Fictional Friday :: 5 fictional genres that spark my interest fairly immediately

…and leave me either disappointed or really, really happy.

5. Vampire stuff.
This one is the least automatic of the list, because I don’t go ooh gimme for every vampire thing.  For example, I will probably never watch The Vampire Diaries (because really, I am a snob, but the CW… I was willing to make an exception for Sarah Michelle Gellar, and I still don’t even know if Ringer was worth it).  And yeah, Twilight was a mistake forever.  But obviously, Buffy and True Blood and things of that nature.  And I enjoy C-movies I see on Chiller or SyFy or at Blockbuster that are about vampires.  This is also on the list because it is a genre that sometimes I regret and a genre that I criticize the hell out of in certain cases.

4. The 1960s.  Is that even a genre?
No, really, is it?  I am a gigantic sucker for it, though.  I have been my whole life, though it used to be more hippie late 60s and now it’s more obvious Mad Men early/mid 60s.  But this one is so pervasive it extends to real life: apparently the Disneyland Hotel has been remodeled all mid-century modern, and we are planning on being in Disneyland later this year, and while we will not stay there as it is exorbitantly priced, welp, as they say.  Mid-century modern with a restaurant and bar to visit?  Suddenly I know what I’m packing and I know what we’re doing one night.  The 1960s were crap for a lot of social reasons, and I acknowledge that, but I crave the aesthetic value of the clothing and the architecture and the music and the cocktails and stuff often.

3. Apocalypses.
Which are totally a genre don’t even.  I mean, more often than not apocalypses leave me sorely disappointed; my favorite kind of apocalypse is the zombie kind, though my love for the genre does not only reach to zombie apocalypses.  I dunno.  I enjoy apocalypse stories because they are morbid and also because, particularly if they’re zombie-related, I feel comfortable analyzing them to death and feeling vaguely authoritative on the subject.  (And no, shouting “double tap” at the screen does not count as analyzing.  Helpful advice, sure, but really?  I am more concerned with group dynamic and weapon usage and stuff.)

2. Film noir.
Always weird; I mean, you have James Ellroy, whose works are novels (that then became films, yes) but it’s still the film noir genre.  Detective mysteries, 1940s-1950s, stylish and morbid and probably involving a lot of gun violence.  This one has come back to bite me often: good film noir is good, really good, and I love it.  Bad film noir is often bad.  Cheesy and cliche.  A lot of things proclaim themselves as “modern noir,” too, which is still an instant grab to me, but really a debatable thing.  For example, Brick, the high school noir with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Nora Zehetner, is good and I really like it, but Passion Play, which had a very legitimate cast but was so forgettable I just had to look up its title, is not so good and I did not like it.  Also, film noir is a problematic genre in the way that the 1960s genre can be problematic, what with pesky things like misogyny everywhere.  Let’s talk about LA Confidential for a second, though: here you really only have one main female, Lynn Bracken, and she doesn’t run around shooting people and she gets beat up by men and she’s a whore, yes, but she doesn’t damsel, really.  She’s at least an interesting character in her own right.  I saw the trailer for the upcoming film Gangster Squad and went “ooh yay noir” but then immediately started to go “okay is Emma Stone’s character going to be legitimately interesting and well-written or just a spunky damsel?”  I really hope the former, because this is my biggest noir gripe.

1. Late 1800s period pieces.
Many of which are Westerns, yeah.  I am not a complete sucker for the entire Western genre; cowboys tend to bore me.  But I like lawmen and halfway-established towns full of ne’er-do-wells and saloon girls.  And aside from sloppy generic characterizations and sloppy generic sets and sloppy generic plots, which do happen, particularly in low-rent Western-types, the saloon girls are what I judge these hardest about.  This is 100% the fault of Deadwood, which taught me what saloon girls should be (and also how you write good female characters in Westerns).  Saloon girls should not look like they bought their clothes at Pete’s Party Plaza or whatever the hell the party supply store of your choosing may be.  They should not wear brightly colored satin with black lace and black fringe, accompanied by a black feather sticking out of their perfectly neat updo.  For that matter, a saloon girl’s dress should not look brand new or actually new at all.  There should be flaws.  And what is the saloon girl’s role in the plot?  Is she just there to hang on a man while he plays cards and drinks?  Maybe scream during the breakout of a gun battle?  Yeah, no, I will be rolling my eyes.  There should also be interesting women in the story who aren’t saloon girls, and I’m not just talking about extras.  There should be women with lines who aren’t saloon girls.  And at least some of the saloon girls should actually have lines themselves, probably.  Etcetera.

–your fangirl heroine.

Theatre Thursday :: in which I do the thing of respecting performance and performers but still not being a fan of the material.

