This month was all about the teen rom-com drama, which sounds like a weird follow-up to last month’s Shakespearean splurge, but at least three of the films I watched were based on a Shakespearean play, so it was actually quite a fitting theme. (This also meant I ended up watching a lot of YouTube clips from Not Another Teen Movie).
Furthermore, I’ve continued with my journey through The Dark Crystal franchise, with two of the four YA novels, and a rewatch of the gone-before-its-time Netflix series (so now I’m grumpy all over again at its cancellation).
More girl detectives, more of The Tudors (as well as an unrelated Anne Boleyn-centric miniseries) and ... wait for it ... Ivanhoe! I’ll be watching the most famous film/television adaptations in July and doing my promised deep-dive into Rebecca and Rowena.
New York, New York! by Anne M. Martin
It feels like the girls have barely got back from California, and how they’re off to New York. Time flies. I’m actually cheating a little with the placement of this Super Special, as it comes between books #44 and #45, but I don’t like to break up the main series if I can help it.
We’re on the sixth Super Special already, and New York is the obvious choice for a vacation given Stacey’s father lives there. However, it’s Claudia who gets the narrative framing device this time around, with the premise being that she’s attending a prestigious art school in the city under the tutelage of McKenzie Clark, an established artist. (He’s also not a real person, even though for some reason I was convinced he was when I read this book as a kid).
Naturally, all the other babysitters go with her (to New York, not the art school) on one of their vaguely unspecified school breaks, having gotten the permission of Mr McGill to stay with him. Only seven girls in one apartment is a lot for a single dad, so half of them end up at Laine Cummings’ place – because sure, her parents are fine with hosting their teenage daughter’s ex-best friend’s social circle for two weeks. That’s a totally normal thing to do. (Even weirder, four of the seven babysitters end up staying with the Cummings).
Claudia comes up with the idea for everyone to keep a vacation diary, which meant I had to squint my way through about five pages of her incomprehensible handwriting, including all the misspellings, and her sketches of the city (which were actually by Anne M. Martin’s father, a cartoonist).
And naturally, once they’re all settled in, the girls decide to split up, and we get the usual multi-branched storylines that comprise all the Super Specials. Claudia and Mallory go to their art class, only for Claud to get frustrated at the levels of criticism she’s getting from her tutor, who is also much nicer to Mallory, despite her having considerably less talent (and only wants to learn how to draw mice and toadstools for her children’s books).
I can kind of get Claudia’s frustration, as it’s a classic case of expectations versus reality, not to mention the frustration of perceived favouritism being directed at someone who is clearly not as good as yourself. She also brings up her fear that if art is the only thing she’s good at, and if it turns out she’s not very talented after all, then she has absolutely nothing going for her. Unfortunately, she decides to be a complete brat about everything, and for no reason at all. It eventually transpires that she was only getting harsh treatment because the teacher wanted her to exert herself and maintain discipline.
Mallory gets the other half of Claud’s story, in which she has to put up with her friend’s resentment and nasty comments through no fault of her own, and basically tries to make the best of an art course she’s really not that interested in. Her chapters contain some sightseeing of New York locales, but she: “needed to learn to draw bunnies and mice and fat mushrooms and cute little bugs.” Instead, she’s stuck sketching a pile of cardboard boxes for the sake of shading and perspective.
Kristy finds a stray dog in Central Park, sneaks it into the Cummings’ apartment, is told absolutely not when she asks Watson if she can bring it back to Stoneybrook, and eventually finds it a new owner in the guise of a little boy who agrees to keep calling the dog “Sonny,” which was short for “son of Louise” given his resemblance to Kristy’s original collie dog. It’s a sweet enough story, though Kristy breaks at least twenty rules of common sense when it comes to keeping yourself safe in New York.
Dawn is terrified of New York City, to the point where it feels like she has undiagnosed anxiety. I mean, I understand she’s convinced something terrible is going to happen, but my main complaint is that they’ve trod this exact same ground in Stacey’s Emergency! She just stays in the apartment by herself all day, cleaning, until a neighbour called Richie talks her into taking a walk around the less-touristy areas of the city, and she gets over her fear. Just like last time. I get the feeling they couldn’t come up with a decent plot for her, so went with this.
Jessi has a nice story about going to a performance of Swan Lake, and meeting a ballet dancer her own age called Quint who wants to quit ballet because he’s tired of being bullied. Naturally, Jessi talks him into going to Julliard and she gets her first kiss. Aww. (Also, we Quint will pop up again in other books).
In my favourite subplot, Stacey and Mary Anne get a job babysitting for the children of some British diplomats. Alistaire and Rowena (complete with matching sailor outfits) are sweet kids, and the girls are essentially getting paid to give them a tour through New York. But during their daily outings, the girls notice a man in a trench coat and dark glasses following them everywhere and become convinced he’s stalking one or both of the children. Turns out he’s just their bodyguard, but it’s a fun mini-mystery, even if there are holes aplenty (why wouldn’t the girls be told this upfront? Wouldn’t such a wealthy family have a nanny? And why don’t the girls tell the parents straightaway when they think the kids are being followed?)
But it’s actually a very funny book. When Kristy’s entire extended family come to see her off at the train station, she remarks: “I’m surprised the cat and the goldfish didn’t come too.” Later, she says of the other people on the platform: “I hope they were entertained. We did our best to put on a show for them” and “I had the feeling that the people around us were quickly learning our names.” Mal’s first art lesson is described thusly: “She looked from the boxes to her pad. Slowly she picked up a pencil and began to draw. She erased her first line.”
Once Stacey and Mary Anne are convinced the children are being targeted, they have this conversation: “What are we going to do? Disguise the children?” “Disguise them? How? With moustaches and wigs?” When Quint tells his parents he wants to go to Julliard with Jessi in attendance, Jessi says: “I’m sure Quint’s parents thought we were going to tell them we wanted to get married” (though it’s obvious to the reader that “she’s pregnant” was also on the table). On hearing it’s actually about dance class: “his parents lost around twenty pounds, just by letting their breath out.”
And at the end, amidst the letters that are going back and forth between the babysitters and the characters in New York, Mr McGill writes to his daughter: “I can’t find anything. Ask Dawn if she knows where the salad plates are.”
See? Funny stuff.
As for Mary Anne, she’s not that bad here, though she sings: “New York, New York, a wonderful town,” instead of “New York, New York, it’s a hell of a town,” as she really is that much of a goody-two-shoes.
Shadow of the Dark Crystal by J. M. Lee
My The Dark Crystal experience continues with the four YA novels penned by J.M. Lee, though... well, it became something of a confusing experience while reading them in tandem with a rewatch of Netflix’s Age of Resistance.
I was initially under the impression that these were tie-in novels with that show – after all, they contained the same characters and premise. But I get the distinct impression that these were originally conceived as a direct prequel to the 1982 film, and were then loosely used as the blueprints for the Netflix show. Plenty of the same characters, locations and concepts exist in both books and series, but certain events that occur here are wildly at odds with the continuity of the show. They simply do not mesh with each other.
It’s kind of like what Disney did with the original Star Wars continuations: they cherrypicked the parts they liked, but discarded the rest. And like I said, that makes for an extremely confusing reading/watching experience, as I was constantly getting the two continuities mixed up in my head.
It starts out just fine. Our main character is Naia, a Drenchen Gelfling who lives in the Swamp of Sog with her family, and whose mother is the maudra (or leader) of the clan. She featured as a supporting character in the show, voiced by Hannah John-Kamen. When the story begins, Naia meets a Gelfling soldier called Tavra journeying through the swamp to deliver some disturbing news to the maudra: her son Gurjin (Naia’s twin brother), who was employed as a guard for the Skeksis at the Castle of the Crystal, has been accused of treachery, and subsequently fled into the wilderness with his friend Rian.
None of Naia’s family has any idea what’s going on, but one of them is called to accompany Tavra to the Castle and stand witness at Gurjin’s trial. When her father is injured, Naia continues the journey alone, only to make new friends, visit new locales, and discover more about what exactly her brother discovered when he ran afoul of the Skeksis. All this tracks with the events of the show. So far so good.
I thought to myself that this was clearly not so much a prequel to the Netflix prequel, but a story that was supplementary to it, detailing the events that were happening concurrently to the adventures of Rian, Brea and Deet, the show protagonists who were closer to the more narratively important arc of the Skeksis and their plan to drain Gelflings of their vital life-force. And that was a good idea, giving these books the chance to flesh out some of the periphery characters that didn’t get as much screentime on the show.
And yet, that’s apparently not the case. Even though it’s not as obvious in this book (if you squint, it exists enough on the outskirts of the main action that it more-or-less fits into the show’s continuity) there are definitely some inconsistencies with the events of the show, which become more obvious with each new instalment. In order to enjoy this, you have to read it as though it’s an alternative history of Age of Resistance – which for this continuity-nerd, was difficult.
Compounding to the confusion is just how much was taken from these books in the crafting of the show – everything from the names and environs of the seven Gelfing clans, to the fact that many Gelflings work for the Skeksis in the capacity of castle guards, to many of the character names and personalities. No wonder it was so hard to untangle the separate stories in my mind!
Lee also draws upon some of the facts established in the Creation Myths graphic novels, particularly pertaining to the whereabouts of Aughra, as well as implicit mentions of her son Raunip and legendary figures such as Jarra-Jen. The story even starts with a quote from those books!
More than anything, Lee is exceptionally good at world-building, and we owe him a lot of credit for how gorgeously detailed and structured the Netflix show ended up being, as so much of it was derived directly from his imagination. For me, The Dark Crystal has always been about the world-building, and Lee delivers in abundance.
We’re given references to “apeknot trees” and “the droning of buzzers” and “sour alfen fruit” taken from Naia’s “waistpouch.” A banquet is held, which serves: “wood and leaf bowls filled past the brim with squirming delicacies: fushcia wort beetles and fermented Nebrie-milk dumplings, mushroom wing-fronds and blindfish plucked from the very bottom of the swamp floor.”
The prejudices between the clans and distinct linguistics are established, from Naia being embarrassed that her wings haven’t “bloomed” to her father calling the Stonewood clan “those rock-banging forest bugs” to Gurjin’s absence being blamed on “climbing a tree with a lassywings.” You can just tell it’s Gelfling slang for a floozy. They also reference “soft talk” and “hard talk” to differentiate between someone being straightforward, or delicately picking and choosing their words.
