Reading/Watching Log #121

 No prizes for guessing what this month’s theme was: I have been very into Christmas ghost stories since October, and was looking forward to diving back into the vibe – even though here in Aotearoa, we’re facing high twenty-degree weather. I’m sure something atmospheric is lost given that there’s no snow or darkness outside, but perhaps one day in years to come, I’ll be able to revisit all this material in its rightful setting.

I also took a mad dash to squeeze in as many of this year’s most prominent genre films (Sinners, Weapons, Wake Up Dead Man, K-Pop Demon Hunters) because I need some material for my annual “Best Moments” list. Two more Babysitters Club books, more Magical Girls and the final season of Doctor Who for the foreseeable future, and the year ended on a relative high.

I dearly wanted to see the Twelfth Night that played recently at the Delacourte Theatre in New York, but unfortunately PBS didn’t allow for international viewing – given that I started this year with Twelfth Night, it would have been nice to finish with it too, but I had to contend with some clips and the hope it’ll turn up available in due course.

Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year. If possible.

Meta: Comparing/Contrasting Andor and Black Sails

“Love, it seems, has triumphed over virtue.” 

– Renault, Casablanca

This year I completed two incredibly good television shows: the second (and final) season of Andor (2022 – 2025) and all four seasons of Black Sails (2014 – 2017). You don’t need me to tell you that one garnered considerably more online discussion than the other, but on recommending Black Sails to a work colleague recently, I found myself saying: “it’s just like Andor!”

It wasn’t until I got home that I thought back to my comment and wondered why exactly I had made that comparison. At first glance, the shows have very little in common: one is a sci-fi espionage thriller set in a galaxy far, far away; the other a historical epic set during a specific period in our own history (the Bahamas, 1715) with many characters based on real-life people. One comprises a small part of a sprawling, multi-million-dollar Disney franchise, while the other is a high-budget but relatively little-watched Starz show that ran for a respectable four years.

Yet they both boasted high production values, talented casts, and hefty themes concerning warfare, oppression, conviction, the moral and emotional cost of resistance, and the question of how far an individual can pursue a righteous cause before it’s deemed (either by themselves or the audience) that they’ve gone too far.

Both have ensemble casts full of morally complex main characters, that have set themselves for or against a powerful Empire, a struggle in which they’re called upon to make difficult moral decisions, come into conflict with their allies just as much as their enemies, and face the impossible choice between protecting those they love, or sacrificing everything to the furtherment of a cause they believe in.

More specifically, both narratives revolve around the concept of revolution – why people fight for it, and what price it exacts from those who engage in it. Just as Cassian Andor and the rebels of Star Wars are mired in espionage against the Galactic Empire, so too are the pirates of Black Sails gradually preparing for war against the British Empire.

I’ve seen each show be described as a workplace drama, which is a fair assessment of each one if you take into account they interest both stories have in the concept of “the work” (or “the cause”), how a character can find themselves working with those they may dislike or distrust to achieve their goals, and how when they exist in this space, friendships and morals and love will inevitability be left behind because the work/cause is paramount.

Coincidentally, the shows are also prequels to pre-existing material: Andor to Rogue One (which is itself a prequel to the original Star Wars trilogy) and Black Sails to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

Most importantly, both are extremely well-written. For this reason, I’m in the mood to delve further into the details of each show, how it is they have such simpatico with each other, and why each one is almost universally regarded as that most elusive of subjectivities: good. Sometimes, it’s just nice to gush about things you enjoy, and in doing so, I can hopefully provide you with a litany of reasons as to why you should watch these shows.

SPOILERS FOR ANDOR AND BLACK SAILS

Robin Hood: I Choose You

It’s Christmas Eve-Eve, so I’m going to have to try and keep this one short. That shouldn’t be too difficult, as this episode is mostly table-setting for the season’s grand finale (and possibly the show’s grand finale, as there’s been no word on a renewal just yet, and that’s never a good sign).

Robin Hood: The True Price of Defiance

Here we are with just three episodes left to go, and somehow this show feels like it’s still warming up. Time certainly flies!

As per the previous episode, the Saxon Elders (including Robin’s Uncle Gamewell) are locked up in Nottingham dungeons, awaiting their fate. The Sheriff states that he’s going to pull the old “you’ll all be executed unless Robin turns himself in” ploy, though after freeing one of the prisoners to deliver the message, he divulges to his new captain that this isn’t the real plan. It would appear that scheming and plotting has finally entered the chat…

Robin Hood: Thieves With a Purpose

You know, I thought the title “Thieves With a Purpose” was promising, one that suggested Robin and the outlaws would finally hone in on what they stand for and what they want to achieve – but instead, the writers decide that it’s time for more love triangles!

Small consolation is that they don’t waste any time when it comes to Marian confronting Robin with what she knows about his involvement in her brother’s death. He knows straight away what she’s referring to, which means he’s been feeling guilty about it, which also means that he knows damn well he should have fessed up when he had the chance (preferably before they slept together). I’m glad Marian also mentions Priscilla’s injury and other collateral damage that the outlaws have left in their wake – at the end of the day, she’s still a Norman, and it’s her people that Robin has been maiming and killing.

Any resistance, no matter how justified, will see innocent people caught in the crossfire, and that’s the reality all stories dealing with this subject matter should keep harking back to. What is the cost of revolution? Currently, it’s Robin’s relationship with Marian.

Robin Hood: Bound by Love, Divided by Lies

The last episode was obviously very outlaw-heavy, and now we turn to court politics. Marian once more comes to the fore, and we learn about what Queen Eleanor is actually attempting to achieve with her various manipulations – and unsurprisingly, it doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense.

Woman of the Month: Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth from Macbeth

The Year of the Villainess is nearly over, though I still have plenty of candidates left to chose from. The Wicked Witch of the West, Cruella de Ville, Annie Wilkes, Nurse Ratched, Delilah, the White Witch, Agatha Trunchball, Morgana le Fay, Amy Dunne, the Marquise de Merteuil… the list goes on.

