Reading/Watching Log #76

Naturally I churned through a lot of stuff this month as I had three whole weeks off from work! Don’t worry, I spent a lot of it outside getting fresh air and exercise, but the evenings were free to settle down with media that I’d been meaning to get under my belt for a long time. Most of my viewing time is usually spent trying to fill in my backcatalogue, but this year has been filled with new projects that I’ve been interesting in seeing, from espionage thrillers to period dramas to fantasy films.

I also managed to get a lot of reading done, though I’m going to hold off talking about Catherynne Valente’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland series until I finished all five books (and I may make them a separate post).

5 Worlds by Mark and Alexis Siegel, Xanthe Bouma, Matt Rockefeller and Boya Sun

I had read the first four books in this graphic novel series last year, but by the time the fifth finally made it through the ordering process at the library, I was a little fuzzy on some of the story’s details. Best described as a mix between Star Wars and Avatar: The Last Airbender (though with an aesthetic that’s deeply reminiscent of She Ra) each story takes place on a particular planet or moon with a distinct cultural milieu. What each one has in common is a colossal beacon, the lighting of which is prophesied to end the climate change disaster that’s currently wreaking havoc on each world.

Yes, there are certainly a lot of nods to current events, from water shortages to media manipulation to the dangers of populist leaders and misinformation. Our three protagonists are Oona Lee, a sand dancer with the ability to light the beacons, An Tzu, a street kid with a mysterious background, and Jax Amboy, a famous Starball player who is secretly an android. The basic formula of each book has this trio travelling to a world and struggling against the political turmoil they find there in an attempt to light the beacons.

It’s quite extraordinary how closely these stories vibed with the Relic Master books (below) as each series involves an alien race that colonizes another planet, only to disappear and have the relics they leave behind form the basis of a religion. Even in graphic novels aimed at children, 5 Worlds can get into some pretty heavy stuff (one sequence is clearly a dig at the American healthcare system) and not every character makes it out alive.

As you might have guessed from the titles, each book has a distinct colour scheme that matches its location’s clime and habitat. The final book, The Emerald Gate, is set on Grimbo (E) which is a planetary swampland and depicted in every shade of green you can possibly conceive. As the only one I hadn’t read yet, it was a strong send-off for these characters and their storylines, though it ended up being a bit more bittersweet than I had anticipated.

It does the thing I always appreciate, in which all the supporting characters are given a chance to do something important, though the final climatic showdown unfortunately comes down to who can concentrate the most on projecting their psychic laser beam. No matter the source of this power surge, whether it’s wands or technology, this is always the most boring way to stage a final showdown.

That’s just a slight misstep though. For the most part 5 Worlds has been a fascinating, beautiful, insightful and timely read. I have yet to recommend it to a younger reader who didn’t enjoy it.

Waiting for Murder by Fleur Hitchcock

I’ve read the two previous murder-mysteries for young readers by Fleur Hitchcock (Murder at Twilight and Murder in Midwinter) and this one lands squarely in the middle of its predecessors (better than Twilight, not as good as Midwinter). They’re not sequels or prequels to each other, just standalone tales about young adolescents stumbling into serious crime and using little but their wits to struggle their way out again.

Dan has accompanied his archaeologist mother on a dig in Sandford, where she’s excitedly identifying bones from an old burial pit. As the oppressive heat starts to drain the local reservoir, a car surfaces from what has clearly been a long stint beneath the water, and Dan is certain that he can glimpse human remains inside. By the time the car is accessible and the police have arrived, the car is empty.

Along with his new friend Florence, Dan begins an investigation that takes him around the small English village, which is filled with the usual assortment of lies, secrets and buried treasure.

I get the sense that this is a seasonal cycle of books: Midwinter obviously took place in winter, and if memory serves Twilight was autumn, but this one is definitely summer, with much of the plot contingent on the hot weather. Is it safe to assume a fourth and final book will be set in the spring? Either way, Hitchcock captures the heat of the countryside very effectively: the swelter, the flies, the sweat... read this on a cold day and I guarantee you’ll feel warmed up.

In all, they’re fun little books. Admittedly not hugely memorable (I’ve already forgotten who the killer was, or who in fact, was killed in the first place) but they’re quick and easy reads, with above-average prose for the target audience.

The Dollhouse by Charis Cotter

Ghosts and dollhouses? Hell yes. I had this book on my library reading list since well before it was on the shelves, and snapped it up the moment it became available. Even the cover art is gorgeous. The problem is... it wasn’t quite what I expected.

Alice’s summer plans are overturned when her mother decides to take a job as a nurse/housekeeper in an isolated country manor house, leaving Alice’s workaholic father behind. Divorce seems imminent, and a cloud of dread and anxiety fills her as she’s whisked away to the country, especially when a train accident results in her banging her head.

The mistress of the house is a caustic and grouchy old woman called Mrs Bishop, who has already driven away several live-in nurses. Alice is therefore warned to be as quiet as possible, though she’s enchanted by something she finds in the attic: a massive dollhouse that’s an exact replica of the house she’s currently residing in. Things get stranger when things in the dollhouse start to correlate with occurrences in the real house: specifically the appearance of a young girl called Fizz, replicated in the dollhouse by a doll that looks just like her.

Naturally her mother is too frazzled to have much time for this, and Alice is left to figure things out by herself, helped only by the cleaner’s daughter Lily, who has developmental issues and is limited in her ability to impart helpful information.

The major problem with the story is that it doesn’t satisfactorily explain just what the heck is going on. The moment that the possibility of time-travel is introduced, I was immediately reminded of Phillipa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden, one of the best – if not the best – time-slip books for younger readers. Granted, that sets the bar pretty damn high, but Cotter’s explanation for what is happening in this house remains frustratingly vague. Dreams? Time travel? Magic?

Perhaps you could argue that the ambiguity is the point. Maybe it’s a strange sort of ghost story and you’re not supposed to understand its inner workings. But no, that doesn’t fly. In books for young readers, answers are expected, and without them the story just feels random. It was a great premise, and is told nicely enough – but we needed some ground rules, even if they were made-up ones.

Relic Master: The Hidden Coronet by Catherine Fisher

The third book of the quartet, we’re now well into it regarding the plot and character arcs. At this stage the overarching premise is clear to any discerning reader: the “Makers” that the inhabitants of Anara have built their religion around are clearly off-world colonists with advanced technology that had to return to their home planet, leaving behind a civilization that remembers them as gods.

Now that Anara is under threat from genetically altered creatures, fundamentalist witch-hunters and moons literally falling out of alignment, protagonists Raffi and Galen (plus their entourage) have been desperately trying to contact the Makers to return and set things right. To do this they rely on the “relics”, which are obviously bits of old technology. The hidden coronet of the title refers to a neural programmer that promises a direct link to the Makers and their knowledge... though it’s kept in the secret Hoard of the planet’s indigenous people: cat-like creatures that have been collecting and concealing anything of value for centuries.

Thankfully, Raffi and Galen are friends with one of these Sekoi, who knows the exact location of the coronet. But even if they can convince him to go against his own people and deeply held religious beliefs, they still have to deal with various monsters, Watchspies, bizarre weather phenomena, and a traitor in their midst. This is probably the most action-packed of all the books thus far, and Fisher isn’t afraid to go to some pretty dark places.

She also has a genuine interest in the way religious belief affects people’s lives and the decisions they make based on it – either for good or ill. Just as faith can give people a sense of purpose and a blueprint for understanding their world, it also leads to overzealousness and misery when it’s misplaced or used to control others.