Naia’s people live in the Great Smerth, a massive tree in the midst of the Swamp of Sog that is filled with boardwalks and suspension bridges, and time is measured in “unums” and “trines” based on the orbiting of the three moons and suns. Most of all, we have to credit Lee for making Gelfling society a matriarchy, which formed the backbone of the world-building in the Netflix show, and – as a result – means it's filled to the brim with powerful and interesting female characters.
It’s all beautifully done, and clearly a huge reason why the show was as good and consistent as it was. There are some oddities, such as why some fantastical creatures are spelt with a capital letter (Nebries) and some aren’t (ruffnaws) or why the Castle of the Crystal is described as being on the edge of a forest when all visuals of it in the show and film place in on a plain next to a braided river. I was also somewhat amused by the many descriptions of Gelflings moving far more nimbly than anything a puppet is capable of achieving on-screen.
Despite the non-canon placement of these books in the franchise, I’m going to continue with them, as they’re well-written and provide further insight into the world of Thra, not to mention a unique look at what is essentially the same story playing out over two different mediums.
Song of the Dark Crystal by J.M. Lee
Not to repeat myself, but I had finished the entirety of Shadows of the Dark Crystal and was halfway through Song of the Dark Crystal before realizing that things just weren’t adding up with the Netflix show.
It all reached a breaking point when I reached the chapter that recounts Mira’s death at the hands of the Skeksis, which describes the Scientist having a missing eye, Rian having never seen the central chamber where the Crystal is kept, Mira being deliberately selected by the Skeksis for their fatal experiment, and Rian watching everything through a door to the chamber – all of which is completely contrary to what plays out in the television episode. And the real kicker? That particular episode was written by J. M. Lee himself. WHAT was going on? Were these novelizations of the show’s first drafts, maybe?
I can understand why I was confused, as so much of these books were repurposed in order to inform the story and characters of the show, and it made more sense to me that a commissioned author would choose to focus on the periphery characters of Naia and Kylan (who appear only briefly in Age of Resistance) than the protagonists Rian, Brea and Deet.
Because obviously, he didn’t want to risk contradicting anything in the show, while still telling a compelling, suspenseful story. Otherwise, why wouldn’t he write about the characters who were directly involved with the Skeksis’ scheme to kill the Gelflings for their life-force, which was clearly the driving force of the grand events in Thra’s history? Any author would surely go straight for the centralized events, not faff about with a less-important side-story.
And so I had assumed the show’s inclusion of Naia and Kylan in a limited capacity came first, and that Lee capitalized on their small roles in order to give himself the freedom to tell their story on the margins of the main action. In reality, this book was published in 2017, a good two years before the release of the Netflix show, and with that it mind it’s apparent that Naia and Kylan appearing in the fourth episode was a nod to their prior importance in the books – almost like a cameo or Easter egg. (This also explains why their entrance into the show feels rather slapdash. They’re suddenly just there, with their own agenda and mission, with no background given on either of them).
It also explains why there are two publications of these books; ones with nice covers, and ones with those godawful Netflix stickers that you can’t remove on them. Also why Corey Godbey’s wonderful illustrations don’t match up with any of the character designs as they’re featured on the show.
Therefore, this is not a prequel, nor a supplementary story. It’s a completely different version of events that occurred prior to the original Dark Crystal movie, which tracks the Gelfling clans realizing that their lords and masters aren’t the benevolent protectors they’ve presented themselves as, and the beginning of the dark road to their near-total genocide.
Okay, let’s get to the actual plot of the book. The story’s perspective switches from Naia to her Spriton travelling companion Kylan, a bard and song-teller who (like Naia in the previous book) has his fair share of insecurities. Having uncovered the betrayal of the Skeksis and the terrible slaughter being inflicted upon their people, the duo’s next mission is to get this information out to the rest of the Gelfling clans. Their best bet appears to be a bellbird-bone flute that’s said to have the ability to reach everyone in Thra, though it was last seen in the depth of the Grottan caves...
As with its predecessor, it’s well-written and filled with lovely world-building details. Naia’s wings “buzz in irritation” and a house in Stonewood has for a table: “a large flat stone that grew straight from the floor near one wall of the hut. Kylan wondered which had come first, the stone or the hut.”
It’s fun recognizing the connective tissue between these books and other supplementary materials: like Kylan getting his hands on a journal that was written by Raunip, or the tension that exists between the Vapran and Sifan clans. I even spotted a nod to Xena Warrior Princess when Tavra states: “I have many skills.” These details are what I came for.
I also like that since Naia and Gurjin are twins, the Skeksis take a vested interest the pair of them, as naturally this bond reminds them of their own mystical connection with the urRu. That makes a lot of sense, and the character development of Naia and Kylan gradually recognizing their inadequacies and overcoming them is nicely done.
I’m going to press on with Tides of the Dark Crystal, but it’s still a shame that that these books don’t fit with the continuity of the show, despite the latter borrowing so much from them. Focusing on Naia and Kylan as protagonists seemed like an obvious inroad to the greater narrative arc of the show, which would have made this four-book series a wonderful supplement to that story, but it’s obvious from the last few chapters that this is well and truly charting its own path. Which makes watching it in tandem with Age of Resistance very confusing.
Her Majesty's League of Remarkable Young Ladies by Alison D. Stegert
How could I resist that title? This ended up being a fairly standard “wot ho, jolly good” type of mystery/espionage story, involving young Victorian ladies who are mildly perturbed about the patriarchy and which veers into a little silliness with all its contraptions and inventions. The high watermark for this kind of book is still The Sinclair’s Mysteries.
It’s 1889 and Queen Victoria is being plagued by magpies everywhere, the latest mishap involving a pie being opened to reveal several dead birds. Meanwhile, Winnie Weatherby is an attendant at the Beacon Academy for Poised and Polished Young Ladies, as well as the daughter of an inventor. She’s helping her father improve his Telautograph Machine, though remains rather ignorant as to the fact he’s not going to give her any credit for it, even though her dream is to present it at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.
Her headmistress Disapproves, and after butting heads with her for the umpteenth time, Winnie tries to get ahead of the disparaging letter by contacting her father through their joint invention.
She’s surprised not to get a reply from her father, though soon she’s informed that he’s missing. She leaves the school in search of him, only to be promptly carried away in a carriage and recruited by a Mrs Campbell: to join the League of Remarkable Young Ladies in the capacity of an inventor. Seeing this as a way to get resources in the search for her father, Winnie (eventually) agrees.
Headquarters is Madame Toussaint’s, and she’s introduced into the world of espionage and her cohorts: Euphemia Lee, Stella Davies, and Adelaide Culpepper, all tasked with finding the mysterious Mr Magpie who is hellbent on terrorizing the Queen.
The book does have some clever ideas within its pages: I was surprised by the identity of the mischief-maker (though the connection to the magpie rhyme – one for sorrow, two for joy, etc – was a little clunky) and the twist around Mrs Campbell was unexpected as well.
I appreciated the portrayal of Queen Victoria as an old dragon, as she’s way too beloved for someone who was so staunchly against the suffragettes – power for me, but not for thee, I guess. The real feminist cred goes to her daughter Princess Lousia, who if there had been any justice in the world, would have taken the throne after her.
There are plenty of historical domain characters, from Prince Bertie, Princess Louisa, Stella Davies, and Hafiz Mohammed Abdul Karim, and Queen Victoria’s pug Bosco. In fact, the afterword was quite eye-opening. Among other things, I learned that Louisa was a sculptor, whose statue of her mother is still on display in Kensington Palace, and that Stella Davies was the daughter of Sara Forbes Bonetta (who featured in one of the episodes of Victoria) who in turn had been enslaved by King Ghezo of Dahomey (the person who John Boyega played in The Woman King).
It's very Enola Holmes in nature; quick and breezy. However, I had two issues, the first being that the dual storylines – the mystery of Mr Magpie and the disappearance of Winnie’s father – never intersect, as you’d expect from these types of books. I suppose it’s not a bad thing, but I kept waiting for them to link up and they never did. The second is that the camaraderie between the girls wasn’t done very well: the likes of Effie and Stella are cold toward Winnie at first, then they’re suddenly sharing a laugh together, then they become standoffish again. Their team development wasn’t structured very well.
I’m not sure if this is the first book in a series or just a one-off, but it's a lark. Hooray for Victorian lady spies who are interested in STEM.
The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place by Julie Berry
This one was fun, and I raced through it surprisingly quickly. Set in Ely in 1890, it concerns the students of Saint Etheldreda’s School for Young Ladies, with prose that is soaked in a sardonic tone:
“The seven enrolled young ladies were invited by custom to join Headmistress Constance Plackett while she entertained her younger brother, Mr Aldous Godding, at the dinner table. The privilege of watching the headmistress and her regular Sunday guest consume the veal that they, the young ladies themselves, had prepared, more than compensated for the lack of sufficient veal for all the table to share... such self-denial would serve them well in their future callings as wives.”
Within the first two pages, Mrs Plackett and Mr Godding are dead, having keeled over at the conclusion of their meal. The girls are fairly nonplussed, having been taught to keep that stiff upper lip and so on, but also see an opportunity for themselves. None of them want to go home to their families, so why not dispose of the bodies and live at Saint Etheldreda’s in perpetuity by themselves?
I mean, for a bunch of teenage girls, it’s an idea that makes perfect sense. Naturally it starts to unravel almost immediately, as they have to deal with callers, policemen, the domestic help, and various gardeners and neighbours that might notice their headmistress is missing.
It gets a little outlandish at this point, with one of the girls managing to pull off a disguise and impersonation of Mrs Plackett that fools the neighbourhood into thinking she’s a sixty-something year old woman, so thank goodness they’re also investigating the deaths of their former headmistress and her brother, whom they suspect were murdered. And if someone murdered them, then surely that someone is still out there...
I generally enjoyed this, though I couldn’t for the life of me tell any of the seven girls apart – not even with names like Disgraceful Mary Jane or Smooth Kitty Heaton, and a helpful set of portrait illustrations on the inner cover. There’s just too many of them, introduced in too small a time frame. A couple of them (well, the two I’ve named) manage to set themselves apart a little, but they’re mostly just an amorphous blur.
Of course, their plan to hide the bodies and live in freedom forever at Saint Etheldreda’s is absurd, and some of the hijinks they get up to in order to hide the deception is far too much to swallow, but the illustrations put me in mind of A Series of Unfortunate Events, so it helped to think of that very particular aesthetic while reading this – it’s meant to be a bit of a farce, even though the afterword reveals that Berry took her research seriously, and a lot of what’s captured here is an accurate portrait of day-to-day life in Victorian England.
