For the final month of the year, I decided to look back over what I’ve been watching across the previous eleven months and then go with something that corresponded to the theme of each one. For instance, I watched historical epics in March, seventies/eighties fairy tales in April, Shakespeare in May, teen rom-coms in June, Robin Hood and Ivanhoe adaptations in July, vampire movies in October, and foreign-language films/shows in November.
That’s not to mention plenty of things based on the Plantagenets/Tudors, some Apple paperbacks of a ghostly nature, a variety of material in The Dark Crystal franchise, my ongoing Babysitters Club reread, and the end of my Slavic Fantasy reading list. Oh, and my slow-but-steady rewatch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Can you believe I was also going to attempt rewatching Avatar: The Last Airbender this year? That certainly never happened).
It ended up being a surprisingly structured year in terms of viewing, and it was fun picking out more films based on the categories I’d already covered in 2024. As a result, you can expect... more of the same! But in a good way. Some things even manage to be twofers: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the 1961 Snow White are both foreign films, but the former is also an epic, whilst the latter ticks the “old school fairy tale” box.
I was originally planning to gorge myself on pop-culture junk this month, only to find I didn’t have the stomach for it after all. I might save up all those things (House of the Dragon, The Rings of Power, Doctor Who) and wait for new seasons of Andor, The Wheel of Time and Stranger Things just to make a real meal of it.
I do have a New Year’s Resolution pertaining to my viewing in the coming year, but I won’t spell it out explicitly. See if you can guess what it is once the whole thing gets rolling. I also plan on doing something different for 2025’s Woman of the Month series, so stay tuned...
Happy New Year!
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Brooklyn’s Theatre)
Why is A Midsummer Night’s Dream so popular? I feel like there are more productions of it out there than any other Shakespeare play in existence. I have three recorded stage versions (the one at the Globe Theatre, the one at the National Theatre, and this – Julie Taymor’s version) not to mention the Russell T. Davies television special and the 1999 film starring Kevin Kline and Michelle Pfieffer. On a personal level, I’ve seen a live amateur performance and the ballet twice over.
Is it just a fluke, or are people drawn to this play in particular? Maybe we just really like fairies.
It has to be something, because there are a lot of weird issues with the play itself. There are three major subplots going on which are only tenuously connected: the romantic complications of four young Athenians, the feud between the King and Queen of the Fairies over a young changeling boy, and a troupe of actors rehearsing a play that’ll be performed at the wedding of Duke Theseus and Queen Hippolyta.
Across the course of the story, Titania will be tricked into falling in love (and having sex) with a donkey-headed man, Oberon will claim the changeling boy as his own (despite his wife having a much better claim) and though they eventually marry, it’s unclear whether Theseus and Hippolyta’s nuptials are entirely consensual given that he recently defeated her in battle.
I’ve never understood the logic of Helena’s plan to tell Demetrius that his intended is fleeing Athens with the man she loves (girl, how is that going to help you?) and he ends up spending the rest of his life under a love spell that makes him adore a girl he would otherwise loathe (do you really want this guy, hon?)
So there are three possible cases of rape involved in all of this, not to mention some odd structuring. I’m about ready to wrap things up and head home by the time the lovers awaken in the forest, but we’ve still got the entire performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe” to get through before the curtain falls. I suppose Shakespeare felt we had to see the play given all the lead-up to it, but it’s not that funny and feels like it goes on forever.
No wonder the whole thing ends with Puck saying: “yeah, that was pretty weird, wasn’t it?”
In any case, performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream felt like the perfect follow-up to having seen the ballet in November, and Julie Taymor’s take on the material is freely available on YouTube. Anything directed by her is bound to be a feast for the eyes (as I’m sure you know, she was behind adapting Disney’s The Lion King for Broadway) and this is no exception, using light and shadow and all kinds of special effects to create an effectively dreamy, surreal, almost psychedelic tableau.
There’s always a risk that the technical side of things will overwhelm Shakespeare’s language (which is really all you need) but Taymor tows the line while simultaneously throwing a dozen different styles into the proceedings: Elizabethan collars, muted Victorian clothing, a wedding that looks like a noir circus, the duke’s estate as a large dollhouse, the players with broad Brooklyn accents, and so on. It certainly feels like something you’d glimpse between sleep and awakening, and it leans more into Taymor’s fantastical atmosphere than Shakespeare’s comedy.
Fairies float through the air, Oberon and Titania argue atop seething storm clouds, and Bottom’s donkey head is... well, how’d they do that? You can still see the actor’s lips moving, despite being positioned at the end of a donkey’s muzzle.
David Harewood’s Oberon is all about his physicality, making good use of his obvious strength to command the stage, though Tina Benko is his match in regality. But of the fairy characters it’s obviously Kathryn Hunter who steals the show, drawing on her androgynous voice and contortionist skills to portray a surprisingly creepy Puck.
The rest of the cast is fine without being exceptional – Demetrius is a bit smarmy this time around, and though I liked Lilly Englert as Hermia (who does the best job out of the four Athenian youths to gradually shed her inhibitions and throw herself into what can only be described as a four-way orgy/pillow fight in her underwear) the fact that she’s so tall puts her at odds with her most famous bit of dialogue. Hermia must be short, or at least shorter than Helena, for the funniest joke in the play to make sense.
Most of the fairy extras are played by children, and according to the credits, Sophia Lillis is in there somewhere, though I didn’t spot her.
My only real complain is the filming of the show itself. For example, why are we getting a close-up of Oberon during Titania’s monologue? She’s fuzzy in the background for the whole duration! Likewise, the camera movements are so jerky and abrupt – I kept wanting to yell: “stay still! Let me SEE it!” It calmed down in the second half of the show, but it was incredibly jarring to start with.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Globe Theatre)
This was held at the Globe Theatre in 2013, a year before Julie Taymor’s offering, but since I watched it after that one, I’ll discuss it second. Despite how close each show was staged to the other, there’s a chance Taymor was inspired by this one: the gradual deterioration of the Athenian youths from fine clothes to rags and undergarments after their night in the forest is staged similarly here (though I suppose that’s a fairly obvious creative choice to make), complete with a brawl that begins to look a little bit like a foursome.
The production also casts a lot of the actors in dual roles, most notably Theseus and Hippolyta as Oberon and Titiana (the National Theatre version with Gwendoline Christie also did this), as much for thematic reasons as for practical ones.
Because it’s staged at the Globe, the costuming and set design heavily leans into the Elizabethan styles of the period in which it would have been originally performed, with the familiar frilled collars, puffy breeches and traditional headpieces. (It’s just struck me that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a version of this play that’s actually set in Ancient Greece). These outfits are deliberately contrasted with the pagan costumes of the fey-folk, who are more like nature spirits than delicate fairies: think deer skins, oak leaves, animal masks, primal drums, discordant music, and plenty of howling whenever they come onstage. One is even dressed as the Green Man.
This time around we actually see the defeat of Hippolyta in battle at Theseus’s hands, which means that their upcoming nuptials aren’t exactly joyful. When Theseus lectures Hermia on her disobedience to her father, he’s talking just as much to Hippolyta as he is to Hermia, and in response, Hippolyta gives a little smile at the girl’s defiance. Theseus's brutishness passes into John Light’s take on Oberon, whose treatment of Titania feels crueller and more deliberately vindictive than usual.
Thankfully, Michelle Terry’s Hippolyta/Titania is allowed to demonstrate no small degree of fury at the hand she’s been dealt, and this is the only version of the play I’ve seen in which her final monologue to Oberon (“Come, my lord, and in our flight/Tell me how it came this night/That I, sleeping, here was found/With these mortals on the ground”) is delivered as a threat and not with a sense of wonderment.
Which is a welcome change, as I’ve always been bewildered as to why Titania wasn’t beside herself with rage at Oberon’s trick. Here, it’s made clear that he’s not off the hook, and the fight over the changeling boy is probably far from over.
I mean, there’s no escaping the inherent misogyny of the play, but at least this version confronts it instead of trying to ignore it. The only “feminist” victory is that Hermia gets to marry the man she choses for herself, but that’s only because Demetrius relinquishes his claim on her.
In a way it’s a bit of a shame, as I’ve always appreciated the compassion Oberon demonstrates toward Helena by instructing Puck to make Demetrius fall in love with her (with this Oberon, it’s a bit of a mystery as to why he cares at all). Likewise, Lysander’s parting words to Helena: “as you want him, Demetrius dote on you,” is here flung out casually as he rushes off, instead of a sincere wish for her.
And then there’s Theseus telling Egeus and Demetrius: “I have some private schooling for you both,” which can be interpreted as a lead-in to an off-screen scolding for how they’re treating Hermia, despite the law of the land technically being on their side (David Strathairn’s gentle but clearly powerful Theseus in the 1999 film nails this line, and he's by far my favourite take on the character). Here, the delivery is just yelled, like so many of Theseus’s/Oberon’s lines.
This time around the Athenian youths are characterized as a collection of overeager nitwits – not just Helena, but all of them. The most familiar face among them is Luke Thompson as Lysander, currently playing Benedict over on Bridgerton. He actually does a good job here, not just in his comedic timing, but in the way he’s clearly trying to fight the love spell that’s been placed upon him.
Pearce Quigley’s Bottom is interesting: not foolish, but rather irreverent and languorous, seeing the world not with sincerity but sarcasm. I’ve never seen a Bottom like this before, since most actors try to lean into the poignancy of his predicament. In comparison, this guy is an absolute diva about the whole thing, and almost seems in on the whole joke. He kind of reminded me of a slightly less campy Mr G. on Summer Heights High.
Finally, Matthew Tennyson makes for a very airy-fairy sort of Puck, very different from the grounded homunculus of Kathryn Hunter. There’s plenty of homoeroticism between himself and Oberon, including a full-blown, on-the-mouth kiss, though I wasn’t entirely sold on this very serious, almost melancholy take on Puck. Where’s the sense of mischief? Any self-respecting Puck should be delighted with the chaos he’s spreading.
As with the Julie Taymor version, there are some issues with how the whole thing is filmed: at one point the fairies seem to be in the audience itself, catching floating objects in nets, but the cameras never give us a chance to see what’s actually going on. There also appeared to be a reluctance to focus too much on the audience (perhaps for legal reasons?) though the fact that they were clearly visible, and not hidden in the darkness of an auditorium, is surely one of the great joys of performing at the Globe.
Staging wise, they make the odd choice to keep Titania onstage throughout entire scenes of the lovers lost in the forest and the first rehearsal of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” pretending to be asleep while awkwardly standing in the background. They couldn’t have given the poor actress a hammock or something?
And of course, Bottom’s donkey mask contrasts badly with the one in the Julie Taymor production. By some technical trick, that one managed to keep the facial expressions of the actor; this one just looses him entirely. If nothing else, Taymor has certainly set the standard for Donkey-headed!Bottom – though this version did some great sequences with the players communicating with each other via their tap-shoes.