But I wanted to end on a strong note, so who better to showcase than Lady Macbeth (no first name given), who is undoubtedly Shakespeare’s most memorable female villain. I mean, who else is there? Goneril and Regan? Tamora? Sycorax, who isn’t even in the play? There really aren’t that many to choose from.

Lady Macbeth obviously embodies traits that Shakespeare’s contemporary audience would have considered “ungodly” in a woman: not only her ambition to become Queen of Scotland by committing regicide, but her expert “wiles” that goad Macbeth into doing the deed in the first place. Like Eve and the serpent combined, Lady Macbeth is a danger to her husband precisely because of her skill at manipulation, knowing exactly what to say and do in order to get him to act.

That womanhood and weakness are considered intertwined is apparent when Lady Macbeth first learns of the opportunity that lies before her husband, and so in order to rid herself of any femininity that might hinder her capacity for murder, she gives her most chilling monologue: “Come, you spirits, that tend on mortal thoughts! Unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top full of direst cruelty; make thick my blood, stop up the access and passage to remorse, that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose.”

This notion has always unnerved me; the idea that someone could self-consciously pray for evil to come upon them so that they might have the “courage” to go through with an evil act.

Yet despite all the powers of persuasion she has at her disposal, she’s also an active participant in the murder. She is the one that prepares King Duncan’s bedchamber, ensures that his attendants are inebriated, and makes sure that weapons are in place for her husband to use. Afterwards, she has to hurriedly clean up Macbeth’s mess when he neglects to place the daggers alongside Duncan’s attendants in order to frame them.

Although she also manages to salvage the situation when Macbeth has a vision of the murdered king at a banquet, her own grip on sanity starts to wane, and after her famous “out damned spot,” sleep-walking scene, she drops out of the action entirely. News of her off-screen death is brought to Macbeth only a few minutes before his own.

And yet despite this lacklustre conclusion to her character, it’s a testimony to her impact that she’s one of the most unforgettable parts of the play. I’ve heard it said that every serious stage actress should play Juliet in their youth and Lady Macbeth in their prime, and there’s certainly a line-up of talent when it comes to those that’ve taken on the role: Vivien Leigh, Isuzu Yamada, Judi Dench, Helen McCrory, Keeley Hawes, Alex Kingston, Marion Cotillard, Frances McDormand, Tabu, Ruth Negga, Saoirse Ronan, Indira Varma and Valene Kane (and those are just the ones I recognize).

I’ll end with a quote from her, which in many ways could be attributed to any and all of the women I’ve written about this year, demonstrating their drive, their tenacity, their cruelty, and their allure: “you shall put this night’s great business into my dispatch, which shall to all our nights and days to come, give solely sovereign sway and masterdom.”

Reading/Watching Log #120

There goes November, and now Christmas is just around the corner. There’s no real theme to this month’s reading/watching log – I just sort of went with the flow and did whatever I wanted. Most of my free time is currently being taken up with festive-related activities, and my nephew/niece are fully into the Christmas spirit at this point (we’re taking them to the markets this Sunday, in which they’ll be able to see Santa go punting on the Avon).

Having taken it a bit easier this month, I’m going to have to start cramming if I’m going to get all the books/films/shows I wanted to finish this year done with. Sinners, Weapons, K-Pop Demon Hunters, Wake Up Dead Man, Philip Pullman’s The Secret Commonwealth re-read, Scott Westerfeld’s Behemoth… I’ll have to offset it all with the slightly more holiday-appropriate Ghost Stories for Christmas. But here’s November…

Robin Hood: Go Back To Them

We are now halfway through the season, and what to make of it so far? I’ve found myself comparing it to the BBC’s Robin Hood a lot, mostly because that show looms so large in my imagination, but it strikes me that the biggest difference between long-form storytelling and a series of standalone episodes is how it effects the overall quality of any given project.

When you’re watching episodes that each have a beginning, middle and end (even if they plug into an overarching storyline) then it doesn’t really matter if there are a couple of duds. You know there are going to be ups and downs, and a solid episode usually makes up for a few weaker ones.

But in long-form storytelling, it’s either all good or all bad (or all average) since it’s all part and parcel of a single story. There’s no room for comparison, as the run-on effect makes it difficult to discern one episode from another.

That’s probably the most crucial structural difference between this show and the BBC’s version (and Robin of Sherwood, and The Adventures of Robin Hood, and any other show based on these legends), making it impossible to tell if it’ll be worth our while until it’s over. Right now it’s levelling out at “it’s fine, I guess.”

Links and Updates

Well, the most important news of the day is that my Reading/Watching Log for June is finally UP! Hopefully you’ll understand why it took me so long once you see the size of it.

The very day after I thought to myself: “hey, it’s been a while since we’ve heard anything about Laika’s Wildwood,” the studio goes and releases a behind-the-scenes promotional video. And damn, it looks gorgeous. 

I’m so excited to see this one, and I have high hopes it’ll be a balm to my soul after being exposed to so much slop recently. Speaking of Laika…

Fifteen years after Paranorman, the studio is releasing a short film set in the same world, with Anna Kendrick returning as the voice of Courtney. Though it’s CG animated rather than stop-motion, it keeps the visual style of the original movie, and as a cute little bonus, we’re finally given a look at Mitch’s boyfriend (who was perpetually off-screen in the film itself).

Aww.

I can’t remember if I’ve posted this before, but Cartoon Saloon has a new animated short film coming up, called Éiru. As ever, it looks amazing, and very aesthetically similar to Wolfwalkers. Now the only question is: where can I watch it?

By the time this gets posted, most of fandom will have already absorbed the first four episodes of Stranger Things’ final season. I’ve got my viewing plans lined up, but I’m going to hold off commenting on it until I’ve seen every episode, which won’t be until the beginning of next year (the grand finale airs on New Years’ Eve). I’m casually looking forward to it, as it’s been a reliable source of entertainment since 2016 – yikes! – and I have faith that the Duffer Brothers will stick the landing. Of course, it helps that I’m not desperately invested, which means that if it does crash and burn, I can shrug it off and move onto the next thing. But I don’t think that will happen, and I’m ready for (as the trailers promised) one last adventure with these characters.