“Even a hamlet feels like a metropolis to bright, social young ladies who have been cloistered far too long in one house. The shopkeepers in their aprons, the tradesmen in their boots, and the housewives with their caps and babies were an invigorating sight. They proved the world was more than seven maidens, two corpses, and a puppy.”
I enjoyed it, though perhaps the girls were a little too boy-crazy for my tastes. If a title of a book has the word “sisterhood” in it, then I damn well expect it to be about the dynamics between the girls, not their crushes on interchangeable boys.
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
Back in February, I suddenly became intrigued by the variations of duality when it comes to portraying fictional female characters, something that was brought on by watching Xiao Qiao and Sun Shangxiang in Red Cliff. They are two very different types of women, who share only a single scene together, but one that demonstrates they’re close friends. They’re also the only two notable female characters in the entire story. They put me in mind of Walter Scott’s Rebecca and Rowena, who could be described in almost exactly the same way (though they have more the potential for being friends than the reality of it).
It piqued my interest in re-reading Ivanhoe, which I’d first struggled through some years ago after watching the 1997 miniseries and then finding the book at a second-hand shop, as well as William Makepeace Thackery’s parody sequel Rebecca and Rowena, which (as the title implies) delves deeper into the contrast between the two women – not only in the book itself, but in the eyes of the readership at the time.
You see, it’s the rule of fandom that if one female character is loved, the other must be despised. It’s practically the law. I plan to explore this mentality as it pertains to Rebecca and Rowena in due course, as there’s so much to say about it that it deserves its own post. But for now, I’ll stick with discussing Ivanhoe.
It’s the story of Wilbur of Ivanhoe, a young knight coming back from the Third Crusade with the hope of reconciling with his estranged father Cedric and winning the hand of fair Rowena, his father’s ward and Wilbur’s childhood sweetheart (not to mention the cause of the rift between himself and his father, as Cedric is dead-set on marrying her to Athelstane, a scion of the Saxon race).
Disguised as a pilgrim, he returns to his father’s home and scopes out the lay of the land: Rowena is still unmarried, his father still hellbent on overthrowing the Normans, and Wilbur’s own name still largely cursed. Also in the household that particular night is a wandering Knight Templar called Brian de Bois-Guilbert and his compatriots, and a humble Jew called Isaac who has sought out shelter on his way to York.
The range of characters widens to include Prince John, Isaac’s daughter Rebecca, a mysterious helmeted knight, and manservants like Wamba the jester and Gurth the swineherd, all of whom converge on the tournament grounds in Leicestershire that same week. Ivanhoe is badly wounded in the melee and taken into the care of Rebecca, who wants to repay his kindness for having protected her father from hostile members of Cedric’s household.
While travelling the forests between Ashby and York, the travelling parties of Isaac, Rebecca and the wounded Ivanhoe (who remains incognito) and Cedric, Athelstane, Rowena and their retainers, decide to journey together for greater protection. Unfortunately, the combined parties are captured by an alliance of scoundrels who have designs on rumours of a Jewish fortune and the beauty of both Rowena and Rebecca, who forcibly escort them to the stronghold of Torquilstone Castle.
This is where the action can truly be said to begin, as the narrative moves from one character to another: Ivanhoe too injured to do anything, Cedric and Athelstane trying to find a way to escape, the mysterious knight gathering outlaws to lay siege to the castle, and both Rowena and Rebecca approached by unwanted suitors who promise their freedom in exchange for capitulation.
It is Rebecca’s story that becomes most prominent, for it’s Brian de Bois-Guilbert who is pressing her to become his mistress (in spite of his Templar vows and her Jewish faith) and she has nothing but her own strength of spirit to fend him off. When the siege is successful, Brian manages to carry her off to a Templar stronghold, where she’s placed in even more danger when the Grand Master decides he’s under Rebecca’s ungodly spell.
You probably know how it all pans out, but there are several fascinating elements to the influence this novel had in its time, many of which resonate to this day. First of all, there’s no understating the impact Ivanhoe had in creating a surge of popular interest in medievalism during the Victorian era (even Victoria herself got in on the act, staging old-timey tournaments and banquets at various castles). There’s no telling how many chivalric romances Ivanhoe inspired, but it was enough for William Makepeace Thackery to write a parody of them.
Secondly, so many of the staples that are now so ubiquitous in the body of Robin Hood legends can find their origins here. Robin’s name had been linked to a place called Locksley (or Loxley) in the past, but it was Walter Scott who cemented the connection in the minds of our collective imaginations. In fact, it’s important to note that Scott was attempting to conceal Robin’s true identity from his contemporary readership by having him use the alias “Lockley” in his dealings with the other characters; it's only by today’s standards that the word is an instant spoiler.
Likewise, his erroneous use of “Saxons versus Normans” to create conflict between two subsets of English inhabitants was a theme that continued in other Robin Hood retellings for hundreds of years, despite being completely anachronistic – by the time Richard was king, that tension had long-since died out (modern writers seem to have caught on, as you don’t see much of this particular element in the retellings these days).
The historical backdrop of the Good King versus the Evil Prince is obviously so dramatically rich in potential I’m sure someone would have placed Robin Hood’s story in that specific place and time sooner or later, but again, it was Scott who popularized this particular period, as opposed to the reigns of any of the Edwards, which the older ballads ascribe to. And his characterization of Richard the Lionheart as reckless and boisterous, as well as Prince John as weedy and shrewd, may have also been codified by, if not originating in, this novel.
Most interestingly, even though Scott did not make use of the concept of Robin Hood as a dispossessed nobleman (ie, the Earl of Huntington), many later adaptations of his story cherry-pick certain aspects of Ivanhoe’s character to affix to Robin: that he’s returning from the Third Crusade, that he’s estranged from his father, that he’s left behind a sweetheart who he’s hoping to rekindle a relationship with, that he’s committed to justice and the rightful king – all of these elements pop up in any number of Robin Hood films, television shows or novelizations.
And as far as I know, Ivanhoe is the first time Robin is depicted as making the famous “arrow-splitting” shot in the archery tournament.
Sadly, Maid Marian has no presence in this story, making her the only familiar character of the Robin Hood legends to be omitted. Not that any of the outlaws have a particularly large presence sans Robin and Tuck, the latter filling several comedic chapters with his appetite and eccentricities (as it happened, I was watching episodes of The Adventures of Robin Hood while reading this book, and couldn't help but hear Tuck’s dialogue in the voice of Alexander Gauge).
But there are mentions of Scathlock (the earlier name for Scarlett) and Allan-a-Dale and “the Miller” – and finally one of Little John, though it’s only to inform us that he’s currently doing business on the Scottish border and will not be appearing in this story.
The book itself is beautifully structured: divided into four parts with each chapter elegantly flowing into the next, and occasional flashbacks that fill in the blanks of what certain characters were getting up to “off-screen” handled gracefully. It’s a little episodic, which is unsurprising given how it was originally published in those aforementioned four volumes, and the prose is incredibly verbose (for some reason, Scott feels the need to describe the clothes of every single character in great detail) but when it comes to the plot and characterization – well, it’s no wonder that this story has been adapted for film and television so many times.
The tournament! The mass kidnapping! The siege! Rebecca’s defiance! Ulrica’s vengeance! The trial! The jousting! The unmasking of King Richard! All of it is so dramatic and colourful and thrilling.
And for all of this, some decidedly odd creative decisions. For example, Ivanhoe himself would surely have to be the poster child for a Vanilla Protagonist; a hero who does practically nothing across the entire course of the book, and has no real personality to speak of. By my reckoning, he fights (and is almost mortally wounded) in the tournament, spends most of the rest of the book on his back, and then races to Rebecca’s rescue in order to joust Sir Brian at its conclusion. After successfully knocking him off his horse, Brian conveniently dies of “conflicting passions” before any swordfight can ensue.
You’re seriously not going to have your hero fight the villain to the death? He dies instead of what can only be called self-immolation of the brain? Um, okay.
Then there’s the romantic endgames. It should be common knowledge even among those that have never read the book that (as in Little Women, when Jo and Laurie married other people) many believe the author got it wrong. As my introduction stated: “the character of the fair Jewess found so much favour in the eyes of some readers, that the writer was censured, because, when arranging the fates of the characters of the drama, he had not assigned the hand of Wilfred to Rebecca, rather than the less interesting Rowena.”
I’ll have more to say about all this in my post on the subject of the two women, but suffice to say for now that I liked the way things panned out. Matters of faith as well as integrity stood between Ivanhoe and Rebecca, and you’ll be unsurprised to hear that I not only didn’t dislike Rowena as much as everyone else does, but felt that Rebecca got the better deal living as a healer in the balmy climes of Spain. Honestly, Ivanhoe is so bland in comparison to Rebecca that I felt it was he who didn’t deserve her rather than the other way around.
Then of course, there’s the contingent that would have preferred Rebecca to end up with the passionate, amoral Brian de Bois-Guilbert – you know, the guy who kidnaps her, threatens her, can’t believe that she’s saying “no” to the sweet deal of becoming his mistress, and nearly gets her burnt at the stake. But, you know, he does it because he’s passionate, so it’s romantic.
Actually, I take it back: dying of a brain failure is the perfect way for his character to die.
But speaking of Rebecca, it’s naturally no small thing to have had such a rich and sympathetic portrayal of a Jew in Walter Scott’s time, even if she is offset by the more stereotypical treatment of her father. She’s undoubtedly the true heroine of the book, and easily its most interesting and impressive character. But is that by design? It seems to me that there is often a rather sardonic tone to much of Scott’s story; that he might well be poking fun at the idea of a chivalric romance just as much as he’s lionizing it.
For instance, can you sense the sarcasm in the following sentence, keeping in mind that a villainous character is speaking?
“Here is the stout Baron Reginald Front-de-Boeuf, whose utter abomination is a Jew; and the good Knight Templar, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, whose trade is to slay Saracens – if these are not good marks of Christianity, I know no other which they bear about them.”
Or how about in this one:
“Thus ended the memorable field of Ashby-de-la-Zouche, one of the most gallantly contested tournaments of that age; for although only four knights, including one who was smothered by the heat of his armour, had died upon the field, yet upwards of thirty were desperately wounded, four or give of whom never recovered. Several more were disabled for life; and those who escaped best carried the marks of the conflict to the grave with them. Hence it is always mentioned in the old records, as the Gentle and Joyous Passage of Arms of Ashby.”