In this case, a recording of the National Theatre in London’s performance of an adaptation of Frankentein  done by Nick Dear and directed by Danny Boyle.  One that I went to largely because it starred Benedict Cumberbatch and a friend of mine was squeaking in delight so much we decided we would accompany her.  It would be, if nothing else, an interesting experience.

Well, yes, it was interesting.  The production also starred Jonny Lee Miller (they alternated the roles of the creature and the doctor; Cumberbatch was the creature at the recording we viewed) and George Harris and Naomie Harris and Karl Johnson who was Cato on Rome and a bunch of other people.  And all of them did a pretty good job.

• Before the show started, an announced from the local theater group hosting the event explained that wasn’t it funny?  Benedict Cumberbatch plays Sherlock Holmes on the BBC (people cheered) and Jonny Lee Miller is going to be playing Sherlock Holmes on CBS.  I kid you not, multiple full-grown adults in the audience actually booed at that.  Like, enough of them that I would feel comfortable saying “a small majority of the audience booed at that.”  Which is just so weird to me!  I mean, I don’t know if I’m going to watch Elementary, mostly because since I try so hard to keep up with 10,000 other AMC/FX/HBO/Showtime/Starz/whatever shows all the time I don’t watch network shows generally (until they’re replayed on other channels or available on-demand on Netflix I guess) but not because I have any antipathy toward it.  It has not even aired, and they were booing.  Why?  I mean, it’s a little strange to me that they’d release a competing Sherlock Holmes series when BBC Sherlock is such a deal, but that’s just strange in the way of “oh, it was weird that there were two Snow White movies around the same time,” or “oh, it was weird that there were two musical adaptations of The Wild Party in 2000.”  I don’t feel like booing.  Why booing?  Because it’s not British?  Because it’s on CBS?  Because it’s not Benedict Cumberbatch?  It’s strange.
• For what it’s worth, Jonny Lee Miller was a very effective performer I guess?  I mean, Victor Frankenstein as a character is an enormous d-bag.  And this production was allegedly more creature-slanted, so he was written as an even bigger d-bag.  But Jonny Lee Miller was performing well?
• Benedict Cumberbatch was a fine monsterperson.  The first 5+ minutes of the production were literally just Benedict Cumberbatch in scar makeup and a loincloth/diaper thing emerging from the semitransparent giant wombscreen of science and learning how to walk.  Which involved a lot of falling down, rolling around, and grunting. I get it.  Learning to walk is not fun.  I know.  But literally that was all that was going on.  It was a risky choice.
• Everyone else did well in their respective roles I guess.
• Plus points for some colorblind casting!
• Minus points for weird pseudo-sneaky misogyny, I guess.  I mean, the novel was written by a woman.  I don’t remember it well enough to remember if the male characters routinely exchanged in dialogues like
  Elizabeth: Do you think I wouldn’t understand your work?
  Victor: Well, yes, you’re a woman.
  (That is paraphrasing, but that’s what it meant.)  And the pleasant, aloof audience of theatergoers (predominantly female) just laughed and laughed.  I understand that such thoughts were sometimes held in the olden days.  I don’t necessarily think it’s a funny joke.
• I do remember the plot of the novel well enough to know that Victor never actually built a mate for his creature.  The creature requested it, and Victor did begin it, but then curtailed that effort after realizing what the ultimate result may be.  In this play version, Victor actually heads to Scotland and entreats some locals to graverob a young beautiful girl for him.  He then animates her, save some vague spark of personality (basically he animated her up to a tabula rasa, then figured to add the tiny extra in a minute, but she was very much alive), asks his creature if he truly loves her, and then upon the yes answer, he goes behind the weird semitransparent giant wombscreen of science and brutally hacks the ladycreature’s stomach out (?? that’s where all the blood was).
• Oh, okay, and here’s something else that wasn’t in the novel.  Yes, the creature killed Elizabeth after her wedding to Victor.  That happened.  The creature did not go into Elizabeth’s room, converse with her, tell her he had learned how to lie, and then rape her.  What the hell is up with that, I was asking myself.  He then killed her once Victor had caught them in the act, but seriously?  That added absolutely nothing to the story.  Literally nothing at all.  All it did was make me go “okay, why.”
• There were some neat set design things though I guess?  The lights were cool, there was a train at one point that looked all steampunk?
• Oh, and at one point Karl Johnson the blind man was playing guitar and it sounded like it had been written by Colin Meloy.
• In short, yeah.  I actually have no definitive opinion about the production as a whole, other than acknowledging that it really was not the book at all.

–your fangirl heroine.

Whedon Wednesday :: See How It Ends [a Buffy season 7 fanmix]

1. Seven Nation Army (The White Stripes)
I’m gonna fight ‘em off, a seven nation army couldn’t hold me back.  They’re gonna rip it off, taking their time right behind my back.  And I’m talking to myself at night because I can’t forget.

