Links and Updates

Another Links and Updates post with another sad passing to acknowledge: Sam Neill, one of the greats. This one was awful on a number of levels: that he had beaten cancer, that he was a national treasure, that it seemed as though he still had a lot of zest for life left in him.

Obviously Jurassic Park has come up frequently in the conversations around his death (and despite its many faults, at least Dominion did the right thing in reuniting him with Ellie), but I will always remember him best and most fondly as Uncle Hector from Hunt for the Wilderpeople and the titular character in the Merlin miniseries. That last one in particular was event viewing when I was a kid. My aunt worked at Blockbuster at the time and got sick to death of us nagging her to bring us a copy.

Dear universe, stop taking all the good men! We need them on Earth more than ever!

Here in New Zealand we’re in the final month of winter, which comes as a great relief to me. I hate the dark and the cold, though it’s been a surprisingly mild three months with only one snowfall that didn’t even settle (and I’m aware that deadly heat waves in other parts of the world are definitely not preferable). But I still prefer light and warmth and long summer evenings, and now that we’re halfway through the year, Christmas is just around the corner.

The original cast has staged a production of Hadestown that was filmed and will (hopefully) be available for home viewing instead of just released in a few select theatres. I would love to see a decent performance of this, and – as I’ve said in the past – this will lead to more musicals being filmed in this way. Weren’t they doing something similar for Six at one point?

Doctor Who isn’t coming back for a Christmas Special, and in fact, nobody seems to know what the hell is going on. Russell T. Davies released a statement that had a decidedly passive-aggressive tone, saying among other things that: “for the record: there was no script, I never wrote it, and no actor was ever approached to play the next Doctor. You may disagree; fine, sit in that chair and wait to be proved right.”

Er… okay? I’m not particularly interested in muckraking or finger pointing, but there was clearly a lot of drama going on behind-the-scenes and now for the first time since 2005, there’s no indication that more Doctor Who is on the way. What a mess.

Not to sound morbid, but they need to get a move for the sake of Carol Anne Ford finally returning as Susan Foreman. She’s currently eighty-six and isn’t getting any younger.

Here are two articles about things that have been on my mind lately: Supergirl (the 1984 film) and the legacy of Toy Story.

I missed the bus on The Vampire Lestat (I’ll catch up eventually, it just caught me off-guard) but our first look at David Eggers’s Werwulf have been released as well and I’m definitely envisioning it as a triple feature with Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Luc Besson’s Dracula: A Love Tale. And yes, I’m sure I will be exasperated by at least two of those adaptations, but it’s about the aesthetics, people! The aesthetics!

Why Do Second Seasons Always Bomb On Netflix? The article argues it’s because Netflix is a technology company as opposed to an entertainment one, which comes down to the obvious reasons: too-long hiatuses between seasons, the binge-watching model robbing the viewer of anticipation, people not bothering to tune in without knowing there’s going to be a satisfying conclusion (“the cancel game”), and general mediocracy. It also includes a perfect description of the live action Avatar: The Last Airbender – “it looks flat, polished, and without texture.” Nailed it.

Speaking of ragging on that monstrously bad show that shouldn’t have been allowed to exist in the first place, here are a couple of critical YouTube essays that break down everything wrong with season two. Yes, I know that YouTube videos are lazy ways of engaging with fandom, but it’s gratifying that others find this show as abominable as I do.

(With that in mind: Moana is the Apex Disney Princess, and Live Action Could Never Do Her Justice).

On a slightly more positive note, the first teaser for Seven Havens (the sequel to The Legend of Korra) has been released. I can’t say I love the animation, as production was moved from Studio Mir to La Chouette Compagnie (their style looks more She Ra than Avatar) but I’m always here for more stories in this universe. I’m looking forward to seeing Korra again, and I suspect that the single visual we get of her is some kind of fake-out. I don’t believe for a second that she turned to the dark side, so all that remains to be seen is how exactly this world went apocalyptic.

This is due to air on October 9th, which was the original airdate for Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender film, which was pushed forward because of the leak, which happened because Paramount is completely useless. Oh, and apparently it’s all being dropped at once, so people will binge over the course of a weekend and then forget about it. No anticipation, no discussion, no engagement. *deep weary sigh*.

And I will get to Avatar Aang eventually, but I want to be able to savour it properly.