Of course, most of the time the genre is played completely straight, and you can take your pick of the type of romance you like best: the steadfastness Rowena, the courtly love of Ivanhoe, the tortured passion of Brian, the unrequited yearning of Rebecca, the patriotic fervour of Cedric...
Having found this experience of reading Ivanhoe much more enjoyable the second time around, I’m now looking forward to viewing the movies and the miniseries – as well as penning a longer write-up on the subject of Rebecca and Rowena.
Rebecca and Rowena by William Makepeace Thackery
It’s funny how so many of fandom’s idiosyncrasies have been around for far longer than the internet (and modern fandom) has existed. Louisa May Alcott was so annoyed by fans of Little Women pestering her about when Jo and Laurie were going to marry that she deliberately broke them up. Thomas Hardy gleefully recorded an anecdote about a dinner party ending with a physical fight after a disagreement over the virtue of the titular character of Tess of the d'Urbervilles. People walked around with mourning bands on their arms after Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes, because that’s a normal thing to do.
And then there’s Rebecca and Rowena, which in modern parlance can only be described as a Fan Sequel Fix Fic that makes heavy use of the Die for Our Ship trope in its treatment of Rowena, the least interesting point of Ivanhoe’s love triangle, but who here is recharacterized as (in Thackery’s own words) “a frigid piece of propriety... that icy, faultless, prim, niminy-piminy Rowena.”
In other words, Thackery didn’t like the shipping endgame of Ivanhoe, and so wrote his own version of the story in which his preferred character gets to “win” the love of the main character – even though he doesn’t seem to have much regard for Wilbur of Ivanhoe either. Not to mention that in order to facilitate the match between him and Rebecca, she has to renounce her faith and convert to Christianity, even though her refusal to do so in order to save her own life in the original novel is one of the most impressive things about her.
I mean, this ticks every box: a complete disregard for the character you supposedly “love” by having her give up an intrinsic part of herself (how many other female characters in fanfictions are forced to sacrifice their integrity in order to make a ship happen?), the mentality that a “happy ending” for a female character just HAS to involve matrimony with a man, no matter how unsuitable he is, and of course, making the whole thing a hit-piece that demonizes an unpopular female character who “gets in the way” of a Fan Preferred Couple, even though Rowena was one of the few people in Ivanhoe that actually treated Rebecca with genuine kindness. It’s almost funny how transparent it is.
So, more than a parody of Walter Scott’s original novel, it’s also a fascinating look at how fandom existed hundreds of years ago, and how people have always responded to fictional characters and their romantic relationships. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Heck, he even presents an argument for people being allowed to enjoy fandom into their middle age, writing:
“Some there be who have been married, and found that they have still something to see and to do, and to suffer mayhap; and that adventures, and pains, and pleasures, and taxes, and sunrises, and settings and the business and joys of griefs of life go on after as before the nuptial ceremony... I wish to know what lady among us would like to be put on the shelf, and thought no longer interesting, because she has a family growing up and is four or five and thirty years of age? I have known ladies at sixty with hearts as tender, and ideas as romantic, as any young misses of sixteen.”
Let the young ones be warned that the old folks have a right to be interesting, and that a lady may continue to have a heart although she is somewhat stouter than she was when a schoolgirl, and a man his feelings although he gets his hair from Truefitt’s.”
That passage would look right at home on a Tumblr post.
The story picks up a few years after the events of Ivanhoe. King Richard is fighting in France, Robin of Locksley is now Earl of Huntington, Prince Arthur of Brittany has been murdered, and Wilbur and Rowena are married – but not happily. Rowena has spent her entire married life seething with jealousy over the assumed love affair that took place between her husband and the Jewess Rebecca, and makes Wilbur pay for it in every barbed comment she makes.
Wilbur is desperate to join Richard in France, but after being wounded in the siege of Chalus, remains in a coma that lasts six years. Since he’s presumed dead, Rowena remarries Athelstane and bears him a son, only for the couple to become the target of the recently crowned King John, who lays siege to their home. This is Wilbur’s cue to come out of hiding, though he’s unable to save Rowena and her son from imprisonment (and doesn’t work particularly hard to find them).
It's not until several years later, which Wilbur has spent living incognito, that he’s reunited with Rowena on her deathbed, who extracts from him a promise – to never marry a Jew. He ends up fighting in the Reconquista on the Iberian Peninsula, where he nurses his grief and disappointment in life by slaying thousands upon thousands of enemy soldiers, only to finally be reunited with Rebecca, who has fended off many suitors with her vow that she’ll marry none but Ivanhoe.
With that, Thackery has successfully achieved what he set out to do: remove Rowena from the equation and give Rebecca the love story he desired for her, even if it means converting her to Christianity. For a woman to get the happy ending she “deserves,” she has to sacrifice who she is. Of course.
The whole novella is largely concerned with poking fun at the time’s obsession with medieval chivalry, which was very much brought on by the popularity of Scott’s novels. It’s riddled with deliberate anachronisms (perhaps because Scott’s was filled with accidental ones) including cigars, muffins, the polka, and Union Jacks, and is infused with deep sarcasm over what precisely readers were getting from these sorts of novels. To wit:
[After describing a gruesome death] “I just throw this off by way of description, and to show what might be done if I chose to indulge in this style of composition, but as in the battles which are described by the kindler chronicler of one of whose works this present masterpiece is professedly a continuation, everything passes off agreeably – the people are slain, but without any unpleasant sensation to the reader.”
The foreword of my edition calls it a “Christmas panto in print,” as well as a Victorian England version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There are plenty of digs at King Richard (after his demise, the author states: “from the 29th of March, he never robbed or murdered anymore”) as well as names such as Roger de Backbite, Peter de Toadhole, and Don Beltran de Cuchilla u Trabuco y Espada y Espelon.
We learn that Robin Hood has gained a lot of weight, while poor Gurth and Athelstane are slain (the latter for good this time) when King John attacks their home. Wamba and Tuck are more involved in the plot, and historical figures such as Blondel and Queen Berengaria get surprise cameos, as does Maid Marian, who didn’t appear in the original Ivanhoe. Naturally, Rowena doesn’t like her either, accusing her of unattractiveness and flirting with Major Littlejohn and Captain Scarlett.
Truly, most of the author’s scorn is reserved for Rowena, to the point of excess. I mean, I suppose we all have that one character we intensely despise, but this makes my hatred of a certain “feisty village girl” look reasonable by comparison, for Rowena bears no resemblance whatsoever to her book counterpart. Even stranger, Thackery spends more time vilifying her than he does exalting Rebecca, who doesn’t even appear until the novella’s final chapter. I suppose there’s more enjoyment to be found in the visceral hating of something than the loving.
But again, I’ll have more to say about all this in my forthcoming post about the two women. A lot is packed into this slender volume, but I have to say the most amusing passage for me was the meta-commentary on how these stories usually operate, and the assurance that Ivanhoe, as a verified protagonist, would have done something about the assassination of Prince Arthur if he’d been in the vicinity:
“Ivanhoe was, we need scarcely say, a hero of romance; and it is the custom and duty of all gentlemen of that profession to be present on all occasions of historic interest, to be engaged in all conspiracies, royal interviews and remarkable occurrences – and hence Sir Wilfrid would have certainly rescued the young Prince, had he been anywhere in the neighbourhood of Rouen, where the foul tragedy occurred.”
10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
Unpopular opinion time: I don’t love this movie, even though it’s generally considered one of the best of the teen comedies that were so prolific in late nineties/early noughties. A retelling of The Taming of the Shrew, the basic plot-points are given a modern spin: shrewish Katherina is an angry feminist, Petruchio (or Patrick) is a bad-boy Australian, and the gist is that in order for newcomer Cameron James to date the younger Stratford sister, he has to find someone (as per the new rules of the girls’ father) brave enough to take out the elder.
There are a few more hiccups along the way, from Cameron having to fund Patrick’s contrived interest in Kat by outsourcing the solution to Joey, the smarmy rich kid/male model who is his rival for Bianca’s affection, to Patrick running hot-and-cold with Kat on realizing that he’s not exactly the good guy in this dating scenario, which in turn jeopardizes Kat’s interest in him.
Yeah, Shakespeare’s play doesn’t quite mesh onto a contemporary setting, but at least the cause of all this drama derives from an amusing source: Kat and Bianca’s father, an obstetrician who is so paranoid about one or both of his daughters getting pregnant that he makes them wear a fake pregnancy harness before they leave the house.
In all honesty, once you can get your head around the premise, most of it works – though a lot of it has dated (Cameron’s friend accusing Bianca of wearing a skimpy sundress just to taunt them) or comes across as rather cringey (Kat flashing the teacher in detention so Patrick can escape the room).
There are also some weird issues with the pacing, such as the fact that Patrick’s deception is revealed so late in the game that the director presumably thought there was no time to delve into the fallout, and so simply has Kat deciding to forgive and forget off-screen. Patrick doesn’t even have to say sorry for misleading her! Why not place the betrayal and the consequences earlier, and make Patrick’s iconic song-and-dance number on the bleachers be his apology?
(The film is well-aware that Patrick is technically the bad guy for showing interest in Kat under false pretences, and so in order to establish his “good guy” credentials, they depict him refusing to kiss Kat after she makes a move on him... which then leads to the obstacle of her being humiliated and him having to win her back with the aforementioned rendition of “Too Good to Be True.”)
The truth is, I’m old enough now to be more amused and interested in the adults: the guidance counsellor writing smutty novels at her desk, the take-no-shit English teacher who is fed up with everything, and the girls’ father, who probably gets the best arc of the whole movie. I actually got a little teary-eyed at this dialogue:
“You know, fathers don't like to admit that their daughters are capable of running their own lives. It means we've become spectators. Bianca still lets me play a few innings. You've had me on the bleachers for years. When you go to Sarah Lawrence, I won't even be able to watch the game.”
And yet the true MVP of the film is Bianca. Seriously, this girl does nothing wrong! She’s obviously meant to be second fiddle to her more dynamic and independent older sister, but she’s so much smarter than anyone gives her credit for. She realizes on her own that Joey is a douche, she makes no promises to Cameron (seriously dude, she doesn’t owe you anything for arranging Kat’s life so that she can attend a party) and she’s generally a nice person throughout, who has the entirely reasonable desire to enjoy life and youth while it lasts.
On an inverted note, I’m not sure why Gabrielle Union’s character is suddenly deemed a bitch by the final act. All she does is take an opportunity with Joey when Bianca passes, and later informs her that Joey was bragging about planning to have sex with her after the prom. She says it in a smarmy way though, so... bitch, I guess?