2.  Cuckoo (Lissie)
When you’re with us you don’t have to be quiet no more, no, no more.  I see you now, we talk about the way it used to be when we were brave, we misbehaved, yeah you know what I mean and you know why our battle cry always comes back to me.

3. Blackened Crown (Eisley)
Did you hear me holler at you to come save me, I’m in danger, my pearls have fallen into mud and you are too late.  This breath, precious to you, knocked from me, taken so faintly and I never feel ’til it’s too late.

4. For What Reason (Death Cab for Cutie)
I will hold a candle up to you to singe your skin. Brace yourself: I’m bent with bitterness.  When your apologies fail to ring true, so slick with that sarcastic slew of phrases like “I thought you knew” while keeping me in hot pursuit.

5. Giving Up the Gun (Vampire Weekend)
Your sword’s grown old and rusty, burnt beneath the rising sun.  It’s locked up like a trophy forgetting all the things it’s done and though it’s been a long time you’re right back where you started from.  I see it in your eyes, that now you’re giving up the gun.

6. Struggle (Mirah)
An angel I was, beloved by everyone.  The devil you were, just what I made you become.  And I don’t regret this way it’s gonna be, I just hope she gets treated better than you did me.  You should give what you find and not tread so fearfully, if you felt good inside you wouldn’t be so scared of me.

7. To Save Me (M. Ward)
And he shifts in his sleep and the earth begins to quake, yeah, he shifts in his sleep and the earth begins to quake.  So how much difference could it possibly make?  How much effort could it possibly take?  To save me, to save me, to save me, just to save me, Save me from sailing over the edge?

8. Sprig (Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton)
Awake in terror, words staring back at him, never to be used. Their hands on hold, so quiet, they could hear each other’s thinking, denying.  Garner interest, each other’s thinking, denying. Garner interest, making of life, a forged painting, life’s big magnet tug, tugging.

9.  Maybe (The Submarines)
There is a sign among the remnants of all our words, best left unsaid, and when the truth flies in our direction do we work it through or lose our heads?  Maybe, maybe, maybe we’re strong, but maybe, maybe, maybe we’re wrong.

10. Accident and Emergency (Patrick Wolf)
So what happens when you lose everything?  You just carry on and with a grin, sing for all that love life has to bring, and just get yourself back into the ring, knock us out, for accident and emergency.

11.  Getting Scared (Imogen Heap)
The only times in my life the sun was meant to shine for me, you made it pour down, pour down with tears of rain, dug my pride with a knife, encaged by your obsession with me.  Time for some mental torture and screams of justified pain.  So ya gonna chase me now boy?  Yeah ya gonna corner me now boy?  You think ya gonna threaten me now boy?  Somehow I don’t think so.

12. Guiding Light (Muse)
Impure hearts stumble, in my hands they crumble, and fragile and stripped to the core, I can’t hurt you anymore.  Loved by numbers, you’re losing life’s wonder, touch like strangers detached, I can’t feel you anymore.  The sunshine trapped in our hearts, it could rise again, but I’m lost, and crushed, and cold, and confused with no guiding light left inside.

13. Last of Days (A Fine Frenzy)
Something’s causing fear to fly, rising like a dark knight in silence.  Traffic’s slow with broken boats heading for the sky and I’m an island.  I watched you disappear into the clouds, swept away into another town.  The world carries on without you but nothing remains the same.  I’ll be lost without you until the last of days.

See How it Ends at 8tracks.

–your fangirl heroine.

Television Tuesday :: 10 (sometimes ridiculously) minor television ladies I have (sometimes ridiculously) latched onto

What it says on the box.  I get weirdly attached to really minor characters, sometimes for legitimate reasons and sometimes for reasons that are somewhat silly.  Which you all should know by now.

10. Nora Gainesborough (Lucy Griffiths, True Blood)
I mean, technically she’s main credits but she’s only been present for three episodes so far and honestly I still have not figured out why I am so attached to her already.  I mean, there’s the capable ladyvampire thing, there’s the British thing.  I think that’s part of it?  I still haven’t figured out what her game actually is, because for all we know she could still be lying right now (since she’s all good at that and stuff, which I also enjoy in fiction sometimes I think) and maybe she is and maybe she isn’t and I’m pretty sure that won’t change that I just enjoy her presence and want her around more.  And I do not enjoy that every episode and next week’s preview so far has basically been an “oh god is she meeting the true death not yet nooo” situation.

