Reading/Watching Log #75

Somehow this became a month of romantic comedies from the nineties (and one from 1989). What brought this on? Watching Fear Street 1994 for the fourth time? I can’t rightly say, but below the cut are four staples of the genre and I hadn’t even seen most of them (and the two I had were so long ago that I’d forgotten most of the beats).

It was a genre ruled by Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock. They found themselves in absurd situations, such as pretending to be a coma patient’s fiancée, or falling in love with a man they’d never met, or working in secret to destroy a wedding, and very much set the tone for all romantic comedies to come. It’s not my favourite genre, but there’s stuff here that’s worth seeing, if not just to get a handle on the influence they had.  

As per my New Year’s Resolution, I’ve been trying to concentrate on reading, having realized that it’s much more conductive to getting my creative juices flowing. Seeing as the library is only admitting people with vaccine passes and that the city council are no longer footing the bill for security guards, there’s plenty of time for reading when you’re on door-duty for hours at a time. *internal screaming*

Dark Waters by Katherine Arden

The third (but clearly not final, given the cliff-hanger ending) book in this as-yet unnamed series sees our three young protagonists once more go up against “the smiling man”, an immortal fey creature who loves to make deals and play games with unsuspecting mortals. As I anticipated after Small Spaces and Dead Voices, this book places Brian front-and-centre while Ollie and Coco take on supporting roles.

Having received a cryptic note that promises yet another round of the terrifying feud they’ve been dragged into, the trio leap at the chance to take a boat ride on Lake Champlain, a location that seems far outside the influence of the smiling man and his power.

Of course, that’s not about to happen. After spotting an island not marked on any map, a terrifying water snake sinks their boat and runs them aground, where strange voices filter through the radio, an axe-wielding man carries on conversations with a skeleton, and Ollie’s father slowly succumbs to a snake bite.

Brian steps up to get everyone through the ordeal, though it’s a challenge to keep everyone calm when things are going from bad to worse.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this book is that having already gone up against a vindictive and powerful fey who can warp reality twice already, the trio are clearly suffering from no small degree of PTSD. They’re nervy and anxious, barely hang out with anyone but each other, and live in constant fear of the smiling man popping up again. That said, their ordeal has granted them some degree of experience, and (as another character notes at one point) they are surprisingly calm when shit finally hits the fan.

This time their parents and another school friend are with them, which means they have to work around their ignorance of the situation while not understating the real danger they’re in. Arden captures the desolation of the island and its spooky inhabitants to great effect – like the autumnal forest and isolated ski lodge of the previous books, she’s great at creating atmosphere.

It wasn’t my favourite of the three books, and a lot of it feels like setup for the fourth and final instalment, but it was still engaging. The last one should be firing on all cylinders, what with Ollie’s life being on the line, and the others roped into one last game to set her free.

Aggie Morton: The Dead Man in the Garden by Marthe Jocelyn

Another third book in a series, this one offering a fictionalized look at the childhood of Agatha Christie and her friendship with the boy who will one day serve as the inspiration for Hercule Poirot. I’m not sure exactly how biographical these are: obviously the murder mysteries are a complete fabrication, but I’m assuming that the details of Aggie’s family and home are authentic.

The back of the book tells me that the inspiration of setting this story at a luxury spa came from the disappearance of Agatha Christie after her divorce and her reappearance ten days later at the Old Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, which is as good a reason as any to build a murder-mystery around such a location.

Having travelled with her mother, grandmother and friend Hector Perot to a Yorkshire spa so that her mother might take the healing waters and recover from the recent death of her husband, young Aggie is intrigued to hear there’s already been a death at a nearby boarding house... just a little while before a second one occurs. Naturally she’s on the case, along with Grannie Jane (clearly a nod to Miss Marple), Hector and fellow guest George Bellamere, a young boy in a wheelchair with a long-suffering nurse.

There are some great supporting characters in these books, like Mr Fibbley (real name: Miss Truitt) the crossdressing journalist, and Miss Napoli, the early prototypical pathologist who suspects poisoning in the victims. The mystery itself is rather pedestrian: it’s not so much that I couldn’t guess who the murderer was among the usual false leads and red herrings, but that I didn’t actually care that much. Perhaps the tone is too light to really get invested in a murder.

There are some fun Easter eggs (at one point a character laments: “why didn’t they ask Evans?”) and it’s obvious that Jocelyn is a big fan of Christie’s mysteries, so it makes for a diverting read. They’re fun, but not essential.

The In-Between by Rebecca K.S. Ansari

Inspired by the real-life mystery of the Charfield railway disaster, in which sixteen people were killed in 1926 after two trains collided in misty weather, including two small children whose bodies were never identified or claimed. Taking this as the inciting incident, the author introduces us to Cooper and Jess, two contemporary children still struggling with their parents’ divorce and the fact their father has since started a new family.

Cooper is vaguely aware of the girl across the street, who sits in the swing outside and stares at him, but is far too caught up in his own anger to really care. Jess on the other hand, has very much noticed the mysterious girl, particularly the crest on her school blazer. She’s researched the Charfield railway crash for an assignment at school, and has noticed that their new across-the-road neighbour bears the same crest as the dead child found in the crash. But what on earth could the connection be?

This is one of those puzzle-box plots, in which an array of seemingly unconnected plot-points eventually come together in a satisfying whole – though in this case, I wasn’t entirely sure the author would pull it off. Cooper and Jess’s family turmoil seemed thematically unconnected with the weird mystery that falls into their laps, and the mystery itself made up of so many disparate moving parts that I was deeply sceptical that it would all come together in the end.

