The Second Annual Serene Wombles

Two years! Woo-woo! Thanks for keeping with me. It’s been another hell of a year, and although Life Events have meant that I wasn’t able to review quite as much as I would have liked, you’ve stuck with me, and that’s awesome. In fact, with 28,000 hits this year, three times as many people have shown at least a vague interest in this little blog as last year. So: thanks! 😀

Those of you who were here last October 3rd will remember that to mark the aniversary of this esteemed blog I decided to hand out some meaningless awards: The Serene Wombles!

What exactly are the Serene Wombles? Well, to quote myself last year:

Eligibility for a Serene Womble i[s] conferred by being the subject of a review [on In Search of the Happiness Max] in the past year. There may have been better or more worthy things that came out this year, but if I didn’t find them relevant to my interests, or if I simply didn’t have the time to review them, they won’t be eligible for a Serene Womble. I make no pretense that these awards are significant or important in any way, but I enjoy having the opportunity to praise and draw attention to things I have loved.

The Serene Wombles are divided into two categories, those that apply to recent releases, and special Time Travelling Wombles for the most awesome things in my Reviewing Through the Time Machine posts. The division between the former and the latter may at times seem arbitrary – why should a film that came out in 2009 count as a recent release, whilst a TV Show that ended in 2009 requires a time machine? It’ll always be a judgement call, and the judgement will [usually] have been made on a case-by-case basis at the time of reviewing. Sometimes I use a time machine for my reviews because I want to review something that came out in 1939, sometimes because I want to review something more recent that’s out of print, or because it’s a TV show that’s been cancelled… At the end of the day, these are not the Oscars, they’re the highlights from a blog, and are therefore subject to my whim.

Exciting stuff, eh? Let’s get started!

The Serene Womble for Best Film: Dredd 3D
Eligible Films: Dredd 3D, Prometheus, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Dark Knight Rises, The Hunger Games

The competition was basically between Dredd 3D, The Amazing Spider-Man, and The Hunger Games. If this category were about which film I’m most likely to rewatch… well, I’d probably rewatch all of those three, but I’d want to watch The Amazing Spider-Man first and most often. But this isn’t just about which film I found most fun. Each of these was well put together and entertaining, and The Amazing Spider-Man was also visually stunning and thematically well-conceived, but Dredd 3D was just in a league of its own – beautiful and thoughtful in equal amounts. It really felt like Dredd 3D was taking sci-fi back – giving us a real vision of the future, beautiful and provocative as well as dark. Breathtaking, is the word.

I doubt this film will sweep the Real and Proper awards in the way it deserves, but here in Womblevonia I’m doing my bit to recognise originality, inspiration, and artistic genius where I see it. Congratulations, Dredd 3D! Well deserved.

The Serene Womble for Best TV Show Game of Thrones
Elligible TV shows: Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, Misfits, The Fades, The Hollow Crown: Part I, Richard II

Tough crowd. I mean, we have The Fades, one of the most strikingly original and well-executed British fantasy TV shows in a good many years – a real tragedy that it was not renewed for a second series. Then there’s The Hollow Crown‘s adaptation of Richard II, which contains some of the very best Shakespeare I have ever seen performed, and for one of my least favourite plays, at that, including a truly spectacular performance from Ben Whishaw, as Richard II, and a simply wonderful portrayal of John of Gaunt by Patrick Stewart. And although Doctor Who has been highly questionable over the last year, I can’t deny that ‘A Town Called Mercy’ was excellent. Yet Game of Thrones is still hands down the winner, for me. It feels unfair to some of the competition to give it the Serene Womble for Best TV Show two years in a row, but given that it was even better this year than last year, I don’t feel that I can really deny it. Performances by Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey, and Maisie Williams were stand outs, but everybody was bringing their A-game. The special effects were incredible – I now believe that dragons exist and that they are both very cute and very dangerous. Pretty much every element of music, direction, and writing was outstanding, and it stands out in my memory as the best thing I have seen all year.

As they say on these here Internets: All of The Awards.

The Serene Womble for Best Web Series The Guild
Eligible Web Series: The Guild, Dragon Age: Redmption

Well, maybe not all of the awards. This is a new category introduced to include the burgeoning genre of web series. I was tempted to roll it into the TV shows Womble, but, upon reflection, I must concede that web series are their own medium. They are usually shorter and are often much lower budget. It’s neither fair nor practical to try and compare them to much longer, much higher budget shows. Moreover, they are developing their own tropes and styles and on the whole exhibit a different character to their televisual brethrin.

That said, there wasn’t a lot of competition in this category. Both these shows are Felicia Day creations, and whilst I did watch other web series over the course of the year, I can’t deny that Felicia is the mistress of this genre – she has not only talent but the extra experience of being one of the founders of this artform. It means that she’s been at it for longer, but also that she’s better known. Nevertheless, it is notable that The Guild greatly outstripped Dragon Age: Redemption. I suspect this is in part due to the fact that Felicia will have had much less control in the latter, but I also didn’t find her own performance as convincing. In all honesty, The Guild is just in a league of its own. It has the geek-following to bring in stars for the extensive cameos that were a feature of this series, and it’s starting to get the money that allows it to do more things. It’s also excellently and knowingly written for the audience that powers the Internet: geeks. Not to mention the spot on performances of the other cast members: Vincent Caso, Jeff Lewis, Amy Okuda, Sandeep Parikh, and Robin Thorsen.

