Strangely Socialised

It’s an absolute crime that I didn’t go see this movie when it was first released. (And it was, in fact, widely released in theatres in Canada, thank you very much.) No matter what personal horrors were going on in my life at the time, I should’ve scraped together the pennies and found the time and gone. I’d heard it was good, and it was better than I’d heard.

Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald are the social outcasts of the school, and largely by choice, rejecting everything superficial that their parents and their school seem to stand for. But promises and pacts made to each other as children are hard to hold up at the onset of adulthood.

The film relies on a parallel between lycanthropy and the onset of menstruation, and a very solid one at that, keeping it’s focus on change — on the ways that the body and personality and social interactions change. Ginger, one year older than her sister Brigitte, is bitten by a beast that has been terrorizing her suburb and begins these changes all at once. Her body blossoms, her period starts, she develops a taste for tearing things apart and starts to grow a tail. Brigitte is left behind.

The parallels that are drawn are overt, but except on a few occasions don’t feel particularly heavy-handed. The film is a feminist film and does not make any effort to hide that fact, but it is also a genre horror film and succeeds on that level too. One scene that works particularly well in both arenas is when a boy who Ginger has slept with suddenly starts peeing blood — an unsettling sight, and certainly something that boys never see where girls have to deal with it for a good portion of their lives. He is, unsurprisingly, completely freaked out by this.

One of the strongest parts of the movie, beyond its basic construction, is the performance of the two leads, Emily Perkins and Katherine Isabelle, as Brigitte and Ginger respectively. They raise the film far above the standard teen horror fare that is so prevalent these days.

Also strong are Mimi Rogers and John Bourgeois as the girls’ out-of-touch parents, and Kris Lemche as the drug dealer/botanist/accomplice to Brigitte in helping to find a cure for Ginger’s disease. (I spent much of the film trying to remember where I’d seen him before, then had a truly duh moment when I looked it up and realized he plays Cute God on Joan of Arcadia.)

The ending, which has been derided by many people who otherwise enjoyed the movie, was to me one of the most powerful moments in it. Ginger has already killed at least four people, and is advancing on her sister who in one hand holds a knife and in the other holds a syringe with the cure. Ginger pounces, and it’s the knife that ends up in her side, not the syringe.

The film opened, in part, with a montage of the girls playing out death scenes for a class assignment, and ends in much the same way. There was no way to a happy ending here, no way to undo the trauma of everything that had happened. I didn’t see the ending coming, but I was very satisfied with it in a way that I’m not with the usual American-style happy ending.

Highly, highly recommended.

Spent an hour on the phone with technical support. Again. Let’s just hope that the problem is actually fixed now so I don’t have to call back ever again. Because if there’s one thing worse than the hold music, it’s that woman droning on again and again how to look up support information on the website. Yeah, yeah, I’m sure it’s of use to the masses, but I don’t need it and I don’t want to listen to it over and over again. For sport I started keeping track of how many times it repeated, Last time I called it was seven; this time was only four. I’ll count my blessings.

The episode of Highlander with Nick Lea in it is on right now (The Boxer) but unfortunately I didn’t realize this until halfway through because I was — guess, just guess — on the phone with tech support. It’s bringing back a lot of memories, watching this show again. When I was in university, every night after the news, I’d pop in a tape and record it. Most of those tapes are terrible; we had lousy satellite reception on the station and everything on the screen has a ghost, but I’m still glad I have them. Such a great show if you have a fertile imagination (and if you’re able to look past the deficiencies of the first two seasons.) A show like this would never last more than a couple episodes anymore. Le sigh.

[A novel by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman]

Ever since reading Swordspoint for the first time years ago, I’ve been looking forward to this book. Before I even knew there was a book to look forward to, I’ve been looking forward to this book. And so it had a lot to live up to, by the time it was released.

I read it all in one day, between a couple plane rides and a bus ride and the space between bed and sleep. I don’t read a book all at once if it doesn’t engage me, engage my imagination and involve me with its characters. So it definitely has that going for it, which is arguably the most important thing. The world it is set in is obviously one I was already familiar with, so it was easy to fall into the narrative and know what was going on.

All in all, it holds up as a strong, readable, imaginative book. The only place where it doesn’t hold up, is in comparison to Swordspoint. Swordspoint is one of those magical books that you can never get enough of; the characters are complex, the world is lush, the detail is exquisite and the story is tight. It’s romantic and capitivating and it sweeps you away. The Fall of the Kings isn’t, quite, that.

The politics of the two books, I would put on par. Part of the whole atomosphere of the world comes from politics, whether it’s the politics of the city, the upper class, the lower class or the university. It’s always rich and complex. In The Fall of the Kings, the situations are perhaps a bit more cliche, but they don’t go against the spirit of the world and don’t contradict anything that’s already been set up. One of the things I love best about the books is their intelligence. and on that level this novel certainly succeeds.

I think the problem lies in a couple areas. The central relationship of the story isn’t quite as strong — we see more of it, and yet it doesn’t have that same sense of binding and romance as the first. It’s hard to pinpoint just why, because neither of them really fall under any conventional definition of romance. Perhaps it’s that one seems devoted and mutual, and one does not.
It’s really when you get to the end that The Fall of the Kings really begins to suffer by comparison. A character is introduced who becomes instrumental in getting one of the main characters out of a bind, and the whole thing seems very contrived. The character isn’t set up properly at all and comes off very much as a Mary Sue type — the author’s avatar in the story, and not particularly well executed. Which is disappointing, because she had the potential to be a very interesting character if introduced and developed properly.