Altogether, it’s been fun seeing so many takes on the material in quick succession, and how each production can come across as very different depending on what the director choses to focus on: National Theatre leaned into comedy, the Globe embraced the play’s darker, more uncomfortable, aspects, and Taymor’s vision rendered the whole thing a bizarre, surreal experience of light and darkness.
Beneath the Dark Crystal: Volumes 1 – 3 by Adam Smith and Alexandria Huntington
As far as I’m aware, this is currently the last lot of tie-in material that's been released for this particular franchise (though I’m sure there will be more in time) and is to be commended for not repeating itself. Rather than present yet another iteration of the Mystics and the Skeksis fighting each other with the Gelfling as their victims/proxies, it instead builds on the characters and circumstances of the previous graphic novel series, The Power of the Dark Crystal.
Places like Mithra and its culture are explored in more depth, protagonists Kensho and Thurma go through their next stage of character development, and (most impressive of all) the Mystics and Skeksis have no part to play in the story, except for a brief appearance in a vision to provide guidance.
Artwork by Alexandria Huntington is neater and more stylized than we’ve seen in the past, and more consistent in its quality. It actually reminded me just a little bit of Cartoon Saloon and the animation from Disney’s Tangled series, though you can see some of the quality and detail taper off towards the end (no doubt a deadline was looming). Still, I did love the colour palette: reds, oranges and yellows for the underground realm of Mithra, and blues, purples and darker reds for the upper realms of Thra.
And as usual, a surplus of muppet-like creatures: cat-like squirrels with six eyes and long prehensile tongues, goldfish the size of dolphins with fins that allow them to leap from the water, mash-ups of mantises and scorpions with ram’s skull heads whose blades can create hypnotic music, and at least one giant flying serpent. You can't have a Dark Crystal story without this kind of bizarre fauna.
When the story picks up, the Gelfling Kensho is now in a position of power within the Castle of the Crystal, but getting frustrated at the wheel-spinning that goes on when it comes to governance, while Fireling Thurma – now in the running to become Queen of her people – is equally annoyed by how their outdated traditions are clung to. Both of them miss the other, having saved the world together in the previous book, but feel they must put duty to their realms before any attempt to reunite.
Thurma must contend with a challenger to the throne, which leads her to undergo some Yoda-like training with a being called The Fire That Stays, who initially comes across as the male equivalent to Aughra; a gender-flipped reflection of her that embodies all of Mithra, just as she embodies Thra. Whereas she has rather sheep-like features and horns, The Fire That Stays looks like a mix between a cat and a fish, and makes for an interesting comparison (especially regarding what eventually happens with him) to the Mother of Thra.
Meanwhile, Kensho is suffering from something of an identity crisis, and is now looking for a purpose that isn’t just sitting in the Castle of the Crystal, accepting offerings and giving orders. He goes out into the world with a motley group of Gelfling, discovering corruption in the land and attempting to help those in need.
The world-building is generally solid, from how they’ve assembled the culture of the Firelings (leaders are referred to as “Your Ember” instead of “Your Highness,” life-cycles are divided into sparks, burning and ash, and death is called “dimming” – as in: “I would have let you both dim”) to the familiar world of Thra and fresh details that fit nicely into the pre-established vibe of this place (for instance, many of the new characters have names that are exactly like what Gelfling names should sound like: Dihnmor, Toolah, Cindrah and so on).
The whole thing contains the usual themes of unity, duality and balance, with only a few passages of naval-gazing gibberish (“belief is knowing, when you say you do not know, you say you do not believe” – buh?) And as stated, it deserves a lot of credit for building on the plots of the previous books, sticking with Kensho and Thurma as its protagonists, and not overusing the Mystic/Skeksis conflict. As a goodbye to Thra, at least for the foreseeable future, it was a solid send-off.
Dawn’s Big Date by Anne M. Martin
We have now reached the “shamelessly recycling plots” stage of The Babysitters Club series, and with well over one hundred books left to go, that’s a rather depressing prospect. Here, Dawn essentially learns the same life-lessons as she did in Dawn and the Older Boy, in which she changes her whole look and personally to suit a love interest rather than herself. In many ways it’s a direct sequel to The Older Boy, since it brings in Logan’s cousin Lewis, with whom Dawn became a pen-pal to at its end. Now he’s coming to stay, and Dawn is nervous about making a good impression.
After some excessive humblebragging and judgment (“other girls are always saying I should be a model or an actress. They say, “Oh, I wish I had your silky hair,” or “I’d die to have your skin.” They might have good hair and skin if they didn’t eat so much junk food,”) Dawn admits that she’s apprehensive about Lewis’s visit (“even though Lewis had seen my picture, and even though he seemed to enjoy my letters, I was afraid he wouldn’t like me. I know this sounds like I’m totally insecure, but I’m not. People are always saying what an individual I am. You have to be somewhat secure to be an individual.”)
Wow, Dawn. Just wow.
She decides to seek out help from her stepsister, which is a bad idea on every conceivable level, and ends up getting more than she bargained for. According to Dawn: “I’d always thought Mary Anne looked up to me. (At least a little.) I thought she saw me as secure and confident. I didn’t want to shatter her image of me as an individualist. Boy, was I wrong. As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one who thought I could use a makeover. Mary Anne thought so, too!”
Mary Anne inundates her with magazines containing bad advice on how to attract a man, including how to talk to them (basically only ever ask questions about themselves, since this makes them feel interesting) and bad fashion tips (which leads to arguments like this one: “Ask Dawn what happened to her eye makeup during the movie.” “Mary Anne deliberately picked the saddest movie of all time so that my makeup would run.” “Ask Dawn who advised her not to wear so much eye makeup.” “Ask Mary Anne who moved up the time of the date so that I didn’t have time to take the eye makeup off.”)
It all accumulates with Dawn embracing early tradwife rhetoric such as: “I’d read a magazine article saying pulled-back hair turned guys off. “Let him see your feminine glory loose and flowing free,” is what it said, to be exact,” and “Boys aren’t supposed to like smart girls. That’s what I’ve heard, anyway.”
Unsurprisingly, Lewis is completely bewildered by what’s going on, and probably rather terrified too considering Dawn sends him a postcard with this missive: “dying to see you Friday night. Mary Anne said you have an extremely hunky voice. Can’t wait to hear it whisper in my ear.”
This book also contains an extremely awful babysitting subplot in which the girls are introduced to the Hill family, whose oldest son Norman is overweight. His parents and sister all bully him for being fat, as do the kids at school and in the neighbourhood – which naturally, only makes him eat more.
Claudia tries to give him some advice: “Maybe you wouldn’t feel sad if you lost some weight. You might feel happier if the kids didn’t pick on you and call you names.” Or maybe it’s THEIR behaviour that’s the problem, not his, Claudia. And it’s pretty rich that she’s criticizing him considering she also hoards junk food in her bedroom. And why do his parents keep stocking their larder full of cookies and sweets if they don’t want their son eating it?
The girls finally help Norman stand up to the bullying, though the book ends with the expectation that Norman will still lose weight and be happier for it – according to him, he’s going to pretend to have diabetes like Stacey, and scare himself into not eating sugary foods. Yeah, there’s no way that’s a healthy mentality to have.
And of course, this nightmarish subplot only exists so that Dawn can have an epiphany about not trying to change her appearance in order to please other people. Again. So the moral of the story is: be yourself, unless you’re fat.
In other minor details, it would appear we’ve completely bypassed Halloween and Christmas this year, because the girls open the book celebrating New Year’s Eve and coming up with resolutions for themselves. We’ve definitely entered the time-flux at this point.
Also, it turns out that in-universe actor Cam Geary has released an album called “Cam Geary Sings!” which is very funny, but gets even funnier when it turns out he’s terrible: “Nobody but Mary Anne thought much of Cam Geary’s singing. “I think he sounds... good,” she said loyally.”
I hate the girls-go-boy-crazy instalments, as it always involves one of the girls acting insanely out of character and then learning the exact same lesson about self-worth. And as far as I know, we never hear from Lewis or Norman again.
But hey, at least we’ve made it to the fifties!
Stacey’s Ex-Best Friend by Anne M. Martin
There is a certain level of continuity in this book, as following on from celebrating the New Year in Dawn’s Big Date, this one opens in February, with the girls now preparing for Valentine’s Day. I felt pleasantly surprised, until everyone starts freaking out about how this year the school’s Valentine’s Day dance is going to fall on Friday the Thirteenth... even though there’s just been a Friday the Thirteenth in Beware, Dawn! which was only three books ago.
Granted, there can be more than one Friday the Thirteenth in a year, but one that falls that close to the previous one? Unless it was the same Friday and this story was happening concurrently to the events of that book... which was clearly not the case. Laine was definitely not in Stoneybrook while the girls were being terrorized by the mysterious Mr X.
This book is the inverse of Stacey’s Mistake: instead of her friends going to New York and behaving badly towards Laine, Laine comes to Stoneybrook and behaves badly towards the babysitters – along with everyone else. There are some early red flags, such as when Laine decides to call Stacey “Anastasia” since it sounds more grown-up, and that she’s dating a fifteen-year-old called King.
But this doesn’t stop Stacey from inviting Laine to Stoneybrook during her vacation, since on having the choice of a. a skiing trip with her class, b. going to Florida to stay in her aunt/uncle’s condo, or c. simply remaining with her boyfriend in New York, Laine decides to visit Stoneybrook, while Stacey and her friends are all still attending classes.
As Stacey enthusiastically says: “she could spend a day in school.” What. WHY.
It's completely baffling, and even Laine says throughout the book: “I cannot believe I am on vacation and I’m going to school today,” and “I’m on vacation, the idea is not to be in school.” SO WHY DID YOU GO TO STONEYBROOK, LAINE? I’m completely bewildered by this entire scenario, especially when we learn that most of the time Laine just stays at Stacey’s house, watching television while she’s at school.
Laine is talked into attending the Valentine’s Day dance with Pete Black, who tells her things like: “your hair is like gossamer” and that her “eyes are like limpid pools,” which does not sound like something any teenage boy that has ever existed in the history of humankind would say to a girl.
The tension brewing between Stacey and Laine comes to a head at the dance, and they end up fighting after Laine ditches Pete in order to dance with another (cuter) guy. Stacey is furious at her, though again, it’s difficult to believe that a teenage girl would be this worked up about the feelings of a guy she’s only casual acquaintances with, and not even dating herself. Laine goes back to New York early, and in an interesting turn of events, the book ends without any reconciliation.
Stacey realizes that Laine has become a very different person, writes her a letter detailing what went wrong on the visit, and returns her half of the friendship necklace they share. It’s a surprisingly realistic way to end the story, leaning into the idea that sometimes people just drift apart and friendships can’t always be fixed.