9. Drusilla (Juliet Landau, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Yes, she was in more overall episodes of Buffy and Angel than, say, Miracle Laurie was in Dollhouse, but I did the percentages.  Miracle Laurie is not on this list for Mellie/Madeline who I love so much because she was in 57.7% of the episodes in the series.  That’s more than half (barely, but still).  So she was supporting cast.  Juliet Landau was in 11.8% of Buffy episodes and 6% of Angel episodes, or 9.4% of episodes in the overall collection of the Buffy/Angelverse.  SO.  And anyway, yes, I love Dru a lot.  I love Dru because I love the crazy ones and I love the ones who are unabashedly evil and I love the British ones, yes, and I just love her.  And one of my favorite discussions to have is the one with someone who has just fallen in love with Dru because I like to remember when I first discovered how awesome she is.

8. Ruby/Little Red Riding Hood (Meghan Ory, Once Upon a Time)
Granted, she has been present in 77% of the first season’s episodes and has been promoted to main cast for season 2 (YES YAY).  But she’s really only had one episode to actually do anything, and a few moments in others, and mostly she’s just sort of there.  Honestly, I loved her from the start; I think it was the red lipstick that did me in.  Aside from her waitress clothes, she sort of dresses/accessorizes like she came from my everfavorite now-defunct rockabilly/quasi-alternative store.  Also, she’s just very genuine and seems like a good person and I am excited and also terrified to get to know her better (terrified because I don’t want anything strange to happen to her character-wise I guess).

7. Trudy Campbell (Alison Brie, Mad Men)
As I mentioned last week, basically.

6. Aylesh Rohan (Emma Kenney, Boardwalk Empire)
Literally she was in one episode.  Literally I have already discussed every reason I loved her, but oh wow, it was pretty much instant affection for that bookish perceptive little girl who should really be more present.

5. Ros (Esmé Bianco, Game of Thrones)
I do not care.  She was not in the books, and serves mostly for people to have sex with while they talk about important plot points.  I have developed a strange affection for her anyway.  This, I will admit, is largely because I discovered that Esmé Bianco is a burlesque performer and pinup model, and also because of my latent tendency to latch onto what is the obviously-not-musical version of the chorus whore, after my days being such.  I look at Ros and go “oh, yep, that’s who I played in Oklahoma! and Once Upon a Mattress, just in Westeros.”

4. Saffron (Christina Hendricks, Firefly)
I first watched Firefly before I started watching Mad Men, though not by much; even still, “because Christina Hendricks” is a valid reason at play here.  I really do love Saffron for other reasons, too.  A lot of them being the aforementioned “I love when fictional women are really good liars and are unabashedly [somewhat] evil” reasons.

3. Trinity Ashby (Zoe Boyle, Sons of Anarchy)
This is actually just a list of fictional women I have mentioned before, basically.   I seriously have no reason why I love Trinny so hard, but I really do adore her, except for that whole “whoops, almost boned my brother” thing which wasn’t her fault, so.  She’s just all Irish and sweet and I want to know more about her, dammit.  She sparks my curiosity.

2. Mag (Felicia Day, Dollhouse)
(You can all see where this is going, can’t you?  Really?)  “Because Felicia Day” is of course a reason; “Joss’s redheaded lesbians” is also a valid reason, though a belated one as per that was not made known till the second of her two episodes.  And wheelchair!Mag at the end of “Epitaph Two” was also important to me at a point in my life, so there’s that.  I dunno.  I like women who are badass not necessarily because they’re kicking ass but because they’re just sticking it out through tough times and doing what they have to and not giving up.

1. Bennett Halverson (Summer Glau, Dollhouse)
WOW SHOCKER I KNOW.  But seriously, I have discussed before how crazy it is that I am so attached to a character with so little screen time; other than the oft-mentioned “dear holy god it is disturbing to me how much I self-identify sometimes” kinds of ridiculous things, there is the fact that for so little screen time, she actually had a pretty reasonable amount of development.  Backstory, check.  There were fuzzy details, sure, but there were fuzzy details about everyone on this show because of its untimely end.  Also, Bennett is another one of those not-exactly-obvious badasses, in my opinion.  No, trying to kill Echo was not a good idea, and no, the Dollhouse in general and working for it was probably not a good idea.  But damn, I love geniuses who are all geniusy; also despite her various deranged vengeance schemes, she is not someone whogave up.  What happened to her changed her, probably not in a great way, but some people would probably use that kind of thing as a reason to just surrender, and there she is intellectually badassing it up anyway.  I mean.  Headcanon, what?  Irrational, what?  Unashamed, yes.

–your fangirl heroine.

Music Monday :: my thoughts on Synthetica

How many times have I said how I love Metric?  A lot.  Okay.  Pithy intro, done.