Though it’s interesting to see the way Fisher’s sci-fi backstory has laid down the framework of a world’s mythology and subsequent religious following, it remains to be seen to what extent the main characters’ faith will be rewarded. They’ve definitely got the wrong end of the stick when it comes to understanding who and what the Makers actually are, but there’s a good chance this will be deemed irrelevant when it comes to how the situation is finally resolved. I’ll know by the end of...

Relic Master: The Margrave by Catherine Fisher

As a grand finale, The Margrave is... fine. A few of my predictions didn’t pan out, save for the fact that the Makers didn’t show up in a burst of glory to save the day at the end of the story – that would have been at odds with everything Fisher has been setting up across the course of these four books.

The Big Bad of this series has been revealed and it’s called the Margrave: one of the genetically altered experiments of the Makers. He’s been controlling things from his relic-strewn lair in the Pits of Maar, sending the Watch out to destroy all things Maker-related (namely their relics and those that revere them as gods). Raffi has been suffering nightmares about the Margrave, and Galen has sworn to destroy him, though I appreciate that Fisher gives him a chance to explain his backstory and motivations – even if he isn’t absolved of his crimes against Humankind and Sekoi.

The plot is divided between Raffi undergoing a typical Final Temptation in the realm of the Margrave, while Galen and Carys go about amassing their allies (characters from previous books) and organizing an assault on Maar. In all honesty, it’s a structure we’ve seen a million times before, and even some of the surprises (such as the Margrave’s ultimate fate) aren’t hugely satisfying. I wasn’t entirely sure what lasting statement she would make on the role of the Makers and their influence in the characters’ lives – turns out, she didn’t have much to say at all, and there are a few threads left dangling that I would have liked to have seen wrapped up in a more satisfying manner.

Raffi remains a deeply uninteresting protagonist, and ironically the two characters that are introduced in this book – Quist and Scala – are much more fascinating, both in themselves and regarding their fraught relationship with each other. It’s a shame Fisher didn’t think to bring them into the action sooner, or to even make them the main characters, as they’re filled with far more complexity than Raffi ever was.

All things considered, the Relic Master quartet was imminently readable: Fisher knows how to structure a sentence and keep the chapters clipping along at a brisk pace. They very much provided a landmark reading experience in my life: I’ll forever remember them as the books I read while I was sitting in the library foyer for hours at a time, checking the vaccine passes of library patrons.

We are The Babysitters Club: Essays and Artwork from Grown-Up Readers edited by Marisa Crawford and Megan Milks

This was a book my colleague showed to me, knowing that I devoured these books in my tween years, and it was... fine. Admittedly, I came to it with entirely the wrong preconceptions. Assuming that it would be essays about the books themselves, it was instead a series of deeply personal recollections about how the books shaped the writers’ lives as young readers, usually pertaining to the personal troubles of their youth being filtered through the lives of characters in the books.

(Sometimes too personal: one writer discusses how she used to project herself and the babysitters’ identities onto her Barbies, leading to role-playing scenarios in which Kirsty would get her first period in class, be forced to strip naked in front of everyone, and get publicly shamed. Um... yikes).

This is down to a matter of expectations versus reality. I was hoping for something light and fun that would tap into the idiosyncrasies of these books, like how every reader knew to skip the expository second chapter, or how Charlie was a construct designed to drive thirteen year old girls to their babysitting jobs, or how every ghost story would explain every clue except one, which would leave open the possibility of a real supernatural occurrence.

I would have been interested in stuff like how the girls are aged thirteen for about ten years and how this arrested development affected the stories, or a discussion on the series’ double-edged feminism (they were a celebration of female friendship and teenage entrepreneurship... within the realms of childcare) or whether I was the only one who noticed that Anne M. Martin seemed to truly loathe Mallory Pike. Just some fun stuff basically, not the incredibly heavy material that gets discussed.

That’s not to say there isn’t interesting material here: it was good to get a Black perspective on the character of Jessi, as well as both diabetic and autistic writers commentating on the portrayals of characters such as Stacey and (the one-off) Susan. The latter also pointed out something I’d never noticed before: that all the books dealing with health/medical issues were crouched in secretive terms: The Truth About Stacey (diabetes), Jessi’s Secret Language (American Sign Language), The Secret of Susan (autism) and Jessi and the Awful Secret (eating disorder).

Of course, there are essays about Kirsty being perceived as LGBTQ and in love with Mary Anne (don’t kill me, but I never read her that way. She was a tomboy who liked doing things her way – if there was ever a gay love story in these books, it was between Mallory and Jessi. Their desperate mutual desire to find a best friend like the ones they’d read about in books is framed like a romance – to me, they were the modern day Anne Shirley and Diana Barry).

There are some funny comics and fake cover art, though the essay that most closely catered to what I was looking for was the one that explored the handwriting of the girls in the opening chapters, and how it deliberately reflected their personalities. I would have preferred more material like this – though the key word is preferred. This wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but it might well be invaluable to someone else. And it did lead me to Jake Shepherd’s podcast, which is hilarious.

House on Haunted Hill (1959)

I actually watched this years ago, but a Tumblr gif-set inspired me to revisit. I had a vague recollection that there wasn’t anything truly supernatural going on in the house, but rather that it was all a cover for a planned murder (and that it was remade badly in 1999 – as was The Haunting of Hill House, just to make things super confusing) but apart from that – nada.

Vincent Price plays an eccentric businessman throwing an equally eccentric house party, in which the specially-chosen guests are invited to spend the night in a house where several murders have taken place. If they last through the night, they can each collect a substantial check. Despite repeatedly insisting that all this has been organized for the enjoyment of his wife, she seems deeply reluctant to join in the festivities.

Most of the action centres around party attendees Lance and Nora, who are your standard young American couple. While Lance tries to discover rational explanations for the odd events that are plaguing the party, Nora grows more and more hysterical – though thankfully there’s a psychiatrist on hand to inform everyone that this is completely normal in a young woman.

It wasn’t until this recent viewing that I learned the movie was originally filmed in order to incorporate a real-life special effect, in which a skeleton would be suspected over the live audience during a particular sequence in which Price’s character uses a pulley system to animate a skeleton (which accounts for the oddly prolonged scene in which he reels it back towards him). One can’t help but feel that the director came up with this idea and wrote the entire script around the scene in which it happens.

I say that because the rest of the story is completely bonkers, from the convoluted murder scheme to the fact the blind housekeeper apparently just wanders the house at night, making scary faces for no apparent reason. There’s another female guest who is “haunted” by a bloodstain on the ceiling that drips onto her – this is never explained. The owner of the house is a man whose brother and sister-in-law were apparently murdered in the place – we never find out how or why. And someone dies due to falling backwards into a pit of acid. Really!

I mean, it’s a cult classic for a reason and that’s because it’s so hilariously absurd. If you were to play a drinking game in which you took a shot for every woman’s scream, you’d be totally incapacitated by the final credits.

Spirited Away (2001)

To watch this movie is to be hypnotized. I remember vividly what it was like to watch it for the first time: I had bought it on DVD (back then there was no streaming, and if you hadn’t seen a movie at the theatre, you had to take a chance on home release) and popped it in the player. What unfolded was something I had never seen the likes of before in my entire life. It was like stepping into another world of movie-making, in which things like the three-act structure and the standard maturation arc of a child protagonist was unheard of.