But what do you know – it did! It’s certainly gets more metaphysical than I expected: some details are overexplained while the broader scope of the whys and wherefores remain opaque, but for the most part the story sticks its landing. I can’t even remember why I picked this one off the library shelf in the first place, and its been sitting in my TBR pile for ages, but it was a good one!

Relic Master: The Dark City by Catherine Fisher

I’m always down to read anything by Catherine Fisher, though this quartet (called Relic Master) skews closer to high fantasy than anything I’ve ever read from her – even if it is technically dystopian. Little clues strewn throughout suggest that this medieval-era feudalist society is actually a colonized planet of the far-distant future. What the population call “relics” are actually remains of old technology, and the “Masters” that they revere are the original colonists, who have since left and are now remembered as gods.

Catherine Fisher’s gift as an author lies in the relative simplicity of her plots, which are held together with vivid prose and deep insights into her subject matter. To look at the bare outlines of the story, it’s a simple quest narrative, with all the beats you’d expect: traps, escapes, hostage situations, wandering bands of thieves, fanatical “witch” hunters, the remnants of a magical order hunted to extinction... and yet there’s enough verve in the way she tells this familiar tale that makes it a page-turner.

Raffi is the apprentice of Galen Harn, a Keeper (or Relic Master) who is tasked with collecting the long-ago relics of the Masters and safeguarding them. Both are part of what’s called the Order of the Keepers, though this society has been persecuted by the Watch, who are out to destroy all remnants of the Masters and those that followed them.

Galen is a crotchety companion, largely due to the staggering losses of friends and knowledge that he’s sustained throughout his life, but is also a true believer in the faith and an exacting teacher to Raffi. Over the course of their adventures, which eventually takes them to the city of Tasceron (the dark city of the title) they’re joined by a young woman called Carys who is secretly working for the Watch and hoping that the two of them can lead her to more relics before she betrays them.

But of course, in the time-honoured tradition of such tales, close contact with the “enemy” has her reassessing everything she’s been taught to believe. (Which also makes her the book’s most interesting character. Compared to her, protagonist Raffi is downright dull).

At this point things like the political landscape, the world’s history and the various belief systems are all very lightly sketched, but you can tell Fisher will delve more into them as the books continue. Or at least I hope so; the characters have their adventures against an interesting backdrop, and I’m eager to see how some of the broader concepts regarding the Order, the Watch, the Emperor and the Relics fit together.

It’s more fantasy than sci-fi, though that balance may tip in the latter’s favour as the series goes on. It wasn’t until after reading it that I discovered this was initially published back in the nineties, and the success of her more recent publications justified a reprint of her earlier work (naturally repackaged with shiny new covers and advertised as brand-new material).

If anything, it reminded me of Diana Wynne Jones’s Dalemark quartet... which is a little strange, because I only ever read one of those books, years ago, before getting permanently distracted. Maybe this is a sign that I should return to them.

Relic Master: The Lost Heiress by Catherine Fisher

The second in the four-part series, which is named for the lost granddaughter of the assassinated Emperor, who was found as a baby and raised among the Watch (effectively making her a traitor to her own people). Unfortunately the book doesn’t spend a lot of time with this story – the character doesn’t even turn up till well over three-quarters of the way through.

(And obviously: find the lost royal heir to the throne has been done a million times before, though I’m going to hold off on judgment till the end of the series. I have the feeling Fisher is preparing for a twist on expectations).

Having received a missive from the Makers at the end of the first book, Galen and Raffi are spreading the word among the faithful: that their gods are going to return and overthrow the hated Watch. Rescued from this world’s equivalent of a priest’s hole by their quasi-ally Carys (still working through her existential crisis over who she is and what she should believe) they share with her a single word: Interrex. It refers to the missing heiress, but provokes a range of reactions depending on who hears it.

Since the previous book, Carys has been caught in a stalemate with her overseer Braylwin, who caught her assisting a family she was meant to be terrorizing and now holds complete control over her. So that he doesn’t blow her cover, she’s forced to obey his every command. In many ways it’s more her book than anyone’s, especially once she ends up at the Tower of Song. Once the summer palace of the Emperor and now the Watch’s most important fastness, it’s where she must use all her wits and training to survivor its dangers, learn where she comes from, and outsmart her fellow Watchmen, who have all been trained since childhood to hold no loyalty to anyone but their overseers.

Though there’s still plenty of material for Raffi, it was a smart decision to devote more pages to Carys given that her internal conflict and self-awakening is far more interesting than anything her co-protagonist has going on, and hopefully Fisher realizes (or realized, since this was published more than two decades ago) that the titular lost heiress is in a similarly interesting position going forward.

Beware the Wild by Natalie C. Parker

I’ll admit to loving the aesthetic of Southern Gothic: the bayous, the Spanish moss, the gators, the plantation houses, while feeling a bone-deep antipathy to the ever-present (but usually ignored) spectre of its bloody history. In books such as this, it’s always there and hardly ever remarked upon.

Such is the case with Beware the Wild, though to be fair it’s not trying to be anything deeper than a YA ghost story. Sticks is a small town in Louisiana, on the verge of a swamp that’s the main focus in an array of odd stories, and held at bay by a fence covered in candles, charms and other gris-gris to keep the spirits away.

Sterling Saucier’s brother has disappeared into that swamp after a fight, and before a single day has passed, a girl emerges to take his place. Lenora May enters the family dynamic as though she’s always been there, inserting herself into everyone’s memories, and Sterling is horrified to realize she’s the only one who remembers Phineas. Everyone else’s memories of him have been neatly replaced with ones of Lenora May.