It’s a deserved win, but with more and more people finding it natural to watch their visual content online, more TV stars using short videos as a way to get a bit more exposure and make a bit more cash on the side (see, for example, David Mitchell’s Soapbox), there’s a blooming new arm of the media that I’m thinking I need to investigate further in the coming year. I’m interested to see how things develop.

The Serene Womble for Best Actor Ben Whishaw
Elligible Actors: This category is open to any actor in any recent production that I’ve reviewed in the past year – film, TV, radio, podcast, whatever. I do not discriminate by gender. It’s a fight to the melodramatic death and the best actor wins, regardless of what’s between their legs or how they identify.

This was a tough one. I feel bad for stinting Peter Dinklage for the second year running after praising him so highly, but it was a strong field, and he did contribute to the overall Game of Thrones win – keep it up, Peter, there’s always next year. Lena Headey was also giving all the players a run for their money with her outstanding performance as Ma-Ma in Dredd 3D – a real performance of a lifetime. But I can’t deny the just deserts for Ben. He took a role I’d never especially liked or understood and made me see it from a completely different angle – an angle that was utterly compelling and heart-breaking. In all honesty I was far less impressed with Parts II and III of The Hollow Crown (and I somehow missed Part IV), and I’ll not deny that Tom Hiddleston did a good job, but Richard II blew me away, and Ben Whishaw was the lycnhpin of that production. Incandescent. Any actor that can ellucidate not just the character they are portraying but the themes of the play and have that render their performance more compelling rather than less, and to such a level… sheer genius.

Thank you, Ben, for showing me Richard II the way you see him. Have a Womble.

The Serene Womble for Best Novel Rome Burning, by Sophia McDougall
Eligible Novels: A Dance With Dragons, Kraken Romanitas, and Rome Burning

This one was probably the hardest. Kraken is the most imaginative novel I’ve reviewed this year, and it was certainly a gripping as well as intelligent read. However, it did have some minor gender issues, the attempt at rendering London accents was unconvincing, and although I found the exploration of personal identity fun, it was inconsistent.

Rome Burning‘s alternate history setting was imaginative in a different way. For exploration of gender, race, and cultural issues it was outstanding. The characters were interesting and varied. The pace was fast and gripping. The politics, nuanced and intriguing. And, overall, the harder-to-define ‘squee’ quotiant was just higher than for anything (new) I’ve read in a long time.

Romanitas, the first book in the trilogy of which Rome Burning is the second, was also good, gripping, and squee-worthy, but the writing was not quite as strong and the world-building was more developed in the second volume.

A Dance with Dragons is what it is: a novel to which I have mysteriously devoted a surprisingly large chunk of my life in reviewing; part of a long series that has given me both great joy and great frustration. Perhaps it is unfair to put it up for assessment when the review is as yet incomplete, but I’ll give you a sneak preview and say that, for all its good points, A Dance with Dragons was not really competition for any of the above.

The Serene Womble for Best Comic Romatically Apocalyptic

Eligible Comics: Real Life Fiction and Romantically Apocalyptic

Another new category, and only two in it, but I couldn’t leave them by the wayside. Both of these are excellent, and I thoroughly recommend them to all of you. Both are surreal, hilariously funny, and gender balanced. Romantically Apocalyptic has an edge for me by being, well, apocalyptic; but then again, Real Life Fiction has Manicorn. The real clincher is the artwork, which, as you can see, is stunning. I have never seen anything like it in a web comic. Or any comic. Or ever. And the creator, Vitaly S Alexius, hands this stuff out for free. There are no two ways about it: this comic wins.

The Time Traveling Wombles

The Time Traveling Womble for Best Film The Glass Slipper
Eligible Films: Robocop, Soldier’s Girl, The Glass Slipper

That’s right, I’m giving the award to a film it’s virtually impossible to buy anymore. It’s not available on Amazon (there’s a Korean film called Glass Slipper, but it’s a different movie), it’s never been made into a DVD, the only videos I can find are US vids on eBay, the cheapest was going for about £16 (inc. P&P) at time of posting. I don’t know if it’d even play on a non-US machine. My copy was taped off the telly in the 1980s. But if you can get it, I urge you to make the effort. And this is really what reviewing via time machine is all about: drawing attention to classics and forgotten works of art. How can we get great films like this pressed for DVD if nobody speaks up to say that they are wanted?

The Glass Slipper is beautiful, sweet, and knowing. To me, it is the definitive cinderella story, and that’s not just the nostalgia talking. I feared it would be when I went to rewatch for this review, but it’s not. This was a feminist take on Cinderella in 1955, long before anyone even dreamt of Ever After. And it doesn’t sacrifice the romance for its message; it is a heart-breaking, life-affirming, challenging, witty, and beautiful work of art.

This is not to discredit its competition, however; both of the other films were clear contenders, although each is very different to the others, and it was hard to make the comparison. Robocop is a cleverly written and directed critique of capitalism. Its ultra-violence and gritty realism stand at stark odds to The Glass Slipper’s colourful fairytale punctuated with surrealist dance-interludes. Soldier’s Girl is a moving and powerful adaptation of the true story of a soldier who was beaten to death for loving a transgender woman. It perhaps didn’t have the artistry of the other two movies, but I don’t know that you want a lot of whistles and bells for such a movie – its task is to tell someone else’s tale and command the viewer to witness a crime and recognise an injustice. It would be wrong for a director to grandstand and steal the show. So, what do you do, when confronted with three such different films, ones that resist judgement on equal grounds?