It was my first Hayao Miyazaki film, but certainly not my last. Spirited Away was very much the feature-film that introduced him properly to Western audiences, having already been given “the Japanese Walt Disney” moniker by his own country. Jaded by foreign releases to his films after the botch-job that was made of Princess Nausicaä, it was the now-disgraced John Lasseter that championed the English dub of Spirited Away and gave it an American release under the Disney banner.

All these years later, it still has its power. Chihiro and her parents are moving to a new home, though her father takes a wrong turn on the way and ends up in front of what he soon identifies as an abandoned theme park. The three of them wander inside and start to look around the empty streets, though Chihiro is deeply unsettled for some reason. Her parents help themselves to food available at a nearby stall, while Chihiro wanders off, discovering a seemingly empty bathhouse and some faraway train tracks.

Darkness soon falls, and on her return she discovers to her horror that her parents have transformed into pigs. To say any more is to give away the unfolding of a plot that simply can’t be predicted. There are touches of foreshadowing here and there, but for the most part it plays out like a fever dream, a story only slightly less random than Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which the protagonist is thrown headfirst into a world that’s not only filled with strange customs and rituals that are beyond anyone’s comprehension (though there are some echoes of old folklore – eating the food of the spirit world is dangerous, always mind your manners) but which are never explained at any point during the film’s run-time.

And that’s a good thing. The world Chihiro finds herself in never loses its inherently alien quality. The characters she meets can turn helpful or dismissive on a dime. She scrabbles to grasp some sort of firm ground amidst complete inexplicability. You simply don’t know what to expect at any given moment.

More than anything Miyazaki is a master of pacing. This is a film in which Chihiro taking a few achingly slow steps down a rail-less suspension staircase, before she loses her balance and ends up uncontrollably sprinting the rest of the way, is absolutely riveting. In a film that contains all manner of ghouls and spirits, Miyazaki he can engross us with the mundane right alongside the strange and eerie.

I also love the initial progression into the spirit world: from the car Chihiro glimpses strange shrines and statues in the nearby forest. Then as she stands at the entrance to the theme park with her parents, she feels the wind at her back, as if it’s trying to push her in. Then comes the empty, echoey foyer that looks rather like a train station. Then the open air of the abandoned theme park: a place of grassy hills, dried up riverbeds, empty streets and the imposing bathhouse towering over all. The gradual progression from the ordinary to the supernatural never fails to send shivers down my spine; it’s only comparable to Lucy making her way through the wardrobe and into Narnia for the first time.

Critics and fans have spoken at length about the film’s potential themes and hidden meanings – I’m not saying those things aren’t there, but I much prefer to enjoy Spirited Away as an experience rather than something to be analysed and understood. So much goes unexplained, so many details are there simply for their own sake... there’s a point where you have to just give yourself up to the feeling of watching this film (if you’re lucky, it’s for the very first time).

Big Fish and Begonia (2016)

Another one I’ve been meaning to watch for ages – so long in fact that I’ve forgotten how I learned about this movie’s existence in the first place. Animated by Studio Mir, the same company behind The Legend of Korra, it is a true feast for the eyes. The colours, the fluidity of movement, the framing composition – you could watch it on mute and just soak up the visuals.

In a spirit world that exists below the oceans of the mortal one, a girl called Chun participates in a coming-of-age tradition that involves travelling through a watery portal to experience the human realm – rather like the little mermaid and her sisters in Hans Christian Anderson’s original fairy tale. This they do in the forms of red dolphins.

While there, Chun attempts to save the life of a human boy caught in a storm at sea, only to fail and witness his drowning. But she’s already besotted. On returning home, she strikes a deal with a being known as the Soul Keeper, who gatekeeps the movement of souls between life and death. In exchange for half her lifespan, the Soul Keeper gives Chun the boy’s soul in the form of a dolphin, which she must nurture until he’s big enough to return to the human world.

This must be kept a secret, as humans are forbidden in this world, though Chun accepts the help of her best friend Qiu, who is in love with her but also intrigued by the dolphin. Further complicating matters is that the boy’s soul has a detrimental effect on the weather in this world: torrential rain, blizzards and flooding, leading Chun’s parents and the other adults on a search for what could be causing the upheaval...

It’s impossible not to compare this to a Hayao Miyazaki project, but though it contains dizzyingly strange character designs, vibrant colours, a headstrong female protagonist and a bittersweet ending, something was missing. What was it? In Miyazaki’s hands this film simply would have had the X-factor. I would have cared more about Chun and her relationships, I would have been more drawn into this world and its inherent strangeness, I would have been more in awe of its scope and scale.

As it is, this is certainly a poignant and engrossing tale while it lasts, and worth the watch for its stunning animation alone. But didn’t quite hit me in the feels the way I wanted it to, and it’s difficult to say what exactly was missing.

Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)

I could confidently say that this film is the best thing Laika has ever put out – more so than Coraline even – were it not for the ending, which stumbles three times at the finish line. It’s infuriating, and becomes more so every time I watch it. And yet, the sheer beauty and resonance of the first two-and-a-bit acts is enough to make up for it... for the most part.

I rewatched this because I thought it would vibe well with the likes of Spirited Away and Big Fish and Begonia, in terms of both the story and the settings. And it did! In a dramatic prologue, a woman fights her way through a torrential storm at sea with nothing but a one-eyed baby and a two-stringed shamisen, which clearly has magical powers when she uses it to part the ocean water and safely reach the shore.

Years later, she and her son Kubo scratch out a living from their home in a shoreside cave – or at least Kubo does. His mother was badly injured during the storm and seems to suffer from both memory loss and prolonged catatonia, while Kubo travels into the town each day and uses the shamisen to bring various origami sculptures to life and regale the crowd with stories of the samurai Hanzo and his adventures. The only problem is, he never manages to get to the end of the story...

In her moments of lucidity, Kubo’s mother has imprinted on him one essential rule: to never be outside after dark. His grandfather and her sisters are hunting for the two of them, with the intention of taking his other eye should they ever find him. But when Kubo loses track of the time while trying to communicate with his father during a lantern festival for the dead, the two terrifying spectres of his aunties appear, and the adventure begins...

It’s beautiful, exquisite, poignant, amusing, fascinating stuff. It has origami guides and talking monkeys and ships made out of leaves. Watching it for the first time, I was convinced it was going to end up one of the greatest movies I’d ever seen.

SPOILERS

So how does the story trip up? First of all, after a long and arduous journey with a talking monkey and a humanoid beetle, Kubo realizes that they’re actually his parents, finally reunited after a long separation. At which point they’re almost immediately killed off. The film has already established that his mother was on borrowed time, so they have her extract a promise from her husband that he’ll look after Kubo, which would have made for a suitably bittersweet ending: that Kubo loses his mother but in doing so finds his missing father. Then his father is anti-climactically killed off mid-promise. It’s unnecessarily cruel, and really does nothing for the story.

Next is how Kubo defeats his grandfather, the Moon King. Despite being armed with a magical sword, Kubo foregoes violence in order to use the shamisen to conjure up spirits of the dead and give his grandfather a spiel on the power of memory and the lasting influence of love – which is all very nice, but we’ve never seen Kubo demonstrate these specific powers before, and his defiant speech really has nothing to do with what his grandfather is actually trying to achieve. It just doesn’t mesh thematically.

Finally, the power that Kubo summons (another bright laser beam that has the ability to do whatever the plot requires) renders his grandfather a mortal man with no memory of who or what he is. That’s when the villagers step in and tell him that he’s a wise patriarch who looks after children and gives to the poor. Um... what? How is this satisfying? The monstrous king who’s responsible for the deaths of Kubo’s parents not only gets away with his crimes, but is gaslit into believing he’s someone he’s not. One could argue the brainwashing is meant to be the punishment, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way.