It’s an effective take on a supernatural home invasion story, which is high on atmosphere and filled with a couple of interesting... not twists exactly, but perspective flips. Because it’s YA, Sterling is naturally assisted by a broody, smouldering bad boy with a haunted past, but there’s also some neat use of folklore tropes at work here.

It would seem the author is building a series around this community, each one focusing on a different protagonist from within Sterling’s group of friends, if the sequel is anything to go by...

Behold the Bones by Natalie C. Parker

This is that sequel, moving from Sterling Saucier to Candance (or Candy) Pickens as the main character. Candy’s family has a slightly morbid tradition: certain members of the family will be born on the exact same day that another (older) one dies, creating what seems like a cause-and-effect chain across the generations. No one knows why it happens or what it means, but Candy is the latest to claim this dubious honour, having been born on the same day that her grandfather Solomon Craven died.

The strange supernatural occurrences that featured in the previous book have caught the attention of a hit television show called “Local Haunts”, and the producer has relocated his entire family to the area in the hopes of filming more ghostly activity. Candy isn’t particularly interested, as her entire shtick is that she’s basically immune to the paranormal: according to those that can see ghosts – and the mysterious energy known as the Shine that fills the swamp – such things flinch away from her mere presence.

But the daughter of the show’s producer is eager to befriend Candy, and despite her suspicions and distaste for ghostly activity, Candy is sufficiently interested in Nova’s brother Gage to allow herself to get befriended...

About two chapters into this book I realized that it was referring to events in such a way that assumed a reader’s familiarity with them. I checked the back of the book, saw that it was the sequel to Beware the Wild, and came back to it after having read its predecessor. Just as well, because even though it’s a standalone story, there’s a lot here about the community and how the swamp operates that’s elevated by the setup done in the previous book.

Candy makes for a very different protagonist than Sterling, and I’m in torn in how I responded to her. She’s brash, outspoken and pretty rude sometimes – but then doesn’t fandom collectively demand heroines (especially in YA fiction) that aren’t cardboard cut-outs of each other, something other than shy “not like the other girls” bookworms? I suspect most of the target audience won’t relate to Candy, and it makes for a balancing act between accepting her abrasiveness as a deliberate flaw and finding her borderline obnoxious at times.

Still, it does end on a note of personal growth for her. I liked these lines: “What I didn’t know until right this very minute was how growing up happens in little surges. We grow up in moments – when we encounter such stupidities in ourselves that our only choice is to grow past them or into them.”

Behold the Bones has more interesting ideas at work than Beware the Wild, though the latter is a neater and more satisfying story. As this one was wrapping up, I found myself wondering how everything was going to be dealt with satisfactorily within the dwindling page-count – and naturally, not all of it was. There’s one moral equation in particular that deserved far more time and space to explore properly, and instead it was squeezed into the book’s final chapters.

All that said, it’ll be interesting to see if there are more forthcoming books set in Sticks, Louisiana. It seems that Abigail, the third member in this triad of teenage friends, is due for a story of her own.

The Wolf Gift by Anne Rice

Anne Rice passed away just last year in December, but I promise you – I had this book sitting on my TBR pile, waiting its turn since October. I’ve enjoyed a lot of Rice’s stuff, but some of her later work is rather dire, and The Wolf Gift is... unusual. Moving from vampires and witches to werewolves, this first book of a duology contains a lot of her favourite tropes: astonishing wealth, beautiful homes, random hook-ups, theological underpinnings, detailed descriptions of food, furnishings and other luxuries, and the gradual unveiling of an interesting mythology.

Reuben is a twenty-something journalist tasked with interviewing the owner of a stunning coastal home in San Francisco who is on the brink of putting it up for sale. Moments after entering, he’s overcome with desire for both it and its owner, and after learning some of its strange history (it used to belong to the woman’s great-uncle, who disappeared in mysterious circumstances some years ago) things inevitably lead to the bedroom...

He’s woken up by a break-in, during which the owner is killed and Reuben is attacked by a vicious beast. Though the exact circumstances of the crime are a little murky (turns out there was more than one person at the house that night) Reuben soon discovers that he’s been irrevocably changed. I’ll spare you the details; he’s obviously a werewolf now.

Keeping this transformation a secret from his family and several dodgy doctors is one thing, but having inherited the house from his one-night stand (who changed her will before her death – convenient!) Reuben is galvanised by scents of pure evil in the night air and becomes a sort-of werewolf superhero... if superheroes were known for ripping apart perpetrators.

The pacing and flow are all over the place. Seriously, this is such a strange book to read. A big deal is made of Reuben’s brother, a Catholic priest, but the obvious conflict to be mined from that scenario is ignored. Reuben hooks up with a woman called Laura who lives in a cottage in the woods: they sleep together while he’s in his werewolf form without so much as an exchange of words, and it’s presented as true love for the rest of the book. Finally, the climax happens maybe a third of the way through the story, leaving a huge chunk of expository chapters to bring things to a close.

And par for the course, some interminably goofy bits, such as everyone referring to the werewolf as the “Man Wolf”. Yup, we have another contender for World’s Most Unpleasant Fantasy Term, along with Star Wars’s younglings and Harry Potter’s No-Majs. Man Wolf. My teeth itch just looking at it. No one would ever call it that.