I think you have to go with your gut. The Glass Slipper is the one that had the deepest personal influence on me, playing a pivotal role in shaping my psyche and helping me figure out what sort of a woman I wanted to grow up to be. Children’s or ‘family’ movies are often over-looked as less serious art objects than ‘adult’ films*, but they help to form the worldview a child is exposed to when they are trying to figure out what this existence, this life, is all about. Films like The Glass Slipper, which show a child a multiplicity of roles for women, are incredibly important, especially when they do so in the context of a story that is usually cast to define women as romantic creatures whose ‘happily ever after’ lies in marriage, and not in independant thought. Doing that whilst keeping the romantic centre of Cinderella’s tale intact is a masterful stroke. It deserves this award.

The Time Traveling Womble for Best Actor Lee Pace

Eligible actors: anyone who has acted in a film I had to time travel to watch.

It may not have garnered the illustrious Time Traveling Womble for Best film, but I can’t deny the Womble to Lee Pace – head and shoulders above the rest – there really wasn’t any competition. Lee Pace plays Calpernia, the transgendered woman that Barry Winchell fell in love with, and was brutally killed for loving. The gentle, understated approach to this sensitive role is spot on. I imagine a lot of reviews of this film will have said something to the effect of what a ‘convincing woman’ Lee Pace made – I’m not even sure what that means, but it’s the sort of thing people say when they discuss a man playing a transgendered role. I’ve known a number of transgendered women – they’re as varied as any other random woman would be from another; they’re as varied as people. Which is not the same as saying that they have nothing in common or don’t have shared experiences. I don’t want to make any sweeping characterisations of what it is to be a transgendered woman and then proclaim that I think Lee Pace matched that stereotype. What I’m saying is that he portrayed a well-rounded character – a person with loves and passions and heart-ache, with interests both important and trivial; a person whose story moved me and made me think about an important issue.

The point that moved me most – that stood out – was a moment in the above scene. It spoke to me powerfully even though it was speaking about an experience I’ve never had, and am never likely to have. Because it’s a scene in one sense about a man struggling with figuring out his own sexuality in the high-pressure environment of being a soldier in the context of the US Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell policy – only revoked just over a month before I reviewed this film; still in force when it was made. To a large extent, that’s what the film is about. But it’s also about a woman, struggling to be acknowledged as a woman, finding it almost impossible to date, even though she is beautiful and charismatic, because straight men won’t acknowledge her as a woman. And here she has found a man, a man she is falling in love with, and she must always be asking herself: is this just an experiement, for him? Am I his way of figuring himself out? And all this time she has been loving and supportive and understanding that this is hard, for him, but here she finaly shows her pain and anxiety. Yet, it’s still within the context of that loving, caring, understanding character. Once he has affirmed his love for her she subsumes her own pain to his need for support. It is done with so much subtlety and nuance. Lee Pace isn’t the one bawling his eyes out in this scene, but the emotion is nonetheless powerful.

That’s acting. Acting and sensitivity; just exactly what the role needed.

The Time Traveling Womble for Best Novel The Dark Tower, Vol. 2: The Drawing of the Three, by Stephen King
Eligible Novels: The Blazing World, by Margaret Cavendish and The Dark Tower, Vol. 2: The Drawing of the Three, by Stephen King.

I did think about including some of the works of Anne McCaffrey in this category, as I did talk about a number of them in her memorial post, but ultimately I decided that what I was really doing was celebrating a woman’s life’s work, rather than giving a review. Besides, I might want to review some of them properly somewhere down the line.

As for the two remaining novels… well, it was an unfair match. The Drawing of the Three is basically my most favourite book. The Blazing World is an important book that more people should read. It’s historically valuable and truly remarkable for its time. But it’s also the offspring of a genre (novel writing) in its infancy – the very first science fiction novel, in 1666. Don’t believe me? Go read the post.

As for The Dark Tower – ah… I suspect I shall spend my whole life trying to tease apart why it affects me so. My post, ‘Meditations on Death‘ explores just one aspect of my its power – the seductive power of the concept of death-as-release, what makes us resist its allure, and how this is expertly explored in The Drawing of the Three.

And, last of all:

The People’s Choice Award The Guild, Season 5
Perhaps the most arbitrary of all the awards, this is the one you voted for with your feet. The selection for this award is based solely on the review post with the single largest number of hits. And this year it was a landslide, with 8,431 hits and counting, this post has had more hits than my home page. It’s had several thousand more hits than the total for all hits of my most popular month (July). The closest runners up are The Amazing Spider-man and The Hollow Crown (both around 1,000).

And it’s not even because it’s been on the blog since October last year – the hits suddenly started raining in in July. I don’t know what it was, but it seems like all of a sudden the Internet woke up to The Guild, and all I can say is that it couldn’t be more well deserved. Congrats, Felicia and friends: they like you, they really, really like you!

And that’s it! The awards have been awarded, and it’s time to start all over again, selecting novels and films and TV shows and comics and web series, and kittens only know what else, to review in a brand new Womblevonian year.

Stay serene and max for happiness, yo.

*Not that kind, dirty minds!

My First SFX Weekender

There were many things I loved about the weekend I spent in Prestatyn, flying the Angry Robot table at the SFX Weekender. There were also a couple of things that were mindlessly irritating, and one thing that was fairly disgusting. This is not how I wanted to begin my account of the weekend. How I was going to begin it until about 15mins before calling it a night on Saturday, was like this:

‘If you’ve not danced in the same room as Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Captain Picard, Tron, and Bananaman, you haven’t lived.’