In the child-related B-plot, the Babysitters Club organize a Valentine’s Day party for some of the older kids, who are of course renowned for enjoying all that lovey-dovey stuff and sending cards of a romantic nature to their peers. They call it a “Valentine Masquerade” since the idea is to send cards that are semi-anonymous, and there’s some amusement to be had from the girls thinking that Nicky and Carolyn secretly have a crush on each other. (Turns out that Nicky accidentally got Carolyn and Marilyn mixed up – which leads me to wonder how someone can like another individual if they can’t even tell them apart from their twin, whilst Carolyn is into one of the Hobart brothers).
Basically, a book in which absolutely nobody acts their age. Don’t even get me started on the squabbles the girls have with their dates prior to the Valentine’s Day dance – Mallory and Ben fight over the best way to use the library card catalogue, Logan is annoyed that Mary Anne doesn’t want to do anything outlandish like dancing at the school dance, and Bart temporarily calls off being Kristy's date because there’s a football game on television that night. Okay, that’s a dick move. She totally has a right to be ticked off about that one.
Amidst the amusing minutia of this book, we get Mary Anne saying that children get “zooey” before a holiday. I’d never heard of that word before, and an initial Google search only took me to pictures of Zooey Deschanel before I realized it meant “resembling a zoo.” So Mary Anne is describing the children... as excited animals?
At another point Laine insists that the word “dude” went out with the sixties, whilst Stacey is scandalized that her boyfriend calls her “babe.” (“No one had ever called me babe. And I didn’t think I wanted anyone to.") That certainly aged weirdly.
I also found it somewhat amusing that Mal and Jessi are always described as sitting crossed-legged on the floor of Claudia’s bedroom during meetings (“like they always do”) as though that location befits the position of the lowly Junior Officers, and there’s an odd moment when the ice is broken with Laine after someone mentions that To Kill a Mockingbird is on television. Laine cries: “all right!” and Stacey notes that she sounded “genuinely excited.” Over a black-and-white movie about racial prejudice in the south? Erm, okay.
Finally, the very first sentences in this book are: “Snow was falling again. For a planet that’s supposed to be feeling the effects of global warming, it certainly was having a cold winter.” That is not how global warming works, and it’s a shame that Stacey was a denialist even back in 1992.
That’s two fairly bleh Babysitters Club books in a row – let’s hope it picks up in the New Year.
The Ghost That Came Alive by Vic Crume
This was a strange one, starting with the title. On hearing about a “ghost that came alive,” my brain immediately went to some sort of weird science that resurrects the dead. Turns out that the ghost “came alive” due to the fact it was never dead in the first place. The spooky sounds the characters hear are just the moans and banging of a kidnap victim, desperately trying to get their attention.
In true Apple Paperback tradition, the story comes up with a delightfully convoluted way of a. separating a set of tweens from their parents, and b. depositing them in a haunted house. In this case the Blair siblings are wrapping up their holiday when their youngest brother comes down with appendicitis. Rather than stay in the bach they’ve been renting for another night, their father instructs oldest son Jim to drive his younger siblings Emily, Jenny and Chris back home in their station wagon.
Naturally they get lost, naturally there’s a thunderstorm, and naturally they end up seeking shelter in a creepy old house. Residents Doctor Cliff and his sister Miss Cliff may as well have “we are up to something” written on their foreheads, but the Blair siblings decide their odd behaviour is worth beds for the night, ignoring the warnings of their mildly psychic sister, who has been having premonitions of doom from the very first page.
The phone lines are down, of course. Strange noises haunt them throughout the night. The siblings decide to investigate, at which point the whole thing turns into a Scooby Doo mystery. Yeah, it's one of those books that hinges on a group of criminals allowing meddling kids into their place of operations instead of just turning off all the lights and pretending no one is home even though they’ve been leaning on a preestablished ghost story in order to cover up their dastardly deeds.
In all honesty, I’ve forgotten how the whole thing ends, though it’s safe to say that the children win the day. In a word: generic.
A Ghost in the House by Betty Ren Wright
Sarah loves her new house, especially her bedroom, which comes complete with a four-poster bed and its own fireplace. Unfortunately, her father has just lost his job, which means that if she and her family want to keep this house, they have to take in its original owner: Sarah’s great-aunt Margaret, now an invalid who hasn’t lived there since she young. And guess whose room she used to sleep in as a child!
Aside from the fact that she’s been banished to a storeroom and that Margaret is rather crotchety, Sarah is also perturbed by strange occurrences that suddenly start once her great-aunt is installed in the house: a shepherd figurine that falls off her dresser, a painting that seems to change every time she looks at it, and the sound of heavy footfalls on the second-floor hallway.
I’ve said this before, but Betty Ren Wright and Mary Downing Hahn are the two masters of “ghost stories for young readers,” though this offering is as bland as its title. Though she’s usually so good at connecting a supernatural haunting with a family’s inner turmoil, the guilt and shame Margaret feels over a transgression in her past (which really wasn’t something a child could be blamed for) doesn’t really mesh with the emotional journey of our protagonist (who learns to be less selfish, though on the whole she’s a pretty decent kid).
In a nice realistic touch, Sarah doesn’t get her room back by the end of the book, nor does she get to go to the rock concert she’s been angling for throughout the story’s duration, but the major problem in A Ghost in the House is the ghost itself. Namely that neither Sarah or Margaret contributes anything toward getting rid of it – instead, a secondary ghost just turns up and does it for them. The text literally states: “she could feel the battle that raged between [the ghosts], but she could do nothing.” And she doesn’t. The whole thing resolves itself without her input, which just leads one to wonder why the benevolent ghost didn’t confront the evil one sooner. What changed that finally gave it the power to defeat the opposition? Certainly nothing that Sarah did.
So the ghost story unfortunately fizzles towards its conclusion, though Wright does a good enough job with the scary occurrences and the upping of suspense before then. And I am pleasantly bewildered by the (seemingly serious) advice that Sarah gives her little brother when he complains of a bellyache: “drink some Coke, it’ll settle your stomach.” Say what?
Ghost in the House by Daniel Cohen
Not to be confused with the preceding book, which is clearly title A Ghost in the House, this is an extremely slight non-fiction book that recounts several famous tales of hauntings across the world, mostly in England, America, Canada and France. There are the ones we’ve all heard of, such as the Winchester house and the Moberly–Jourdain incident (I’m pretty sure both appeared in The Usborne Book of Ghosts and Hauntings, and we ALL read that one as kids) but I’d never heard of things like the Calvados haunting or the Weir House in Edinburgh, and that naturally sent me down the Wikipedia rabbit hole.
I imagine this was a book commissioned to coast on the success of Apple’s ghost stories for young readers back in the nineties, and there are some pretty obvious mistakes and elaborations (the last name of a family in one chapter is referred to as “Tweed,” when a rudimentary online search reveals it was actually spelt “Teed.”) That’s the level of accurate research we’re dealing with here, though hey – it’s not like it’s claiming to be a literary exposé.
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
I finished this on the very first day of December, though it really should have been read in October, considering that month is practically a theme of the book (though in saying that, October in New Zealand is the start of spring, so it still wouldn’t have provided the right ambiance for a book comprised of falling leaves and dark evenings and full moons).
When it comes to this story, I am more familiar with the 1983 Disney film than the original novel, which I watched at an impressionable age – which was also a far-too-young age. Various images are imprinted onto my brain: the ruby ring, the hand tattoos, the tarantula attack...
As with most things that you watch or read as a child, regardless of how many other iterations of the story there might be, that one will always be the definitive example. And I have to say, I was pretty surprised by what the original novel is like, especially regarding its prose. I was expecting a dark Gothic fairy tale with Americana trappings, and what I got was... not that. It’s actually a pretty hard book to describe, mostly due to how it’s written.
The prose gets almost purplish at times, and is so dense that you occasionally can’t grasp what’s actually going on. There are scenes that don’t appear anywhere in the Disney film – which is understandable since they involve things like the Dust Witch trying to hunt down the boys in a hot-air balloon and Charles Halloway weaponizing a trick bullet by etching a smile onto it.
Things like the lightning rod salesman come across as rather random (this might be blasphemy, but the film integrates him into the story in a much more elegant way) while semi-important characters like Mrs Foley just disappear abruptly from the narrative. Seriously, what happened to her?
Yet what interested me the most was Bradbury’s take on the nature of good and evil. The most important component of Mr Dark and his array of circus freaks is that despite the Faustian deals they strike with various townsfolk, they are not the Devil and his ilk. This is made very explicit, and they are instead referred to as the October People – still diabolical, but also more fey-like in nature.
As Mr Halloway monologues at one point: “I think [the carnival] uses Death as a threat. Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a less, an end, a darkness. Nothing. And the carnival wisely knows we’re more afraid of Nothing than we are of Something. You can fight Something. But... Nothing? Where do you hit it? Has it a heart, soul, butt-behind, brain? No, no. So the carnival just shakes a great croupier’s cupful of Nothing at us, and reaps us as we tumble back head-over-heels in fright.”
It’s very much in keeping with Bradbury’s opinions on faith, which he said ended on: “the day of Darwin and the changes that occurred when science marched in the door and religion drifted out the window... We have lost faith not only in God, but in God’s opposites, the Devil, the apparitions, the werewolves and warlocks... I cannot help but feel we have lost something essentially vital and stimulating... at least there was white Whiteness as well as the dark Dark, while today all is a vast and monotonous plain of unvarying grey.”
That’s a very writerly opinion to have, and these ideas lie in the heart of Something Wicked That Way Comes; an odd sort of yearning and nostalgia for darkness and evil, while still recognizing that it’s not entirely (or solely) based in Christian ideology. There is something about a carnival that is inherently pagan in nature: transitory, strange, uncanny, wild – and as Mr Halloway says of the October People, they are all Halloween and no Christmas.
As C.S. Lewis once said of the origins of the White Witch (“we were born knowing the witch”) I feel that everyone knows this story on some primal level, even if they’ve never heard of it before. A mysterious carnival comes to town and offers its customers their greatest desires... at a very steep price, of course. We are also born knowing the devil’s bargain, even if the devil is nowhere to be seen.
This edition came with some essays by Stephen King, Seth Grahame-Smith, Margaret Atwood and Brian Sibley, along with several drafts from a time when the story was quite different, right down to the main characters’ names. It’s interesting enough, though doesn’t delve into the work in any great depth.
Fever Crumb by Philip Reeve
With the publication of a brand-new book in the Mortal Engines saga, I have decided to read the books in chronological order all the way through. Huzzah! Philip Reeve is one of my favourite authors of all time, and I’ve been completely engrossed and delighted with the crafting of this post-apocalyptic world of Traction Cities since its first publication, in a way that’s only comparable to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.