“Artificial Nocturne.”  Oh my gosh yesss.  This is perfect and I want everything to be like it.  I pretty much already have a use for this one, because it is so lyrically delightful and wow, it’s dark and hauntinglike and creepy but in an oddly straightforward way.  Oh, and it’s beginning to rock, this is more perfect than I could have imagined.  This is one of my two-songs-within-one-song songs, I think, and I love it.  I love Emily Haines, can I say that enough ever?  No.  She is excellent and I love her voice.  I also love the rest of Metric, but I tend to fixate on voices sometimes, so there you go.

“Youth Without Youth.”  Wow, rock and roll!  Yes, okay.  This is definitely got guitar that is lovely, and yeah.  She just said “double Dutch with a hand grenade.”  I am weird and I love when people say things like that in songs.  I think this is suited to one of my theoretical high school zombie movie soundtracks too.

“Speed the Collapse.”  Okay, can this album just be the soundtrack to a theoretical high school zombie movie?  You know what I’d love, incidentally?  More movies or television shows that aren’t written/marketed as “chick flicks” or the television equivalent to include songs sung by female artists that weren’t chart-topper hits.  Action movies, period, to have female-led songs on the soundtrack.  Wouldn’t that be great?  I digress.

“Breathing Underwater.”  I mean, I’m not saying it never happens.  Zombieland had a Metric song, Scott Pilgrim obviously had one (and a couple other lady artists too), Death Proof had a couple lady artists.  Plenty of TV shows on HBO and Showtime and stuff do it.  But think about it, when was the last time you heard a female-led band or female singer on network television?  Better yet, one who wasn’t Adele?  I love Adele, I really do, but have you noticed that she’s one of the only ladies who gets played on ~serious~ television shows?  Oh yeah, Metric is still perfect.

“Dreams So Real.”  This is nice.  This is sort of creepy if you think about it but then not creepy at the same time.

“Lost Kitten.”  Well, well, I believe this has a message underneath the twee hopscotch voice and the bump-bump-bump rhythm.  Okay.  I’m good with it.  I was prepared to say this song was cute before I heard the words, but now I’m just digging on it in a different way.  Did I just start in adding to another hypothetical mix?  I think I might have.  Hrm.  Yeah, okay.

“The Void.”  Oh, yay, songs for the digital age.  I mean that in a good way.  It doesn’t actually sound too computery, there’s just a hint of instrumentation that you would not have heard back in the day and she’s doing cool things with her sustained notes and yeah, digital age.  Lyrically simple but I seriously dig the vibe.

“Synthetica.”  Title tracks, yes, okay.  This is a nice legitimate Metric jam and I say that it is so them and I mean that with love. “Hey, I’m not Synthetica, oh, I’ll keep the life that I’ve got, oh, so hard, hard to resist Synthetica, oh, no drug is stronger than me, Synthetica.“  Well.   Yes, all right.

“Clone.”  Whoops.  Metric, your gift for suiting my strange theoretical purposes is nearly unparalleled.  This is one of those deceptively cheerful songs and I adore that.  I love deceptively cheerful songs so much.

“The Wanderlust.”  Oh, more cheerful in a yummy vintage 80s kind of way but not too 80s.  Except wait, not really that cheerful.  This is kind of a love song, but not in the painful kind of way.  This is a song about relationships that doesn’t actually say the word love, because maybe it’s not love, it’s just something that makes sense right now, or anyway it might.

“Nothing But Time.”  Also a little creepy in the good way that I like.  Particularly when the vocals come in all breathy and held-out.  Yes, I’m good with it.  I’m good with all of this.  This album is lovely and delightful and Metric has yet to fail me, basically.

–your fangirl heroine.

Sundry Sunday :: my urban dictionary: like zombies

Def.: essentially, this is used to describe something that is gross (stemming from my people and our Walking Dead refrain, “zombies are gross”).

Usage: wow, humor based in broad stereotypes about groups of people that often leads to racism and misogyny sure is like zombies. 

–your fangirl heroine.

Spoiler Alert Saturday :: my thoughts on Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

It was kind of inevitable that I’d go opening weekend.  I’m that person.  I’m the person that was into Seth Grahame-Smith back in the How To Survive a Horror Movie days (because really, books of metafictional advice are right up there with books of pop culture philosophy in terms of how they draw me in like magnets) and I love that he’s all famous now for his ridiculous genre of historical (fiction) mashups.  I probably will not be tired of this genre for a while, I admit it openly, and I know that it’s silly but I just enjoy it so much.  I understand that it’s not to everyone’s taste, but I love campy monster stories and I love historical settings and I love stylized real-life cartoon movies, so I’m not complaining.