I’m being a bit hard on it, even though it’s the first of many teen movies I plan to watch this month, and I can already tell it’ll be one of the best. There is an underlying humour that can’t be beaten, from Patrick drilling a hole in Cameron’s French textbook (and him trying to study from it, hole still intact, in a later scene) to one of the hoity-toity rich kids inadvertently having to host a party for the whole school – when the doorbell rings, he announces: “that’ll be Nigel with the Brie!” He heads down the hall and gets knocked over by the swarm of teenagers stampeding into his house – but if you look carefully, the first person through the door is Nigel with a plate of Brie.
Bring It On (2000)
Watching this movie twenty-four years after its release, one thing is obvious: if it had been conceived and filmed today, there’s little doubt that Isis and the Clovers would have been its main characters. In fact, it’s a little strange that they weren’t the stars of the movie originally, since their storyline is clearly the most compelling.
Okay, not that strange. Is it plausible that a team of Black cheerleaders would have been allowed to headline a would-be teen blockbuster back in 2000? That the film goes as far as it does is somewhat eye-opening, since the topic of appropriation and the theft of intellectual property – especially that of Black artists – have become big talking-points in the years since its release.
It’s almost prescient that on being told that their routines were stolen from another team, the white cheerleaders simply don’t care – there’s a sharp social commentary affixed to that moment which the rest of the movie isn’t interested in exploring. Because of course, the film is at pains to assure everyone that its actual protagonist is in no way responsible for this crime. When Torrance takes captaincy of the five-time championship cheerleading squad of Toros High in the first act of the film, she has no idea that for years their former captain has been stealing the routines of a lower decile squad from Compton.
On realizing they’ve been cheating their way to victory for years, Torrence is determined to both make amends with the Clovers and to “bring it” at the next Championship Finals.
What follows is every story-beat you can imagine: the training montages, the bland love interest, the pitfalls, the inter-team rivalries, the comedic vignettes of the other teams... what else is there to say? The routines themselves are fun to watch, and some of the funny stuff still holds up – in fact, the movie’s best gag is the fact that the Toros football team is terrible, and everyone turns up to games just to watch the cheerleaders. When one of the footballers try to get in a dig at the male cheerleaders as they leave the field, their would-be victim points out: “dude, you just lost.”
There’s really nothing to say but to simply list the notable features. Like how there are three Buffy the Vampire Slayer actresses involved (Eliza Dushku, who had already appeared on the show as Faith, Clare Kramer, who was about to appear as Glory, and Nicole Bilderback, who had a one-off appearance in “The Wish”).
I’ve never understood why the Clovers don’t go public with the rip-off, or (just to flip the perspective) why the crowd assumed that the Toros were the ones who had stolen the routine when the Clovers turn up at their game. (I mean, they did, but you’d think their home crowd would assume the rival cheerleaders had studied their competition and were just pulling a crazy stunt). Speaking of that scene, I think I’ve seen Not Another Teen Movie too many times, as I was waiting for someone to say: “oh, it has already been broughten.”
There are plot-points which are brought up and then forgotten almost immediately, such as Big Red never being held accountable for her brazen theft of the Clovers’ routines, or Torrance’s mother getting concerned that her daughter’s studies are being completely subsumed by cheerleading. Also, Torrence is given the most repulsive little brother you can imagine, and I’ve no idea why the audience was denied the cathartic joy of him getting hit by a car or flung off a cliff. Maybe a cheerleader pyramid could have collapsed on top of him or something.
There are plenty of hilarious teen drama clichés throughout: parking a car in the middle of the carpark (no one cares or even notices that it’s blocking every other vehicle in there), people having an involved conversation in the middle of class without anyone telling them to shut up, students leaving campus whenever they want without consequences, and the bell ringing to break up classes (and thus end the scene) approximately two minutes after said class has started. Unique to this particular film is that there is absolutely no adult supervision on the cheer teams. They are apparently completely autonomous and run entirely by the underage teens.
The opening sequence is probably the best part, in which reams of exposition are delivered to the audience via a cheer routine – and it ends up being a nightmare, so it was very helpful of Torrence to have a dream that spells out the situation and characters so succinctly.
The dialogue can be rather awful though. Nothing here sounds like something a teenager would actually say, but rather the words of adults trying too hard to mimic teens – especially all the cheering puns. The generous option is that it’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but it doesn’t quite manage it. Worse, so many of the jokes have dated badly. There is fat-shaming, slut-shaming, homophobic slurs, trans jokes, and a completely gratuitous locker scene of the girls in their underwear.
Unlike 10 Things, which was structured around the genuine love sisters Kat and Bianca had for each other, you never get the sense that these cheerleaders love or support each other, and the entire film is comprised of them all being varying degrees of awful to each other.
There’s a nasty undertone to almost every interaction in this film, and you spend the entire runtime waiting for a sexual assault to happen and be passed off as a joke. And hey, there it is! A male cheerleader fingers one of the girls while he’s lifting her during a routine, and the fact that she apparently liked it doesn’t make it any less gross.
Okay, I do have to give it credit for including an otherwise throwaway scene in which one of the gay male cheerleaders introduces himself to another guy from an opposing team, a scene that’s played completely... erm, straight. No gags, no sniggering – just a meetcute between two dudes.
Heck, it would have been interesting to have a film told from the perspective of those male cheerleaders and how they deal with being involved in such a woman-dominated sport. Or Eliza Dushku’s character, and how she comes to respect the work and agility that goes into something she initially dismisses. Or of course, the Clovers, who are shortchanged in nearly every way, and you can tell just from the trailers that a lot of their scenes were cut.
In short, a movie about anyone but Torrence herself. You have to admire a film that is so cognizant of the chemistry and subtext between herself and Missy that they have to palm their protagonist off on the latter’s twin brother. I’ll let The Toast explain that injustice in more detail.
Whatever its faults and predictability, we can thank this movie for one thing: giving cheerleading the respect it deserves as an actual discipline, in which the participants aren’t just peppy girls in short skirts, but serious athletes who can perform all kinds of incredible stunts and dance moves.
During my own adolescence, I actually recall my friends taking an online quiz that asked whether they thought cheerleading was a sport or not, with the answers across the board being a scornful no. I doubt that would have been anyone’s opinion after watching this film.
Get Over It (2001)
Wow, this one was bad.
I was actually under the impression that this was one of the better teen movies, but nope. Clearly hoping to piggyback on the success of 10 Things by shaping a teen drama around one of Shakespeare’s plays, it completely misses the point of both the play it’s trying to adapt, and the clever ways in which its predecessor adapted it.
The gist of the story is that Berke Landers (yes, I had to look up that name) has just been dumped by his longtime girlfriend, and in an attempt to stay in her vicinity, auditions for the high school theatre production, a musical take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So he’s already being kind of gross and stalkery, not to mention morose and self-pitying. The idea that a perky Kirsten Dunst (his best friend’s little sister, also in the play) would find him attractive is laughable.
There are some excruciating parts, like how there’s just one (1) Black guy, that Zoe Saldaña is essentially playing Gabrielle Union’s character from 10 Things, and that there’s absolutely no reason to care about who ends up with who. It shamelessly poaches things from better movies in the genre, from the presence of Kirsten Dunst, to the retelling of a Shakespeare play, to the generic three-word title that was obviously meant to mimic Bring It On. A lot of this was parodied in Not Another Teen Movie.
The most annoying thing is that it’s not even an updated version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in any meaningful way, since Lander is more like Demetrius, the Bottom subplot is ignored entirely, and the fairies are only present in Landers’ dream sequences. It’s all pretty weaksauce, though it perks up a little during the actual performance of the play in the film’s third act.
As ever, the adults are the most entertaining part of the whole thing (namely Martin Short as the overzealous drama teacher and Landers’ mortifying parents, who run a sex-based talk show and have no qualms about discussing the subject with their teenage son) though this also boasts a range of bizarre cameos (Coolio, Vitamin C, Carmen Electra) and way-too-good-for-this-material actors like Colin Hanks, Mila Kunis, Zoe Saldaña, the aforementioned Martin Short... it’s all quite bizarre.
I will however, commend the film for not demonizing Landers’ ex-girlfriend Alison. It sucks when someone breaks up with you, but it’s not a crime, and the film is careful to ensure that she doesn’t meet or start dating Shane West’s character until after she ends things with Landers. Don’t be fooled by reviews that erroneously state she cheats on him – she doesn’t.
As such, when Shane West cheats on her, it’s not framed as karma or comeuppance, but a shitty thing to happen to her, and when she approaches Landers afterwards, she pitches it as wanting their friendship back and “leaving the rest to fate.” When he turns her down, she takes it gracefully, and still gets to be in the big dance party at the end.
Any other teen movie would depict her as a hateful bitch that needed to be punished; this simply presents her as a normal teenage girl exploring her options. So, kudos in that regard.
But other than that, this is profoundly skippable. I take back all my criticisms of 10 Things I Hate About You.
Mean Girls (2004)
Try not to be shocked, but I had never seen this movie before. I mean, it’s such a cult classic, and yet it completely passed me by during my formative teen years. That said, I feel like I’d absorbed most of it through pop-culture osmosis, since practically every single scene is a meme.
In what is generally considered her best role (and it was a bit sad to see her looking so young and vibrant here) Lindsay Lohan is Cady Heron, a sixteen-year-old girl who has been homeschooled her entire life due to her parents being zoologists in an unspecified part of Africa. Now she’s going to high school for the first time, her introduction to which plays out a bit like a lamb being sent into a den of lions.
She has no clue about how the cliques and social mores of high school work, and even though she settles into a friendship with Janis (Goth girl) and Damian (“almost too gay to function”) she catches the attention of the Plastics, a posses of the school’s most popular girls led by queen bee Regina George (Rachel McAdams in her breakthrough role, even though she's clearly not a teenager).
Janis comes up with a plan: to have Cady integrate herself into the Plastics in order to learn more about them and gain enough intel to concoct an even greater revenge scheme. Although Cady is initially surprised to find she enjoys the company of Regina and her hangers-on, rivalry over a boy means things soon turn ugly.
Written by Tina Fey, who also stars as Cady’s math teacher, the whole thing is adapted from Rosalind Wiseman’s non-fiction book Queen Bees And Wannabes, which was a guide to parents trying to help their daughters negotiate the social-strata of high school. In this light, the narrative purpose of Cady’s childhood in Africa becomes clear, as she views much of high school life through the lens of an anthropologist, noting the different rules, tribes, pecking orders and mating rituals that dictate the lives of American teenagers.