I think an underrated quality of any story is elegance of plot: how it carries the characters along, when and how revelations are made, the conveyance of complex ideas in graceful ways, the flow of sentences and creative turns-of-phrase: Reeve is a master at all of it. There’s a poem I recall from high school about how reading poetry should make you feel like you're ice skating, and that’s how Reeve makes me feel: as though I’m sliding effortlessly over his words. His stories know exactly where they’re going and how to get there.
That’s not even getting into his mastery of Dickensian naming that perfectly sums up every character (Ted Swiney, Bagman Creech, Mistress Gloomstove) or his sense of humour (this book involves a religious procession for the prophet “Hari Potter,” the expletive “Cheesers Crice!” as referring to “some obscure cockney god,” and an Order of Engineers living in a giant statue head – when they exit from the nose, they’re described as filing “through his nostril like a well-educated sneeze.”)
This trilogy is a prequel, and so it covers the origins of the Traction Cities and the genesis of Shrike, finding a way to eventually sneak in the magic words: “It hardly seems a very rational idea. Trundling about the world, snapping up the things one needs from other cities. And what if those other cities follow suit, and start to move themselves? Then only the fittest and fastest would survive. It would be an absurd way to live... a sort of Municipal Darwinism.”
Thankfully Reeve doesn’t go too crazy with prequelitis, in which the backstory of every single thing has to be explained, but Shrike’s background ends up being a little underwhelming, and his post-transformation reunion with his children is flat-out anticlimactic. Sometimes things are better left a mystery.
Of more interest are the Scriven, a genetically mutated offshoot of humanity who used to rule over London before their numbers dwindled. Identifiable by their spotty leopard-like skin (which meant I couldn’t help but visualize them as cat people, despite descriptions to the contrary) Scriven were longer lived than most humans and considered themselves innately superior until two hundred years of their tyrannical regime saw them overthrown, derogatorily called Patchskins, and systematically hunted down by the Skinners Guild.
The remnants of these people are mysteriously connected to our protagonist Fever Crumb, and not just because she lives in the giant head of an unfinished statue of their last overlord, Auric Godshawk. The statue head is big enough to house the entire Order of Engineers, an organization of scientists and researchers who wear white coats, shave their heads, and pride themselves on completely divesting themselves of any feelings.
Having been raised among them, Fever also suppresses her emotions, though you won’t be surprised to hear that she starts to lose her grasp on rationality and feels some feelings across the course of her adventure, after an archaeologist requests her assistance in studying some artefacts from a newly discovered site.
London at this time is still stationary, but Reeve has filled it with trams which roll along suspended platforms and are powered by the wind, a car chase/gun fight that takes place between two rickshaws, and the quirky irony that just as Fever has been living in Godshawk’s (statue) head, so has Godshawk been living her Fever’s (actual) head. It makes sense in context.
I’ve already compared Reeve to Philip Pullman, and so it’s worth mentioning that he too holds a degree of animosity against religion – more so in the next book than in this one. Still, you get the sense that he’s trying to reconcile his younger readers to the possibility that this life is all there is; that the here and now is all we get. At one point Fever considers her grandfather, and thinks:
“Perhaps he realized, there at the end, that immortality wasn’t won by designing engines or building sky-high statues or stuffing your thoughts into other heads, but just by keeping your children and their children safe, so that they could carry something of you on into the future.”
As a result, the tragedy inherent in this book feels especially tragic, but amidst the desolation and melancholy, there are always moments of tenderness.
Reeve isn’t interested in simplicity either, and there aren’t any black-or-white characters or scenarios to be found here. People are complex, and they have equally complex motivations. A hardened Skinner can show mercy to a Scriven mother and her child, just as surely as a frightened young boy can be viciously cruel in pursuit of what he's been taught to believe.
I could go on, but there are so many glorious turns of phrase, so much effortless world-building here, that it can almost get a little depressing. There are hundreds of passages I could quote, but here’s my favourite, occurring as a member of the Order of Engineers watches Fever escape their home in a hot-air balloon:
“It seemed to him that Godshawk’s Head looked wonderful, lit from within by the glow of the fire, with firelight shafting out of every vent and window and the balloon rising palely from its crown like a thought bubble, one last idea wafting free in the updraught from that mighty brain.”
A Web of Air by Philip Reeve
Although I’m far from finished, this might well prove to be my favourite Mortal Engines book, and that’s mostly to do with the setting. On a massive crater-like island that’s only accessible by causeway or boat, the settlement of Mayda rises across a series of ascending levels within the basin walls. Many houses are built on funiculars that that move them up and down and slopes, from the coolness of the bay in the mornings, to the heights of the crags for the evening views.
Here's a description from about midway through the story:
“The street called Rua Circulo ran all round Mayda, about halfway up the crater wall, even spanning the harbour mouth on a vertiginous bridge. Some stretches of this street were smart and others shabby. The stretch where Fever’s abductors finally set her down was on a boundary between the two; fine mansions with sea views to the west, to the east long rows of run-down town houses like rotting teeth.
Between them a buttress of the cliff rose almost sheer, and ten or more big funiculars had been built on it. Most of these were restaurants or nightclubs, and they shuttled ceaselessly up and down their tracks, entrancing their guests with an ever-changing view, filling the night air with the grumbling song of their wheels and cables. It was a restless part of town.”
It reminds me of Pullman’s Cittàgazze, or Frances Hardinge’s Gullstruck Island, or even Monkey Island from the game franchise. More fantasy stories should take place in tropical climes.
After the events of the previous book, Fever finds herself a traveller with Persimmon’s Electric Lyceum, a theatre troupe of friendly misfits that perform shows such as “Neil Strong-Arm and the Story of Going to the Moon,” based on the old legend of the astro-knight Niall Strong-Arm, who flew to the moon in Apollo’s fiery chariot and won the love of the moon-goddess. To quote some of the dialogue: “Tis but one small step for a man/ Yet for Mankind it is a Mighty Leap!”
But soon she finds herself caught up in a mystery. Gradually she becomes aware of a strange young man called Arlo Thursday who is attempting to build a flying machine on a small island off the coast of Mayda. Given her own intelligence and experience with the Engineer’s Guild, Fever is certain that she can assist him in this endeavour. But not everyone wants to see a return of the miraculous flying machines of old – in fact, many will kill to keep humankind on the ground.
The plot is as elegant as always, with narrative strands and secret identities and shocking revelations woven throughout the story, smoothly paced and perfectly structured. There’s a scene in which Fever is hiding from a gunman in a bathroom that had me holding my breath, followed by a terrifying chase over the ambulatory rooftops of the buildings that move up and down the sloping terrain. How does he do it?
In terms of character development, Fever is still dismissing her feelings and yet feeling them regardless, and eventually experiences the pangs of heartbreak for the first time. This instalment also gives us the single-minded Arlo Thursday and the sinister Jago Belkin, but even minor characters like Jonathan Hazell are fully fleshed-out, so rich in characterization and realistic quirks.
And of course, the humour. Here’s my favourite Brick Joke, when a character explains the underbelly of Mayda to Fever:
“It is easy to hire thugs and assassins in Mayda. There are whole guilds of them. The Shadow Men, for instance, who dedicate all their murders to the Mother Below. The Lords of Pain, who specialize in torture, the Songbirds, who will murder or maim your enemy while singing him a message of your choice...”
Much later on in the story she’s running through the streets by night, and glimpses this:
“In an alleyway a man was being kicked and beaten by a quartet of brawny thugs in straw hats and stripy coats who were singing, “That’s for squealing on Louie, you double-crossing fink,” in a catchy four-part harmony.”
As a prequel, it touches lightly on the Bird Roads and the Jenny Haniver, but we only get the barest bones of their origins. At this stage the Jenny Haniver is a boat and not an aircraft, but I’ve only just learned that an actual jenny haniver is: “the carcass of an animal that has been modified by hand then dried, resulting in a mummified specimen intended to resemble a fanciful fictional creature.” Clearly Reeve intends us to assume that the Jenny Haniver is a Theseus’s Boat type situation, and that Arlo’s seafaring vessel will eventually become Anna Fang’s airship.
It's a light touch, as we’re only left to speculate that Arlo will eventually fly again, and by doing so bring air travel back into the world. It’s also the only book that (at least until Thunder City) doesn’t feature Shrike.
Reeve has such a wonderful grasp on the English language that I started keeping a list of the best words: feldspar, rhomboid, gambrel, wind-writhen, revetments, Northish and “Darklymost ventricles.” And here’s my favourite passage, when Fever gets her first look at Arlo’s flying machine:
“It was only half-finished, the fine blond wooden bones of its wings and body not yet covered with paper, but already it had the grace which Fever had recognized in the models. There was a sense of imminence about it; of some flying thing at rest, readying itself to spring into the air. It looked caged, filling the room, the tips of those skeleton wings touching the walls.”
Scrivener’s Moon by Philip Reeve
Fever Crumb’s story wraps up with this third and final part of the trilogy, in which London finally becomes the terrifying Traction City of the original quartet. Unsurprisingly, not everyone is pleased with this latest development in technological revolution, and Fever finds herself caught between two massive armies, one of which is determined to stop London at any costs.
Just as unsurprisingly, they fail. That’s always the way with prequels, as if you’ve read the original Mortal Engines books – or even just know what the titles are – it’s clear who’s going to come out on top in this particular conflict. No doubt realizing this, Reeve bases the tension on who’s going to live or die, for there are root-able characters on each side of the equation, and none of the stories in this series are about good versus evil – rather opposing worldviews and belief systems.
Fever argues that the Traction City is a step forward: “it will be safer, and cleaner, and fairer. Everyone will pay their share to provide good housing, and hospitals for the sick, and schooling for children, and pensions for the old,” but new character Cluny is horrified at the very idea of the whole thing: “Then none of you will be free! If you aren’t responsible for yourselves, if you expect your leaders to provide everything, you will be no better than their pets.”
Who is right? The Municipal Darwinist or the primitive libertarian? The truth is, you never really know what side to be on, and can only hope that your favourites will make it out alive.
As far as this book’s existence as a “prequel” goes, it answers some questions about Scrivens and the Sixty Minute War that I didn’t really have in the first place, provides a very early incarnation of the Traction City that will later be called Arkangel (here called Arkangelsk, and originating as one of the Traction Fortresses of the Nomad Empires) and even throws in a Natsworthy (though in typical Reeve style, it turns out to be a red herring – there’s no way this character could be an ancestor of our later protagonist Tom).
But as usual, any Mortal Engines book is a feast for the imagination, from the proudly freakish members of the Carnival of Knives, to the mysterious black pyramid that holds a multitude of Scriven secrets; the vast and cold wastelands of the north, and the cramped interiors of the mobile fortresses that make up the ever-moving Nomad Empires, stretching for miles across the tundra. Plus, there are war mammoths. War mammoths! How does he come up with all this stuff?