So yeah, there are things I would have done differently. It’s also worth saying that as much as I enjoyed Charlize Theron’s clear, clipped voice as Monkey, the fact that so few Japanese actors were in the voice cast (a grand total of George Takei and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) is deeply unfortunate. I mean, there really isn’t anything that Matthew McConaughey brings to the voice of Beetle that couldn’t have been provided by a Japanese actor.

A beautiful film, definitely worth watching, but also a deeply frustrating one. It’s ironic that Kubo is characterized as someone who can’t provide a satisfying end to his marketplace storytelling; a trait the film itself eventually falls prey to.

West Side Story (2021)

I’ll admit, I had no prior knowledge of West Side Story, either the stage musical or the original 1961 film adaptation, beyond the fact it was based on Romeo and Juliet and set in 1950’s New York, in which the feuding families have been reimagined as rival gangs: the white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. Beyond that, nada.

So it was an interesting experience to watch this without the nostalgia factor that I suspect most viewers carried, and I wonder if I would have been more awash in feels had I prior knowledge of these specific characters and their story.

The Romeo and Juliet of this version are Tony, a former member of the Jets that’s just been released from prison and looking to turn his life around, and Maria, a new immigrant from Puerto Rico who is rather overawed by the big city. At a school dance meant to bring together these warring tribes, the two catch each other’s eyes and fall immediately in love.

Musicals don’t usually translate well to the screen, and this is precisely the reason why. When you’re in a theatre, in a fancy outfit, watching live people on an actual stage, it’s easy to get caught up in the emotion of the story. Love at first sight? Yeah, I can totally believe it on a stage. On the screen though? Not so much.

So I wasn’t exactly convinced by the sweeping Tony/Maria love story... making it a good thing that they’re surrounded by a supporting cast that pretty much steal the whole movie right out from under them. Mike Faist as Riff (the Tybalt) is lean and raw and terrible and heart-breaking, while David Alvarez (the Mercutio) is warm and passionate and protective and stubborn. Rita Moreno is Valentina, who I understand played Anita in the 1961 film – again, this would have had far more resonance for me if I had a history with this musical – and plays her with a dreamy, poignant, saddened sort of calm.

But the true MVP is Ariana DeBose as Anita, Bernado’s girlfriend and a near-sister to Maria. I swear, this woman has fire in her veins. Even the promotional stills of her, dancing in that yellow dress with the red petticoats on the street, were electrifying. She believes in the American dream, and when that faith is cruelly ripped away from her by the final act, you can see the flame go out of her. I’m writing this on the same night as the 2022 Academy Awards, and damn she deserved to take home that trophy.

The dance numbers are choreographed to perfection – too many musical directors just film the performers like they’re still on the stage, but Steven Spielberg’s camera is an active participant. It dips and dives and flows along with the dancers, often in ways that seem impossible (if nothing else, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the long-shot that follows the Puerto Ricans into the gym – it’s incredible). And the costumes! The cinematography! The symbolism! There’s so much richness in every frame, and it definitely deserves more than one viewing.

And this film definitely did not come to play around – there are so many scenes and choices that demand discussion and consideration, from the reimagining of one of the Jets (who I believe was originally conceived as a tomboy) as a transgender boy, to the frank assertion by Lt. Schrank that the Jets are “the can’t-make-it Caucasians”, to the horrific near-rape of Anita in which Riff’s grieving girlfriend Graziella goes from racially abusing her to sensing the shift in the boys’ intentions and desperately fighting to defend her.

It’s obviously not a cheerful movie, but it is one that I’m looking forward to revisiting in the near-future.

The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure (2022)

This movie was something of a mix-up. For years now I’ve had The Pirates – a Korean comedy-drama from 2014 – on my hard-drive, though haven been unable to watch it due to it not being subtitled. So on seeing The Pirates on Netflix, I wrongly assumed that it was the movie I’ve been dying to see for so long now, only realizing once it had finished that it was actually a sequel to the original (and not one connected to its predecessor in any significant way).

Hae-Rang captains a pirate crew that picks up a gang of marooned fishermen led by the charismatic (or clownish, depending on your point of view) Mu-Chi who considers himself the best sword fighter in Goryeo. On discovering a treasure map to a treasure stolen from the dying Goryeo dynasty, the two gangs fight, backstab and double-cross each other... then come to an agreement to work together to retrieve the lost treasure. What follows is adventures on both land and sea involving stampedes, underwater caverns, duels, behemoths, deserted islands, sea battles, and the inevitable rival band on mercenaries out to snatch the treasure for themselves.

The character of Hae-Rang is great fun: a female pirate captain with a great wardrobe and a take-no-shit attitude – what’s not to love? As a genre, pirate movies have been somewhat on the wane since the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise started dying its slow death, though this is very reminiscent given its broad comedy, swashbuckling content, romantic subplot and adventurous spirit. Not what I was expecting to watch, but still fun.

Turning Red (2022)

The panda is a metaphor for puberty.

Now that I’ve addressed the elephant in the room, know that the movie itself is very charming and funny, and captures that weird awkwardness of early adolescence to perfection. Maybe a little too perfectly, as there were more than a few scenes which had me cringing with my whole body and soul.

A lot has been said on the “relatability” of this film, which (putting aside the fact that stories should be windows as well as mirrors) is an odd way to gauge the success of a viewing experience, but suffice to say that some of Mei’s experiences resonated with my own (embarrassing parents, the desperate desire to please) and some didn’t (the obsession with a boyband, the specific cultural background). So in a way, this made it a perfect combination of familiarity and freshness.

But regardless of race or gender, anyone should be able to relate to the awkwardness of being a thirteen-year-old.

The fascinating thing about Meilin Lee is that unlike the plethora of other Disney/Pixar heroines who rebel against their parents and chase their own destiny, Mei has pretty much internalized the restrictions placed upon her. The opening montage that featured in all the trailers is quickly undermined when this overachiever tells her friends she can’t go with them to karaoke because it’s cleaning day at the family temple, something she loves doing. (As one of her friends comment as she leaves: “she’s so brainwashed.”)

Mei has been raised to please and strives for perfection, something that’s impossible to maintain when the red panda makes its first appearance (or as her mother puts it “the red peony blooms” – in my house it was “a visit from Auntie Flo” or “riding the crimson wave”). Mei wakes up after an especially humiliating experience to discover she’s transformed into a giant red panda.

She’s mortified, though to her parents it’s not wholly unexpected: Mei is just the latest in a long line of women dating back to their ancestress to manifest “the panda”. Triggered by strong emotions, the panda can be permanently suppressed by a ceremony under a blood moon (of course).

But as the weeks go on, Mei comes to realize something astonishing – she likes the red panda, and so does everyone else! Using it to raise money for tickets to the 4Town concert, Mei begins the inevitable rite of passage that is defying one’s parents.

In its time, Disney’s antagonists have gone from Camp Evil to Hidden Villains to this: generational trauma. This one is rooted in Chinese culture, specifically the stereotype of a Tiger Mum, which... is a cause for consternation for some and not without reason. In the mix is the typically Western-centric search for self-actualization, and the setting itself reflects this: one of Toronto’s Chinatowns, a perfect melding of East and West.