While I knew that it probably wouldn’t be a happily ever after kind of story, the end still caught my by surprise. It was very abrupt and jarring and I’m still not entirely sure how I felt about it, and may not be sure until I give the book another read.

So a good, strong book that still wasn’t everything it could have been.

So there was a wedding, and everything surrounding a wedding, and I got awfully behind. Much to say, so I’m going to start at the most recent and work backwards.

The fourth season premiere of Angel aired locally last night, a lovely birthday present for me. Like a lot of people, I was getting more and more disappointed in the series as last season wore on. And while watching Angel sink to the bottom of the sea was cool visual, the whole plotline leading up to that lost me, more often than not. And let’s just not even start on Cordelia, who kicked ass getting her demonhood and is a lousy higher power. I mean, Cordelia?!

But I digress.

This season, it started out right. Wesley, who has truly become the badass he wanted to be in the first season, is my new hero. And I’m even not missing Doyle so much anymore. I love how this show doesn’t feel the need to make its heroes pure and without fault and vice. Wesley is a hero, and he’s sleeping with the enemy, and who knows what’s going to come of that, but I hope it’s something.

Fred and Gunn — individually, I like both characters. I love Fred when she’s being a geek and I love Gunn when he’s being … Gunn. But seeing the two of them in this picture of demon-fighting domesticity, bringing up baby, is just wrong. The whole dynamic was just off off off. You have some great characters here, play up their strengths, don’t suppress them to fit them into your plot. Rewrite the scene — it could have still worked without turning them into pod people.

And now to Angel himself. I really like how the madness and rescue and recovery were handled. There wasn’t anything where I wanted to say “Oh, as if.” Meaning, of course, it worked withing the logical boundaries of the character and the show, not that I expect to go out to the water’s edge and see a vampire welded into a coffin being pulled out. We knew that he would have had to be rescued, in order for the show to go on, but we didn’t know how or by who and I’m really pleased with the direction they chose to go in this particular part of the show.

Normally I try not to read anyone else’s comments before talking about a show, but I happened to in this case, mostly because I get it three days after it airs in the U.S. And so I want to add that I agree with what almost everyone else has said — he should have killed Justine. Not only because you know she’s gonna be coming back but because I just don’t like her. She’s very one-dimensional and while I can appreciate the horror of a single-minded villain (T2 comes to mind. So does Les Miserables, for that matter.) it doesn’t work in this case. I don’t buy her justification for what she does and I don’t buy that she can’t be at all swayed by the facts in front of her face. I’m not sure if it’s the writing or the acting or the set-up, but now.

That’s how I felt about the whole Holtz arc, though, so take that for what it’s worth. I think I’d be happiest if that whole thing just went away — Justine and Connor included. Then I’d have my show all the way back again.

This is one of those shows that I was determined to make up my own mind about, and not be swayed by the legions of disenchanted Joss fans who were drifting over from Buffy and Angel. Of course it was impossible to escape their influence, but I’d like to think that what they said didn’t have much of an effect on how I felt in the end about the pilot episode of Firefly.

Of course, I’m a bit of a disenchanged Angel fan myself, and I won’t say that didn’t.

The show starts out with a monologue giving enough backstory to the universe that we know why things are the way they are. And despite my natural aversion to that sort of thing, I appreciated it — as long as it’s a one-time thing. Because that’s not the kind of thing I need to hear week after week (after week after week). Good visuals with it, too. I could stand those visuals under a credit sequence without the voiceover, actually.

Moving right alone, we go into the inevitable introduction of the characters. Which was clumsy and obvious, but could have been worse. The problem is trying to cram in all of the main characters, and then get a plot going, and then wrap it up all in one hour. There’s a very good reason why pilots of SF, large-cast series are two hours, and it’s not just creative indulgence. The good news is, I like just about all of them so far. And I did appreciate that we moved into the plot so quickly, even if it meant that the introductions were clumsier than they could have been otherwise.

And so I’ll say now that I really liked this. I’d heard that it was a space western but hell, Star Wars was a space western, too. I thought it was just going to be a metaphoric kind of thing. But no — the old west oozed out of every aspect of this show, from the visuals — the dustiness and the colours — to the logistics — the train robbery and the gun holsters — to the music, which was twangy all the way. Before this I would have said that I don’t particularly like westerns, but the SF aspects of this make it for me.

There were some other choice details that I liked. First of all, there are no aliens. And there will be no aliens, or so says the creator. (Should I capitalize that? The Creator. The Joss.) Without aliens, I think we’re going to see a different kind of space-set show than we’re used to, and that appeals to me. Also, I loved the language-droppings. They didn’t make any attempt to subtitle what was going on, the different languages — I’m guessing it was a mishmash of current languages — was just a natural part of communications.

I know what to expect from Joss Whedon because I know Buffy and I know Angel and I know the kinds of characters he likes to create. And there was some of that here, some of the wit that I love. There were a few fabulous moments (“Is his job open, then?” with the Sherriff, and the money scene at the end) but I wanted more of it. I wanted crackling dialogue. Now that the exposition episode is out of the way, maybe we’ll get more of that next week.

And damn did I love when that guy got sucked into the engine. I’m a sick, sick bastard.