With the end of the year in sight, I’m looking ahead to more posts and projects. I’d like to write more about how our understanding of vampires has changed across the years, and continue my deep-dive into the portrayal of Rowena and Rebecca in various adaptations of Ivanhoe. Philip Pullman’s The Rose Fields is officially available, but I think I’m going to hold off reading it until I can read it in tandem with Philip Reeve’s Bridge of Storms, his new upcoming Mortal Engines book (and the third book in Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan trilogy). Those books just vibe so well with each other.

Come December, I’m reading my last two Babysitters Club books of the year, and am continuing my newfound fascination with Yuletide ghost stories: I’ve ordered a bunch of appropriately-themed anthologies from the library and downloaded a bunch of the most recent A Ghost Story for Christmas episodes. I’m also currently watching the latest season of Doctor Who, which ended up being the last for Ncuti Gatwa. It’s mildly devastating, but perhaps he’ll turn up again in future seasons. I mean, why not? David Tennant and Matt Smith have certainly done so!

And the Christmas festivities are in full-swing here in Christchurch. I took my nephew to the Santa Parade last Sunday, and this coming weekend is the annual Christmas in the Park (basically a lot of guest performers on a public stage – my friend and I usually head in a bit later just to watch the fireworks). Then there are the Christmas markets, and the carol singing at the local church, and the mall Santas, and the Christmas tree decorating… I’m getting myself into the spirit!

Oh, and my review for the latest episode of MGM’s Robin Hood is also forthcoming…

Robin Hood: The Cause of All This Unrest

This is a bit of a patchy episode, the goal of which seems to be moving pieces around the board so that everyone is in place for the second half of the season. And introducing Friar Tuck, of course.

It’s also a Four Lines, All Waiting situation, as the writers’ room is now juggling a fairly massive cast of characters, all of whom are off in their own plotlines that barely intersect.

Robin Hood: No Man Can Hide Forever

In which Robin’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (or Week) continues, and Marian kickstarts her own plot at the court of Queen Eleanor. The showrunners promised us something like this for her, and I’m glad it looks like they’re going to try and deliver.

Robin Hood: This Heinous Devil

This second episode of Robin Hood (which aired on the same night as the first, it’s just taken a while for me to write about) isn’t quite as good as the premiere. That was better structured, being bookended either side with scenes of Hugh: opening with him telling stories to his son, and ending with his death.

This episode probably should have ended with Robin and Marian parting in the rain given the emphasis on their relationship throughout this episode, but it decides to carry on for a bit longer and conclude with a cliff-hanger instead.

Don’t worry – this will be a much shorter review than the first.

Robin Hood: I See Him

And so it begins, a new Robin Hood show arriving with very little fanfare, virtually no promotion (I counted a teaser, trailer and a couple of interviews with the cast), on a streaming service that no one’s heard of. Still, it did have one very good poster (below), in which Robin holds the bow and Marian pulls the bowstring, which is hopefully an indicator of teamwork and equity in the episodes ahead.

Is there any point in getting invested, or will this be another one-and-done with an unresolved cliff-hanger finish?

Woman of the Month: Rebecca de Winter

Rebecca de Winter from Rebecca

This is the first time I’ve added an entry without an image of the woman in question, because the whole point of Daphne du Maurier’s famous novel is that we never get a glimpse of Rebecca, just as we never find out the name of the story’s narrator, the second Mrs de Winter.

Rebecca is a posthumous character, yet despite being really, most sincerely dead by the time the story starts, she is the novel’s main character, her presence still looming large over Manderley and all its inhabitants. Heck, it’s right there in the title. She’s the subject of the book, and our actual protagonist is so overshadowed by her that she doesn’t even warrant a name.

SPOILERS

The new Mrs de Winter is at first cowled by tales of her predecessor, the beautiful, glamourous, vivacious Rebecca, and struggles to assert herself – especially when it comes to the housekeeper Mrs Danvers, who was devoted to Rebecca and resents the arrival of her replacement. She’s convinced that Maxim could never possibly love her as much as he did his first wife, but just over halfway through the novel the truth emerges: Rebecca was a cruel and manipulative woman with clear psychopathic tendencies.

Yet once you finally get the whole story, you can’t help but admire her just a tiny bit. As it transpires, Rebecca was terminally ill with cancer, and in order to spare herself prolonged suffering, she goaded her husband into shooting her dead by taunting him with a lie about how she was pregnant with another man’s child. Her plan worked perfectly: she got her relatively painless end, and her husband was left guilt-ridden and paranoid.

Even when the reality of Rebecca’s true nature becomes public, Mrs Danvers ensures Maxim and his young wife will never enjoy her true mistress’s home without her, and burns it to the ground. Rebecca has won, did win, and was always going to win.  

The allure of Rebecca is her unknowability – she’s dead before the narrative starts, so all our protagonist ever learns of her is second-hand. There are plenty of Sapphic undertones in her relationship with Mrs Danvers, and it’s made clear she was carrying on a love affair with her first cousin, as well as many others. Her husband says of her: “she was not normal,” and that she had told him things about herself that he would never repeat. To some she was a virtuous and charming woman, to others a pathological liar and narcissist. But the final word on her must simply be: “She did what she liked. She lived as she liked.” And ultimately, she died in the way of her own choosing.

Reading/Watching Log #119

The theme for this year’s October turned out to be Folk Horror. Yes, this was a bit of a surprise to me too, as last year it was vampires, and the year before that, werewolves. Something like witches or ghosts would seem the next obvious choice, but I had a ton of shows and films in the Folk Horror genre that I wanted to revisit, so Folk Horror it turned out to be…

When I think about that particular genre, it’s the atmosphere more than anything that springs to mind. Damp autumn leaves, mist-soaked fields, eerie forests, abandoned graveyards… there are plenty of exceptions of course, though to my mind any self-respecting Folk Horror story has to establish a strong ambiance. From that starting point, you can establish the weird cults, creepy neighbours, ancient beliefs, and highly ambiguous endings.