It’s also something of a period piece (heh) in that so many of the details are rooted in 2002: Tamagotchis, flip-phones, mixed CDs, boy bands – probably a lost more that I missed. Mei’s group of friends are a particular delight: obsessed with nonsense, yet their frivolous problems are felt so deeply that you’re compelled to take them seriously (on realizing that one might not go to the concert, another says: “You can’t not go! Jessi [one of the boyband members] is your soulmate!”)

If there’s one glaring problem, it’s that it dissolves rather than resolves the central conflict, which makes for a somewhat weak climax that is incredibly fuzzy about what exactly the rules are regarding the transformation, the ritual and the purpose of the panda (yes, it’s a metaphor, but like the house/candle in Encanto, it really needed to make sense on its own terms within the fantasy world-building).

But ultimately it’s a very fun movie. The visuals are gorgeous – I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy the Aardman-like design of the characters, but they work great with the material and Disney is going to sell a ton of those red panda plushies.

Cyrano (2022)

The trailer for this dropped a while back, and I was mostly intrigued by the fact it had managed to do so without me even knowing the film was in production. But a musical based on Cyrano de Bergerac starring Peter Dinklage and directed by Joe Wright? Sign me up!

That’s a match made in heaven, even for those who might initially think that exchanging the infamous nose for dwarfism is treading on sacred territory (like a Peter Pan who grows up or a Romeo and Juliet where the lovers get a happy ending). But the switch works pretty well... up to a point. Dinklage is obviously a handsome guy, and is here characterized as a man of means, wit and popularity who can breezily deal with a heckler and hold his own in a swordfight against at least six other men. What exactly is holding him back from declaring his love for Roxanne?

Cleverly, it’s not just fear of rejection and self-loathing as to his appearance, but rather a surplus of pride. One suspects that even if this version of Cyrano did take the plunge and declare himself, he would suffer under the gaze and commentary of other people passing judgment on such an unorthodox couple. He prefers suffering to the possibility of a happy future under the gaze of other people.

It’s an old story and you probably know the beats: Cyrano loves Roxanne who loves Christian, who reciprocates but has no way to express himself in the way she desires. So Cyrano offers his services: to write love letters on Christian’s behalf and in doing so, give himself an outlet for his own romantic longing. She’s swept away by the words, and Joe Wright isn’t afraid to go there when it comes to the framing of his three-way love affair, with images, lyrics and letters overlapping all three participants.

Later, when Cyrano woos Roxanne with Christian’s “voice” outside her balcony, it becomes apparent that Christian is emotionally aware enough to pick up on Cyrano’s own yearning. In fact, this is a great take on Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr) – if memory serves, he’s a bit callow in the original play, though here he not only feels conscience-stricken at the thought of deceiving Roxanne, but insists that Cyrano tell her to the truth so that she can chose for herself. (Then he dies in a remarkably stupid way, but never mind).

In many ways, he’s probably the better catch of Roxanne’s two paramours, though Dinklage naturally puts in a tour de force performance as Cyrano, moving between excitement and despair, yearning and arrogance, dry wit and hopeless acceptance. The scene in which Roxanne comes to tell him of her feelings for Christian, in which he initially believes she’s talking about him, has been rightfully singled out as the scene that should have landed him an Oscar.

That leaves Haley Bennett as Roxanne, left with the thankless task of being the object of two men’s desire, forced to scrape out characterization in the narrow space their feelings afford her. She manages pretty well despite the impossible limitations: to be intelligent while simultaneously oblivious to Cyrano’s feelings; warm and kind while putting her best friend through the emotional wringer. The song lyrics help in this regard, establishing her as a romantic who doesn’t want anything less than true and pure love without really understanding what love is.  

Oh, and Ben Mendelsohn is also here, as yet another suitor for Roxanne’s hand (the evil one). Honestly, I would have preferred to have cut this character to make room for some more insight into Roxanne and/or Christian’s interiority.

As it happens, I ended up listening to the soundtrack before watching the film, which is always a double-edged sword. I think it allows you to appreciate the music and performances more, but at the same time you inevitably start imagining how the songs are staged in your head that never live up to what actually happens on the screen. For example, “Wherever I Fall” had me in tears when I listened to it, but did nothing for me on the actual screen.

It’s a gorgeous movie though, with stunning visuals set in and around Sicily, where songs are accompanied by the swish of long sleeves as the soldiers practice their sword-fighting, or flurries of letters filling a bedroom like snow around Roxanne’s rapturous spinning. With Joe Wright at the help, it was always going to look stunning, but everything here is infused with light and beauty. It’s ironic to make such a sad story look so deeply romantic, but Wright knew the assignment and delivered.

Duck Tales: Season 1 (2017 – 2018)

Everything is being remade or rebooted these days, so much so that on learning Duck Tales, that quintessential afterschool cartoon of my generation’s collective childhood, was getting similar treatment, the response was neither excitement or outrage – just a nonchalant “okay, I guess” attitude.

The original designs got a sharper makeover, a plethora of celebrity voices were cast (David Tennant, Danny Pudi, Ben Schwartz, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Allison Janney, Catherine Tate, Don Cheadle) and some of the more dated elements were reimagined, along with an overarching plot involving the nephews’ missing mother and a nefarious scheme from a shadowy villain.

As with the original show (and the comic books that preceded it) the first episode has Huey, Dewey and Louie move from Donald Duck’s houseboat to Uncle Scrooge’s mansion, which kickstarts a range of adventures involving everything from mythological creatures to cutting-edge technology when the little rapscallions reignite the elderly Scrooge’s lust for excitement and treasure hunting.

Just as comic book movies can cherry-pick from literally hundreds of earlier stories in order to shape their plots, Duck Tales has a wide range of material for the writers to choose from – not just the earlier show, but the entirety of Disney’s animated cartoon canon. As such, there are early appearances from the likes of Gizmoduck, Gladstone Gander, Duckwing Duck, Gyro Gearloose – and I hear it only gets more meta in the next two seasons.

I get the feeling they tried to give Huey, Dewey and Louie unique characteristics this time around, though honestly they’re still interchangeable to me, largely distinguishable by the plots they end up in: Dewey gets the most screentime as the main instigator in researching his mother’s disappearance, Huey interacts the most with Gizmoduck and other tech-based episodes, and Louie... is also there. It’s with Webbigale that the show really does something different, revamping her as a quirky and over-eager adventurer/Scrooge fangirl who’s never had any friends before – a far cry from the literal child of the original cartoon who was never allowed to do anything particularly fun.

Mrs Beakley gets a fun update too (now she’s a retired spy as opposed to just Scrooge’s housekeeper), Launchpad is as hapless as ever (he was always my favourite) and there’s a twist involving Donald Duck’s speech impediment in the finale that brings the house down. And that theme song! Who doesn’t know all the words to that theme song?

Black Lightning: Season 3 (2019 – 2020)

I technically only watched three or so episodes this month, but those were the ones that finished this season off. I’ve been dipping into this on-and-off since Crisis on Infinite Earths, which was the halfway mark of all the CW Arrowverse shows airing at this time and that was a while ago, so I was having some trouble remembering exactly what had happened prior to the multiverse collapsing.

The season mostly centres around the fact that the (fictional) Eastern Europe country of Markovia has secretly invaded Freeland in order to detain meta-humans for their own ends. In response, the A.S.A. has imposed martial law on the city in order to maintain law and order, and capture as many meta-humans as they can to prevent the Markovians from getting to them first.

This puts the Pierce family between a rock and a hard place, as neither of these warring factions are comprised of people whose side you’d want to be on. I find it easier to recall the individual character arcs rather than the overarching plot: Lynn is captured by the Markovians and forced to work on stabilizing the meta humans in their possession (and getting addicted to Greenlight in the process), Jennifer is groomed by Odell to become his personal assassin, and Anissa continues to help with transporting refugees and beating up street criminals while getting more serious with her girlfriend Grace.