What changed that was really the last straw of something I’d been trying to grin and bear the whole weekend. I’m talking about the semi-naked women. No, not the slave-Leias – those ladies do that because they want to fulfil their own fantasies, and I respect that, especially when they’re braving the gold bikini on the coast of Wales in February – I’m talking about the women hired by SFX as entertainment, where the entertainment consisted of walking around in little but a thin film of silver spandex, on stilts, trailing men with cameras. I’d heard the complaints about them last year, and was appalled that nothing had been done to even out the score.

Let me be absolutely clear on this: I’m not appalled by the women – they’re doing a job and I imagine they’re extroverted types who are drawn to the work; neither am I appalled by the concept of employing people to dress up in risqué SF and fantasy costumes to entertain the punters. What I’m complaining about is the complete lack of equality. It sends a completely different message to employ only young women to walk around wearing very little with the deliberate purpose of titillating men in a purely objectifying fashion. (They may well have been titillating some of the women too, but I don’t think that was the aim.) It’s clear by such a decision that the organisers neither considered that heterosexual women might want a bit of harmless titillation, too, nor how discomforting it would be for the female attendees to have to endure the constant leering of their male companions without any similar outlet to balance it out.

It was deeply discomforting to have to listen to the constant comments whenever they were around; deeply disappointing that nothing similar had been laid on for me. But I tried to set it aside. I assumed it would be done after the trading room closed and the evening events began. Yet there I was, partying with the Lukes and the Leias, the Picards and the Uhuras, feeling like this was the closest I would ever get to a genuine alien disco, and there were superheroes there too, and I saw them: the same women from the daytime-posing, now dancing on stage wearing nothing but tiny black straps and lightbulbs over their crotches and breasts, reducing them to giant glowing versions of their sexual characteristics.

Instant buzz kill.

I wasn’t the only woman who felt this way. And the thing is this: no one would have minded if there were some semi-naked chaps strutting around for the het ladies and gay fellas to enjoy as well. It’s much less objectifying if the sexual desires of the other genders and sexual preferences are being recognised, too. It was a real shame that something so easy to rectify should sour what had been working out to be one of the best discos of my life.

So, yeah, there was that.

The other problems were fairly endurable. The accommodation was terrible. If buildings had personalities, Pontins would be a little old woman whose grandchildren never visit and who can’t really look after herself anymore, but refuses to have a carer in to help. Most of the windows in our ‘chalet’ didn’t close properly, and one was hanging off its hinges. There was no mirror. The heaters were ineffectual, and the beds were singularly uncomfortable. Oh, and we had no hot water for the first day, so I endured the coldest shower of my life.

But I didn’t come to Pontins for a luxury holiday experience; I came to hang out with awesome people dressed in awesome clothes talking about awesome geeky things. At the end of the day the poor accommodation instilled a sort of camaraderie: ‘Yours doesn’t have a mirror? Ours doesn’t have a microwave! And have you seen our sofa bed?!’ I can’t say I ever want to experience that sort of accommodation again, but for a weekend it was endurable.

My experience of the various panels was limited, due to my duties on the stall, but that’s OK, I come to conventions to socialise, for the most part, anyway. The panels I did get to see were fantastic. I especially enjoyed the Q & A with Eve Myles. Anyone who’s read my reviews of Torchwood: Miracle Day will know that I’m recently converted to Eve Myles fandom. I thought she was absolutely fantastic in TMD, both as an actor and as a realistic female action hero. It was wonderful, then, to discover that she was such a wonderful, open, entertaining speaker, as well. I enjoyed both her stories of Torchwood (including certain amusing and bizarre stories concerning John Barrowman’s ‘little Barrowman’) and her accounts of her own life. I admire a woman who is pleased by the concept of wine in pint glasses and endless buffets. She’s gained status as a sex symbol without ever being tempted to destroy her beauty by starving herself to abnormal thinness. Every moment of her Q & A was an absolute treat.

I also have to say how much I enjoyed the Kitschies, awards presented by the very fine people at Pornokitsch for ‘the year’s most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works of genre literature’. I can’t help but approve of an award ceremony where the winners receive handmade stuffed tentacles and Kraken rum as prizes, as well as monetary rewards. It’s great to see progressive and intelligent genre fiction rewarded, and I’ve noted several of the nominees and winners to chase down and sample myself. You can read more about them, and this year’s winners, at: http://www.thekitschies.com/ . I kind of felt that A Monster Calls deserved the Inky Tentacle for its cover art, but as it won the Red Tentacle for most progressive, intelligent, and entertaining novel I suppose it’s only fair that the Inky went to someone else.

There was a special pleasure, too, to singing along to ‘Once More with Feeling’, the Buffy musical episode, with several hundred other people, at least 50% of whom knew all the words. There’s no doubt that this was a convention for fans, and as such it had a joy and exuberance not quite like any other I’ve been to. The costumes were fantastic. There were Daleks and Aliens and stilt-walking transformers. One of my favourites had to be the wookie, which I first saw being greeted by a tenth Doctor. The wookie called out to the Doctor in wookie, and the Doctor responded in kind (of course, the Doctor would speak wookie), and then they hugged. I also heard tell of a dalek saying to someone who held the door open for it ‘You will be the last to be exterminated’. All in all it was as warm and open and kind as you would hope a bunch of geeks would be when they’re all just enjoying the openness and company of others as prepared to celebrate geek culture as themselves.

My only regret is that I didn’t have anything resembling a true costume myself. I would have loved to join the ranks of the superheroes and aliens. All the same, until my buzz was killed, there was really nothing quite like the costumed disco. I’ve rarely enjoyed dancing quite so much.