Honestly, the most accurate take on this book was from Goodreads, in which a commentator says: “It could only have been written by Anne Rice. I’m actually stumped as to how someone who hasn’t read any of Anne Rice’s books before would feel about this novel.” It’s so true. I enjoyed Interview with the Vampire and The Witching Hour as much as the next person, but she went to some pretty bizarre places in her later books (didn’t Lestat end up going to Atlantis or something?)

But hey, no one can say she didn’t do things her way. The Wolf Gift is somehow classic Anne Rice: if you’ve read even one of her other books, you’d know immediately that this was one of her offerings. In all honesty, I read it because the second book is called The Wolves of Midwinter, and how can I resist a title like that?

Vertigo (1958)

I was looking forward to this one, as it’s generally considered one of Hitchcock’s best, and (as is so often the way) the extent to which I’d hyped it up in my head had a detrimental effect on my enjoyment of it. That’s not to say it still isn’t good: it’s suspenseful and creepy on so many levels, and by the final act it’s the lead character who is the most unsettling thing of all.

Jimmy Stewart, a prematurely retired San Francisco detective, suffers from vertigo, which prevents him from climbing anything higher than a step ladder. He’s hired by an old college friend to shadow his wife Madeleine, who has been behaving very strangely of late: seemingly possessed by the spirit of her dead ancestor, she wanders around the city in a fugue-like state, making at least one serious attempt at suicide by leaping into San Franciso Bay.

Because she’s played by Kim Novak, Jimmy Stewart is captivated by her beauty and soon develops feelings for her. He’s determined to unravel the mystery of why she’s so haunted by the memories and personality of her ancestor, only for tragedy to strike before he can get a grasp on what’s truly happening.

Hitchcock takes his sweet (and I’m not being sarcastic) time with the setup. Along with Stewart, we follow practically every step Novak takes around San Francisco, not to mention a whole other subplot in which we’re introduced to Stewart’s ex-fiancée Midge, who is clearly still pining after him. And once we’ve reached what feels like the grand climax of the whole affair, the film shifts gears and moves into a secondary plotline in which Stewart is captivated by a Madeleine lookalike (also played by Kim Novak) who reluctantly agrees to going out with him – which is followed by some downright creepy demands for her to change her appearance into a semblance of Madeleine.

It’s all very engrossing, though the big let-down is the reveal about the true nature of Madeleine’s psychosis and the reasons why Novak’s rebound girl looks so much like her. I was actually deeply intrigued by the possibility that Madeleine was being possessed by one of her ancestors – as far as I know, Hitchcock never delved into the supernatural – but the truth of the situation is one of the most convoluted evil schemes I’ve ever come across.

SPOILERS

Turns out that Stewart’s college buddy wanted to kill his wife, so he had Novak impersonate her, pretend to be mentally unstable, and then fake her suicide by flinging herself from a belltower, betting on Stewart’s fear of heights making him unable to follow her up the steps and realize what was actually going on. It’s ludicrous. What if Stewart had asked to see the body? What if he had done rudimentary research into his friend’s marriage and realize that his actual wife looked nothing like Kim Novak? What if he had been able to push through his phobia and reach the top of the belltower?

And why go with the elaborate setup of a potential ghost-possession? So much detail is poured into this cover story, what with Novak visiting graves and staring at old portraits, when all that really needed to be said was: “my wife is displaying suicidal tendencies and I need someone to keep an eye on her.”

A lot of character motivation is left ambiguous, which I can appreciate, but mysteries and whodunnits need to be watertight. That’s the whole point! Here, there’s an extended sequence in which Stewart follows Novak into a hotel, only to learn from the receptionist that no one has been in her room that day (even showing him the key behind the front desk to prove it). What the heck was that all about?

For all that, I was pretty captivated, and I’m looking forward to seeing it again. Armed with foreknowledge of the twist, it’ll be fascinating to go back and watch knowing that “Judy” is the real woman and “Madeleine” the ghost (instead of the other way around) and that Stewart is being led on a merry dance for almost the entirety of the film’s runtime.

When Harry Met Sally (1989)

Watching this was an odd experience, as it’s a movie that very much established most of the tropes and clichés that we now associate with romantic comedies. At the time, this made it fresh and innovative. By today’s standards, you have to go in knowing that it was a trope-codifier in order to appreciate its contributions to the genre, or else you’ll find it completely formulaic.

There’s the funny but droll male lead, paired with the upbeat but neurotic female lead. A high-concept hook: in this case, a love story that unfolds over at least twelve years, complete with time skips marked by big events (weddings, New Year parties, etc). The beta couple whose relatively smooth relationship provides a contrast to the will-they-won’t-they tension of the leads. A climactic scene in which someone has to run to declare their love. And negging. So much negging.

It establishes the beats of the genre that we’ll see for years to come. For me, watching this for the first time in 2022, it’s aged in a lot of respects, and really isn’t as charming as it might once have been. Billy Crystal for example... oof. It’s hard to imagine any woman finding his Harry attractive: cynical, stand-offish, lewd, arrogant – he drops moments of genuine kindness like crumbs for Sally to scramble after, and when he finally does mellow at the end of the movie, it kinda makes him feel like a completely different person. (Even then, his big confession of love immediately segues into a commentary about the song that’s playing, which... okay, good luck with that Sally).

I do realize that a lot of this was of its time, and it’s only very recently that the romance genre is having a complete overhaul of how male love interests are portrayed, and I’m sure a lot of fans of this film will dismiss me as just not getting it... but there we are.

Carrie Fisher was unsurprisingly a delight, and my favourite part of the movie. Ah well, I can now say I’ve seen it.