In what is perhaps the season’s most fraught subplot, Khalil is revealed to be still alive, and reprogrammed into an emotionless killing machine by Odell who sends him out after various targets, including his own mother. As I understand it, Jordan Calloway was being set up for a Painkiller spin-off that never went ahead, and his material here is pretty harrowing stuff.

That leaves Jefferson, who... er... aside from the Crisis on Infinite Earth interlude, was mostly preoccupied with keeping his family together. I suppose the problem with a middle-aged superhero who knows his stuff is that there really isn’t any profound character development left for him to go through. He still centres the show though, as a good father, good husband and good man – I do love the fact that unlike other superhero shows that focus largely on found families, this one has a biological family as its heart, who all love and support each other. That’s a strangely rare thing.

It would seem that the universe of Black Lightning has been integrated into the larger multiverse post-Crisis, what with the final episode taking place in Gotham City, so going forward it’ll be interesting to see if there are any other minor crossovers on the table. This show has always been markedly different from the rest of the Arrowverse shows in its content and aesthetic, but we’ll see...

Nancy Drew: Season 2 (2021)

This show is truly one of the strangest I’ve ever seen, largely because it has next to no interest in its source material. This is a Nancy Drew show in which Nancy isn’t actually a Drew (she was adopted at birth), doesn’t live in River Heights, doesn’t have a housekeeper called Hannah Gruen (the character has been reimagined as the curator of the local historical society) or a dog called Togo, no longer has a love interest called Ned Nickerson (not that the character even goes by the name “Ned”, everyone just calls him “Nick” for some reason) but is paired with a completely original character called Ace, and whose best friends Bess and George have been reimagined as gay and Asian respectively (which is fine) but not overweight or tomboyish (not so fine). Plus, they're no longer cousins. I mean, Nancy is a redhead that solves mysteries and there ends the similarities to the book series.

After a certain point you wonder why on earth they even bothered. Why build on such a well-known IP if you’re just going to replace absolutely everything about it? For me, the quintessential charm of the Nancy Drew books are their 50s/60s setting, but this show could have provided an update of those old school mysteries into a contemporary setting (like what Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatkiss did for Sherlock). Instead, in what is perhaps the strangest altercation, Nancy and her friends are essentially ghostbusters. Heck, the books didn’t even deal with murders all that often, but here people drop like flies.

And yet for all of this, Nancy Drew is pretty fun to watch. The Scooby Gang dynamics of the “Drew Crew” remind me of those from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: even though there are a few romantic complications, they’re all supportive of each other and there are important dynamics between certain characters that don’t revolve around Nancy (Ace and Bess for example, or Bess and George, or George and Nick).

It’s quite fun to play “spot the inspiration” – the show not only provides the inevitable Groundhog Day episode (though it’s somewhat of a variation seeing that the characters keep losing their memories rather than resetting the day) but the monster is clearly drawn from 2017’s The Ritual. Meanwhile, whoever wrote the episode in which Nancy is locked inside the police station and forced to solve a cold case amongst the suspects that have been gathered there clearly read J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls at school.

And the season pulls off two very good twists that nobody saw coming. I actually read the comments on the PreviouslyTV pages after each episode, and was in agreement with comments that said Nancy was acting wildly out of character for the duration of the season – but it turns out this was completely on purpose. And once you get your head around the fact that this show dives headfirst into the supernatural, there are some fun set-pieces and concepts to be had: the final episode for example is about Nancy trying to remove a spell from herself, taking us on a trip through her subconscious along the way (remember that Buffy episode?)

There’s also an episode that’s clearly a Backdoor Pilot to a new show starring a character called Tom Swift. Now, obviously I knew who Nancy Drew was, and even though I’ve never read any of the books, I was aware that two characters introduced as the Bobbsey Twins have their origins in another series. I’m also pretty sure that Ace and his newly-discovered half-brother are going to end up being the Hardy Boys. But I had never in my life heard of a character called Tom Swift, who is apparently going headline his own show – and I’m all for it! The actor positively drips charisma, and his introduction isn’t nearly so “here’s a great new character that you should instantly embrace!” as these sorts of episodes usually are.  

Covid-19 played havoc with this show’s schedule, and the first five or so episodes are very clearly meant to be the final episodes of the previous season before a brand-new story arc kicks off, but the show manages to remain surprisingly consistent in its storylines and character arcs (even if some of the details are absurd – Nancy solves a mystery by a discrepancy in the colour of ash between a campfire and a burning boat, the latter of which she’s only seen in a photograph). But there’s something oddly charming about the whole thing, so watching season three is just a matter of time.

Pam and Tommy (2022)

I regret watching this, not because it’s not well made or interesting, but because it left me feeling like a sleazebag. Which I suspect was the show’s intent. Based around the theft and distribution of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s honeymoon sex tape (footage from which isn’t actually depicted here, only peoples’ reactions to it) the eight episodes cover the circumstances behind the tape’s theft, the emotional toll it took on Pamela’s emotional and mental state, and the wider ramifications it had on cultural, legal and ethical issues.

An altercation between Tommy Lee and Rand Gauthier takes place while the latter is renovating the former’s California mansion, ending with him getting evicted from the property without payment or the chance to retrieve his tools. Furious at the financial loss Rand masterminds a break-in and makes off with the couple’s safe (this really did involve him draping a furry blanket over himself and passing himself off as the couple’s dog to evade the security cameras). It’s there he finds their honeymoon home-video and seeks out opportunities to monetize it.

The show then largely verges into Tommy and Pamela’s whirlwind romance, in which they meet, hook up and wed within four days. What she saw in him is anyone’s guess, but just as they start to settle into married life, they realize that the safe – and therefore the tape – has gone missing. Once it hits the internet as part of Rand’s get-rich-quick scheme, Pamela’s life starts to crumble as she’s forced to endure public humiliation, legal ramifications, and a husband that tries to be supportive but clearly can’t understand why she and not he is the greater victim here.

I’ll admit I have very little knowledge of the sex industry, but I felt it was a bit disingenuous of the show to present the Playboy Mansion as a classy and professional place, what with the respectful photographer and the gentlemanly, almost fatherly Hugh Hefner, who treats Pamela with kindness and respect. Later, Rand’s ex-wife rips him a new one when she discovers that he was the one responsible for stealing and leaking the tape, emphasizing the fact that porn stars give consent and get paid before their images are used in such content.

I support the safety and dignity of sex workers, but it’s difficult for me to imagine a porn industry that isn’t inherently predatory and exploitative towards women, and the show certainly doesn’t touch on subjects such as the recent accusations toward Hugh Hefner or Tommy Lee’s domestic abuse charges. Instead it very much wants to create a dichotomy between “good porn” and “bad porn”, not to mention a feminist leaning “women support each other in the face of male mistreatment” angle.

There is some poignancy in this, such as a female publicist who tries to support Pamela throughout the escalating PR crisis, or the silent female stenographer who can do nothing but shoot horrified looks of sympathy at Pam while she’s struggling to answer grotesque and invasive questions at a legal disposition. But it fails to acknowledge that women can be just as misogynistic and judgmental as men can in cases such as this, and I have trouble believing that women en masse would have rallied to her side back in the nineties (not that the show depicts this as actually happening).