This particular volume also leans into a glorious mashed-up aesthetic of the old and the new, for example: Nintendo Tharp, the Great Carn’s technomancer.
“In Tharp’s sanctum, down among the fort’s engines, candles flickered behind the scenes of Ancient tellies and puddles of oil burned in Set-a-light dishes and a thousand talismans of wire and circuitry swung from the carved beams... they stood and watched while the technomancer circled Cluny, muttering his sacred runes and apps. Tharp had a face like the face of an aged lizard and a long beard with bones and bits of circuit-board plaited into it.”
My one (ongoing) complaint with these books is that often Reeve forgets to give us decent closure to some of his supporting characters. I was fully invested in Ruan and Fern, but they’re gone now, and we’ll never learn if Fever ever sees them again. Ditto Arlo Thursday, who was essentially the deuteragonist of A Web of Air, and who just sails off into oblivion at the end of that book. I was also interested in Thirza, but we never discover how she reacted to the death of her husband, whom she seemed genuinely fond of, or what she did next.
And here, there’s poor Doctor Crumb, who finally overcomes his emotionless state and reaches the point where he’s able to admit he loves his daughter... but can't say it out loud (ironically, as a result of hardening his heart after believing she’s been killed). Do they ever meet again? Come on, Reeve – your readers want to know these things!
On the exact opposite end of the scale, why does Charley Shallow get spared? I mean, unless one of his descendants appears in the original books and I’ve just forgotten about it, I’ve no idea why Reeve didn’t go with the poetic justice of Fever killing him after she (nobly but misguidedly) saved his life in the first book. Speaking of which, he gets a bit of a character retcon here – from a confused boy struggling to do the right thing in Fever Crumb to a budding psychopath with no qualms about committing murder. He’s rather less interesting in his new incarnation.
But as ever, Reeve brings this harsh but compelling post-apocalyptic world to vivid life with his incredible mastery of prose. Here’s my favourite descriptive passage of the book:
“At last the beach curved north and the wilderness of old Scotland came down to meet it in black cliffs. The air grew cold. Summer was already ending. There was frost in shady places, and inland the white hills slumbered under their icing like disastrous cakes. A broad meltwater river coiled out of the uplands, flowing clear and shallow over beds of golden gravel.”
Thunder City by Philip Reeve
The first Mortal Engines book since Scrivener’s Moon was published in 2011, Thunder City ends up being something of an oddity within the overarching scope of the series. Unlike the prequels, which delved into the history of the Traction Cities that defined the original quartet (namely the genesis of London itself, and how it came to be ambulatory) or Night Flights, which focused on the fan-favourite character of Anna Fang, Thunder City has no real connection to anything that comes before or after it in the fictional chronology it’s a part of.
Basically, it’s what people keep saying they want from the Star Wars franchise: a story set in the sandbox of this particular world, but with no other linkage to the rest of the saga. For my money, I would have liked a little more connectivity – it’s set after the prequels but before the original quartet, and is only the second book that doesn’t include Shrike (and I was genuinely surprised he didn’t appear here).
Perhaps it’s because Reeve leaves so much of his world-building to minor references and the reader's imagination (in favourable comparison to other authors’ encyclopaedic detailing of their invented worlds) that I’m always a little bemused when a new story doesn’t fill in some of the missing pieces. For some, this will be a highlight. For others, a disappointment. Either way, we still get a great story.
Tamzin Pook is a fighter in the Amusement Arcade, a floating entertainment venue in which she and her fellow warriors do battle each night with a variety of different Revenants (another name for Stalkers). Any fight might well be her last, and so she’s emotionally cut herself off from any human contact, especially after the incident with Eve Vespertine.
Meanwhile, in the Traction City of Thorbury, an invading force has seized control of the city and installed a brutal new regime. The tenacious and quick-thinking middle-aged governess Miss Torphenhow gets her young charge (the daughter of the mayor) to safety, and then takes it upon herself to find the Mayor’s only son, Max Angmering, in the hopes that he might oust the usurping Gabriel Strega and restore harmony to Thorbury.
Naturally, it’s easier said that done. To rescue Max from imprisonment, she must first recruit Tamzin. And to do that, she has to find a way to convince the girl to leave the only home she’s ever known.
There’s plenty of excitement to be had throughout the story: submarines, Revenants, explosions, gunfights, intelligent octopi, prison breaks, and finally a forceful takeback of the city. Along the way Tamzin gets caught up in the adventure despite herself, and discovers her place among a quintessential found-family of misfits and eccentrics.
A nice detail is that she carries a somewhat mysterious pendant with her throughout the course of the book, presumably given to her by her biological family, but (unless Reeve is planning a sequel) it never gets explained or resolved. She simply decides that she’s found a family that loves and accepts her, and the rest doesn’t matter all that much.
Despite this, Reeve does tend to veer hard into the cynical side of human nature, and our band of wayward heroes suffer through so many betrayals that it starts getting a bit depressing. Thankfully humanity’s better angels rally in the second half of the book (right when the story needs wrapping up, so that’s convenient) and Reeve has one of his characters ponder what could be the hypothesis of this series in its entirety:
“And in that way that sometimes happens to people who study history she suddenly found herself looking at her own era as if from a great distance, and wondering what those Ancients would have made of her. She supposed it might seem very strange to them, this world where cities rolled about and ate up smaller ones. “But no one gets a choice about which age they are born in... we are all castaways, carried along for a while on the river of history. All we can do is enjoy the passing view, and do our best to help our fellow castaways, if we can.”
As ever there are tons of hilarious details, from a character called Skip Recap, to the fact that one of the villains lives in a literal bouncy castle. (Eventually we learn “some prankster had popped the Bouncy Castle. Its colourful towers were wilting slowly with a sound like a choir of mournful whoopee cushions.”) There’s a submarine that saves our cast of characters from certain death called the Haile Maryam, and a great pontoon bridge that the Zagwan Empire built in the height of its power. As Miss Torpenhow describes it:
“Three hundred years ago, the Zagwans and their allies from Trarza and the Tibesti Caliphate marched across that bridge on their way to try to stop our cities moving. It was a misguided effort, and doomed to failure, but so brave! What a sight it must have made: the banners waving, and the spear-points shimmering, and the Zagwan paladins riding on their war zebras. It was they who gave the bridge its name, of course – the Zebra Crossing.”
And as ever, here’s my favourite passage:
“Outside, the pale fingertips of the searchlight beams felt this way and that across the mountain of garbage. The scavengers who had been at work up there were all hurrying back towards Weech, casting frantic shadows up the drifting smoke. The alarm gong kept on sounding. A blaze of lights flared on the skyline like a cut-price sunrise.”
Sleeping Beauty (1959)
I have three favourite Disney Princess films, one from each era: Moana, Beauty and the Beast, and this, Sleeping Beauty. Which is a little ironic, considering the titular princess barely features, gets only eighteen non-singing lines, and spends the entire second half of the film unconscious.
But the rest! It more than makes up for that: the gorgeous stylistic designs, the three middle-aged fairies as protagonists, a surprisingly developed prince, and of course, the best Disney villain of them all: Maleficent. (Do not under any circumstances watch the Angelina Jolie remake; it completely declaws the Mistress of All Evil).
You already know the story, but there are some interesting tweaks made to the fairy tale in order to streamline the narrative and bypass several of the story’s traditional elements. For instance, the whole “she’ll sleep for one hundred years” thing is skipped entirely, mostly so that Aurora and Prince Philip can have a meetcute before the proverbial shit hits the fan – not that it makes a huge amount of difference to their relationship, since they don’t even know each other’s names before they’re declaring their intention to marry.
Likewise, although the giant bonfire of spinning wheels is dramatized, it doesn’t lead to the kingdom wearing worn and shabby clothing, and nor does Maleficent trick Aurora into pricking her finger on a spindle (instead she’s hypnotized, though I’ve seen at least one version in which the wicked fairy entices the princess into touching the spindle with the promise of what a spinning wheel can actually do – i.e. make decent clothes for people).
The barrier of thorns isn’t a natural occurrence after a hundred years of neglect, nor a protective measure put in place by the good fairies (again, I’ve seen one adaptation have this be the case) but rather something that Maleficent conjures in order to prevent Philip from reaching the castle. And though the entire kingdom is put to sleep, it’s done by the good fairies in order to buy themselves some time, and only for a few hours.
I find it interesting, that’s all, the way that certain parts of the fairy tale are tweaked for this film. Within the boundaries of the animated Disney canon, Sleeping Beauty stands out for having one of the best Disney Princes. In that, he actually has a personality: a sense of humour, a fondness for his horse, the courage of his convictions, and no small amount of bravery when it comes to taking on a big honking dragon. That’s more than Cinderella and Snow White’s beaus ever managed.
Unfortunately, Aurora suffers for this focus on Philip, as the film can’t even decide on her name! Is it Aurora or Rose? She’s mostly just referred to as Sleeping Beauty in the promotional material, but what do they call her in the wider Disney Princess franchise? I mean in stuff like the Wreck-It Ralph sequel?
Apparently the writers went with two names in order to honour both the French and German versions of the story, but having been raised as “Briar Rose” (even though she’s never called that on-screen, only “Rose”) is this poor girl now expected to change her name back to Aurora? Think about the identity crisis that lies before her, having been raised as a peasant and now realizing she’s first in line for an actual kingdom, with parents she’s never known and a trio of godmothers who were actually supernatural fairies the whole time. No thought is given to this upheaval in her life, but I’d be pissed.
Much has been said that Aurora only gets eighteen lines and no agency whatsoever across the course of the film, though that ignores the fact that Philip also never speaks after Maleficent takes him captive. And okay, it’s not a great point to make, since Philip then goes on to fight a dragon while Aurora is unconscious. At least he gets to actually do something. The real counter-argument to the claim that the movie is sexist is that the true protagonists of the story are the three good fairies: Flora, Fauna and Merryweather.
In a way, this is astounding, even by today’s standards. It’s like if Cinderella’s fairy godmother was the main character of that story, and every time I watch I’m amazed that so much time is given over to three fuddy-duddy middle-aged women who spend a lot of the time squabbling with each other. I think my favourite detail is that when they’re using their magic to assist Philip’s escape from Maleficent’s fortress, they turn boulders and arrows into things like bubbles, flowers and rainbows. I mean, talk about weaponized femininity!
It’s also an exceptionally beautiful movie, from the colour palette to the deliberately stylized characters and backdrops, made to imitate medieval illuminated manuscripts. From the warmth and comfort of the fairies’ woodland cottage to the frenzied dancing of Maleficent’s hobgoblins around the bonfire of green flames, every frame is exceptional. This time around, it actually reminded me a lot of Fantasia and The Sword in the Stone; the designs of the squirrel and the owl in particular when compared to the latter.
