Reading/Watching Log #85

This month was all about spending my Christmas break in front of the television, gorging myself on all the delicious content that I’d been saving for the end of the year, which essentially amounted to a bunch of fantasy and sci-fi shows from the world’s biggest franchises: Star Trek, Star Wars, Game of Thrones and The Lord of the Rings. I even watched a bit more of the MCU's She Hulk and Lucasfilm’s Willow, though you won’t find the latter on this list since I haven’t finished it yet (still two more episodes to go).

I didn’t make as large a dent in the pile of movies I wanted to watch though, but managed a few I desperately wanted to squeeze in before the end of the year: Glass Onion, the original West Side Story, a third Hayao Miyazaki film, The Two Towers (to coincide with its twentieth anniversary) and a ton of leftover Halloween movies. I’ll tackle the rest in January.

I also got to see a ballet for the first time in years, which is always a great feeling, and made very slight progress on the massive pile of library books I’ve been renewing for the past three or so months. Oh, and graphic novels. A lot of graphic novels.

Review: Ten Pilots, One Day

Last Saturday I went over to my friend’s house, who has a massive home entertainment system, and spent the day watching the pilot episodes of ten different shows. Why? Because it sounded like fun. There was just so much stuff coming out under the wide umbrella of speculative fiction that I thought it would be cool to marathon the pilots of it all at once.

In alphabetic order, they were Andor, House of the Dragon, Interview with the Vampire, The Midnight Club, The Rings of Power, The Sandman, She Hulk, Wednesday, Willow and Vampire Academy. 

Here’s an interesting side-effect of such a project: a subconscious part of your brain believes it’s actually watching ten episodes of the same show, which leads to musings such as: “how are the vampires going to handle the dragons?” and “it’s a shame the hobbits don’t have access to blasters” and “maybe Wednesday is Elora Danan.”

It was also fascinating to see how many similarities arose between so many seemingly different genre shows. Just off the top of my head, this collection of pilots involved at least two examples of: wolves on the loose, mysterious naked men, tragic car accidents, succession crises hinged upon women being next in line for the throne, New Zealand scenery, reveals that happened so quickly I suspect they’re red herrings, a lost sibling, whispers in a character’s ear that the audience is not immediately privy to, hidden identities, impending death heralded by a pronounced cough, actresses cast as in-jokes by dint of their previous roles in earlier projects, and Bill Paterson (you know him, he’s the guy who played Fleabag’s dad).

It got a little dizzying at times, noticing the echoes of various tropes and concepts, but interesting too, in seeing just how reliant we are on certain storytelling tools.

And watching so many shows in quick succession brought up another question: what exactly makes a good show? Or a good story in general? Because it became obvious very quickly that some of these pilots were of substantially better quality than others. It’s a question I’ll try to answer at the end of this post...

Reading/Watching Log #84

I had to post this later than usual, as I simply ran out of time. Between full-time work and all the other errands I have to do during the day, my allotted time for writing has been significantly whittled down.

This month was a desperate rush to watch as much stuff as possible and get it all deleted from my hard-drive before December kicks in and Christmas viewing begins. And by “Christmas” viewing, I mean all the stuff I’ve been saving for the end of the year: The Rings of Power, Interview with the Vampire, Andor, The Sandman, The Midnight Club, Willow, Wednesday, My Father’s Dragon, Rosaline, Enola Holmes, Wednesday – this Christmas, I FEAST.

But first I have to get through all of this...

Woman of the Month: Maid Marian

Maid Marian from countless Robin Hood films, shows, books and other assorted stories

As it happens, this is my one-hundredth Women of the Month entry, so even though I try to choose someone particularly iconic for the end of the year anyway, this post deserved to feature a character even more special than usual. Thankfully, I’ve had someone in mind for a while.

This is going to be a long one, so you can read on under the cut...

Xena Warrior Princess: Tied Up and Locked Down, Crusader, Past Imperfect

Although Xena Warrior Princess peaked in season three, the next three episodes of the fourth season are pretty solid offerings, with knotty moral conundrums, some great scenes between our lead characters, and three significant guest-starring female characters.