Here’s an interesting deep-dive into comics involving Sisyphus, and from the same writer, Why Doctor Strange is the Best MCU Movie. I have no horse in that particular race, for as far as I’m concerned all the MCU movies exist on the exact same tier of quality, but he makes a solid case for it.

Last year I recommended Enys Men as a very different kind of movie, and now director Mark Jenkin is back with Rose of Nevada. This looks profoundly intriguing, and is clearly shot with the previous film (as well as his first film, Bait) in mind. I feel another folk horror month coming on!

Ridley Scott is putting together a new Treasure Island, with Hugh Jackman as Long John Silver. Sounds good to me!

On that subject, I’m shamelessly plugging the contrast/comparison piece I did on Andor and Black Sails last year. I read through it recently and fixed a couple of paragraphs, and it remains one of my favourite pieces of writing on this blog.

After an extremely long hiatus, Susanna Clarke is returning to the world of Jonathan Strange with a… short story? Novella? I’m not sure what it is, but the synopsis is releasing all sorts of endorphins into my brain:

1110 A.D. The fairy host sweeps across the North of England and the city of Durham is under siege. Wearily the Bishop of Durham, Ranulf Flambard, prepares to surrender – something which proves far more difficult than he could have imagined.

His quest will lead him through a landscape of unco-operative rivers and enchanted forests to a New Castle on the banks of the River Tyne – where, with any luck, he will be received by a court of deceptive, would-be fairy queens, shape-shifting stags and a beautiful teenage Raven King.

Some cast announcements for the second season of MGM’s Robin Hood have emerged, and it’s pretty intriguing: James Purefoy as King Henry II, Colin O’Donoghue (who I haven’t seen since he played Hook on Once Upon a Time) as Prince Richard, and Luke Roberts (last seen in Black Sails as Woods Rogers) as the ambitious Amaury D’Montfort, who seems to have been a real person, albeit one who was born at around the time this series takes place. As well as that, Graeme Thomas King (who played Prince John) has been bumped up to a regular cast member.

That’s a lot more character vying for attention in a show that was already struggling with perhaps half-a-dozen too many characters, but I’m definitely onboard for what the showrunners decide to do next.

We have two new Wildwood posters! CAN’TWAITCAN’TWAITCAN’TWAITCAN’TWAIT…

So, did anyone else know that the BBC was filming a new version of A Tale of Two Cities? I sure didn’t, but Kit Harington is in it and it doesn’t look bad. The casting for Charles and Sydney in particular is good – they look similar enough for the plot to work (despite Kit being significantly shorter, but isn’t that always the case?)

I saw this on Tumblr and had to share: apparently a puppet from a children’s television show that aired back in the seventies has been rediscovered fifty years later, having been stolen by a boy who only recently confessed on his deathbed. The man’s son returned “Mother Clanger” to the museum where the rest of her puppet family were already on display.

I’d never heard of The Clangers in my life, but my father found the puppet familiar when I showed him a picture, and I can certain appreciate that feeling of homecoming and completion. Years ago, I purchased four out of six small Christmas fairy ornaments from a local store, but missed out on the final two. At least twenty years later I spotted them on ebay, which only delivered to American addresses. Luckily I had a work college with relatives in New York, who bought them on my behalf and shipped them all the way to New Zealand for me. I can imagine the curators at The Beaney felt something similar when Mother Clanger was returned.

An interesting article called Common Readers: BookTok’s Critical Values, which points out that these days literature isn’t so much being judged for its quality so much as its emotional impact on the reader. That is, does it make them feel good?

These reviews claim, in so many words or none: “This book’s good or bad because of how it made me feel, so it will make you feel that way, because we’re the same kind of reader.” This isn’t new. The most influential work of Elizabethan literary criticism, Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesie, holds that poetry is superior to philosophy because poetry delights the reader to action whereas philosophy just lectures him. Two centuries later, Samuel Johnson appealed to “common readers” who read for the pleasure of finding their desires reflected in literature, over the pedantic critics of this literature. What’s new is that now the reader’s appraisal of the work, regardless of its ambition, caves into their emotional response to it. On BookTok, evaluation is testimony: the reader’s response to a book isn’t evidence in service of a judgment, it is the judgment. If a book is emotionally pleasurable, that it’s badly written devalues it no more than spit on a fire.

I will have more to say about this in a later post, once I have all my thoughts in order…