And all those little moments of humour: Philip’s face when he’s introduced to his “future bride” as a child, the ongoing argument about whether Aurora’s dress should be blue or pink, the drunk minstrel waking up just in time to be put back to sleep again, and Hubert letting go of his confusion and just going with the flow at the film's conclusion. Surely, Flora’s breezy response to Merryweather’s complaint that the dress looks awful (“that’s because it’s on you, dear”) has got to be the most brutal murder ever featured in a Disney movie.
It's not perfect. The film cheats a little bit by putting the “hand of destiny,” over Aurora and Philip’s love story, which means that despite their determination to marry the one they love (or at least the one they’ve just met), fate itself removes any obstacles by ensuring that by a happy coincidence, they’re complying with their own arranged marriage. I would have quite happily removed the pointless song between Kings Stefan and Hubert in order to spend a little more time on Aurora and Philip’s relationship.
Speaking of inevitability, I was also immensely frustrated by the measures taken to protect Aurora from Maleficent’s curse. By the explicit stipulations of the spell, she’ll prick her finger before the sun sets on her sixteenth birthday. Which means that until that date, she’s perfectly safe. So why deprive her parents of their only child for all those long years? Especially since it ends up being all for nothing anyway!
And then, I’ve never understood why the fairies take Aurora BACK into the castle on her sixteenth birthday, which of course is the most dangerous time for her to be there. Why not go hide deeper in the forest or something? (Yeah, I know, because plot).
Last two points: I will always feel sorry for this movie’s nameless queen, one of the rare Disney mothers who actually gets to LIVE, but who is only allowed one single line. And though the sequence in which Aurora is lured from her bedroom and up the tower steps to the spindle will always be my favourite part of the film (or perhaps any Disney film) this rewatch reminded me of how enchanted I was as a child when the fairies shrink themselves down in order to hold their secret counsels inside a trinket box. There was something about that concept that just delighted me when I was young.
Oh, and I’ve always wondered what Merryweather’s gift to Aurora would have been if Maleficent hadn’t interrupted her. Wisdom, perhaps? It’s not really the case in this particular iteration of the fairy tale, but in others I always felt that Aurora was missing a few braincells when she was so easily lured from the safety of her home and tricked into pricking her finger.
Snow White (1961)
I found this obscure little film on the Kanopy streaming service, and immediately knew it would fit right in to my seventies/eighties fairy tale films category (even if it was released in the sixties). Clocking in at exactly one hour long, it’s quite possibly the most faithful adaptation of the fairy tale I’ve ever seen – right down to the fact it’s spoken entirely in German.
It also covers all three of the attempts the Evil Queen makes on Snow White’s life (people always forget that she tried with a suffocating belt and a poisoned comb before getting to the apple) and the detail of the infamous apple being half red, half white (with the disguised Queen offering the red, poisoned side to her stepdaughter).
However, they chicken out when they get to the part when the Queen attends Snow White’s wedding and is forced to dance in red-hot iron slippers – though let’s be real, no one is ever going to put that on-screen. Instead the Queen arrives, recognizes Snow White, and is then offered the red half of an apple by the Prince, after which she runs away in horror.
There’s no point recounting the story, so I’ll just discuss some of the interesting features. Much like Sleeping Beauty (above), the film allows Snow White and the Prince to meet before the very end of the story. Also like Sleeping Beauty, it doesn’t end up making much of a difference to their relationship, since they just fall in love instantly. Maybe let them have a conversation first? Just one?
A better touch is that Snow White is friends with the castle servants who remember her birthday (even if they’re never seen again after the first ten minutes) and that one of the dwarfs (who surprisingly, are all played by short men and not little people) is called Tumbles. Because there’s a running gag about how he trips over all the time. Guess how this plays into the original ending of the story in which the apple piece lodged in Snow White’s throat falls out after the glass coffin is dropped?
But the movie’s best creative decision is to follow up on the Huntsman, who doesn’t just disappear from the story after he refuses to kill Snow White. After he’s exiled, he goes straight to the Prince to tell him everything that’s been going on, and is present when he finds the glass coffin in the forest. It’s a nice piece of connective tissue.
Snow White isn’t very bright, leading to my favourite line from one of the dwarfs when they discover she’s been tricked by the Evil Queen for the second time: “she looks dead again.” Her lack of intelligence makes more sense when you consider (as this post points out) that she was only seven years old in the original fairy tale, but here she’s clearly a teenager, and so just comes across as an idiot. She’s also remarkably chipper about the attempt on her life, her subsequent abandonment, and the loss of her home. I realize it’s a “that’s the way it was back then” thing, but the angelification of female characters in fairy tales, who never seem to get upset or annoyed over anything, is surely why it took so long to get three-dimensional women in fiction – and why it’s still so rare to see a woman get angry on-screen.
I digress. Two other interesting details are that the Queen gets a Brawn Hilda-type maidservant, and that the magic mirror has a female voice – two things I’ve never seen before, and which allow her to pass the Bechdel Test as she’s plotting the death of her stepdaughter. I mean, what can we say to that?
Fright Night (1985)
Believe it or not, I had never even heard of this cult classic before researching vampire movies for my October vampire fest. In hindsight, that’s rather astounding given how beloved it apparently is. I mean, I’d never seen An American Werewolf in London before 2023, but I knew it existed. But this film managed to get through a slew of sequels and a 2011 remake without me ever knowing about it.
It certainly doesn’t start auspiciously, with protagonist Charley getting shirty with his girlfriend over the fact that she’s uncomfortable with how far their make-out sessions are going. Minutes later, she decides to take the plunge and removes her clothing, telling him “I’m ready,” in a tone of voice that indicates she is definitely NOT ready. Thankfully, by this point he’s distracted by what’s going on in the neighbour’s yard outside his bedroom window: two men are carrying what looks like a coffin into the house.
Believing that he’s now living next door to a vampire, he tries in vain to get his girlfriend, mother, best friend and the local cops to believe him. Naturally they don’t, so instead he seeks the help of Peter Vincent, the host of a television horror show – who if nothing else, really wants to step back into the limelight. If that means indulging the crazed rantings of a teenage boy, then why not?
Like most cult classics that you don’t experience at a very specific time and place, it didn’t really do much for me. That the film opens with Charley trying to guilt-trip his girlfriend into having sex with him pretty much soured him on me for the duration of the film, and his friend Ed is downright unpleasant to watch. Girlfriend Amy inevitably ends up captured by the villain and in need of rescue, and it’s really Roddy McDowell and Chris Sarandon that carry the whole thing (it actually look me ages to realize that the latter was Prince Humperdick from The Princess Bride!)
The practical effects are incredible though. We really lost a lot when everything became computer generated.
Scrooged (1988)
What was I thinking? Okay, I was thinking that I should watch at least one Christmas movie this month, but this was just one hour and forty minutes of Bill Murray yelling at things. A retelling of A Christmas Carol, Murray is a television executive that ends up being visited by three ghosts to help him mend his ways. He does in the most unconvincing way possible. Seriously, there is so little sincerity here that I honestly thought a twist ending would reveal that Murray remains just as corrupt as ever, because that’s the way he likes it.
I was stunned to see Karen Allen, Alfre Woodard and Wendie Malick in this, though all are in depressing roles as the ex-girlfriend who is still at Murray’s beck-and-call, the Bob Cratchit expy, and the “wife of a more important character,” respectively. There’s some enjoyment to be derived from the three ghosts, who are obnoxious, violent and terrifying (in that order) but for the most part, it’s just not that funny.
Basically, another cult classic from the eighties that ended up doing nothing for me. I’ve checked it off the list and now will hopefully never have to see it again.
The Dollhouse Murders (1992)
The moment I realized that Betty Ren Wright’s book of the same name had been turned into a made-for-television film back in the nineties, I raced to YouTube to watch it. The good news is that if you enjoyed reading The Dollhouse Murders, this film has no interest in doing anything other than transposing what’s on the page as faithfully as possible across to the screen, so I can’t fault it for going off-track or making unnecessary changes.
In fact, this film actually does one better in establishing the character of the hired gardener early on, instead of just introducing his existence with the discovery of the note that reveals him as the killer.
The acting and directing is fairly stilted, and no one has any idea how to handle the depiction of the titular dollhouse and the figurines within it, but it’s hard to be too critical of something that was clearly filmed on a budget of three dollars, and which seemingly took the adaptation process fairly seriously. (These days everyone is complaining about how the people put in charge of adapting various things clearly have no affection for the source material whatsoever).
Out of curiosity, I had a look at the cast list on IMDB, and for many of the actors, this was their first and only film. The exception is an actress called Christina Moses, who is credited as “Girl at Party” and went on to star in eighty-seven episodes of a show called A Million Little Things. I’ve no idea what that is, but she seems to have been working fairly steadily since her debut in The Dollhouse Murders, so good for her!
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Ah, that’s the stuff. This film is such a palette cleanser; I’ve watched it so many times and each time feels like the first.
It also made me realize that what separates a good story from a great story is that character dynamics. You can have the most realistic and three-dimensional protagonist imaginable, and it’ll mean nothing if they don’t have someone equally interesting to bounce off. That’s the key to Crouching Tiger: you’re left fascinated by the way certain characters interact with each other: Jen and Jade Fox, Mu Bai and Jen, Jen and Shu Lien, Shu Lien and Mu Bai – any of these relationships is enough to sustain their own film. On that note, it also manages a grand sense of scale; conveying the sense that we’re catching only a glimpse of a relatively short period of time in the midst of much longer, richer lives.
For example, what was really the story behind Jade Fox and Mu Bai’s master? She accuses him of sleeping with her but then refusing to teach her martial arts, but is that what really led to his murder? Perhaps she deliberately seduced him and became embittered when he wasn’t willing to mentor her. Maybe he took advantage of her and so wasn’t as honourable as Mu Bai remembers him.
I can’t help but sympathize with the fact that Jade Fox stole the Wudang manual in a bid to teach herself its secrets (the school doesn’t allow women to learn their craft, so why shouldn’t she just take it?) but by the time the story starts, she’s clearly gone off the deep end. Is that a result of how she’s been treated, or was she always a bad egg? What exactly is the true story here? We never find out, and we don’t need to know.
And then there’s the fraught bond between Jade Fox and Jen, which leads to one of the most heartbreaking lines in cinematic history: “You know what poison is? A ten-year-old girl that’s full of deceit.” It kills me every time, and I would give my right hand to see something of Jen as a child being tutored by Jade Fox, and the beginnings of that love/hate relationship. (Then again, it’s better that we’re left to imagine for ourselves what it would have been like).