Sometimes it cuts a little too close to home. I knew a Regina George, and yes, the mind games and manipulation she indulges in throughout this film were very much a reality in my high school days. Having escaped relatively intact, it was not a pleasant experience to vicariously suffer through Cady going through the same thing.
The razor-sharp commentary turns a little treacly towards the end. I know that these sorts of films are meant to end on a high note, but it would have struck a more realistic tone if Cady hadn’t ended up with Aaron (who was right to cut his losses and get the hell away from the obsessive drama that Cady and Regina had going on between them) and Cady’s acceptance speech for Homecoming Queen was heartfelt, but also way too corny to feel emotionally truthful in comparison with the whole rest of the film.
That’s my main issue with the film: that the entire first three-quarters are so cutting, so appalling, so horribly realistic, that the happy reconciliation between all wounded parties at its conclusion is somewhat laughable. Sorry, life doesn’t work out that neatly.
Still, there’s some solid commentary here. Tina Fey’s: “you all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores; it only makes it okay for guys to call you sluts and whores” is one for the ages. Ditto Cady’s realization that: “Calling somebody else fat won't make you any skinnier. Calling someone stupid doesn't make you any smarter.” I’d like to think this movie bore a tiny amount of responsibility in ensuring that teenagers are slightly better at humanity these days, even if it’s simply knowing they shouldn’t be openly misogynistic and homophobic and cruel to each other. But that’s probably just wishful thinking.
She’s the Man (2006)
Another dud. It’s better than Get Over It, especially in regards to its treatment of the Shakespeare play upon which it’s based (Twelfth Night) but still pretty mediocre. Amanda Bynes, who spends the entire film making silly faces until it’s absolutely exhausting, is Viola Hastings: soccer player extraordinaire and twin sister to Sebastian, who is planning to skip his new placement at Illyria High in order to join his band in London.
Due to the fact the girls’ soccer team has been cut due to low interest at her own high school, Viola comes up with a cunning plan to disguise herself as a boy and impersonate her own brother at Illyria in order to play in their decisive game against her own school and prove that girls are just as good at boys.
That’s a fairly neat premise with which to play around with the plot of Twelfth Night, though the film quickly gets sidetracked with the love triangle: Viola’s roommate is the cute-but-sensitive Duke Orsino (as in, Duke is his first name) who has a crush on popular and nice Olivia, who becomes intrigued with the eccentricities of “Sebastian,” who is definitely not like the other guys. Hijinks ensue.
The stock characters are all here: the hunky love interest, the mean girl, the gay best friend, the two interchangeable and supportive girlfriends, the weirdo principal, the well-meaning but completely hopeless parents, and the story itself is pretty sloppy sometimes. This is best seen during the sequence at the fairground, in which Viola is running around like mad, constantly changing between her male and female personas, without actually doing anything relevant as either one. Like, she races into the bouncy castle and changes, and then she gets onto a fairground ride and changes again. Why? No one has seen her in the interim!
And I’m not sure why we needed the character of Sebastian’s clingy, bitchy girlfriend Monique, as she has no counterpart in the original play, and doesn’t even achieve her expected role as the person who blows the whistle on the whole charade. You could cut her entirely and nothing would change, and I suspect her presence is just to include the Alpha Bitch, which these types of films seem to think is essential.
I was beginning to despair we’d ever get back to the soccer, which was the whole reason Viola was there in the first place, though it course-corrects in the final act and thankfully shows the game that this entire story was meant to be about.
Aside from the names and the cross-gender love triangle, there’s really not much here to connect it to Shakespeare, though Channing Tatum’s character (yeah, I had no idea he was in this!) eventually recites the famous: “some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them” line, which doesn’t make a lot of sense for two reasons: 1, this dialogue was originally spoken by Malvolio, and is meant to demonstrate his inflated sense of self-importance, and 2, he’s seemingly referring to Viola as someone who has “greatness thrust upon them,” even though she’s clearly someone who – by her disciplined training and commitment to the bit – is someone who achieved greatness.
There’s one single clever joke, which might well have been an accident, in which Viola is described as a transfer student (I’m pretty sure there was deliberate emphasis on that first syllable) and I have to admit feeling a cathartic thrill when Vinnie Jones snarls: “we don’t discriminate based on gender!” in Viola’s sexist ex-coach’s face. Do guys even know how amazing they look and sound when they do things like this?
As with children’s movies, the best teen comedy-dramas can be watched by anyone of any age. This one is just for the teens.
Easy A (2010)
Well, we finally get away from Shakespeare, which was a relief, and segue into Nathaniel Hawthorne. This one is inspired by The Scarlett Letter, and though it’s not a modern retelling, it does use the basis of the novel to explore issues of double-standards, teen anxieties about sex, the Madonna/Whore complex, slut shaming and all those other grim subjects that we were very happy to leave behind when we turned twenty. We left them behind, right?
It’s also the movie in which Emma Stone can be said to have arrived. Her trademark awkward-yet-confident quirkiness pretty much carries this film, in which she plays Olive, a girl who lies about losing her virginity and then finds the entire school is fascinated by her. Liking the newfound attention, enjoying the effect she has on the wound-up Christian clique, and being a theatre kid at heart, Olive goes ahead with a plan/plea her gay friend has come up with to help him survive bullying: to stage having sex with him behind closed doors at a party.
Things only escalate from there, as more unpopular guys approach her with promises of cash (or gift cards) if she helps raise their reputations and social standing by pretending to sleep (or at least fool around with) them as well. Initially embracing her role as the school skank, going so far as to dress the part and wear a red A on her clothing, Olive eventually gets in over her head: losing friends, attracting creeps, and discovering that a bad reputation is not a fun thing to have, however unfair that fact may be.
What isn’t said often enough is that most of Olive’s problems stem from the fact that she’s kind. Every time someone asks her to lie for them, you can see her resolve waver because she feels bad for what they’re going through. Which means that when the truth finally comes out, I was disappointed that no one was really in her corner (except her love interest, but we’ll get to him). Her otherwise amazing parents never put their foot down and go to the school to find out what the hell is going on. Her teachers never approach her in any helpful, meaningful way. She goes to several churches for answers, and the pastors are completely useless.
And none of the boys that she “helped” ever come out in her support, admitting the truth and making the point that SHE was the only decent person in the school, and they were only driven to such measures because they were bullied and mistreated by everyone else.
Because the truth is, as awful as it is that Brandon is being hassled for being queer, or that Evan is struggling with fatphobia, it was not Olive’s responsibility to solve those problems for them. It’s the adults who should have done something (and yeah, I get that in America, a country where administrators do little more than shrug their shoulders when students are gunned down in their own classrooms, this concept is laughable. Or screamable. But it doesn’t make it less true).
So we’re really dealing with another story in which a young girl is made to feel responsible for everyone else. And yes, the situation is a little more nuanced than that. Like I said, a part of her does initially enjoy the attention.
But the fact remains that the story itself has no justice to it. No one realizes they were wrong to treat Olive the way they did, whether or not she really was sleeping around. The Christians are never called out on how unchristianlike their behaviour truly is. The best friend never apologizes for turning on her. Olive’s webcast is more about self-actualization than pointing out how hypocritical and sexist everyone else was being. I mean, she’s not even going to point out that having sex boosts the reputations of boys while destroying those of girls? Really? That’s the lowest rung possible, guys.
If Mean Girls went too hard in wrapping things up in a neat little conciliatory bow, then Easy A doesn’t do it enough.
And yet, it’s easy to get swept up in the humour and charm of the story and performances. There’s something empowering about Olive branding herself a whore and owning it, walking down the corridors of school without shame, like it’s her own personal catwalk. Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson are a complete delight, and easily the best parents featured in any of the teen movies I watched this month. The witty banter is actually witty, even if you’re asked to believe that everyone is as whip-smart as a late night comedy show writer.
But ultimately, Olive’s happy ending comes with a boy who accepts her for who she is, even though we’ve been given no understanding as to how he knows who she is. One of the inviolable staples of teen movies is that the female protagonist MUST be hooked up with a cute guy by the time the credits roll, no matter how unnecessary it is to the story itself. This is the worst case, in which Penn Badgley spends the entire movie crushing on Olive, even though we’re never given any understanding of what he thinks is going on with the whole performance she puts on.
Does he believe the rumours, and just doesn’t care? Has he gleaned that she’s making the whole thing up? Unclear. He’s just a generic nice guy without much of a personality of his own, coming across as a consolation prize for Olive at the end of the movie, when her real reward should have been the freedom that comes with truth-telling and coming to terms with herself. Every other subplot in this film (the deranged Christians, the broken marriage of her favourite teacher, her estrangement from her best friend) just sort of trail away into nothingness, while Olive rides off in the back of a lawn mower with her new boyfriend.
Solid movie, weak ending, and one that doesn’t really grasp what it is it’s trying to convey.
The Tudors: Season 2 (2008)
If season one charted the rise of Anne Boleyn, then season two is her inevitable fall. In a way it’s a shame, as Natalie Dormer is so compelling in the role that you wish things could have ended differently, or at least been drawn out for longer just to make the most of her performance, but... well, you can’t mess with history to that extent. There’s only one way her story can end.
Still, it amuses me to imagine this period of history as an original story and how fandom would have responded to it. The first half of Anne’s story is a harlequin romance, in which a lady-in-waiting catches the eye of a king and bodice-ripping ensues. But the second half is a cautionary tale about the danger of ambition, especially in a woman, which would have had the shippers screaming about how the whole thing is an anti-feminist screed designed to punish them personally for their preferences and that Henry would never do such a thing to his wife. Bad writing!
There would be a faction of Catherine of Aragon fans going deranged in their defense of her, and an opposing party just as wild in their condemnation, insisting that if she truly loved Henry she would have let him go and retired to a nunnery. Both groups would have been united in their hatred of Jane Seymour, deriding her as a Mary Sue.
Thankfully (or perhaps alas), fandoms for historical dramas usually spend more time arguing about accuracy than narrative.
After a fair bit of padding throughout the first season, the second starts racing through events at a breakneck speed. Anne marries Henry, is crowned Queen, and gives birth to Elizabeth all in the same episode. Cromwell spearheads the Reformation and Thomas More refuses to take the oath, leading to his martyrdom. Henry meets Jane Seymour and the libelous plot against Anne and her inner circle is formed. By the tenth and final episode, she’s beheaded.
Given the leisurely amount of time that the first season took, which was full of narrative cul-de-sacs and irrelevant subplots (remember the choir dude?) this new pace can cause whiplash.