And I can’t talk about the weekend without saying how great it was to catch up with people. Conventions are a great way to cross the Internet divide, and I’ve never known so many people coming to the same event. I met up with old buddies like Ros Dando and Natalie Burford, who I know from college; and Dave Moore, who I know from LARPing. I met people I’d previously talked to only on Twitter, like the fabulous Emma Newman and Jenni Hill, with whom I worked on Genre for Japan, but never actually met in the flesh until yesterday. And I caught up with people I’d had the good fortune to natter with at EasterCon last year, as well, such as Anne Lyle, Amanda Rutter, Andrew ‘MyGodItsRaining’ Reid, and Emma Jane Davies, to name but a few. I only wish I could have caught up with everyone I knew who was there, but without wifi to get in touch with people it was impossible to find everyone amongst the thousands of attendees.

Plus, it was a great weekend for the Angry Robot team as well. We sold out of nearly everything and did our best business ever at any con. Loads of authors did signings, including my Twitter mate Adam Christopher (author of Empire State) and my old writing group buddy Dave Tallerman, whose debut novel, Giant Theif, was launched on Thursday. We sold out every copy of each of their books from the stock we had with us, and you can’t ask much better than that.

Thanks again to the Angry Robot team for enabling my convention going. If I’m asked to fly the Angry Robot table again next year I shall definitely accept (although I hope we’re able to get different accommodation, and that the event’s organisers will join us in the 21st century regarding sex and gender).

Captain America: The First Avenger

I know I owe you guys another Read Along with Rhube, but I can’t keep it inside any longer: this film was so good. All the squee I had for X-Men: First Class, plus some more, with none of the race and gender issues. If you haven’t already seen this film in the cinema, do it now.

Plot:

Somewhere in the present day Arctic circle a mysterious and oddly shaped plane is uncovered.

Somewhere in Norway, in 1942, Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving) and his team of Nazis invade what looks like a monastery to steal a mysterious artifact.

In lots of places around New York at the same time Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), a short, skinny man with asthma, is getting rejected from the military again and again. Steve is a nice guy who never backs away from a fight, wants to do his duty, and is mysteriously unable to get women. He’s ‘Hollywood Homely’, in other words – i.e. he’s actually not a dickhead and he’s still really good-looking, but because he’s going to become an enormous stud-muffin we have to pretend for a bit that he can’t get women.

Anyway. On a double-date with his successful military friend, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Steve is effectively ignored by the friend of Bucky’s date he’s supposed to be with. So he goes off to try and enlist again, as you do. Bucky realises he’s missing and catches up to go ‘WTF, man, we’re on a date!’ and whilst Steve is going on about how much he wants to help the war effort, Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) overhears, and decides to help Rogers enlist by getting him into his special program.

Rogers doesn’t know what Erskine has planned, but when in training test after test reveals that Steve is both smart and a nice guy, Erskine decides that this is his man. During the testing period, Steve also meets Colonel Chester Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones) and the awesome Agent Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell). Despite his supposed dweebiness, Peggy seems to quite like Steve – probably because she’s neither blind nor an idiot, and he’s blatantly a really nice guy.

So, Steve is chosen for Erskine’s experiment and gets turned into the massive stud-muffin we all expected from the trailers. Unfortunately, a spy for Schmidt somehow got into the room, kills Erskine, and manages to destroy all the serum in the process. It seems that Schmidt was an early experiment of Erskine’s, but because Schmidt was a Bad Man, the serum only made him worse (apparently working on the same theory as ‘only bad witches are ugly’). Rather than an army of supermen, the US now has only Steve, and the program is cancelled. Steve becomes little more than a mascot, ‘Captain America’, shipped around the country with dancing-girls to promote the war effort.

Unsurprisingly, when he’s sent abroad to entertain the troops he’s rather less well received by men who have been fighting and dying in the field whilst he’s been prancing around on stage. As this was never what Steve wanted to do when he was trying to join the army, he’s pretty depressed by this. When he learns that a large number of men, including his friend Bucky, have been captured by Schmidt, Steve decides he can’t sit back and do nothing anymore. With Peggy’s help, he sets off on a one man mission to save the day… and succeeds.

After this success the army sits up and takes notice of him again, and agrees that he can head a team to launch an attack on Schmidt and his organisaton, Hydra, which has broken off from the main Nazi party. Because everyone now agrees that Captain America is properly awesome, Steve is allowed to choose his own men. Of course, he chooses Bucky, as well as a pleasingly mixed race crew of men he freed from Schmidt’s base.

The rest, I’ll leave to your imagination.

How good was it?

This film was so good it was practically erotic. I never really fancied Chris Evans before, but, umm, yeah. Forget whatever rom-com you were thinking of – if you want a date night movie, take your lady/man to see this. Adrenaline + hardbodies = win.

And let’s just give a shout-out to the special effects crew. Watching the trailers I was genuinely curious about whether they used one man or two for their weedy-dude to stud-muffin transformation. It was Chris Evans throughout. The only draw-back was that the voice was slightly off throughout the weedy-Steve scenes. I wouldn’t have thought it mattered, but you could tell it was the voice of a man with a much bigger chest, and it was distracting – not least because I was trying to figure out whether this was a dubbing or effects issue, because I didn’t know if it was the same actor or not. Hopefully I have freed some of you from this by letting you know what I did not.