Sleepless in Seattle (1993)

The second of screenwriter/director Nora Ephron’s three big romantic-comedies (the first being discussed above and the third being You’ve Got Mail) this one had a fairly audacious hook: a love story in which the two participants don’t properly meet each other until the final scene of the movie. It sounds impossible, but Sleepless in Seattle pulls it off.

In doing so, it’s obvious that this film is just as much a commentary on the romance genre as it is a romance itself. I can easily visualize a scene in which Annie and Sam realize they’re incompatible by the time that elevator reaches the ground floor and amicably part ways forever – but that’s not the point. The point is the parallel lives of these two people and the sequence of events (some realistic happenstance, some complete contrivances) that eventually bring them both together on top of the Empire State building for that one night.

When it comes to love, Sam is a true believer – but his beloved wife has passed away and he’s convinced that such love stories “only happen once”. Annie on the other hand, is a romantic who’s beset on all sides by the banality of life (enter Bill Pullman as one of the quintessential examples of a Disposal Fiancé) and so naturally gets caught up in Sam’s story of loss and grief when his son calls a radio programme to ask for life advice.

As with most romantic comedies, some choices are made that feel well outside the boundaries of acceptable or even realistic behaviour, what with Annie becoming so enamoured of Sam, based on nothing but his voice over the radio, that she hires a private investigator to get photos of him and eventually flies across the country to meet him personally (all under the pretence that it’s for a story she’s writing, naturally).

It’s saved by the fact that it’s as much to do with her hang-ups with her own life than her romantic delusions, and her arc is more to do with refusing to settle than with chasing after a fantasy – even if the story technically ends with that. As Rosie O’Donnell tells her: “You don’t want to be in love, you want to be in a movie.”

The funniest running gag is the impact that An Affair to Remember has on all the women in the film, who are moved to tears at just the recollection of it – leading to a bewildered Sam and his brother-in-law (Victor Garber, who unexpectedly turned up twice in my watching log this month!) pretending to get choked up when they recap the events of The Dirty Dozen. So yes, I have also gotten my hands on An Affair to Remember – let’s see what effect it has on me.

While You Were Sleeping (1995)

We move from Meg Ryan to Sandra Bullock as romantic lead, and it’s interesting to compare the trajectory of the two actresses’ careers. Both were more than capable of doing serious drama as well as frothy comedy, but it’s obviously Bullock that’s retained leading-lady status. Heck, The Lost City looks pretty good!

This is definitely one of those romantic comedies that doesn’t have the grounding of a Nora Ephron offering, nor the bite of some of the later satirically-tinged offerings in the genre. Instead, everything is played completely straight, with Bullock as a down-on-her-luck, impossibly lonely ticket booth collector who has daydreams about one of her daily commuters, Peter Gallagher.

During the holiday season, Peter is mugged and pushed onto the railway lines, and in an act of desperate heroism, Bullock leaps down and rolls him off the tracks. Taking him to the nearby hospital, one of those meticulously curated chain-reactions of misunderstood comments and escalating contrivances ends with Gallagher’s family believing that she’s his fiancée, and they subsequently invite her to share her Christmas with them.

With no family of her own, Bullock cannot resist the temptation – and because this has “she’s a crazy person” written all over, the script tries to alleviate matters by having one of the family members – actually a very close neighbour – get wise to Bullock’s accidental deception and encourage her to go along with it because it will bring the family comfort while their son/brother remains in a coma (this is also batshit insane).

But thanks to her giant sweaters, she’s coded as completely non-threatening, and her tragic air of loneliness is reason enough to just go with the romantic-comedy flow. An extra wrinkle appears in the form of Bill Pullman, as the family’s second son and the movie’s real love interest, which feels like the universe’s apology to him for his role in Sleepless in Seattle.

It gets steadily more ludicrous as it goes (with Bullock eventually almost going through with marrying Gallagher when he finally wakes up, only for the ceremony to be crashed by his ex-girlfriend) and that’s a shame since the premise really didn’t need any complications beyond what it was already working with – and it definitely didn’t need the stereotypical Italian lout that obnoxiously pursues Bullock in her apartment block.

(Also, there’s a subplot in which Bill Pullman is hesitant about telling his father that he doesn’t want to inherit the family business despite all expectations, and neither of them stumbles to the possibility that maybe his DAUGHTER might be interested in the position).

Funniest moment goes to the completely random scene in which a paperboy falls off his bike. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s so dramatic – the bike literally flies out from under the poor guy on the icy pavement. Apparently it was just an establishing shot, but the extra really did fall off his bike and the director left it in.

The First Wives Club (1996)

Now we start to move into subversions of the genre. Despite the star-power on display here (Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, Diane Keaton) and the film’s massive success at the box office, there was a palpable sense of unease when this movie came out. Which makes sense, as it’s about three middle aged ex-wives who reap merciless vengeance on the men whose careers they supported for years before getting abandoned for younger models. I’m actually kind of stunned that this got greenlit in the nineties.

Elise, Annie, Brenda and Cynthia all graduate at the same time, and promise each other they’ll always be there for one another. Two decades later, they’ve all lost touch, and it’s only Cynthia’s suicide and subsequent funeral that brings the remaining trio of women together.

Realizing that their old friend was suffering from depression after her divorce, they share their own grievances at life: Bette Midler’s husband has left her for Sarah Jessica Parker, Goldie Hawn’s acting career has dried up (though her ex – Victor Garber again! – is still enjoying the career that she helped build for him) and Diane Keaton feels she’s wasted the last twenty years of her life as a housewife, only to realize that her husband has been cheating on her with her therapist.