Peter O’Toole takes over from Sam Neill as the Venerated Theatre Actor here to raise the show’s levels of gravitas, collect an easy pay check, and demonstrate to the youngsters just how it’s done (even though as Pope Paul III, he doesn’t share any scenes with the rest of the cast) while James Frain steps up as Cromwell and ultimately creates one of the most compelling portrayals of the man I've ever seen (was I the only one baffled by what Mark Rylance was doing in Wolf Hall?)
There’s one wordless scene in particular, on the day of Anne Boleyn’s execution, when he gets on his knees to pray and finds himself unable to do anything but helplessly gape at crucifix on the altar which is just *chef’s kiss*.
You can feel the mounting sense of dread that closes around the men accused of sleeping with Anne, though I can’t help but feel that George Boleyn was portrayed as a marital rapist in order to make the audience less sorry for his death. (I’m halfway through season three, and they’re doing the same thing with Edward Seymour – that is, making him a jerkass for no good reason).
On the opposite end of the scale, the show doesn’t want King Henry to be a full-blown rapist, and so all the women who are brought to his bedchamber, whether she’s a married lady-in-waiting or a young peasant girl he picks up on the side of the road, are all depicted as enjoying themselves during sex, without any indication of how they feel to have caught his attention in the first place. It’s a little weird, since the show certainly doesn’t shy away from showcasing all of Henry’s other foibles.
This aside, the show is extremely generous with its female characters. They have opinions, agency, flaws, ideals, anxieties and religious conviction. They have relationships with each other, both good and bad. Though they’re kept within the “woman’s sphere” of domesticity, this isn’t derided as boring or worthless – in fact, their scenes are often infused with added suspense given their precarious positions and the dependency they must have on the menfolk that surround them. While their husbands, brothers and fathers scheme to advance their own fortunes, the women are quietly fighting for their lives.
In particular, the likes of Anne Boleyn and Princess Mary have been historically portrayed as an evil seductress and a bloodthirsty fanatic respectively in many (or most) other dramatizations of this period, but here are given sympathetic context for their behaviour and the decisions they make. Anne’s spiraling paranoia is especially well-done, whether she’s sniffing food after the taster has already tested it, or trying to manage the reality of her husband's extramarital affairs.
In comparison, I was a little disappointed with the show’s take on Jane Seymour, mainly because we’re given no clue whatsoever as to her interiority. How does she feel about Henry? Is she flattered by his attention or intimidated by it? How does she feel about the prospect of taking Anne’s place, especially since she swore loyalty as one of her ladies-in-waiting? What are her feelings concerning her predecessor’s execution, and did she consider the possibility that the same fate would befall her if she couldn’t deliver a son? Did she even want to be Queen?
In terms of characterization, following in the footsteps of Anne Boleyn is always going to be a hard act to follow, but the show doesn’t even try to give us any insight into Jane’s mind. Instead, she’s merely a comparison: serene and fair where Anne was tempestuous and dark. (Adding to the problem is that the original actress is recast for season three, going from wide-eyed naivety and youth to a much more mature, wiser depiction in the blink of an eye).
Oh, and the show never quite gives up its commitment to irrelevant subplots. In season two, Thomas Wyatt seduces one of Queen Catherine’s ladies, who eventually hangs herself after the death of her mistress. What’s the point of all this? Unclear, but making it even more bizarre is that their love scenes are set to the distinctive theme that is later used (to much better effect) with Henry and Jane. Why would you waste such a beautiful theme on two supporting characters?
And hey, look! It’s Katie McGrath!
The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (2019)
I’ve already detailed how confusing it was to watch this while simultaneously reading J.M. Lee’s YA novels that covered much of the same material and involved the same characters, but which were fundamentally different in many ways... so I won’t go into all that again.
Instead, I’ll talk about how excited I was to hear that the world of The Dark Crystal was being revisited, and how devastating it was to hear it had been cancelled – a day after winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children’s Program, no less. Director Louis Leterrier still holds out some hope that it’ll return in some capacity, but who can really say?
Set several hundred years (or trine) before the events of the original film, this series lavishly depicts the Gelfling race at the height of their civilization; abundant and thriving and peaceful. Divided into seven clans strewn across various ecosystems (deserts, swamps, forests, plains, cave networks, mountains, the ocean) each one has a rich and distinct culture, from the cosmopolitan fashions of the silver-haired Vapra, to the mysterious and deeply spiritual Dousan nomads.
Spiritual life revolves around songs, the concept of returning to Thra once a lifespan is over, and the Dark Crystal, held in the Castle of the Crystal by its “protectors,” the Skeksis. You know those guys, the awful, squawking, vulture-like creatures that scared the crap out of you when you were a kid.
Many Gelflings work as guards at the Castle of the Crystal, living a relatively peaceful co-existence with the Skeksis despite the latter’s demands for tribute and service in “exchange” for protecting the Crystal (though it’s not entirely clear what this actually involves). Unbeknownst to the Gelflings, the Skeksis are exploiting the power of the Crystal to extent their own lifespans, drawing upon its energy to keep themselves if not “vital,” then at least “not dead.”
But the well is running dry, and so the Skeksis Scientist falls upon a drastic solution: to use the Crystal to drain the life-force of their Gelfling servants and consume the remaining essence for themselves. And so begins the generations-long genocide that will eventually lead to the near-annihilation of the entire Gelfling race. It’s astoundingly dark stuff, and I have at least one work colleague who couldn’t bring himself to watch due to this inescapable narrative endgame.
It’s hard to know where the showrunners planned to end this prequel if they’d been given the greenlight to take their story to its natural conclusion, and I imagine a substantial number of the Gelflings protagonists we spend time with would have survived the initial genocide, left with merely the implication that their numbers would gradually dwindle until only Jen and Kira were left. For now at least, we don’t know. If you were to watch this series without any foreknowledge of the 1982 film, you’d probably find it uplifting, with only the arrival of the Garthim in the finale’s concluding moments to throw a pall over the Gelfling victory.
The narrative thrust of this season involves the discovery of the Skeksis betrayal, and the Gelfling attempt to raise the alarm (or to “light the fires of resistance”) across the seven clans. There are three main protagonists, who all obtain a piece of the puzzle and gradually work their way towards each other and a greater understanding of the dire situation their people are in.
They are Rian, a Stonewood guard at the Castle of the Crystal who is witness to the murder of his girlfriend at the hands of the Skeksis, Brea, the youngest daughter of the Gelfling All-Maudra (basically, the head chieftainess, which makes Brea a princess) who uncovers ancient lore that points to the mysterious connection between the Skeksis and the gentle urRa, and Deet, a sweet little Grottan girl with a deep connection to nature, who is tasked with fixing the strange “Darkening” blight that is beginning to effect the natural world of Thra.
Aside from the charm of these characters, the showrunners are acutely aware that the worldbuilding of Thra itself – namely the intense beauty and imaginative quality of the craftsmanship involved – is the main drawcard to the franchise in its entirety, and so there's no stinting when it comes to presenting a rich and vibrant world for the viewer to savour. I lost track of how many episodes began with a low panning shot that depicted this world's wondrous flora and fauna: everything from a figwit rolling across the forest floor to a tiny stegosaurus with crystal plates sunning itself in the desert sands.
The details are gorgeous, which is only to be expected from the crafting of such a minute world. The cultural differences between the clans, for instance, from the silvery hair of the Vapran to the dreadlocks of the Drenchen, the tiny gestures and expressions of each Gelfling, and the careful closeups of puppet hands opening containers or pouring tea. I was entranced.
I was less so when it came to the scenes involving the Skeksis, which mostly involve them plotting and scheming against each other. It’s difficult to tell them apart, they’re a nightmare to listen to, and they’re just too unpleasant to really be enjoyable villains. There’s some pretty gross imagery at work as well: pustules on their beaks, strings of snot from their nostrils, pus seeping from their claws, and the implication that they have three penises (we get to see the trifold stream of urine flowing from just off-camera). The show nails the “rotting decadence” vibe, but that doesn’t make it fun to watch.
They were always going to be an intrinsic part of the story, but it’s a shame they couldn’t be made slightly more compelling. Furthermore, between the context of their backstory in Creation Myths and where they end up in The Dark Crystal, they’re also the most appalling example of Karma Houdini I’ve ever seen, which disturbed me so much more this time around. These are creatures that have colonized another world, enslaved great swathes of its population, committed full-blown genocide, and at the end of it all, they get to flit off into outer space without a care in the world. Yes, this was also all true in the original film, but there the mass-slaughter was offscreen and so not as visceral as it is here.
There are also some issues in regards to the plot, which often folds back on itself or takes unnecessarily long routes to get where it wants to go. Putting aside the fact that the Inciting Incident is a classic fridging of a female character, there’s a lot of round-a-bouting going on. For instance, Brea sets free a moth that will take her to the next part of her journey... and it’s the throne room in her own home. Later, Rian’s father sacrifices his life to ensure his son’s safety... and then he gets captured anyway. Then he gets rescued by an entirely different group of characters, after opting to stay with his Skeksis captor because he’s tired of running away. The Hunter dies, then comes back to life, then dies again.
It’s just messy, is what I’m trying to say.
Other things they do quite well, such as using dream-fasting as an easy (and established) way of sharing information (that is, exposition dumps) and the pacing is surprisingly brisk given they have to work around the finicky nature of manipulating puppets. And I’ll always appreciate the concept of making Gelfling society matriarchal in nature, which automatically means that female characters are going to be front-and-centre of the action.
The show also boasts a truly enviable voice cast, stacked full of great characters actors: Mark Hamill, Simon Pegg, Anya Taylor-Joy, Taron Egerton, Nathalie Emmanuel, Lena Headey, Awkwafina, Keegan-Michael Key, Caitriona Balfe, Jason Isaacs, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Shazad Latif, Toby Jones, Ralph Ineson, Benedict Wong, Helena Bonham Carter, Alicia Vikander, Bill Hader, Andy Samberg, Theo James, Natalie Dormer, Mark Strong, Eddie Izzard, Hannah John-Kamen – even Sigourney Weaver lends her vocals for a brief narrative voice-over! That said, I get the feeling everyone listed here all leapt to be a part of this project. Who wouldn’t?
It's still difficult to get one’s head around the fact that everything is heading towards near-total destruction, but the narrative endgame reminded me of two things: firstly the weird creative decision way back in The Phantom Menace not to use Alderaan as the planet in which most of the action happened, thereby allowing the audience to experience its beauty and culture a generation before it was destroyed by the Death Star. We need to know precisely what’s being lost in order to mourn the absence of it, which is something that this show understands.