Apart from the effects and the phaw, though, this was a thoroughly excellent movie throughout. If you’d told me two years ago that Captain America would be up there with my favourite superhero movies of all time I would have been extremely sceptical. This was probably the movie I was looking forward to least of all the Avengers movies. I always thought Captain America was the most ridiculous and least appealing of all superheroes. Sounds like a big, butch, ‘isn’t America wonderful and patriarchal’ vehicle. He also had the dorkiest of all superhero costumes – running around with a freakin’ flag on his chest. Of course, Captain America was originally designed as a propaganda device, so it’s really unsurprising that that’s how he was, but updating him into something plausible and entertaining for the twenty-first century was going to be a real challenge.

And they achieved it. They really did. I gather from my more comics-informed cinema-going companion, Lee Harris, that the weedy-dude underdog aspect wasn’t a part of the original story, which makes it a really smart trick for the movie. This is what saves the picture and transforms it. Instead of taking a jock and just making him more jock-like and launching him on the world to enforce American values, they gave us an everyman figure who’s just a fundamentally nice guy who wants to do his bit in any way he can. He can still go forth as an ideological symbol, but it’s a subtle shift that makes him much more palatable. I also liked the fact that he’s chosen because Erskine, who is not American, identifies with the values that Steve holds dear – not as American values, but as a universal marker of decency. He likes Steve not because he’s ‘All American’ but because he doesn’t like bullies, and because he’s prepared to fight bullies even if he knows he doesn’t have a hope in Hell. It opens the figure out for the rest of the world to make him their own, which is a really difficult thing to do for a character called Captain America.

I also adore Peggy Carter. There’s not a lot of room, in the setting, for believable strong female characters, but they pull it off in a way that X-men: First Class, which had much more room for maneuver, did not entirely succeed. Peggy doesn’t need to be super-powered to kick-ass. She just shows herself to be calm, determined, and a phenomenal shot. When Steve knocks her out of the way of the car Schmidt’s spy is driving at her it’s pretty clear that she actually would have had the bugger if Steve hadn’t got in her way. No martial arts or super-strength required for this lady to kick-ass. What’s more, there were female agents working in the war. There weren’t as many as the men, not by a long shot, but it’s entirely plausible that a character such as Peggy would exist.

I also liked the racial diversity of Captain America’s team. Up until that point in the film my one big reservation was how white it was. I still think the general crowd scenes and the recruitment offices could have been a bit more mixed, but it was awesome to see that Steve selected an African-American and an Asian-American amongst those for his elite team. I gather that this actually reflects the comics, too, which is rockin’, but I also enjoy the treatment of them in the film. Granted, it probably glosses over the racial tensions such a decision probably would have aroused, but this is a long film with a lot going on – it wouldn’t have been possible to cover this in any depth anyway. Plus, there’s an extent to which it’s nice to have non-white people join a group of heroes and have it not be made a fuss of. They’re just the dudes Steve recognised as being awesome. They’re not exceptional for being black or asian, they’re exceptional as people. After what happened to the black and latina characters in X-men: First Class, it was something of a relief.

Overall, this is a truly well-constructed, fast-paced, and engaging action movie that not only treats its source material with respect, but updates it for the tastes of the modern audience. The love story is nice, but under-stated. Steve Rogers is a thoroughly likeable character. I like what it does for race and gender. I’m slightly annoyed with the ‘being bad makes you ugly’ angle (and the implication that only beautiful people are good), but I’m not sure there was a great deal they could do about that without ditching the Red Skull/Schmidt character completely. This film has an absolutely fantastic cast, and they are all bringing it to the table with both wit and poignancy. The special effects are great, and so is the cinematography.

I can’t wait for the Avengers movie – I want more Captain America now.

(P.S. you definitely need to stay after the credits. It’s AWESOME.)

Reviewing Through the Time Machine: Pushing Daisies

Title: Pushing Daisies
Original Run: 2007-2009
Starring: Lee Pace, Anna Friel, Chi McBride and Kristin Chenoweth
Created By: Bryan Fuller
Genre: Comedy-drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Quirky/Odd-ball
Awards: Nominated for 57 awards, including 17 Emmy Awards; Won 18 Awards, including 7 Emmy Awards
Price: Season 1: £5.99; Season 2: £9.99 (Amazon prices at time of posting)

The most beautiful, funny, poignant, stylish, and original television show ever to get axed.

Premise: Ned has an unusual gift: he can touch dead things and bring them back to life… but only for a minute. If he touches them again, they go back to being dead, but if he leaves them alive for more than a minute then something else has to die in their place. Ned discovered his power as a child when his dog Digby was run-over, and learned the limitations on his power when his mother died, suddenly. He restored her to life, but at the cost of his childhood sweetheart’s father, who died in her place. He grows up to become a pie-maker who avoids close personal attachments, for fear of what he might do if someone he loved were to die. A private detective named Emerson Cod discovered his power, and now Ned works with Emerson to solve mysteries by waking the dead (but only for a minute!) and asking them who killed them.

But when Chuck (aka Charlotte Charles), dies in mysterious circumstances, Ned cannot stop himself from bringing her back, for good. As Chuck helps Ned and Emerson investigate her own murder, she and Ned renew their affections for one another; the only trouble is… they can never touch. Or Chuck will die again, this time, forever.

Why you should love it

Pushing Daisies achieves an unlikely, but perfect balance. Its bright colours, cartoonishly surreal style, and impossibly sweet hopeless romance could very easily be sickeningly saccharine, and yet it is not. Similarly, the morbid subject matter could just as easily be too grim and depressing for a light-hearted comedy. However, together, each provides a perfect counter-balance to the other, producing something so quirky and wonderful and dark and heart-warming that it is like no other show I have ever seen.