(In fact, given my excitement over the upcoming Robin Hood series on MGM, and the fact that a substantial amount of that story takes place in a forest, I found myself wondering what a Folk Horror take on Robin Hood would look like…)

Although I didn’t watch what’s referred to as the “unholy trinity” of Folk Horror films, there’s been something of a resurgence of the genre in recent years (The Witch, Midsomer), to the point where something like Starve Acre can just sort of fly under the radar a bit. This also means there’s plenty to choose from if you’re in the mood for something dark and unsettling for the spooky season, though living in Aotearoa means we’re enjoying longer evenings instead of the onset of winter.

I hope you all had an exciting and/or uneventful Halloween (depending on your preferences) and can start looking forward to Christmas with optimism in your heart. All things pass.

Meta: The Evolution of the Vampire

 Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

         I have been half in love with easeful Death

– John Keats

Earlier this year (May, to be precise) I read and watched a number of vampire stories. This month I went with friends to see Dracula performed as a ballet. Across that time, I was continually stunned to notice striking similarities between so many takes on the same subject matter, similarities which were all the more interesting because they weren’t present in the source material upon which these later adaptations were based.

Said source material is comprised of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (published 1871) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (published 1897). The subsequent adaptations are Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992), NBC’s short-lived Dracula (2013), Emily Harris’s Carmilla (2019) and Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu (2024). What they all have in common is that – contrary to the original texts – their vampire characters are unambiguously portrayed as alluring and inviting and erotic. Well, maybe not Nosferatu exactly, but that didn’t stop a certain segment of fans for finding him so anyway.

But what really caught my attention is that all four stories center on a young woman, one who is caught between the comfort and safety of her every-day existence, and the danger and horror inflicted upon her by the vampire’s intrusion into her life… except that this isn’t how the adaptations frame it.

Instead, each film or show creates a love triangle of sorts, one between a woman who is unsatisfied with her life, the stifling societal norms and patriarchal conventions that surround her (usually represented by her fiancé or husband) and the freedom and modernity that the vampire offers her. To one extent or another, this is the case in all four of the above-mentioned adaptations, and certainly not the case in the two stories upon which they are based.

So, why exactly has there been such a dramatic shift in how vampire-related material is interpreted? One which is apparently so pervasive that it’s appeared in several otherwise unconnected variations of the same story?

Woman of the Month: Drusilla

Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel

As soon as I decided that 2025 would be the Year of the Villainess, I knew that Drusilla would be my choice for October. A Cockney Victorian psychic vampire who dresses like a Goth princess and talks to her dolls? That’s a perfect Halloween aesthetic.

On consideration, there were surprisingly few female villains in a show that was all about strong female characters. Glory is the standout for being the only female Big Bad, and of course we had Darla and Drusilla across the seasons… but that’s about it really. The First could take on feminine form, but was essentially genderless. Amy Madison eventually broke bad, but in a rather confusing way. There was Harmony as well, I suppose, though she was never taken particularly seriously as a threat.

The likes of Faith and Dark Willow always had redemption on the cards, while over on Angel there was Lilah Morgan and Jasmine. Apart from all that, any other female villains were just one-shot guest stars: Catherine Madison, Gwendolyn Post, Vanessa Brewer, Sunday… do you even know who I’m talking about?

But I digress, let’s get back to Drusilla. I’m happy to say on the record that Drusilla is the show’s most tragic character, bar none. Born some time in the Victorian Era, she grows up a pious Catholic girl who believes her psychic abilities are the work of the devil. This is something her sire Angelus is all too happy to take advantage of. To quote him: “It was over the moment I saw her. She was my opposite in every way. Dutiful daughter. Devout Christian. Innocent and unspoiled. I took one look at her and I knew. She’d be my masterpiece.”

After the murder of her entire family, Drusilla flees to a convent for safety, though the church ultimately offers her no safety: Angelus and Darla break in, kill all the nuns, and turn her into a vampire. Just for good measure, they have sex on the altar in front of her while she suffers a complete mental collapse.

Yeah, there are no happy endings here. In a twisted sort of way, turning her into a vampire is almost a kindness after the torture Angelus inflicted on her, as at least the loss of her soul frees her from the burden of her religious guilt. Interestingly, her psychic abilities pass with her into her new existence as a member of the undead, and between her madness and her precognitive gift, she’s one of the most captivating, terrifying and (like I said) heartbreaking characters of the entire franchise.

Although most of her history is presented to the viewer via flashbacks (most notably how she came to sire Spike), she first appears in Buffy the Vampire Slayer in quite a vulnerable state, having been badly injured in Prague. Spike has brought her to Sunnydale for mystical treatment, and the viewer is initially presented with a vampire who is certainly eerie, but not a huge physical threat – at first.

Once recovered, she’s a force to be reckoned with, and as a player in the show’s mythos, is best remembered for killing Kendra the Vampire Slayer and re-siring Darla over on Angel. Sadly, her last chronological appearance was in season five of Buffy, trying and failing to bring Spike back into the fold, after which she just disappears (though I’m led to believe she turns up again in the comics).

What Juliet Landeau brought to the role is a vibe. She’s a Gothic lady and a Victorian child, a spooky seer and a deadly monster. She’s guileless, deranged, coquettish, driven, unpredictable – truly, a compelling performance from start to finish, and given the impact she had on the show, it’s rather astounding that she appeared in only seventeen Buffy episodes and seven Angel ones (and some of these were entirely in flashback, or as a guise the First took on). She was a force to be reckoned with...