“Why did they make this one first and not Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?” one of my people asked.  I don’t know.  It is in production, allegedly, but I don’t know.  Could it be to do with that skepticism about female-led action films?  Maybe.  But it will be here someday.  And in the meantime, we have Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

• Benjamin Walker, mostly known prior to this film for his role as a different U.S. president in the stage production of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, does a very acceptable job as Abraham Lincoln.  They really got him looking Lincolny by the end; his axe work was pretty rad.
• Dominic Cooper, as Lincoln’s anti-vampire vampire buddy Henry Sturgess, does what he needs to do as well.  I had somehow imagined Henry differently while reading, but not to the point where it was problematic or distracting.  Just different.
• The particular vampire mythology of this book has always been a little weird to me – I mean, they could have explained how vampires can daywalk and I wouldn’t have felt it wasted exposition time, for example, but overall I can just accept it.  Different breeds of vampires have different strengths and weaknesses, I guess.
• Anthony Mackie as Will Johnson was delightful and endearing, basically.  Genuinely good guys that don’t bore me to tears are refreshing.
• Jimmi Simpson as Joshua Speed did what he needed to do.  It was fun (also mildly annoying, but theoretically fun) hearing one of my people in my ear coming up with conspiracy theories about him.
• Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Mary Todd Lincoln.  Dear god I don’t care I adore her.  I mean, she didn’t have the most to do, but I appreciate that the character was never written as a straight-up damsel, though she doesn’t do a lot of physical ass-kicking.  She was sad when Abraham revealed he’d been keeping vampires a secret from her and sad when her son died, but that happens and is understandable and okay.  Sadness is not weakness.  And then Abraham said “okay, leave town for reasons” and she left and did very efficient and good things while not-there.  So while I always want more women in movies, I’m not cranky about her role, and also I just love Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s face.  So.
• Alan Tudyk as Stephen Douglas, wow, he wasn’t even credited, but it’s nice to see his face every so often.
• Lux Haney-Jardine, who played baby Abraham, is the little brother of Perla Haney-Jardine who is/was B.B. Kiddo in Kill Bill, and that rocks.
• Rufus Sewell and Erin Wasson as Adam and Vadoma the evil vampires.  Very effective.  Rufus Sewell is generally evil, so he’s good at it; Erin Wasson has really not done a lot before this in terms of acting, according to imdb, but she was fine.
• I was expecting them to be a lot raunchier, honestly, but that’s probably because I watch True Blood and I know that when vampires are referred to as brothers and sisters it can mean raunchy things.  This wasn’t a raunchy movie, though.  This wasn’t a sexy movie in the slightest.  There was one partially naked dead woman and one scene of coitus interruptus in Henry’s bathtub, but that was it.  Abraham and Mary courted, got married, held hands, had a child, were affectionate, but they didn’t dress it up in sexy trappings, which I’m okay with.  There were no sexy vampire sexy scenes, which I’m okay with.  This was a movie full of campy bloody vampire killings, but that was enough.
• Also, this was a movie full of men wearing vests.  It’s the 1800s, that happens and I’m not surprised, but… yes, okay.  Benjamin Walker wearing vests, Dominic Cooper wearing vests, Anthony Mackie wearing vests, vests vests vests.
• Finally, it was actually shot very prettily.  There was gore, and lots of, but it never seemed gratuitous to me; a lot of the nature scenes were nicely done.
• Basically, I’m not complaining.

–your fangirl heroine.

Fictional Friday :: 5 more women I’d love to invent an alternate canon for

5. Trudy Campbell (Alison Brie, Mad Men)
I think Trudy is the absolute cutest.  I fully recognize that we don’t really ever get to see a whole lot of Trudy’s personality; she exists largely to provide a happy family life that is a source of angst for perpetually dissatisfied Pete (Vincent Kartheiser).  But this is why I want something more for her: Trudy deserves a life that does not include and has never included Pete.  I’ve always believed this and it’s just getting worse: I want a world where she gets to be her own woman and hey, if she wants to have a husband and children, that’s her right, but I want her to have a husband who is not a jerk, not a perpetual sleaze, not Pete.  I want her to be happy, and though I don’t see Trudy and Pete’s marriage actually falling apart, I think season 5 showed that socially speaking, Pete is subconsciously attempting to turn into a dangerous shade of Don.  And Trudy does not deserve that.

4. Shilo Wallace (Alexa Vega, Repo! The Genetic Opera)
This is one of those situations where yes, I love her canon as a whole, but wow, babygirl has been dealt the absolute worst hand of life cards that can be.  Although Repo! is kind of a canon where every single character’s life is in one way or another (and probably more than one way) terrible, so I actually sort of want alt-canon for… well, some of them.  Shilo, though, I feel like any of her personal failings are because her life is utter crap and, you know, she’s been locked in a house for seventeen years, perpetually poisoned by her father, and people keep dying right in front of her, and essentially, she just needs a new life where nobody dies or poisons her and she gets to breathe fresh air and maybe kick some ass (literally or metaphorically) or something.