Plotting ensues. Though the ultimate endgame of these women is kept under wraps – and is ultimately very altruistic – the trio go digging for dirt on their exes in the attempts to blackmail them into giving up vast tracts of their accumulated wealth. This dirt includes tax fraud, money laundering and statutory rape (the dude in question didn’t know his girlfriend was underage, but... yikes). Some of the schemes are a little ridiculous, and it bugged me that so much of the investigative legwork was outsourced to other people (including Maggie Smith, a Mafia crime boss, Annie’s daughter and the inevitable gay friend) but if you’re looking for a dopamine hit of pure unadulterated fictional schadenfreude, this clearly hit the spot for a lot of women.

And wait... was that J.K. Simmons as one of the cops that arrest Morty??

My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997)

This is it: the romantic comedy that isn’t, the bucket of ice water that gets thrown over the entire resurgence of the genre at the end of the nineties, in which the crazed schemes of the heroine are depicted precisely as crazed and selfish as they actually are, and the story ends with her not getting what she wants.

Full disclosure: I first watched this when I was very young, perhaps even when it originally came out, and I just could not understand why it ended the way it did. Aren’t movie heroines meant to live happily ever after? What do you mean we might not end up with the man of our choosing, especially in fiction-land? The idea of a story ending this way was not something I’d ever been confronted with before.

Julia Roberts is about to turn twenty-eight, and so is deeply preoccupied by the fact that she and her best friend Dermot Mulroney made a vow to each other in college: that if they were still single by that age, they would marry each other. He’s been telling her he’s got something important to tell her – but when the phone-call comes, it’s to inform her that a. he’s met someone, b. they’re getting married, and c. he wants her to fly in and be the maid of honour.

It’s at this point that Julia (the character’s name is Julianne, so we may as well just call her Julia) realizes that she’s in love with her best friend, and so must immediately rush to the wedding preparations in order to sabotage the happy couple. Because of the expectations and heightened reality of your standard rom-com, there’s no reason to believe that she won’t succeed in this venture, and that the whole thing will be played for laughs.

But My Best Friend’s Wedding has a different agenda. It turns out that trying to ruin a relationship on the eve of the couple’s nuptials is a really shitty thing to do, and various attempts to deceive or gaslight the couple end up backfiring bigtime. Though Julia is repeatedly told by her gay editor (Rupert Everett, who steals the whole movie for approximately twenty minutes) that what she’s doing is wrong and that the only way forward is to simply tell the truth and let Mulroney decide what he wants to do, she keeps digging her own grave with increasingly backhanded schemes until things completely and irrevocably blow up in her face.

And though she eventually seizes her chance to make amends, it’s obvious that even if things stay amicable between herself and Mulroney (and Cameron Diaz playing who we thought was the Romantic False Lead) it’s never going to be the way it was between them.

The film captures to perfection the bittersweet heartache of this: that sometimes we lose people – not through death, but through missed opportunities, growing apart, and the passage of time. There are a number of clues strewn throughout that this is the course the plot will take, from Mulroney all but explicitly giving Julia the opportunity she so clearly wants to confess her feelings (and her letting it pass) to Julia unthinkingly referring to Everett as “my best friend these days” to Everett asking if maybe – just maybe – Julia is motivated more by a desire to “win” than by actual, unselfish love.

But it’s best captured in the use of two distinct songs: clearly Julia/Mulroney’s song is “The Way You Look Tonight”, which they dance to when they’re alone for the last time on a sightseeing cruise. Later, Everett humiliates her by starting a full-blown singalong at a seafood restaurant to the strains of “Say A Little Prayer For You.” Finally, once Julia has conceded defeat to Cameron Diaz, she has the band play “The Way You Look Tonight” at the wedding reception, describing it as a song they can have “on-loan” until they find one of their own. Then, once the couple have left and she’s sitting there dejected and depressed, Everett turns up unexpectedly, leading her to the dance floor to another rendition of “Say A Little Prayer.”

The film is filled with clever callbacks and narrative echoes like this one, and truly: has there ever been a more heart-warming and emotionally satisfying conclusion to a failed romance as a woman’s best friend turning up out of the blue to essentially tell her: “you win some, you lose some – but I’m still here for you.” I didn’t understand it as a kid, but I certainly get it now.  

In many ways this was Cameron Diaz’s big break (not counting The Mask) and she pours so much personality into a role that in any other film would amount to being little more than an obstacle for the real heroine to surmount, from her winning over the crowd with her awful karaoke to her demonstrating a spine when she confronts Julia over what she’s done in the woman’s bathroom.

Likewise, Rupert Everett as George could have easily been the trademark gay friend who has nothing else going on in his life but to support the emotional chaos of the straight protagonist, but the film makes it clear that he’s living his own life on the margins of Julia’s drama (I appreciate that he doesn’t interrupt his own dinner party when she calls him to leave an hysterical voice-message on the answering machine) making it all the more heart-warming when he turns up for her in her greatest hour of need.

But there is one glaring fault at work in the film and that’s the rather jarring realization that Mulroney ain’t no prize. It’s actually kind of baffling as to why two such beautiful, intelligent, successful young woman are fighting over him to the extent they are, and it gets worse when you learn what his immediate plans for marriage are: his wife is only twenty years old and has to drop out of college in order to follow him around while he does his job as a sports journalist.

His reactions to certain things makes it very clear that he knows perfectly well what Julia is trying to convey to him throughout the film (though admittedly, he does give her that opportunity to spit it out) and at other times is jealous, possessive, passive-aggressive and alarmingly quick to anger when his fiancée suggests that maybe she wants a career too. And who asks their ex-girlfriend to be part of their wedding party anyway, especially at such short notice?