Lily James delivers an uncanny performance as Pamela, right down to her speech patterns and body language – truly the most I’ve seen her actually act. It’s a heart-breaking performance of a woman who lives to please and whose body is considered public property... then I’m reminded that Pamela Anderson didn’t consent to any of this, and I just feel gross.

I wanted to watch mainly because I loved Craig Gillespie’s I Tonya, and felt that this would vibe well with that. It did, and it’s good... but I wish I hadn’t watched it.

Disenchanted: Season 4 (2022)

This is one of those shows that I watch faithfully every time a new season drops, and then promptly forget about until the next one. This leads to the disadvantage of having absolutely no idea what’s going on most of the time – for example, this season has a manic little puppet running around which I assume was introduced earlier in the show, but I have absolutely no memory of whatsoever.

As with Futurama, the underlying story is surprisingly complex and interwoven, with a nefarious plan going on in the background that involves Princess Bean’s mother Dagmara and the devil himself, who apparently want to take over her home kingdom of Dreamland. This season also reveals a dark secret to the kingdom’s history, in which the current human inhabitants originally seized control of the castle from the elves and mermaids.

But having introduced all this, the show is still happy to spin its wheels with various subplots and side quests. We end on yet another cliff-hanger, which means I’m still stuck with a lingering trace of fear in the back of my mind that Matt Groening’s project will get cancelled before it reaches whatever conclusion he has planned, and I’ve sunk all this time into yet another story that doesn’t have a decent finish.

Because despite it all, I do want this to a. get finished and b. be good.  I love Bean in all her messy, headstrong, trying-to-be-a-decent-person glory, and whatever the underlying plot of the show is (we still haven’t gotten the details on what Dagmara’s endgame is, how it connects to Steampunk Land, what the hell the puppets are about, or how Bean’s aunt and uncle figure into it all) I’m genuinely curious to find out. The animation – especially some of the backgrounds – are just gorgeous, and the supporting cast is great too, from the demon Luci to the put-upon Bunty.  

Now I’m going to completely forget about this show for another year... hopefully see you next time!

The Babysitters Club: Season 2 (2022)

By now the show’s cancellation has sunk in, which makes me sad for a lot of reasons. Not only was this a fun update of a beloved book series, but the cast was top-notch and the project itself brimming with enthusiasm.

As the creator pointed out in the Vulture article that discussed Netflix’s decision to pull the plug, content for girls usually goes from Doc McStuffins straight to Euphoria with very little in between. Certainly nothing that caters to pre-teen girls who are straddling the line between childhood and adolescence and looking for something that’s fun and colourful but also doesn’t talk down to them.

This was a good, positive thing, and now it’s gone.

Before I started watching, I went to my old collection of Babysitters Club books and counted how many I had of each sitter – just out of interest. Not counting the Super Specials, which alternated between points-of-view, Claudia clocked in the most at ten books, followed by Kristy and Dawn at eight each, then Mary Anne at six, Stacey at five, Jessi at four, and Mallory at two. (I never got as far as Abby).

Claudia was always my favourite, so that’s no surprise, but with my personal preferences in mind it was interesting so see which girl got what character-centric episode in the eight-episode season. There are seven babysitters and each girl gets at least one episode... except for poor Mallory. Her absence makes room for Kirsty and Claudia to each get one extra episode each, retaining Mallory’s position as the series’ perpetual Butt Monkey.  

Also of interest is that the first season followed the publication order of the books, with episodes one to eight adhering to the first eight books in the series, with a two-part finale based on one of the Super Specials as a capper. This season cherry picks all over the place, essentially being adaptations of #11, #12, #43, #27, #30, # 31, #26 and #45 in that order. Which means no The Ghost at Dawn’s House (my favourite one!) but a grab-bag of material that the show puts its own spin on.

Some changes I understood, some I didn’t. Shannon Kilbourne is Shannon Delaney now, a snobbish neighbour the same age as Kristy’s mother who has no resemblance whatsoever to the book character. Ashley Wyeth isn’t a girl Claudia’s age, but one of Janine’s peers who is eventually revealed to be her girlfriend. The drama surrounding Mary Anne and Dawn sharing a room isn’t after they become stepsisters, but when Mary Anne and her father move into Mrs Schafer’s house while their house is fumigated.

Oh, and Dawn is now played by Kyndra Sanchez instead of Xochitl Gomez. Usually I hate cast changes, but it was fairly inevitable when Xochitl went off to do Marvel’s Doctor Strange sequel. A girl isn’t about to turn down an opportunity like that!

But where the show really excels is in the great portrayals of the parents, who were little more than ciphers in the books, but here are well-rounded characters in their own right, from Mr Spier having prepared for Mary Anne’s first date by writing on cue cards, to the Kishis gently but tearfully breaking the news of Mimi’s passing to their daughters, to Kirsty’s mother crying in the bathroom and telling her daughter that this specific set of problems she’s facing isn’t something to burden her thirteen-year-old with – instead she has to do the responsible thing and speak to her husband. Adults behaving like actual adults, will wonders never cease.

It’s a damn shame that Netflix didn’t see fit to squeeze in one more season of The Babysitters Club, even if it was just a two-parter based on a Super Special as a last hurrah. It was never going to last more than three seasons anyway given the rapid aging of the main cast, didn’t seem to be particularly expensive to produce, and doesn’t end on a note of definitive closure.  Ah well.

Vikings: Valhalla: Season 1 (2022)

I churned through these across the course of two days, and yeah – it’s good. Not great, but solidly good. Set over a hundred years after the conclusion of the original show, it uses the massacre of St Brice’s Day in 1002 as its inciting incident, in which King Æthelred the Unready orders the deaths of several Vikings settled across England in retaliation for ongoing Vikings raids on English soil.

Naturally, this only results in warring bands of Vikings teaming up in order to take their revenge. Led by King Canute and his heir Harald Haraldsson (played by the Hot Builder from Sanditon – and wow, Charlotte must be kicking herself for letting this guy slip through her fingers) the two broker a peace between those that still worship the old gods and those that have long-since converted to Christianity.

Among them are siblings Lief and Freydis, who have come to Kattegut to avenge the latter’s rape at the hands of a Viking Christian. When her mission is completed, justice is served by roping Lief into the English invasion, with Harald forming an attachment to the sister and a homoerotic bond with the brother (yup, you can’t help but see shades of Ragnar, Lagertha and Athelstan here).

While Lief and Harald head off in the longboats for England, Freydis is sent on her own journey to Uppsala, where she once more crosses paths with Viking Christians who are determined to convert their brethren to the true faith by whatever means necessary.

As ever, this is taking very broad strokes of the history at the time – but honestly, what else do you expect at this point? There are some incredible set pieces, most obviously the Bridge of London in which the Vikings hoards manage to use English ingenuity against them, and the beauty of Uppsala, a set not seen since the first season of Vikings.

Our trio of main characters are winning enough: Freydis and Lief have a nice sibling bond that thankfully has zero incest vibes (so many actors can’t keep sexual chemistry out of their on-screen dynamics) an interesting attraction/suspicion toward Harald, and strong individual arcs. The reliable David Oakes plays the inscrutable Littlefinger character, whose motivations and double-dealing is a mystery right to the last episode, while Louis Davison channels a demented Prince Joffrey in his youthful prince gormlessness. In fact, it’s difficult not to draw parallels between Game of Thrones and the original Vikings, and as much as I enjoyed it, there’s little here that hasn’t been done elsewhere.