3. Magdalene “Blind Mag” DeFoe (Sarah Brightman, Repo! The Genetic Opera)
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before how irrationally attached I really am and always have been to Mag.  And her life?  Her life is also a pile of crap.  It was all oh yay friend!  Oh yay bionic eyes!  and then oh no dead friend.  Oh no bionic eyes = life-ruining contract with a man who is actually a huge bastard, wow, I will never be free again.  Oh no I guess all I can do is stab my bionic eyes out.  And that sucks.  Mag strikes me as a fairly decent woman who deserves to get to sing opera in a world where body parts are not routinely harvested under protection of the law.

2. Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films, or Lara Pulver, Steven Moffat’s Sherlock)
BECAUSE ORIGINAL CANON IRENE WAS JUST FINE.  Original canon Irene was the woman who bested Sherlock, and that was that.  She could go on her merry and be awesome.  The Ritchie films’ Irene was sassy, but what was up with the love plot with Sherlock?  They were never romantically involved.  Also, she had the worst ending.  Such an insult to her talent.  And okay, I love BBC Irene.  I love the Irene who loves ladies and is a dominatrix and does her lipstick all bright red.  But wow, I do not like her ending either.  I like it even less, actually, because it turned into this hideous damsel in distress thing.  The one woman who almost bested Sherlock, had way too much sexual tension with him despite being sexually attracted to women, and then needed him to rescue her?  Gross.  I want a modern Irene who is allowed to be her own white knight for crying out loud.  

1. Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence, The Hunger Games)
Okay so I’m all for ladies leading action films.  I’m a big fan actually.  And I can generally deal with Katniss as a character.  But wow, I wish she got to live in a different world that didn’t force her to un-introvert and get wrapped up in dumb love triangles that she specifically said at the beginning that she didn’t want.  I want her to have a world where she’s allowed to be by herself when she wants and where she’s allowed to not have any romances if she wants and where she doesn’t have to save the increasingly ridiculous day all the time and where she is just allowed to be herself for goodness’ sake.

–your fangirl heroine.

Theatre Thursday :: thinking cynical thoughts while watching videos from the Broadway production of Newsies

I am a horrible cynic.

Also, I try my very hardest not to judge a thing until I see it, so let me say: I am not judging Newsies the stage musical.  I am just judging the videos I can find online.

To give a little bit of background: I was in this musical revue in junior high where it was allegedly all about Broadway music, yet included, among other things, two songs from Newsies.  I never saw the movie as a kid (I ardently avoided most films that didn’t have female protagonists as a child, which I’m sure I’ve mentioned, and also I just never had cause to see it) but I watched it multiple times in junior high as such.  Ours was a cast of mostly female newsies, but we all wrangled terrible knickers and vests and newsboy caps out of costume storage and performed the dances with aplomb.

Our “King of New York” dance wasn’t unlike the one in the video, fundamentally; granted, we didn’t have any lady reporter hiking up her skirts for no conceivable reason, but hey.  We tapped away, and it wasn’t much different, again.  The overwhelming feeling I’m getting watching the videos on the official Newsies website was… wow, we sure didn’t pump our arms that much.  I don’t remember the film’s newsies pumping their arms so much either.  But there are a lot of arm movements.  To the point that now that I’m thinking about it it’s sort of distracting.

I think the main theoretical issue I’m having with Newsies, based on what I’m seeing, is that it’s not bringing anything new to the table.  (Also wow, I just saw the lady reporter kiss one of the boys.  God forbid there be a lady reporter who just reports on things and then leaves, right?)  It stylistically seems a lot like the movie.  It’s not surprising.  They’re tap dancing.  They’re wearing hats.  They’re throwing news papers around.  Whoo?

I mean, they’re all fine.  A stage full of boys doing cartwheels is kind of cool, I guess, though I really don’t understand why they’re all dancing with newspapers under their feet for no reason.

Also, let’s talk about that set from what I’m seeing?  That three-story scaffolding/light wall combination looks… surprisingly like the Next to Normal set, with more newsboys dancing on/around it.  And I love that set for Next to Normal.  It makes sense.  But it’s… I don’t know, it feels (like something that was already done for a show I like a lot better and that came first) somehow inappropriate?  I’m a snob, but light walls are for rock musicals.  Light walls feel modern to me: modern settings, modern score.

Newsies is a good old-fashioned musical.  It seems very passable.  It’s just underwhelming, and that feeling is growing the more videos I watch.  And that disappoints me a little.

–your fangirl heroine.

Whedon Wednesday :: Buffy characters as My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic characters

Originally I was intending to do the entire Whedonverse as ponyfolk, but once I’d got about four of the women typed Buffy style, I just decided to go with it all the way. So.