If I’ve deliberately left out one dynamic, it’s the “love” story between Jen and Lo, as I’m afraid I don’t find it particularly convincing. I do love the use of the desert as a place of freedom and escape for Jen (much like how a forest would be used for the same narrative purpose in a Western fairy tale) but the romance that blossoms between them falls rather flat, and turns downright weird the moment their physical fight becomes a groping session.
What happened between them didn’t have to be romantic (Jen is too pragmatic and selfish for that) but it’s not sexy either – just random and awkward.
But that sequence just makes up one small piece of this film, which in all other respects is beautiful. You can watch it for any number of reasons: the cinematography, the fight scenes, the performances, the melancholic tone, the fairy tale ambiance... truly one of those films that replenishes the soul.
Beyond Sherwood Forest (2009)
This is either a shitty fantasy story with Robin Hood randomly grafted onto it, or a terrible Robin Hood movie with an irrelevant fantasy subplot shoved into it. Take your pick!
Ironically this came out the same year the BBC’s show ended, and is something of a preview as to how Robin Hood-related media would be treated in the years to come: not good. Seriously, when was the last decent Robin Hood adaptation? In this take, Robin and his men have already been living in Sherwood Forest for some time, presumably ever since a young Robin witnessed his father’s murder at the hands of the current Sheriff of Nottingham.
He was killed because he attempted to stop the Sheriff from exploiting an injured young woman found in Sherwood Forest; one with an arrow in her shoulder that the men had just fired into a dragon prior to her discovery. Putting two and two together, the Sheriff realizes he can use her shapeshifting abilities to seize power, and that’s how he’s ruled over Nottingham ever since.
The Sheriff and Robin also manage to independently stumble across a portal in the forest, leading to the world where the girl – Alina – originally came from. As an adult Robin is sent there (beyond Sherwood Forest, gettit?) to find a special fruit that will help Alina transform into a human permanently. But the crazy thing about all this is that having obtained the fruit, Robin never actually gets around to giving it to Alina. He never even mentions it once they’ve got it! Seriously, this entire subplot is a complete waste of time.
The Sheriff (here called Malcolm) is played by Julian Sands, and what a career this guy had! From Oscar nominated films to dreck like this, he died just recently after going missing in the San Gabriel Mountains in California. He was confirmed dead in late June of 2023 after remains found near his last known location were positively identified as his.
Also sad is the fact that Katherine Allan (of the Ginger Snaps films) is in this, an actress who clearly deserved a much better career than the one she got. Erica Durance is here too, who filmed this halfway through Smallville and serves as an indicator of where her career was going. Much like the guy playing a boyband version of Robin Hood, she’s appeared in a lot of Hallmark Christmas movies.
For a while I thought they were doing quite well with her take on Marian, who is introduced with that time-honoured establishing character beat for "feisty heroines" in which she’s arguing with her father about her impending arranged marriage, not to mention allowing her to win the quarterstaff fight against Robin and strike up a friendship with Alina that passes the Bechdel Test – only to heavily imply that she’s raped by Malcolm at about the midpoint of the movie (he throws her to the ground, makes a lecherous comment, and the scene cuts away to the sound of her screaming).
What the hell? It’s pretty revolting and completely at odds with the tone of the rest of the movie. Making matters worse, it’s never mentioned again.
Any Robin Hood afficionados should know that Will Scarlett and Little John are present and accounted for, but Tuck is killed off almost immediately after his introduction, and the character who could easily have been called Much is instead a mute little boy called Gareth. Rude.
There are some nice locations, as it seems to be on-location wherever it was shot, though it’s one of those films in which everyone seems to be acting in something a little different. Some are taking it seriously, others know it’s ridiculous, some are apparently earnest about this being their big break, and others are just here to pick up a pay check.
As an aside, I watched this at my friend’s house on the same night as Fright Night and “A Dangerous Deal,” one of the third season episodes of the BBC’s Robin Hood – and in all three there was an example of the Bat Out of Hell trope, in which characters are attacked by a swarm of bats. That just tickled me.
And I’ll give it this: they actually use the word “hanged” correctly. When referring to the mode of execution, most people erroneously say someone was “hung.”
Mary Queen of Scots (2018)
As any longtime (or even short time) readers of this blog will know, I generally try to avoid the trap of comparing female characters – because that inevitably leads to pitting them against each other. And yet in the case of Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, what else are you supposed to do? If any two women demand comparison, it’s these two. How they ruled, how they came to power, how they handled their relationships: it makes for a fascinating case study of what to do and what not to do if you’re a ruling queen in the sixteenth century.
I mean, for most of their lives they were literally pitted against each other, so I’m going to let myself off the hook for doing so as well.
This is my last Tudor film/show for the foreseeable future, and it makes for a reasonably interesting (though flawed) conclusion to this particular branch of history. The portrayal of Mary as a religiously tolerant, free spirited and sexually liberated young woman is downright amusing, and (like quite a lot of productions about these two women) the film can’t resist staging a secret meeting between her and Elizabeth.
It’s also a film that seems a little uncertain about what it’s trying to convey. Is Mary meant to be lauded or criticized? Is Elizabeth a success or a tragedy? Who exactly “won” – the woman who took big risks and whose son eventually inherited the throne, or the woman who played it safe and so never experienced the joy of marriage or children?
As silly as it is to take sides on history that’s hundreds of years old, I’m totally on Elizabeth’s. She was smarter, shrewder, and she didn't lose her head. She listened to her advisors, she wielded hard power, and she never allowed a man to take precedence over her. This is in stark contrast to Mary, who tried to forge alliances through marriage, gave birth to a son that she was unable to raise herself, and relied too much on soft power that required the loyalty of men who were never prepared to fully give it.
Altogether, it’s a fascinating look about the way two very similar women chose to wield power in a world that was profoundly hostile towards them, a subject that the film only occasionally manages to grasp. It’s actually most engaging when it focuses on the relationship between Mary and Lord Darnley, and how Mary was taken in by his superficial charisma before realizing what a terrible mistake she’d made.
Kudos to Jack Lowden for threading that particular needle: the irreverent charm that can so easily be interpreted as honesty when in fact it’s just smarm. (Though he clearly made enough of an impression on Saoirse Ronan that she ended up marrying him IRL). In a way it’s a shame when he’s killed off, as the growing disillusion between the ill-matched husband and wife is easily the most compelling part of the film in its entirety.
The whole movie is packed to the gills with character actors: Ian Hart, Guy Pearce, Brendan Coyle, Gemma Chan, Adrian Lester, David Tennant – even Simon Russell Beale turns up for one scene and exactly one line. The presence of Ian Hart is rather amusing, since he played the unquestionably loyal (to Elizabeth) William Cecil in The Virgin Queen, and now the highly treacherous (to Mary) John Maitland here.
Other casting choices are rather questionable: David Tennant sticks out like a sore thumb, and I’m afraid Margot Robbie is totally wrong as Elizabeth. Despite the prosthetic nose and the smallpox scarring on her cheeks, she simply has too modern a face. As they saw, that's the face of a woman who knows what Instagram is.
But there’s some interest to be found in the treatment of the film’s colourblind casting. To my mind, there are now two versions of this creative decision, each with their own layers. Non-white actors will either be cast in period dramas that don’t take themselves particularly seriously and so will brush off any complaints with the reasoning that things are meant to be anachronistic (My Lady Jane) or by providing the barest trace of lip-service explanations (Bridgerton) OR they'll be cast in projects that take themselves totally seriously and so either acknowledge the fact that certain characters are Black in-universe (as they did to Pedro in Becoming Elizabeth) or just expect the audience to go with it, no questions asked (as in this case). It interests me that there are now at least four variations on how colourblind casting can be treated in the story itself.
Ultimately, I’m just disappointed that the film’s focus wasn’t on the differences between Elizabeth and Mary, beyond some basic symbolism involving portraits and mirrors. How did one woman succeed when the other was executed? Was that inevitable? Or was Elizabeth able to control her men in a way Mary couldn’t? Was it some profound difference in their personalities and temperament? Or did Elizabeth just make the right call in remaining single and never sharing power with a man, just as Mary made the wrong call in relying on men and never knowing when to fold em? Because somehow, by some design, Elizabeth came out on top. Sadly, this film isn’t interested in exploring why.
Abigail (2024)
My second vampire movie of the month, and probably the last one for a while. It’s a damn shame that the Big Twist of this story, which isn’t revealed until about halfway through the film, was all over the trailers and promotional material (it’s right there in the poster!) In saying that, it would have been very difficult to conceal it from any marketing campaign, and most discerning viewers would have had it clocked instantly anyway.
I mean, on some level you have to promote this as a vampire flic, and once that’s out in the open, it’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen.
Still, as the only person in the world who started watching From Dusk Til Dawn without realizing it was a vampire movie, it would have been a great experience to come into this movie cold and have no idea (as the characters don’t) that the titular Abigail is a tiny vampire ballerina.
A team of expert criminals break into an affluent house and kidnap the child therein, driving her to a fancy safehouse and being informed by their contact (a cameoing Giancarlo Esposito) that all they have to do now is monitor the girl for the night before their substantial reward is delivered in the morning. They settle down for the wait, only to realize that something else is in the house with them...
Like I said, you know where this is going, and so the real enjoyment is to be found in the performances and the black humour. Before I even realized this was written and directed by the same people that brought us Ready or Not, I was strongly reminded of that film – and if you’re into vampires, it’s much better than The Invitation.
Not every joke lands and there are a couple of clunky scenes (character profiles are established by Melissa Barrera’s character cold reading her cohorts in quick succession for no good reason) but almost every actor knows what tone they’re meant to be striking, and there’s a strong internal logic to the proceedings.
I’ve spoken in the past about how much I enjoy watching “logical wrongness” at work, in which the characters make decisions based on the information they have, or think they have, even though they’re technically wrong or ignorant about certain things. There’s plenty of that here, and ups the suspense – such as when the gang realize they’re dealing with vampires, but have no idea what kind of vampires. The Anne Rice kind? The True Blood kind? The Twilight kind? What exactly are the rules of vampirism in a “real life” situation?
The film is also great at refraining from answering unnecessary questions, and so leaving certain things tantalizingly unresolved. For example, is Lazar meant to be Abigail's biological father or just the guy who turned her into a vampire? If it's the latter, was it to deliberately make himself an asset that looked like an innocent child? How much of the background she divulges to the other characters is actually the truth? There's a whole history between Abigail and her father, not to mention a world of vampire power-plays that's rife with implications, leaving you with enough room to fill in some of the gaps of everyone's backstory. It makes a nice change from having everything overly explained.
Highlights are Dan Stevens as the delightfully loathsome Frank and Alisha Weir as the titular Abigail, who is a complete force of nature. IMDB tells me that Weir also played Matilda in that recent television production of the musical, and wow! What a difference in character! On the other end of the scale, what’s up with Kathryn Newton? She’s been fine in everything else I’ve seen her in, but here she’s practically sleepwalking through the whole thing. At one point she cries "I'm scared!" but the fear she’s supposedly feeling never reaches her eyes.