Honestly, a part of me feels that all Julia had to do was sit tight for a couple of years and wait for their inevitable divorce.

So it’s a shame that such a clever film has such a dodgy character at the centre of its love triangle. At least make him someone worth fighting over! But for the most part, the rest of the story covers for this weird misstep, which is very much about throwing the light of realism over the more absurd parts of the romantic comedy genre, and providing an arc for its heroine that goes beyond just giving her what she wants on a silver platter.

And as with pre-fame J.K. Simmons turning up in The First Wives Club, this features Paul Giamatti in a single scene as a bellhop who offers Julia some cold comfort in a hotel hallway: “this too shall pass.”

Mama (2013)

This certainly made for a palette cleanser after all those romantic comedies. Technically promoted as a horror film but better described as a dark fairy tale with a few jump scares (Guillermo del Toro produced and you can see his fingerprints all over this) it begins with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau on the run with his two very young daughters. Police reports inform us that he’s just killed his wife and business partner, and after a slippery road takes his car off the road and into the wilderness, he stumbles across an abandoned cabin and prepares to finish what he started.

But before his daughters meet their untimely ends, something in the shadows gets to him first... then provides food for little Victoria and Lily.

Five years later, the girls’ uncle (also played by Coster-Waldau) has run out of money to fund the ongoing search effort to discover what happened to his brother and nieces – luckily, that’s the very day that the cabin is found and the girls (now filthy and feral) are discovered. Their uncle is delighted to have them back, though his punk girlfriend Jessica Chastain decidedly less so. Motherhood is not what she signed up for, but that’s precisely the predicament she finds herself in once a custody deal requires the two of them to care for the girls in a specially-prepared house/clinic, to be regularly monitored by a physiatrist who is deeply interested in the case.

It soon becomes apparent that something else has followed the girls back from the wilderness, an entity they refer to as “Mama” that doesn’t take kindly to anyone usurping her place as their protector and parental figure (this leads to some unintentional comedy, as though the uncle is taken out pretty quickly, Chastain’s character is left unscathed for much longer since she’s clearly all but indifferent to her new charges).

It’s pretty easy to figure out the reasons behind the supernatural haunting, and the backstory given to “Mama” isn’t particularly innovative. In all, I’d say the set pieces and jump scares have a 50% success rate, equally divided between eye-rolling clichés and genuinely clever scenes. This one is the best (keep in mind there’s only one woman and two children in the house at this time):

Towards the end it very much veers more toward fairy tale than horror, especially since everyone is so remarkably chill about the possibility of an evil spirit being on the loose (if I’d been Chastain, I would’ve been outta there, but she keeps her chill long after it’s obvious that something supernatural is trying to kill her) and there are plot-holes aplenty. Like, how on earth did the cabin remain undiscovered for that long? The girls’ dad literally got there on foot from the road with two under-fives in tow.

The psychologist is built up as a fairly interesting character, only to die what is possibly the stupidest death imaginable (why would you go somewhere alone at night in the middle of nowhere when you know a psychotic ghost is on the loose?) but the aunt who wants custody, and even Coster-Waldau himself, feel pretty pointless. This is very much Jessica Chastain’s movie, and there’s an interesting character at work here: a woman who doesn’t want children, especially not someone else’s children, who has no maternal instincts whatsoever, but still feels that impossible and unremovable sense of obligation.

I get that, so her character is on an interesting trajectory. On the one hand, I could feel her frustration at being cornered into this situation against her will, on the other, looking after children is considered the baseline test of decency, especially for women, and I probably would have done the same thing in her shoes. The story doesn’t delve into any of this as deeply as I would have liked, and even her growing rapport with Victoria doesn’t really justify her actions in the third act, but it’s a solid character at the centre of an effective movie.  

Winx Club: Season 2 (2005)

I actually started watching this months ago, forgot about it, and then returned sporadically to finish it off. Which perhaps says something about how I felt about it. I saw the first season of Winx in February last year out of sheer curiosity and boy was it weird. Between the creepy insect-like designs of the characters to the excruciatingly clichéd story-beats, I could see why it would enrapture its target audience, but was left a little bewildered as how it managed to sustain itself throughout eight seasons.

It’s essentially a mashup of Harry Potter and Sailor Moon, with a bunch of girls that can transform into fairies attending Alfea College, where they take all sorts of magical lessons from a range of tutors (including at least one leprechaun). Their nemeses are the witches over at Cloud Tower, who – as is usually the case in these types of stories – are deranged with rage over the fact that fairies exist at all.

It’s that specific type of fictional school bully that’s bafflingly obsessed with their victims. I mean, it’s not even like their headmistress is egging them on or anything; these girls have a vendetta that’s fuelled solely by their own vindictiveness.

Rounding things out is Red Fountain, a school that trains boys to become heroes, and which provides perfectly-correlated love interests/male counterparts to our main characters.

The second season is definitely an improvement on the first, simply because they move away from Bloom as the (rather boring) protagonist and use the ensemble cast to map out a much more intricate plot. Kicking things off is the arrival of a new girl, who manages to be a much more interesting and well-rounded character than Bloom by dint of her having a specific goal and clearer personality.

Layla (who is apparently called Aisha in some versions) is introduced infiltrating the fortress of a demonic skeletal robot-like entity (yes, really) in order to save a number of pixies. That’s already more interesting than anything Bloom did in the first season, and it’s the instigating incident of the entire seasonal arc.