Reading/Watching Log #118

This month can best be described as one-thing-leading-to-another month. I wanted to finish the second season of Atlantis, and that reminded me of 2012’s Sinbad. Having watched that, I naturally had to watch the animated movie of the same name from DreamWorks, which reminded me of their other early animated projects. This meant rewatching The Prince of Egypt, which then put me in mind of other Biblical retellings, like Samson and Delilah. And so on and so forth.

It reminded me of just how connected our multitude of stories are; how one can inform all the others; how it all trickles down. Superman’s origins are just a variation of Moses in the Bulrushes, while his superstrength is matched in that of Samson. Then there’s the progression of his story, in which he learns a devastating truth, runs away and returns a changed person, and is then charged with righting a great wrong. It forms the backbone of so many modern stories.

Meanwhile, so many of our Femme Fatales are the progeny of Delilah, while the star-crossed element of her love affair with Samson (she’s Philistine, he’s of the tribe of Dan) reminded me a little of what they’re going for in the upcoming Robin Hood, in which Robin and Marian are Saxon and Norman respectively. Atlantis is filled with ancient tropes that are all muddled up in order to create a new story, while Sinbad’s best episode involves a run-in with the personification of death, who has been promised a young woman as a bride, but can ultimately be outwitted out of his prize. How many times have we seen that one before?

Anyways, I just find it fascinating to connect everything, like there’s a giant fishing net inside my mind, and this was a good month for it. 

Links and Updates

I haven’t done one of these posts since June, so a lot of things under the cut have already been updated (or even released) while I was busy accumulating them over the intervening months.

The good news is that SPRING is here in the southern hemisphere, which means an end to the dark evenings and cold mornings (for the most part, anyway). I’m still super-busy and I’ll be working all the way through Christmas until I get some more annual leave in February, but hopefully I’ll be able to bump up the amount of posts for 2025, as so far it’s been at its lowest since I started this blog back in 2014.

Angela Barrett: The Orchard Book of Stories From the Ballet

That Angela Barrett would illustrate a book of ballet stories seems inevitable, as her style perfectly matches the nature of ballet: delicate, elegant, and with a fairy tale-like ambiance. The Orchard Book of Stories From the Ballet has no less than four original covers, so the publishers certainly got their money’s worth.

This compilation includes ten stories in all, from the most famous (Swan Lake, The Nutcracker) to the more obscure (La Sylphide, Petrouchka) and all those in-between (Giselle, Coppelia, The Firebird). Interestingly, Barrett makes the call to depict the events of these stories as non-diegetic – that is, real events – no matter how magical – as opposed to a ballet enacted on the stage. For a comparison, Francesca Crespi illustrated her firebird in A Little Box of Ballet Stories as a person dressed as the firebird, whereas Barrett depicts it as an actual bird. The title is Stories From the Ballet, not Ballet Stories.

Aside from the cover art, the frontispiece and a few tiny images of ballet shoes and masks and other paraphernalia strewn throughout the pages, these stories are illustrated in a rendering of the real world, not as a theatrical illusion. I’m making a point of this, because there’s one exception, and that’s naturally going to be the subject of this post...

Meta: Rebecca and Rowena; Part I: Introduction

Note: I have been working on this post for several months now, and it just keeps getting longer and longer. As such, I’ve decided to break it down into four parts: the introduction, the novel/parody novella, the films, and the television adaptations.

Every now and then I come back to this article in The Toast about The Unified Theory of Ophelia, in which the author half-jokingly claims that they once believed everything there was to know about womanhood could be discovered in the character of Ophelia.

I had a similar revelation last year on reading Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and watching its assorted film and television adaptations (plus, William Makepeace Thackery’s parody novella). Everything about how female characters are portrayed across media, how fandom responds to them, and even how Love Triangles and Fan-Preferred Couples form in the imaginations of readers/viewers, can arguably be found in media’s collective portrayal of Rowena and Rebecca across the centuries.

Source

I would go so far as to say that the genesis of all fandom’s discourse and harassment and cross-examination and hypersensitivity and preoccupation with female characters and the role they play in any given narrative can be traced back to these two fictional women. Is that too broad a claim? Yes, of course – but as the linked article points out, every now and then certain theories and concepts that interest you can occasionally seem to magically coalesce into a single, shining, straightforward example. It’s like discovering the unifying theory of the universe.

Woman of the Month: Eris

Eris from Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas

For this month, I am allowing myself one semi-obscure female villain.

Of course, the goddess Eris is hardly unknown: she’s a major player in Greek mythology and the deity who kicked off the Trojan War when she threw the Golden Apple of Discord into the crowd at Peleus and Thetis’s wedding (and by doing so, making herself the progenitor of the evil fairy that curses Sleeping Beauty at her Christening, for whether she’s called Maleficent, Carabosse or the Fairy of Red, that character also sows discord after not being invited to a party).

But this particular take on Eris might count as obscure, as she’s from an animated movie released in 2003 that bombed badly at the box office. Yet for all that, she is easily its highlight, and reason enough to watch Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas at least once.

Michelle Pfeiffer lent her silky voice to the manipulative, chaos-loving goddess who has an elaborate plan to strew havoc throughout the known world, but what really gets your attention is the stunning animation that brings her to life. She slinks and glides across the screen, shifting in and out of ink-black smoke, with serpentine hair that undulates around her with an underwater fluidity. Sometimes she’s the size of a mortal woman; other times she expands to frighteningly large proportions, with glowing eyes and elongating fingers. You can’t take your eyes off her whenever she’s onscreen

Truly, she’s a marvel of animation; demonstrating that even a not-great movie can be elevated by a truly great villain.

Reading/Watching Log #117

It is the first day of spring in the southern hemisphere, and I reach it like a castaway washing onto an island full of fresh water and fruit. Damn, that was a gruelling winter. I hate the cold and the dark at the best of times, but there was something in the air this year that made absolutely everyone sick – continuously and relentlessly.

I suspect I caught more than one thing at once, which ended up playing havoc on my immune system, and after five whole weeks of feeling like absolute crap, my doctor finally prescribed me some antibiotics just to help fight whatever the hell was going on in my Petrie dish of a body.