Vikings was always a double-edged sword when it came to its female characters. On the one hand, their bodies were never excessively ogled by the camera to anywhere near the same extent as in Game of Thrones. On the other, many if not most of them were underserved, fridged and/or mistreated (by the fandom as well as the writing). Valhalla does much better, even if it does end on a classic fridging – like seriously, a male character tells his girlfriend that she’s the one thing keeping him from his dark side, only her for to die in battle and him to fully embrace his berserker tendencies.

Likewise, Freydis’s Rape as Backstory is unnecessary (there are plenty of other reasons why a woman might want vengeance on a man) and there’s at least one disappointing death of a fantastic female character. But the likes of Freydis, Jarl Haakon and Queen Emma are wonderful. The latter even gets that very rare storyline: a rivalry with another female character which doesn’t amount to territorial nonsense over a man (even though a man is involved). Instead, each one has understandable and sympathetic motives that inevitably pit them against one another.

Granted, I think they did instruct the actress playing Aelfgida to play her character with a level of haughtiness to code her as “the bad one” even though she’s the wronged woman in the scenario! But both women are intelligent and fierce, and it comes across as a genuine tragedy that they’re unable to join forces due to rules of the patriarchy they live in.

One of the most interesting components of the original Vikings was – I felt – the tension between Christianity and Norse paganism, with the former gradually superseding the latter, and plenty of good and bad adherents to each religion. There was a healthy dash of mysticism as well, and Michael Hirst always had some interesting nuances to every character’s faith and how it drove their actions.

Here, it’s very much Christianity = bad, paganism = noble, with very little exploration of the nuances and reality of people’s lives. Harald is a Christian, but clearly prefers the life of a Viking, while others are complete psychopaths that truly live by the sword. Aside from Lief showing a very mild interest in Christianity and the subject of miracles, the Vikings get the “lost cause” romanticism of their dying faith, being portrayed as the last remnants of the Norse worship.

There is (not without cause) a great distrust of Christianity in the world today, but I would have liked to see it less prejudicially portrayed, especially in this period (after all, there are several fascinating similarities between Christ and Odin, most particularly the fact each were hanged from a tree). But apparently a second and third season has already been greenlit – so there’s plenty of time to add some extra nuance along the way.

Suspicion (2022)

Mum hurt her leg so I took this round to her place and we binged it across two days. This is the best way to watch any sort of conspiracy/espionage miniseries in my opinion, as the twists and turns and variety of characters can get pretty confusing if you’re not totally focused on what’s going on (and in this case, we still had some questions about who exactly hired a central character).

Tara McAllister (university teacher), Aadesh Chopra (IT guy) and Natalie Thompson (accounting) are three ordinary people seemingly going about their daily lives when they’re abruptly brought in by police for questioning on the kidnapping of Leo Newman, the son of a wealthy and powerful businesswoman who’s making a play for a political position in Washington. The demands of the kidnapper are unclear – a viral video simply demands that in exchange for her son’s life, Katherine Newman must “tell the truth”.

Our three protagonists (soon to be joined by wastrel Eddie Walker and psychopathic gun-for-hire Sean Tillson) are completely bewildered by the accusation they had something to do with Leo’s disappearance – though as the interrogations continue, it becomes apparent that they’re not only involved in some underhanded dealings, but that they do have connections with the Newman family. With the clock ticking on how long Katherine has to share this mysterious “truth”, the five suspects team up in an attempt to figure it out on their own.

Also in play is Detective Vanessa Okoye, reluctantly forced to work with her American counterpart Scott Anderson, who has very different ideas about how the investigation should be run. Vanessa is played by Angel Coulby, who was naturally the reason I was drawn to this show in the first place, and she has a great role here. Most interesting is that I recently saw her as another police investigator in Innocent, but despite this similarity between the characters, she plays Vanessa very differently to Cathy Hudson. That’s range!

As well as simply being a fast-paced socio-political thriller, it raises some interesting ideas about what the characters refer to as “ethical terrorism”, in which the wealthy are targeted in order to extract social and economical truths to the public, as well as the oversaturation of surveillance and cellphones in the world today (they borrow that visual trick first seen in Sherlock, in which the words of texts are superimposed on the screen next to the characters as they read them).

It’s a rollercoaster ride, and probably something you don’t want to think about too closely as the twists and turns start piling up, but we churned through all eight episodes in record time – not a bad way to pass a rainy day.

King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow (1992)

When you’re on holiday, you’re allowed to do whatever you want. So even though I try to read and watch various things in some semblance of order, sometimes you can just follow the mood as it strikes you. One afternoon I was overcome with the desire to replay one of the seminal games of my childhood, and ended up doing so well into the early hours of the morning.

This is widely considered the best of the seven (alright eight but no one likes the last one) King’s Quest games due to its sophisticated story, clever puzzles, solid characters, talented voice cast, and incredible detail. Somehow it feels like the most quintessential of all the King’s Quest games, born out of a deep understanding of what fans enjoyed about them (the grab-bag of mythological/folklorish inspiration) while elevating the storytelling and characterization to a level that had never been experienced before.

Prince Alexander is pining for Cassima, the young princess he met at the end of the previous game, who extended an invitation for him to visit her in the Land of the Green Isles. Having glimpsed her in the family’s magic mirror and sensing that she’s in trouble, he charts a course to the mysterious land and ends up shipwrecked on its shores. It’s at this point that the player can take over Alexander’s movements, and naturally most will choose to explore further inland and seek out information in the nearby castle.

There he learns Cassima is not only sequestered in mourning but engaged to the kingdom’s Grand Vizier (and you just know they’re always trouble). Feeling dispirited, Alexander decides to explore the Green Isles, of which there are four: The Isle of the Crown, The Isle of Wonder, The Isle of the Beast and the Isle of the Winged Ones – though the Vizier warns him that the inhabitants may not be particularly friendly. Each one has its own culture, based on various literary inspirations (in order: Arabian Nights, Alice in Wonderland, French fairy tales and Classical mythology) and once Alexander starts his adventure, deeper intrigues and mysteries begin to resurface.

There’s really no understating how formative these games were in my childhood. I wrote stories about the characters long before I had any inkling of the concept of “fanfiction” and practically lived inside the pixelated fairy tale worlds. I absolutely credit them with my interest in Greek mythology and folklore, and Princess Rosella (of King’s Quest IV) holds the honour of being the first female playable protagonist in a computer adventure game.

I don’t want to say too much, as I’ve long since wanted to do a proper deep-dive into these games after playing them all in chronological order, but I was impressed all over again by just how good this particular one is. The voice cast boasts the likes of Robby Benson (who voiced Disney’s Beast), Tony Jay (Disney’s Frollo) and Russi Taylor (the triplets and Webbigale in the original Duck Tales). There is an amazing amount of developer’s foresight given to the game and the order in which certain events are played – for example, most players would intuitively go directly to the castle on arrival, but if you chose not to, the ensuing dialogue with other characters will reflect this omission.

And I appreciated that even though the gameplay revolves around a damsel in distress, there is no small degree of effort to imbue Cassima with a personality and agency of her own. It’s hardly a feminist triumph, especially in a game series that’s veritably full of distressed damsels (Cassima isn’t even the only one in this game) but then it’s not trying to be – it’s a fairy tale that happens to involve a woman in need of help, and we’re given enough reason to care about Cassima on her own terms to prevent her from becoming a Sexy Lamp.

There’s so much more I want to say, but I suppose I better hold off for the moment. Stay tuned for a much more in-depth look at these games... eventually. I also played The Colonel’s Bequest on my time off, and I definitely want to delve more into that one sooner rather than later.