Okay, “significant” is a relative term, as two of them are never seen again, and the other only gets one more appearance before she’s permanently written out. Furthermore, the writers take the easy way out when it comes to Thalassa, and though it’s difficult to say why Satrina didn’t pop as a character, the truth is she simply didn’t (it’s rather fascinating actually – on the page she’s intriguing, even compelling – but that just didn’t translate to the screen).

That leaves Najara, who is truly one of the show’s best antagonists, in one of the season’s very best episodes. Played by Kathryn Morris in her pre-Cold Case days, the character is like no one we’ve ever seen on Xena Warrior Princess before: a mentor figure who is in many ways an inversion of Alti, or a distorted reflection of Lao Mai, adding to the roster of complex female characters on the show.

Standing Tall #34

I can’t say this was one of my favourite giraffes, but at least the venue was nice: Mona Vale, an intercity garden park with lots of beautiful lawns and herbaceous borders. Wandering down its pathways and happening across a giraffe beneath a row of trees did make for a nice afternoon.

Called Kea Parrot Stay, it was designed by Alejandra Diaz, a Costa Rican painter who grew up around parrots and as such was inspired to decorate this giraffe with New Zealand’s most famous example of the species: the kea. According to my guidebook, the kea’s skill at solving puzzles and their ability to work together are traits also to be found in Cantabrians, which… is a bit of a thematic stretch, but okay.

A mint-green giraffe with stencil-like pastel images of keas and a few white ferns didn’t make this the most memorable sculpture on display, but as it happens, it’s now been over a decade since the 2011 Christchurch earthquake that claimed 185 lives. This entire art exhibition was brought about in the wake of the disaster as a way of injecting colour and creativity into the city as the rebuild went on, and I’m reminded of the experience of travelling around the city in search of these giraffes: a chance to talk with other seekers, to see places in the city I’d never visited before, to see Christchurch gradually coming back to life… maybe there is something in Cantabrians being compared to keas.  

Woman of the Month: Rei Hino

Rei Hino (火野 レイ) from Sailor Moon

I have slowly but surely been making my way through all the seasons of Sailor Moon, which is no small feat considering there’s about two hundred episodes in all. I was about eleven or twelve when Sailor Moon’s popularity kicked off in New Zealand, heralding the start of the anime industry becoming more mainstream in Western countries, so it’s been a real trip watching it for the first time since childhood.

For many nineties kids, Usagi Tsukino – or Serena, as she was called in the first English dub – was their first taste of super-heroism, made all the more unique thanks to the fact the show was unabashedly for young female viewers. The main character was a fourteen-year-old girl, the supporting cast was comprised of four more girls and a talking cat, and the most important villain was an evil queen.

And of course, there was Tuxedo Mask, a character with no personality beyond being mysterious, romantic and having the ability to throw roses as projectiles. Even as kids we knew it was more than a little insane, but it was still ours; a story that catered to our specific interests and tastes, in which a teenage girl could be a klutz and a dunce, but also a heroine and a princess and a superhero.

And naturally everyone had a favourite Sailor Scout, based on their personality, aesthetic or power-set. And let’s be honest, the coolest one in all those departments was Rei Hino. While Usagi was throwing her tiara like a frisbee or Ami was spraying bubbles over everything, Rei was blasting fireballs from her fingertips, generating burning mandalas, or unleashing a literal firebird on her enemies. And she did it all in red high-heels.  

She was the most spiritual of all the girls, working as a shrine maiden at the local Shinto temple, which provides an interesting contrast to her fiery nature. With innate psychic abilities, she’s able to perform fire readings, and utilizes ofuda scrolls, mundras and chanting to dispel evil spirits. Such things require a level of calm and mental clarity, which is somewhat at odds with her ongoing rivalry and incessant teasing of Usagi.

And as befits her planetary alignment, she’s the most war-like of all the Sailor Scouts, perhaps only second to Sailor Jupiter (who generates lightning) when it comes to the raw power she commands. Whenever the girls are up against a particularly dangerous foe, she’s usually the last one left standing.

Which is very much the crux of the show in its entirety: girls standing up and fighting for their ideals without getting a hair out of place. Decades before fandom was writing essay-length manifestos about the importance of Mary Sues and wish fulfilment and power fantasies to young girls, Sailor Moon was serving all of it to a receptive audience. In high heels.