Melissa Barrera is solid though, and I’ve always loved the concept of vampire children. Dare we hope for a sequel?
The New Adventures of Robin Hood: Season 1 (1997)
HAHAHAHA! This was so terribad, I loved it. Where to even start? I ended up watching a few of the BBC Robin Hood episodes with my friend concurrently to this series, and as batshit as that show got in its third season, this one might as well have arrived from another planet.
It’s rather fascinating how two similar things can be bad in such profoundly different ways. The BBC version failed because it killed off all the good characters and had nothing to replace them with; where as this has a budget of three dollars and is clearly trying to mimic the success of Xena Warrior Princess without any of the genuinely complex characters or moral quandaries. On the other hand, the BBC show took itself vaguely seriously – this does not in any way, shape or form. Perhaps the most apt thing I can compare it to is The Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog.
The whole thing begins in media res, with no backstory whatsoever. Robin and his crew are already living in the forest, just hanging out, when they stumble across a village being attacked by Mongol warriors (yeah, that old chestnut – they did this on Xena and Merlin too). Their leader is apparently the brother of Genghis Khan, and that pretty much sets the tone for everything that follows. Well, mostly. Nothing will prepare you for the episode in which Marion meets an alien and helps him find the materials he needs to fix his spaceship.
Matthew Porretta plays Robin Hood, and I have to say I’m quite fond of him in the role. Some mild amusement can be derived from the fact he also played Will Scarlett O’Hara in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and he captures the standard heroic persona you’d expect from a show of this quality. Slightly more interesting is Richard Aston as Little John, who is much younger than he’s usually portrayed, complete with a clean-shaven face and Barbarian Long Hair. More recent adaptations characterize him as the Team Dad, but this one is a total brawn-no-brains himbo.
Martyn Ellis makes for a very charming Friar Tuck, but it’s Anna Galvin as Marion (with an O) that I really want to talk about. She’s described as “the beautiful lady warrior” in the opening credits, the first thing she does on-screen is seduce an enemy soldier to distract him, and Robin keeps negging her about her age in comparison with a teenage girl. She wears a tiny red miniskirt and fights with a whip. She’s got a fiery temper, a push-up bra and is a terrible cook. The only thing missing is an argument with her father over an arranged marriage she won’t go through with (though this may come up in future seasons).
Basically, she’s peak nineties feminism – so earnest, so clueless. But hey, after an obligatory jealous moment in the presence of another woman, she ends up passing the Bechdel Test, which is more than the BBC ever managed. Another episode has her train young women in self-defence. Amazing.
I actually watched episodes of this regularly as a kid, and somehow it ran for four seasons despite the huge cast turnovers (including recasting for both Robin and Marion). Those were the days, when even absolute crap could get renewed for years. Today there’s a nostalgic quality about the whole thing, something that makes you watch and wonder: “how on earth did this get made?”
The scripts and performances are horribly stilted but the action sequences are fun and kinetic, and you can tell the actors are doing most of their own stunts. Every punch is accompanied by a cymbal clash or a whip-shao! sound effect (you know the one I mean) and there’s plenty of slow-motion horseback riding through the forest. Gotta fill up that runtime somehow.
Most of the one-shot villains are campy middle-aged women in heavy drag makeup, and there are even a few familiar faces slumming it here: Amanda Ryan (who was Lynley’s lost love in Inspector Lynley), Rachel Shelley (Milah in Once Upon a Time) and Mary Tamm (who I believe was a regular Doctor Who companion back in the day, though I know her best as Vivian Brodie in one of the best Jonathan Creek episodes).
The whole thing can be summed up at the end of the opening credits, in which Robin, Marion, John and Tuck stand next to each other (a little squished so they’re all in-frame), staring at something off-screen and laughing heartily. Sometimes it’s fun to watch things that are objectively bad. It just is.
Inspector Lynley: Season 4 (2005)
Season four of the police procedural sees Lynley and Havers continue their neck-and-neck competition over who has the worst haircut. On a more serious note, the last episode of the previous season ended with Havers getting shot, and though she’s back on her feet again, it’s clearly taken a psychological toll on her. Shippers rejoice, as the first episode of this season ends with our protagonists embracing as Havers weeps into Lynley's chest.
You’ll be unsurprised to learn that I’m not particularly interested in things turning romantic between them, but it seems to me that the show is deliberately starting to insert some Ship Tease into the proceedings (like Havers running into Lynley as he steps out of the bathroom with just a towel around his waist). This season marks Lynley’s turn to fall apart, what with him grieving the loss of his unborn child and the separation from his wife Helen. This is the first season in which she doesn't appear at all, though is often mentioned.
The mysteries themselves are fine, though I imagine they work a bit better in book form, where author Elizabeth George can delve a bit more deeply into the psychology of it all. On television, they’re just standard police procedurals, involving dark secrets in small villages, murder in the House of Lords, black market dealings among illegal immigrants, and the cutthroat world of horse breeding.
And as ever, there’s the usual litany of familiar faces at the beginning (or at least the middle) of their careers: Richard Armitage, Burn Gorman, Eve Best, Nick Dunning, Roger Allam, Claudie Blakley, Jane Lapotaire... It’s funny to think where they all end up.
Julia: Season 2 (2023)
I have FINALLY finished this one. Feels like I started back in May, but I watched it with my mother and we kept getting delayed or sidetracked. Not helping is that it was a bit slow to get started, and that various subplots are spread out amongst a multitude of side characters I wasn’t hugely interested in. A show called Julia should be about Julia Child, no?
And there are a lot of subplots: Julia’s best friend gets a new paramour who turns out to be a dud, Julia’s publisher grapples with her demanding boss (who is in mental decline), Julia’s producer still struggles with racial and gender-based prejudice, Julia’s other producer is trying to put together a documentary, and Julia’s husband’s twin brother turns up unexpectedly to stir up some mischief.
What’s actually happening with Julia?
I suppose because The French Chef is up-and-running, there’s not a lot left for her to accomplish. The season covers her Lifetime magazine interview and her visit to the White House, as well as an extended trip to France, some tension with Simca (the co-author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking who is a little bitter than Julia’s fame has passed her by) and a former associate from the FBI trying to blackmail Julia into becoming an informant at WGBH (the red scare and all that).
Of most interest to me was her reaction to a female director being brought into the production of The French Chef. Julia was by all accounts “a man’s woman,” who didn’t fully appreciate trailblazing feminists, despite her own achievements in life. On the one hand, I’m glad the show took the opportunity to examine some of her foibles (they completely glossed over her homophobia in season one), but as interesting a wrinkle as it was, the development didn’t exactly jive with her former characterization as a loving and supportive friend to the likes of Avis, Judith and Alice. It’s a bit odd to suddenly see her bristle at the presence of another woman.
Perhaps sensing the inevitable cancellation on the horizon (par for the course these days) the show goes all-out to wrap up its various storylines, while still leaving a few threads open, just in case. So at least we get a happy ending, in which everyone is handed exactly what they want at a party everyone is invited to. Even Simca attends via telephone call.
It’s about as much as we can hope for these days. Hats off to a great cast, especially Sarah Lancashire, whose performance as Julia when contrasted with her time as Catherine Cawood in Happy Valley is nothing short of miraculous.
Vikings Valhalla: Season 3 (2024)
After finishing episode six of this season I began to feel a little queasy: there was so much left to wrap up in just two episodes. Then I found out that it wasn’t a wrap-up, but a cancellation. *screams into pillow* The writers were clearly gearing up for a season four, and then had the rugged pulled out from under them. Thanks for nothing, Netflix. AGAIN.
As ever, the season is divided into four distinct storylines, which unfortunately means that everyone is spread a little thin. Freydis and her people abandon their home after an attack and seek refuge with her father in Greenland, only for him to forbid her from trying to discover the “golden land” she glimpsed in her vision with the Seer back in season one.
Harald is negotiating the politics at the Byzantium court, specifically his rivalry with General Georgios Maniakes and his love affair with the Empress Zoe, despite her marriage to the Emperor. Meanwhile, Leif is getting restless, and so strikes out on his own to track down a mapmaker that might help him find the legendary continent that supposedly exists beyond the scope of any given map.
Finally, King Canute has realized he’s dying, and so brings together all his sons, stepsons and relatives to Kattegut in order to chose a successor. Among them is his wife Queen Emma and his advisor Earl Godwin – and yes, the rivalry between these two is still as fraught as it ever was. At this point David Oakes has embraced his type-casting as a conniving bastard, and no one does it better than him.
There’s nothing wrong with any of it: plenty of good set pieces and strong character beats, it’s just – as I said – spread very thinly, and because of the cancellation, much of the drama goes unresolved. Does Leif find the golden land? Does Freydis reconcile with her family? Does Harald ever meet his son? We can suppose the answer is yes, but it’ll never be dramatized on-screen.
I suppose we can do a little better with the fate of Emma and those that came after her: it only takes a quick trip to Wikipedia to remind ourselves what of happens to Edward the Confessor, William of Normandy, Alfred Ætheling and Harold Harefoot – but again, it’s just a damn shame we won’t see it all play out.
The most disappointing storyline was the one in Byzantium, specifically that three major characters are unceremoniously killed off – and no one seemed to even care! The journey to Constantinople was my favourite part of season two, specifically the bonds of trust and friendship that were forged between all the characters, and yet the likes of Batu, Kaysan and Dorn are reintroduced here, only to be executed off-screen in order to torment Harald.
I actually yelled “no!” at the screen when their fates were revealed, and it remains a sour note. In hindsight, it feels like the writers just didn’t know what to do with them after a certain point, and once they’re dead, no one ever mentions them again. When Harald and Leif are reunited later on, he doesn’t even tell him that their fire-forged friends of the last seven years are dead!
On the other end of the scale, the highlight of the season is the meeting of Emma and Ælfgifu, both proud but deeply pragmatic women. Back in season one they had a fascinating rapport: they clearly didn’t like each other, and both were vying for the same man – and yet there was respect there. It was truly wonderful to see them come together again as allies and equals (even though they’re never going to be besties), especially since the show has disappointed me in the past when it comes to the complex relationships between women. I’ll never get over Lagertha shooting Aslaug in the back for no reason.
Likewise, Emma lost me in the second season after she tortured an innocent woman to death (something that goes strangely unmentioned in these episodes, no doubt on purpose) but I’m glad they tried to right the ship and recaptured something of her dynamic with the wonderfully haughty Ælfgifu.
The show also allows for a reunion between its three leads at Kattegut in the final episode: Freydis, Leif and Harald, which at least gives us some closure on their relationship, and a fitting last shot of the siblings sailing off into the world together.
I’m disappointed that it ended prematurely, but hey – I should be used to that by now.
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