This demonic robot creature is called Darkar, and is genuinely creepy at times (think Beezlebot from Futurama but not played for laughs). His masterplan is to harness the power of the pixies, find some magical tomes, and overthrow the entire world – typical Dark Lord stuff. It’s one of those cases in which a bad guy is way too intense and sinister for the children’s cartoon in which he’s part of (never forget that THIS was a My Little Pony villain) but his presence helps pull together the story and give the heroines a singular foe to fight against.

However, the transformation sequences are still awful. I’m currently watching a dub of Sailor Moon on DVD, and the transformations on that show are magical: the shapes, the colours, the movement. Here, they’re ugly, choppy things and I can’t see the point of a transformation sequence if it doesn’t look good. Later in the season the girls earn things called “Charmix” which are essentially power boosters in the shape of hip-bags, which they access through rather pitiful girl-power war cries. It’s exactly as terrible as it sounds.

To be honest, the best thing about this season was the fact that my download featured text scrolling horizontally along the bottom of the frame: messages sent in by young viewers (I’m assuming through the show’s website). Most of them were standard fandom fluff, but one of them read: “Katie. Miranda wants me to apologize, so sorry. Are you happy now??” Oh the pathos. What happened between these girls? Where are they now? We’ll never know, but that passive-aggressive little missive is a story unto itself.

Arcane: Season 1 (2021)

Another show I was led to by Tumblr gif-sets, with animation that looks very much inspired by Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse: a blend of computer graphics and hand-drawn embellishments. It’s very much like a painting come to life, and some of the micro-expressions that are conveyed on the characters’ faces are extraordinary. Then there’s the colour palette, the fluidity of movement, the rich backgrounds – if nothing else, it’s a feast for the eyes.

Good thing there’s a strong story and characterization to go with it – which is all the more incredible considering it’s based on a video game. How often do adaptations of video games turn out well?

The show centres on the tensions that exist between two distinct cities: the upperclass (and above ground) Piltover and the lowerclass (and literally underground) Zaun. Much like Parasite, each metropolis feeds off the other in harmful ways, yet their economies and societies are so inextricably linked that there’s no escaping from the co-dependency of their relationship. Aboveground is ruled by a wise and eclectic Council; below the crime-lords and their gangs run the show – though they all have one thing in common: an arms race.

Whether it’s Piltover’s “hextech,” which fuses magic and technology, or Zaun’s “shimmer”, a bright purple drug that bestows super-strength on those that inject it into their veins, each side is delving deeper into the more dangerous components of their respective weaponry, inching everyone closer to war as the episodes go on.

At the centre of this powder-keg are sisters Vi and Powder, thieves that work for a man called Vander, a fairly decent father-figure and leader who is committed to keeping the peace between the cities. I trust it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that the girls eventually lose their protector and end up on different sides of the escalating conflict, but the way in which the story plays out is genuinely suspenseful and heart-breaking.

There’s quite an extensive ensemble cast at work, from all walks of life and each with a distinctive design. From Silco’s creepy glowing eye to the beautiful beadwork in Mel’s hair, it’s easy to keep track of who’s who simply by how unique everyone looks – which is handy because this is quite a complex narrative, full of moving parts and intricate connective tissue. It’s definitely something I might return to in the future, just for the chance to rewatch it with the power of hindsight.

Came for the amazing visual flare, stayed for the surprisingly gripping storyline.

Nine Perfect Strangers (2021)

Since the success of Big Little Lies, Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Amy Adams have been trying to recapture lightning in a bottle with the likes of Sharp Objects, The Undoing, Little Fires Everywhere, and even a second season of Big Little Lies (which was dreadful).

So far nothing has been anywhere near as good as that amazing miniseries, though Nine Perfect Strangers, also adapted from a Liane Moriarty novel, feels like the closest in spirit if not quality.

The strangest thing about miniseries is that all of the nine guests at the controversial health centre, plus Nicole Kidman as its owner, act like they’re each in a completely different show. It’s almost fascinating. The Marconi family are in a deadly serious drama about a grieving family coming to grips with the suicide of their son/twin brother. Melissa McCarthy and Bobby Cannavale are in a quirky romantic comedy. Regina Hall and Nicole Kidman go for high camp – the latter especially with her guttural Russian accent and crazy wig (and I say that as someone who never cares, or even notices, weird accents or obvious wigs).

Luke Evans (undercover journalist) seems rather bemused by the whole thing, and Samara Weaving and Melvin Gregg (a married couple on the outs) are so irrelevant to the proceedings that you could cut them entirely and not miss a thing. It’s like they’ve flown in from another planet.

The plot zig-zags between all these guests and their hang-ups, and the tonal whiplash is certainly something to behold. From the Marconis hallucinating their dead son to Luke Evans dreaming about giving birth; Kidman being stalked by some unseen assailant to various hijinks between McCarthy and Cannavale (he throws a grape into her mouth while she’s asleep in the pool and she almost chokes to death).

Plus there’s a whole other subplot about how one of Kidman’s employees get increasingly uncomfortable with the steps she’s taking to medicate her guests, which basically comes down to the two of each other confronting each other on the issue every single episode with no forward momentum whatsoever.  

It’s not like it’s a bad premise: force nine strangers to mingle together at a healthcare centre in which they’re secretly being drugged and sit back to watch the fallout... yet this show makes so many odd choices without committing fully to batshit insanity, which makes it an odd sort of curiosity rather than a decent story or a campy thrill-ride. You can skip this one.