Every element is in harmony. The casting could not be more spot on. Lee Pace is an inspired choice for the sweet, physically awkward Ned. Anna Friel positively glows off the screen as Chuck, effusing exactly the renewed zest for life needed for a woman who spent most of her life cooped up looking after her shut-in aunts before being killed on the cruise that was her first independent venture into the world. Kristin Chenoweth deserves every bit of her two Emmy Awards for her portrayal of Olive, the diminutive waitress who has long pined for Ned, and the foot and a half difference in height between them provides the perfect opportunity for some sweet and well-played physical comedy. Chi McBride’s sarcastic but good-hearted Emerson Cod grounds the show with a dash of practicality.

Much credit should be given to the costume and visual design, which perfectly complements the vibrant surreality of the show. This is probably the most stylish television programme I have ever seen (although Mad Men offers some stiff competition from a different genre). Accents of 1950s and 60s fashion are mixed with something thoroughly modern in joyfully bright colours that speak of the fairytale undertones whilst lightening the darker elements of the show.

Most of all, the fast-paced and snappy script is both witty and poignant as it brings the characters to life, exploring their unusual issues and unveiling the weekly mystery they must solve.

This show was always going to hit a sweet spot for me. The Ned/Chuck romance with its associated angst is just exactly the sort of thing I like to curl up with, and you guys know how I adore someone with superpowers who is forced to hide his ability. But Pushing Daisies is never weighed down by its angsty elements; it soars with them to new heights, and somehow always leaves you at the end of the episode somehow feeling better about the world. Because even if their world is not our world, wonderful men and women alive in our world dreamt it up.

Moreover, it’s a wonderful programme for race and gender, for the most part because it doesn’t make a fuss of them. Although the two leads are white, it is otherwise unusually racially diverse for an American TV show, Emerson Cod being just one of several black men and women, and although he’s the only non-white show regular, many of the guest stars are Asian or latino. There are also more female regulars than men, which is very unusual, and although there are romantic plotlines, Pushing Daisies passes the Bechdel Test so well it’s not even an issue. Yet this is not a show with any overt feminist themes, it’s just a show that thinks about people in terms of their characters first, not their genders.

It is a true loss to the world that this show was cut short. Its ample awards demonstrate that the brevity of its run is not a reflection of its quality or critical reception. It was just a victim of the writer’s strike. Its first season was cut in half, and it wasn’t able to build on its early success to develop the following that would ensure viewing figures to satisfy the networks in its second season. This is nothing but an act of short-sightedness on the part of executives who dismissed the shows clear potential for future growth on the basis of present figures at a very difficult time. Not that I’m bitter, or anything.

Anyway. If there’s one new TV show you want to try this year, make it this one. Just get it. £6 will get you the whole first season. You could spend more at the cinema getting a headache from a poorly made 3D film. And if you’re worried about the inevitable lack of resolution for a show cut short: Bryan Fuller has been working on a comic to tie up the story.

Besides, Lee Pace is very pretty.

Green Lantern

I really, really like superhero films. I like space. I like people with powers. I like skin-tight jumpsuits. I like secret identity angst. Although I do not think all superhero movies are good, they rarely bore me. X-men 3 was bad, but it didn’t bore me. There are three exceptions to this, two of which I saw in the last week. The first of these was The Death of the Incredible Hulk, which I’d been saving up as a special treat. If you know me well enough to know how much I love The Incredible Hulk, you’ll know what it means when I say that this movie was so bad I can’t even bring myself to review it. The second is Green Lantern, which was probably only enjoyable because I saw it with the wonderful Lee Harris, and the bottle of wine we smuggled in. (The other film is Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Nuff said.)

I’d heard that this film wasn’t 100% made of win, but that had been in the context of speculation about superhero fatigue created by the recent glut. As I’m pretty much never going to get tired of superhero films, I didn’t pay this too much mind. However, although I think the assessment is wrong, the message that this is a dull film that’s just going through the motions is worth heeding. The danger lies in blaming a genre for the faults of a film. The last three films I saw in the cinema were all superhero films. Thor was massive fun, despite my prejudice against Kenneth Branagh as a director. X-men: First Class was one of my favourite superhero films of all time. This film isn’t dull because there are too many superhero films, and superhero films aren’t dull because there are too many of them. This film is just dull.

Green Lantern has all the elements of a superhero film. It has space (not necessary, but often a joy). It has superpowers. It has secret identity angst. It has skin-tight costumes. But it’s just thrown them all together with no sense of style, pacing, or originality. I’ve seen worse scripts. The Spiderman films had god-awful scripts and actors that did little to bend their terrible lines into something less painful. But the script in Green Lantern, if not as actively painful as Spiderman, was boring and obvious.

I wondered if it was just that the Green Lantern story was not for me. I’m not a fan of the comics, and what little I’ve gleaned about them didn’t inspire me. However, Lee is a fan, and if anything I think he was even more disappointed than I was.

The one credit to this movie is that the actors are really working hard with what they’ve been given. Ryan Reynolds (Hal Jordan/Green Lantern) and Blake Lively (Carol Ferris) are to be commended for forcing believability and interest out of an unconvincing romance. Tim Robins is wasted as Senator Hammond. Not in that he was inappropriate for a role – I loved seeing him be a little bit bad, it’s just that he was given absolutely nothing to play with.

