child to teenager. Of course, Prue is possibly the one I most aspired to be: confident, intelligent, level-headed, and able to throw things around with her mind.

Reading/Watching Log #69

This month was ostensibly Part II of the superhero-themed month that I started in August, but aside from finally getting to the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover and finishing up with the first season of Batwoman and the very last season of Arrow, I still don’t feel I’ve made significant headway on the ever-increasing roster of CW superhero shows (Supergirl, The Flash, Black Lightning and Legends of Tomorrow are still waiting patiently for completion – and apparently Stargirl is already on season three! I will never catch up).

Reading-wise I finished Elizabeth Knox’s Dreamhunter duology and the third book in Mary Hoffman’s Stravaganza series, started on Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice trilogy, was introduced to Tony Cliff’s Delilah Dirk (who also provided September’s Woman of the Month) and enjoyed... some miscellaneous stuff.

Movie choices were even more irregular: a black-and-white screwball comedy, an animated cult classic, and the deconstruction of a late 14th-century Middle English chivalric romance.

At least October will provide me with a much easy theme to adhere to: witches.

Legend of the Seeker: Sanctuary

The one with the magical painting...

Could this be the strangest ever episode of Legend of the Seeker?

The objective of the story is easy to discern: to reunite Richard and Kahlan with the Book of Counted Shadows, or at least a copy of it. The original is what Richard deliberately threw into a fire in the very first episode because he felt that choosing his own destiny was more important than following a guidebook. (And for the record, TV Tropes tells me that the “counted shadows” part of its title refers to the fact it’s meant to be an instruction manual for the Boxes of Orden, which each cast a different number of shadows when they’re in direct sunlight. Here, the boxes contain no such quality, which only adds to the half-baked feeling of this particular MacGuffin).

Deciding that yes, perhaps destiny guidebooks are the way to go (or at the very least to keep it out of Darken Rahl’s hands) our trio go in search of this new copy.

Legend of the Seeker: Cursed

The one with the werewolf that isn’t actually a werewolf...

Like many episodes in this series, Cursed is more important than it initially appears. Though you could get away with skipping it, the story introduces the concept of the Rada’Han, reminds us of Shota’s existence, and fills in a little background on Zed...

In a rare story development, the gang doesn’t stumble upon trouble or meet with a Resistance assignation, but rather receives a message with a request for help. Having long since accepted that helping individuals will be prioritized over any big-picture Rahl-defeating missions, Kahlan and Zed accompany Richard to the territory of King Gregor to hear his story...