My blog has been so quiet lately because I honestly haven’t had the energy to write anything. By the time I got home from work, I just wanted to crawl into bed and fall unconscious, but now – well, hopefully I can start plumping up these entries again.

And yes, I will eventually post my reading/watching list for July.

This month’s theme: PIRATES!

Woman of the Month

 

Debbie Jellinski from Addams Family Values

It’s time to showcase a comedic villainess.

I was surprised to discover that Addams Family Values was a flop when it was released back in 1993, as in my opinion it’s far better than the first film, and Joan Cusack damn near steals the show as its villain. She plays Debbie Jellinski, a woman engaged in that noble profession of marrying rich guys and then killing them to inherit their fortunes. She’s been doing it for a while, successfully offing her unfortunate string of husbands and evading law enforcement, but what elevates her from being another run-of-the-mill black widow is Cusack’s performance.

There is truly nothing more fun than watching her go from the wide-eyed, earnest, virginal (yet still aggressively sexual) Debbie in the first half of the film to the cruel, materialistic, vindicative monster-bitch (who remains aggressively sexual) in the second. Joan Cusack just oozes malevolence from every pore, her facial expressions and body language so completely predatory and over-the-top.

Her incredulous “you?” when Fester admits he’s a virgin, her wriggling glee when she watches the Nightline exposé on herself, the look of dark intent when she preps the bomb to take out her latest husband – all done in an array of colourful sundresses. Her manipulations even get Wednesday and Pugsley sent to summer camp.

The craziest thing is that if Debbie had just been upfront about her intentions, the Addams family probably would have welcomed her as one of their own (Morticia is cool with her scheming, it’s the pastels she objects to). They even wish her good luck as she’s about to murder them and make her escape.

What was a pretty clichéd villain is elevated entirely by Joan Cusack’s deliciously evil performance. She practically slithers her way through the role, and is the larger-than-life villain that the previous film lacked; the perfect dark foil not only to the Addams family, but also the obnoxiously chipper camp leaders. Not everyone can paraphrase the Wicked Witch of the West (“I’ll get you, and your little hand too!”) and own it.

Reading/Watching Log #116

Okay, I suppose you’re wondering: where’s the Reading/Watching Log for June? Between work, annual leave, and then a flu bug that’s still dragging on, I just couldn’t get around to finishing it – but it’s on its way. My two weeks off coincided with terrible weather, and so I made it my mission to catch up on every bit of franchise fluff that I’d deliberately skipped in the last five or so years.

But then it got a little out of hand after I decided to watch something from every big-budget franchise, from The Matrix to The Muppets, under the proviso that I’d never seen it before. There’s simply no way in hell I can write a full review for everything that I binged in those two weeks – but limiting myself to just a couple of sentences also takes quite a while when you watched as much as I did in a fortnight.

It'll turn up eventually. For now, July saw a return to the Tudors and murder-mysteries, both of which were linked by the Lady Grace Mysteries, a series of mysteries set in Tudor England (I mean, duh).

Watching another batch of Tudor-related programming makes me realize just how extraordinary those times were. If you tried putting even half of it in a fictional story, you’d be slapped by your editor. The story of Anne Boleyn alone is incredible: that Henry the Eighth would go to such lengths in order to marry her, only to cast her away when she became an inconvenience. And that their child would end up being one of the most famous monarchs of all time is just… I mean, what word could you even use to describe that?

Xena Warrior Princess: Fallen Angel, Chakram, Succession

After a long hiatus, I’m back with the Xena Warrior Princess reviews.

Ah, season five. Shit gets weird. I’ve talked before about the grab-bag of world religions that get thrown into this show, and now it’s Christianity’s turn to get ticked off the list. I supposed it’s handled a modicum better than Hinduism, but not by much.

Woman of the Month: The Velociraptors

The Velociraptors from Jurassic Park

All the villainesses I’ve featured in these posts so far have been reasonably complex figures, with equally complex motivation – but not these girls. The velociraptors of Jurassic Park (specifically Jurassic Park; I never saw the sequels and I’m definitely not counting the raptors who respond to Chris Pratt’s commands in Jurassic World) don’t want anything beyond hunting people down and eating them.

But the way in which they do so makes them the key antagonists of the film, and the lead-up to their first onscreen appearance is a masterclass in building a sense of dread. The opening sequence involves a team of men transferring an unseen creature from a crate into a walled facility, and the apprehension on their faces (along with the weapons they wield) speaks for itself. Before the scene is over, an unfortunate worker is pulled to his death by whatever’s in the crate – we don’t get the slightest glimpse; we can only hear its unholy shrieks and screams.

With just a fossilized claw, Alan Grant scares the crap out of an obnoxious kid by explaining the hunting techniques of the raptors (“you’re alive when they start to eat you”) and much later, he holds a baby one in his bare hands, realizing what it is: “raptors… you’ve bred raptors?” Right now it’s harmless, but already the audience is trying to imagine what this little thing of teeth and claws might look like when it’s fully grown.

They’re taken to the velociraptor enclosure, where the gamekeeper delivers an ominous backstory: “we bred eight originally, but when she came in, she took over the pride and killed all but two of the others. That one – when she looks at you, you can see she’s working things out.” After explaining how the raptors were attacking different parts of the fence during feeding time, looking for weaknesses, he turns to them with a half-grim, half-admiring look on his face: “they remember.”

At this point we’re about twenty-five minutes in and we still haven’t actually seen them. It’s not until the last half-hour of the film in its entirety that we finally get a good look, after they’ve taken out the gamekeeper (arguably the most capable human on the island) by tricking him into looking one way while they sneak up on him from another – just as Alan described at the start of the film.

Now that they’re Unseen No More, the hits just keep on coming. Nobody can forget Ellie escaping the maintenance shed by the skin of her teeth, or the terrifying cat-and-mouse hunt in the kitchen, or Lex falling through the roof and nearly getting her leg chomped, or my personal favourite: Ellie stating “[we’re safe] unless they’ve learned how to open doors.” The film then cuts immediately to a raptor doing exactly that.