Secondly, that it all reminds me a little of that Tumblr post which talks about how (paraphrasing): “the love was there; it didn’t change or save anything, but it’s important that it was there.” In this case, even though the Gelflings are doomed, it doesn’t change the fact there’s still beauty in the world they inhabit, and that it was the right thing to fight against its destruction.
Gah, now I’m disappointed all over again that we’ll see no more of this. What makes the cancellation really baffling is that the costs of production were already mostly spent. Any ongoing seasons would have logically been cheaper since the greater part of the puppets and sets had already been made. Having started the third book in Lee’s quartet, The Tides of the Dark Crystal, I can get a gleaning of where the series might have gone, and it’s so disappointing to know it might never be realized. *sulk*
One last thing, I spent this entire re-watch staring at the Maudra Fara puppet and wondering why she looked so familiar. Then I realized:
Anne Boleyn (2021)
It took me ages to find a download of this show (after it disappeared from our free TVNZ streaming service) and then I could only play it on ClipChamp of all things, since none of the usual apps would read the material. Weird, but also: whew. I’m glad I got this one under my belt, as I very much wanted to watch it in tandem with The Tudors, in order to contrast and compare two versions of the same events.
And it was interesting to see the same events play out with a different set of actors, as well as in a more protracted amount of time. There is a rather muted air to everything – after Henry’s jousting accident, there’s no wild panic, but rather rooms full of people who are mildly fretful. It’s somehow very slow and ponderous despite its accelerated runtime. Likewise, it aims for a much more realistic tone in the sets and costumes than the glossy sheen of its processor, and it dramatizes events that The Tudors skipped, such as Anne’s court case, while leaving out other stuff, such as an onscreen depiction of Henry’s jousting accident and (bafflingly) Anne’s final speech on the scaffold.
And yet there are other moments that are nearly identical, notwithstanding the location and pacing, such as Jane Seymour responding to the king’s letter by kissing it and then returning it, or Anne walking in on Jane sitting on her husband’s knee, which is framed as being the cause for her miscarriage – I’m not as well versed on the details of this history as others, but that the scenes were so similar in each series suggests they were derived from recorded history.
The Tudors had a whole season of television to plot Anne Boleyn’s downfall, whereas this only has three episodes, and very much keeps the focus on Anne herself. This take on Anne is one less perceptive than Natalie Dormer’s, for though she seems aware on some level that her husband’s affection is waning and that events are conspiring against her, she’s nevertheless completely blindsided by her arrest and subsequent trial.
Jodie Turner-Smith (who we’ll soon see in The Acolyte) plays Anne as languorous, demanding and rather petty. It’s not as careful a character study as that portrayed in The Tudors or Wolf Hall, but one that positions Anne between Dormer’s vulnerability and Claire Foy’s capriciousness – it’s a shame there’s not more time to explore it.
And alright, I’ll address the elephant in the room: Turner-Smith is Black, as is the actor who plays her brother. Race-bending a real person in an historical drama isn’t quite the same thing as colour-blind casting for any other genre, and I wondered if the point the show was trying to make was that Anne was something of an outsider even at the height of her power. She very much stands apart from all the other characters visually through the richness in colour of her gowns, and occasionally gets anachronistic details, such as gold eye shadow.
The casting choice also carries some unfortunate implications: that of an older, highly sexualized and predatory Black woman being replaced by a younger, innocent and more naïve white girl is a little questionable, and it’s one of the ongoing issues with colourblind casting that no one seems to think about over the usual tumult of the anti-woke crowd. As with David Oyelowo playing Inspector Javert in 2018, often the showrunners don’t seem quite prepared to deal with the optics of it all.
Maybe. I don’t know! The obvious solution is to start telling stories about Black history instead of the millionth take on Charles Dickens, Jane Austen or Tudors history, but it'll probably take another twenty years for anyone to realize it.
Another couple of familiar faces are Thalissa Teixeira from The Musketeers, and Anna Brewster from Versailles (also the sultry, smirky spy in The Force Awakens and the daughter of the Duke of Buckingham in The Tudors – I didn’t recognize her there!) as Lady Rocheford, who it seems is doomed to always be portrayed as a catty bitch.
Billed as a “psychological drama,” it doesn’t really deliver on that description, outside of the fact that it’s structured a bit like a stage play, in which the action is moved forward through a series of increasingly fraught conversations. Unfortunately, a lot of the dialogue is painfully on the nose, whether it’s Jane Seymour winning a card game and being told by Anne: “you had the winning hand all along,” or Henry having his horse killed after his jousting accident and saying: “I have no use for an animal that won’t obey me,” or the fact that Anne is gifted a ticking timepiece that stops working the moment she recovers from her miscarriage. I mean, for heaven’s sake.
Ultimately, there’s not much here that hasn’t been explored better, and in more detail elsewhere, and it has no particularly keen insights on Anne Boleyn as a person, a mother, a queen or a Christian. I would love to see something that gave more attention to her role in the Reformation and her belief in the changes that it wrought. On reflection, it almost seems astonishing that no adaptor has picked up on or explored the irony inherent in the fact that the very societal/political changes that made Anne the Queen of England are also what led to her demise.
Criminal Record: Season 1 (2024)
Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo, what more do you need to know?
In case you do, then know that this is one of those moody British police dramas that delve into subjects like race relations and institutionalized police corruption. (I saw one comment amusingly describe the genre as “Concerned Women in Inclement Weather.”)
June Lenker is a mixed-race detective early in her career whose attention is brought to a recent 999 call. The woman on the other end of the line is clearly terrified, and drops several hints that her abusive boyfriend is responsible for a murder that someone else has been put away for. June narrows down the list of potential cases, and draws the conclusion that the woman is referring to Errol Mathis, a Black man incarcerated for the brutal murder of his white girlfriend.
It’s a tenuous link, but we know it’s a true one because otherwise we wouldn’t be watching a TV show about it.
June follows up with DCI Daniel Hegarty, an old-school veteran who was the lead detective on the case, and whose demeanour leaves her spider-sense tingling. Something clearly went wrong with the investigation at the time, and she’s determined to uncover what it was. Hegarty is just as intent on preventing her from doing so. As such, June is left fighting two enemies: the men who are trying to cover up their mishandling of the case, and the institutionalized racism of the police force she works for.
The whole thing is used as a way to explore the subject of personal bias and unexamined prejudices in the individual and the justice system, which may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s fully incorporated with the compelling mystery that unfolds across the eight episodes. There’s a lot of “ah-ha” moments here, such as Hegarty deliberately playing the part of the reasonable one in the face of June’s emotional and instinctive reactions to the investigation, while clearly pulling some strings behind-the-scenes to make her job more difficult.
But we’re also given some insight into Hegarty’s outlook on the job and what was happening in his personal life at the time of the investigation, and a few intriguing moments when June herself makes thoughtless assumptions (she refers to a surgeon as “he” before being informed they're actually a “she”).
Yet before you think the story leans too far into a “both sides have a point” mentality, rest assured that it eventually holds everyone accountable for the decisions they made and the prejudices they hold.
I think one of my favourite scenes was the aftermath of an argument June has with her white husband about whether or not one of her son’s (Black) friends could have planted drugs in his bag, or if it was one of the cops that “randomly” targets him in the street. They apologize, but her husband rather dismissively refers to the argument as “that,” in a later conversation, almost as though he’s forgotten about it. And you can SEE the struggle on June’s face as she fights with herself over whether or not to reopen the argument over a single word. At the same time, I could grasp where her husband was coming from: sometimes you play devil’s advocate because you don’t want to believe it’s that bad out there.
(There’s also another funny moment when her husband and white mother are watching a news report on a young white boy that’s been shot, and both comment that the media wouldn’t be making as much of a fuss if it was a Black boy, to which June sighs and says: “do you want a gold star?”)
The subject matter is grim, but it never becomes misery porn, and at only eight episodes long it’s easily bingeable. Honestly, watching Capaldi and Jumbo face off against each other is worth the price of admission.
As it happens, I watched this with mum on the weekend after she’d had an operation. She’s never been very good with names, and referred to Zoe Wanamaker (who plays June’s mother) as “Zona Bugger.” That was too amusing not to share.
I also have to call foul on the absolutely terrible casting on the teen and young adult versions of Patrick, the son of the murdered woman. Both are fine actors, but they not only don’t look anything alike, but the younger teenage version is actually TALLER than the adult one! I’ve never seen casting that bad before, and wouldn’t be surprised if audiences had trouble grasping that they were meant to be the same person.
I always loved the New York Super Special - I always chalked up Laine's parents willingness to host the BSB as affluent generosity (is it explicit or just implied that they live at the Dakota?). Claudia again gets terrible treatment from a teacher - the art guy is so overcritical of a 13 year old without explaining why until she's questions him? Trash.
ReplyDeleteI admit that Ivanhoe has bypassed me in cultural context to an extent I had no idea it was a Robin Hood story - I'll have to add it to the list.
I don't think any Tudor adaptation had ever been able to make Jane Seymour interesting, sadly. Not even the musical Six could manage it, and they only had to give her one song.
Race-bending a real person in an historical drama isn’t quite the same thing as colour-blind casting for any other genre, and I wondered if the point the show was trying to make was that Anne was something of an outsider even at the height of her power.
Yes, it was deliberate - I recall at the time it was described as "colour-conscious" casting as opposed to colour-blind casting.
Yes, they're definitely at the Dakota. It makes sense I suppose; presumably their apartment is huge. And yeah, Claudia is definitely the butt monkey of this entire series. Something terrible is always happening to her, having a shitty teacher is the least of it.
DeleteIvanhoe: the crazy thing about this book is that at the time of publication, his inclusion of Robin Hood would have been a slow-burn reveal, with readers going: "is that... could it be... hmm I wonder..." which culminated in an official confirmation in the final chapters - all of which is completely lost on a modern viewer due to his use of "Locksley" as an alias.
And it's frustrating because Jane Seymour SHOULD be interesting. There's no way this woman didn't consider the possibility of what would happen to her if she didn't produce a son, and the irony of her succeeding and being practically deified, while Anne was slandered and ended up producing the ACTUAL famous monarch, is so rich in narrative/symbolic potential.
Interesting confirmation of the reasons behind the casting of a Black Anne Boleyn. After writing out my misgivings on how she was portrayed, the counterpoint occurred to me that worrying too much about optics means that non-white actors are left saddled with less-complex and interesting roles... so it's still tricky terrain to navigate.