The 3D was wasted on this film, also. If you have a choice, do not spend the extra couple of quid, all you will get is a movie that’s blurrier than it needs to be in the action scenes. There are a couple of nice moments, but not enough to warrant the whole film. It doesn’t have to be this way. Thor worked its 3D seamlessly in a way that only enriched its beautiful CGI landscape. I never once had to remove my 3D glasses due to eyestrain when watching Thor, but with Green Lantern they were almost more off than on.

Admittedly, Carol Ferris puts the representation of other female love-interests to shame. She kicks legitimate butt with both her brains and with missiles without crossing any lines of believability. Moreover, this film does pretty well for race (for a Hollywood movie). Not only do we have a black woman as the chief scientist in what is clearly a high-level secret scientific institution, but I have never seen so racially diverse a crowd scene in a Hollywood movie. It is a sad thing for other Hollywood movies that I noticed this. On the other hand, in the green lantern crowd scenes, I only spotted one female green lantern. For some reason, she was the only one whose costume left a large portion of her chest uncovered by green suit, revealing most of her ample alien bosoms. Similarly, Dr Amanda Waller (Angela Bassett) may be intellectually at the top of the game, but for some bizarre reason she tends to wander round the lab in four-inch heels and a tiny lab-coat dress. Nothing wrong with sexy female scientists, I actually know several, but they manage to look much sexier than this without dressing so impractically at work.

The real thing that drags this film down, though, is the pacing. We spend far, far too long on the back story of the Green Lanterns, and then on Hal’s training. The basic story is actually OK, and Hal’s initially repulsive character really turns around by the end of the film. But we take far too long to get there. I imagine I’m meant to be rooting for Hal as he stabs his friend in the back and selfishly ruins his company’s chances by showing off. But I’m not. He deserves to be fired. You can pull off the reckless rogue, but you have to really work it, and Hal Jordan is no Han Solo – not in this film, anyway. Once the character actually starts to arc, he does grow on you, but by that point you’ve already spent 40 minutes thinking he’s a dick. If there were something else in the film to provide a hook, it would be OK, but it’s formulaic is as formulaic does.

I don’t especially like writing negative reviews. It isn’t so much that I loathed this film with a fiery passion. I have seen worse films. I do not hate this movie. I was simply bored by it. I rarely feel like I wish I could have the time back I spent watching a movie, and in this case I had a fun night out with a mate, so I don’t regret that. I’m just saying that if you want to have a fun night out with a mate, there are better films on at the moment you could go and see.

X-Men: First Class

Except for the exceptions, this movie is exceptional. If there’s one superhero movie you should make the time to see this year, it’s this one. I haven’t decided yet whether to regard it as my favourite superhero movie of all time (there’s some stiff competition, and I do have some reservations), but it’s pretty damn good. I know in some parts of the internet it’s considered sacrilege to say this, but it’s better than Iron Man.

So, that’s some heavy praise. What was so good? Well, for starters, it is expertly cast. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender are spot on for the younger versions of Charles Xavier (Professor X) and Erik Lensherr (Magneto). Jennifer Lawrence as the young Raven (Mystique) was also charmingly appropriate, both as an actor, and as a match for a younger version of Rebecca Romijn. Not to mention that January Jones was a true pleasure as Emma Frost – nice to see her in a more forceful role, as a contrast to her interesting, yet fragile beauty in Mad Men. But the real show stealer for impeccable casting was Kevin Bacon, as the ageless Sebastian Shaw. Given the old ‘six degrees of Kevin Bacon’ game inspired by his ubiquitous presence in films of the 90s, Bacon has been oddly absent from our screens in recent years. This was a wonderful role for him as a come back, especially as he still looks like he might have walked in right off the set of Tremors.

In addition to the casting, the script was simply excellent. Funny, understatedly sad with foreshadowing, and thrummingly charged in all the right places. Truly, the trailers do not do this film justice (and I thought the trailers were 100% squee-worthy). In particular, the quiet, not-meant-to-be relationship between Raven and Hank McCoy (Beast) was beautifully played.

This film was swinging with all the style and opulence of a 60s spy film, but also managed to capture the youthful exuberance and folly of a group of young people thrust together and discovering community in their difference.

So, what are the exceptions? [Spoiler alert] Most striking is the scene where Shaw’s Evil Mutants have invaded the compound where Our Heroes are getting to know each other, slaying dozens of men in front of the shocked eyes of the young mutants, and then asking the teenagers to join them. Who goes over to the dark side? The latino female sex worker. Which of the mutants dies senselessly in a completely unnecessary manner? The black one. In an otherwise brilliant piece of cinema, there’s really no excuse for such an outdated message that black men are expendable and women who have sex are evil. Overall, there’s an unusually high balance of men to women in this film, but as Aliette de Bodard pointed out on her Twitter feed (with one notable exception) they’re all evil. And even the otherwise commendable character of Moira McTaggart (played by Rose Byrne) gratuitously gets her kit off. Not to mention the ridiculous moment when Emma Frost’s otherwise impermeable diamond skin is apparently vulnerable to brass when she’s being tied up against a bed. These are not awesome messages, yo.

Of course, all of this is par for the course for a Hollywood movie, it’s just a shame when a fun, but otherwise lesser, movie like Thor recently did so much better so easily for female representation and discussion of race issues (even if the plot mostly centred about the woes of gods who presented as white males for most of the movie).

But I don’t want to dwell on that. Despite these objections, I still think this movie is 95% awesome, and one of the top superhero films ever made. Never have powers been used so well or effects been so good. Rarely have scripts been so finely crafted.

See this film. You will enjoy it.

P.S. There’s nothing after the credits – just FYI.