Whereas the other dinosaurs are portrayed as animals, who simply act according to their natures, the velociraptors veer a little closer to genuine, deliberate monsters. There is a malevolence in their design that sets them apart from the rest of the creatures in the park, and their combination of intelligence, speed and cooperative hunting tactics makes them absolutely terrifying. Like the gamekeeper says, there’s something in the way they look at their prey that taps into our primal fear of being hunted, cornered – of there being no escape from a bloody and violent death.

It's no surprise that they ended up being the go-to villain for the franchise, even as their impact is diluted with each passing sequel. But in Jurassic Park at least, the threat they pose looms large over the entire film, and it’s not for nothing their leader has since been immortalized as “clever girl.”

Reading/Watching Log #115

This month, I gorged myself. I had two weeks off and I challenged myself to watching something from each of the biggest franchises and/or networks on the planet: Star Wars, Star Trek, the MCU, the DCU, Disney Animation, Pixar, Studio Ghibli, The Lord of the Rings, Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Muppets, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter (don’t worry, didn’t pay for it), Mission Impossible, Game of Thrones, Ghostbusters, Jurassic Park, The Hunger Games, Doctor Who, Dune, Indiana Jones, Max Mad (or rather Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga), The Terminator, The Predator, The Matrix, Alien…

I also managed a few slightly more “second tier” things: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, The Wheel of Time, short films from Shrek, How To Train Your Dragon, Kung Fu Panda and Toy Story, as well as the making-of documentary of Stranger Things: The First Shadow on Broadway, since the show’s final season won’t be out until November. Oh, and I threw in a Stephen King movie for good measure.

And because I’ve seen every single episode of Xena Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I made do with a comic book and a tie-in novel respectively. Along with that, I read the graphic novel adaptations of His Dark Materials, and the last book of the Mortal Engines quartet.

Whew, did I miss anything out? I had only one condition to this little project: that everything from each of these franchises had to be something that I had never seen before, the goal being to fill in the gaps of as much of the big-name stuff as possible. It was all pretty exhausting, actually.

Not everything got ticked off: there simply wasn’t any material for James Cameron’s Avatar, or The Chronicles of Narnia. Other stuff like James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, The Musketeers, Robin Hood and King Arthur-related media I decided to hold off on until a later themed-month, as they aren’t so much franchises as they are stories about specific individuals.

All of it has coalesced into one giant blob in my mind, and there was just so much of it that there’s absolutely no way I’m reviewing it all individually. Aside from the books, I’ll comment on everything only briefly, though there are some projects that I absolutely intent to revisit and discuss in more detail later on (Andor, The Wheel of Time, The Rings of Power).

One more thing: as gluttonous as all this looks, I felt rather sad on completing it, as I almost certainly won’t ever be able to do this again. The Wheel of Time has been cancelled, and I doubt there’ll be any more Ghostbusters, Pirates of the Caribbean or Mad Max Sagas (at least not ones that I’ll ever want to see). So in many ways, this felt like the end of an era.

But for what it’s worth, it was a lot of fun.

Links and Updates

I realize it’s been quiet on this blog lately, but there’s just so much going on in my life right now: work, niece/nephew, more work, focusing on getting through the winter…

I’ve recently enjoyed some annual leave, and used the time in order to catch up on big-budget franchise shlock that has been stored in the hard-drive for a while now – I’ll have more to say on all that in my next Reading/Watching Log.

For now, here are some interesting up-and-coming projects…

Woman of the Month: Callisto

Callisto from Xena Warrior Princess

There’s an argument to be made that Callisto is one of the most iconic villains of popular culture, breaking more than a few glass ceilings in how women can be represented as compelling, dangerous threats, while also remaining complex and pitiable, with no easy answers provided in how someone like her should (or even could) be dealt with.

But what makes a “good” villain? Panache? Presentation? A sympathetic point-of-view? That debate continues, but on some level it’s generally agreed upon that the most effective bad guys often serve as a mirror to their heroic counterparts, highlighting their foibles and reflecting their strengths, bringing them into sharper focus by operating as a dark foil to their thoughts and deeds.

That pretty much sums up Callisto, who first appears in the episode aptly named “Callisto,” in which she’s introduced destroying villages under the name and guise of Xena herself. When our Warrior Princess rocks up in order to put a stop to it, she’s hit with a devastating truth bomb:

When she was just a child, Callisto was the sole survivor of a raid that Xena led on her community, one that took the lives of both her parents. Driven mad with grief and rage, Callisto has now come of age and is ready to take her revenge. She’s a destructive, unanswerable, in-your-face consequence of Xena’s own past, who has no motive or ambition beyond making Xena suffer as much as Xena made her suffer when she was a girl. She cannot be stopped or swayed or reasoned with. She doesn’t want power or wealth or even an apology – only to wreak havoc on Xena’s life. 

As Callisto herself announces at one point: “you created a monster – with integrity.”

It’s reminiscent of the whole “you made me/you made me first” exchange between Bruce Wayne and the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman, but with infinitely more depth since Xena has to take full responsibility for what Callisto is. And yet her existence leaves Xena powerless: she can’t deny what she did to Callisto, and she certainly can’t defend it. She can’t apologize for it in a way that changes anything, and she can’t make it better in any meaningful way.

What gives Xena the right to kill a woman whose family she murdered and life she ruined? And yet, how can she justify sparing her when Callisto kills indiscriminately? It’s the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object: an enemy of Xena’s own making.

This of course is where the show stumbled a little. Being naturally unwilling to kill Callisto off permanently, and yet not being able to let her roam free or incarcerate her for any length of time, the writers relied heavily on cave-ins and falling rubble and other contrived ways of rendering her incapacitated until the time was right to release her from these narrative holding pens.