As Twilight Sparkle, we have Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan).  Because she is the extremely bookish one, the not-strictly-sociable one who still loves her friends very much, the one representing the “element of magic.”  Twilight Sparkle didn’t have friends except Spike before moving from Canterlot to Ponyville, when she learned about the importance of friendship and teamwork; Willow didn’t really have a lot of friends except Xander before Buffy moved to Sunnydale, when she learned firsthand about the importance of friendship and teamwork.  I will also note that Twi’s official My Little Pony wiki article states that at one point she does use a memory spell on her friends (I haven’t seen that far yet, but hey).

As Spike, we have Xander Harris (Nicholas Brendon).  He may be named Spike, but he is Xander through and through; he is best friends with our resident bookish one, he is goofy and affable and flirts with a lot of people to very little success.  He isn’t always the most useful in the traditional sense, but he is valuable to the team.  He is a little bit of a derp.

As Applejack, whose name I just realized was written as one word and not two, we have Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar).  NO WAIT I SWEAR THIS IS RELEVANT.  I mean, Apple Jack was the one I had the hardest time Buffycasting, actually, since none of the Buffy characters are all twangy and cowgirl and Buffy herself isn’t exactly the “element of honesty” all the time for valid reasons.  (Though look see Buffy owns a cowboy hat go with it.)  But what got me was when AJ got all stubborn and insisted on doing everything by herself, because as teamworky as the Scooby Gang could be, Buffy did do the “it’s my responsibility and mine alone” thing several times.  Also, the sister thing.

As Apple Bloom, we have Dawn Summers (Michelle Trachtenberg).  See, sister thing.  Apple Bloom really does mean well and she has a very good heart, it seems like from the once I’ve been exposed to her.  She just wants to play with the others and not be treated like a kid, and she’s very open to people even if they’re not the obvious choice.  (I.e. with Zecora the zebra, and sort of like Dawn’s unlikely friendship with Spike for a while.)  And yeah, sisters.

As Rarity, we have Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter).  Rarity is the town fashion plate; Cordelia is the town fashion plate.  Rarity is a fan of the spotlight; Cordelia is a fan of the spotlight.  Rarity represents “the element of generosity,” and while that is not true so much of high school Cordy, I’d say what I know of her on Angel shows that she grows into a generosity of spirit.  Rarity sometimes frustrates the others; Cordelia sometimes frustrates the others.  Etcetera.

As Pinkie Pie, we have Harmony Kendall (Mercedes McNab).  Really, Pinkie is just innocently, ridiculously chipper; Harmony is more judgmental and occasionally mean-spirited than Pinkie, as Pinkie is really not mean ever (being the “element of laughter”) but she is also kind of ridiculous.  She’s just a cute girl used to being cute and therefore happy; she’s got her selfish moments, her facepalm-inducing moments, her foolish moments.  But she’s not a terrible person, just like Pinkie isn’t a terrible pony.  Just… sometimes misguided.  Or something.

As Rainbow Dash, we have Faith Lehane (Eliza Dushku).  What this totally isn’t just because Rainbow called her friend Gilda “G” that one time, no, of course not.  And Faith is hardly Rainbow in the sense of being the “element of loyalty,” at least at first; I think in her way, Faith is plenty loyal by the end, but season 3 Faith not so much.  Faith is much more troubled than Rainbow, because ponies do not come from such screwed up backgrounds as people, but she is, a la Rainbow’s page on the wiki, brash, (sometimes) competitive, and (sometimes) mischievous.  I’m pretty sure Rainbow is the only pony I can imagine actually making vaguely dirty jokes like Faith sometimes does; Rainbow is also the pony I see as most likely to kick your ass, which is another thing Faith does.

As Fluttershy, we have Tara Maclay (Amber Benson).  Finally, another girl whose pony analogue element suits her wholly: the “element of kindness.”  Tara is the absolute nicest and the sweetest; she is also (at least at first) quite shy.  She’s good at taking care of people, but she can and does get fierce when it’s required of her, even if she personally doesn’t think of herself as being particularly bold and daring like the others.  And she is just the gosh-darn sweetest and I adore her.  So there.

As Trixie, we have Amy Madison (Elizabeth Anne Allen).  Because Amy is a life ruiner and Trixie is a life ruiner.  Because Amy tries to do magic but is not as good as Willow and Trixie tries to do magic, ish, but is not as good as Twilight Sparkle.  Because magic semiposer reasons.

As Princess Celestia, we have Jenny Calendar (Robia la Morte).  Literally just because she is an adult and because she was a teensy bit Willow’s mentor, ish, with the computer teaching and the inadvertently-being-why-Willow-started-magicks.

As Luna/Night Mare Moon, we have Glory (Clare Kramer).  I believe I mentioned this before, yes.

–your fangirl heroine.