Which was often, as she was a recurring villain throughout five of the show’s six seasons. Though her final fate was a bit of a headscratcher (she’s eventually reborn as Xena’s daughter), until that point you could guarantee that any episode which featured her was sure to be a highlight. Her episodes often focused on the cycle of vengeance and its inescapability, and along the way she also murdered Gabrielle’s husband, temporarily swapped bodies with Xena, allied herself with a demonic child, died and started working for the devil, and became an angel before her eventual rebirth. She even enjoyed a few guest appearances on Hercules.

And none of this would mean anything if it wasn’t for Hudson Leick’s performance. In the past I’ve described her as a blend of cat and spider, child and woman, mental insanity and clarity of purpose, complete with a little-girl voice, creepy mannerisms and deranged look in her eyes. As Xena’s accidental protégé, physical match and living reminder of her past sins, she was easily the show’s most evocative villain.

Reading/Watching Log #114

I’m in the middle of my annual leave, which started during the final week of May and will continue through the first week of June, so I’m enjoying myself by catching up with a lot of things – and I’m finally about to get cracking on Doctor Who, The Wheel of Time, Andor, Star Trek Discovery and other big franchises that I’ve been ignoring for a while.

For whatever reason, May ended up being a month of Arthurian legend and vampires – I’ve no idea how two such different genres came together this month, but it’s lead to a number of familiar faces popping up in various projects, years apart from each other. Oliver Jackson-Cohen starred on NBC’s Dracula as Jonathan Harker, and I’m now watching him on Surface every week with my mum. Ben Miles also featured on Dracula as the head of the Order of the Dragon, and has just recently played Mon Mothma’s unfortunate banker friend on Andor.

And between Gawain and the Green Knight, Elphaba in Wicked, and the dense forest setting of Frances Hardinge’s The Forest of a Thousand Eyes, this was also a month brought to you by the colour green.

(We also had another movie night at work recently, but because I’ve spoken extensively about Spirited Away in the past, I won’t repeat myself here).

Standing Tall #35

It has been over two years since my last Standing Tall post and over TEN years since I actually saw this cross-city sculpture trail in the first place. We’ve had two more since it concluded, one involving penguins and the other variations on Elmer the Elephant. Ah well, there’s nothing else for it but to keep chugging on, as we are closer to the finish line then we were back in 2022. (This is giraffe #35 out of #50).

Here in Aotearoa we love our native birds, so there was little surprise that they turned up so prevalently on these sculptures. This giraffe, situated in front of Jellie Park, one of the city’s largest public pools, is covered with them: the pukeko, the fantail, the wood pigeons – as well as some native flowers and fish (those yellow ones are kowhai, the red are pohutakawa).

I like the way it stretches from the stony river bed at the giraffe’s feet, up through the branches to the birds and monarch butterfly at the giraffe’s head. Designed by Ira Mitchell-Kirk, it’s called Reach for the Stars, presumably referring to the white stars on the solid blue background – though to be honest they look more like the stars on the Australian flag given they’re not outlined in red, and there are too many to denote the Southern Cross, the star constellation on our flag.

Still, it’s a nice work – I may have just been a bit distracted as I distinctly remember dropping my camera on the concrete steps.

Woman of the Month: Demona

Demona from Gargoyles

With each year that passes, Demona feels less like a villain and more like an anti-hero. She wants to destroy all of humankind, and these days, who can really blame her? TV Tropes would probably describe her as a Well-Intentioned Extremist or a case of Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters, and if she was in a Marvel movie, she would be one of those patented “has noble motivations but is going about achieving their ends in the wrong way” left-coded antagonists, who fight for things such as equality and freedom and essential supplies for the underprivileged, but blow up buildings along the way so the audience doesn’t become too sympathetic to their cause.

Demona is someone who has a very real set of grievances, though back in the halcyon days of the nineties, the oppression she faces must be met with boundless patience and forbearance, as demonstrated by her partner Goliath, even when her fellow gargoyles aren’t allowed into the dining hall built upon their ancestral land without being called “beasts,” or hang out on the clifftops where their eyrie is situated without someone throwing a burning log at them.

Understandably, Demona despises this treatment, and so comes up with a plan to reclaim the land for her own people. Sounds pretty fair to me! But of course, nothing ever goes according to plan...

What follows is a saga that spans hundreds of years, forming the backbone of the show in its entirety. From surviving the massacre at Castle Wyvern to her generational feud with the Hunters, her immortality granted at the hands of the mysterious Weird Sisters to the stable time loop in which her future self appears to show a young Demona what the future holds, thereby ensuring the entire tragedy is set into motion in the first place, Demona’s life story was Shakespearean in its grandeur. And I mean literally – a huge part of it involved Macbeth himself.

Goliath and the other clan members may have been the show’s protagonists, but you knew you were in for an incredible episode whenever Demona turned up.

Marina Sirtis voiced the character with an arch, sharp elegance, though the most compelling thing about Demona was that you could never fully discount her opinions on the cruelty of humanity or the state of the world. Still, the moral framework of the show made it clear that her one-woman war against mankind was a misguided cause, one that leaves her embittered and hateful, thereby rendering her the very thing she initially wished to destroy.

Yet despite her blind hatred and inability to take responsibility for her actions (perhaps her most telling line is when she looks upon the destruction at Castle Wyvern and cries: “what have I... what have they done to you?”) according to creator Greg Weisman’s website, his long-term plans for Demona would have eventually included a redemption arc, largely brought about by her love for her daughter Angela. I hope one day we get to see this story play out.

Until then, Demona remains one of the most complex and three-dimensional villainesses of all time. Truly, I’m struggling to think of anyone comparable, and that she appeared in a Disney cartoon back in the nineties is just astounding. As pitiable as she is terrifying, surely her most memorable moment would have to be at the end of “City of Stone,” in which the other characters implore her to tell them a password they need to reverse a potentially fatal timed chemical reaction that she’s sabotaged.

After some cajoling from mystical forces, she eventually divulges the word she chose to override the computer system: “alone.”

Whew. If that doesn’t break your heart, I don’t know what will.