Behold! My Belated Official First Post of 2017!!

I, uh, watched a lot of movies last year. SO for my first official post of 2017, I’m doing a MASSIVE breakdown of the stuff I actually caught in theaters. Also, as you may have noticed, I have moved to DreamWidth! I’m still working on getting all the photos ported over here, so anything that links to Glitter n Gore is going to the LJ account until I get it fixed. Bear with me; I’ll make it work eventually. Meanwhile--movies! Let’s talk about those.

Cross-posted to rhoda_rants.

( Capsule reviews below! )

What were some of YOUR favorite movie experiences from 2016?

Just got back! Trailer!

First things first: This is not a prequel. I thought it was a prequel. It starts prior to Snow White and the Huntsman, when Chris Hemsworth's character (who now has a name--it's Eric!) first gets taken by Queen Freya (Emily Blunt's Ice Queen is called Freya) to train in her army. But then it skips forward like 7 years and it's after Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron's Evil Queen from the first movie) has been defeated by Snow White (Kristen Stewart was not invited back), and supposedly everything is okay now. Until it isn't.

Really it's an expansion of the first movie, an opportunity to explore Eric's relationship with his first love, Sara (Jessica Chastain's definitely-not-inspired-by-Katniss ace archer), and how that all went down before Ravenna's minions picked him up in a tavern all depressed and mopey. It brings in new characters like Freya and Sara who are both a joy to watch, and whose characters arcs are more similar than they realize. The story is a basic quest adventure, with the quest object (the mirror) being the Sealed Evil In a Can variety, and I did enjoy seeing it come into play in the end. But I didn't love it as much as I wanted to. I have two main talking points here. Just two.

( Spoilers here. )

*All GIFs via Giphy.

So guys! There's a new Star Wars movie coming out. As you may have noticed, I'm neglecting this blog badly. Ahem. But the reason is I've been running three--count 'em, three--separate review marathon series elseweb, and had to let something go. Anyway, we're approaching game time for The Force Awakens (yes, I have my tickets already OF COURSE), and I recently realized I have seen more movies this year than I have collectively in the past five--half of them in theaters. Why is that? Are movies especially awesome this year for some reason? Is there more big-budget, explodey-things fare that demands to be seen on the big screen? Have I found a larger number of real-life people who aren't my mom to go to movies with, instead of waiting for the DVD like I usually do?

A bit of all those things, but what I want to talk about today is this: Today's heroes are a little different from the heroes I grew up with. They're more flawed, more relateable, and more diverse. Funny thing, because most of the people playing heroes onscreen right now? Grew up at the exact same time I did.

Disclaimer:
I'm going to allow SPOILERS for The Force Awakens and all other films mentioned in the comments, and I won't be marking them because that tag is freaking impossible. But there will be none in the post itself.

( Read more. . . )

Because one retrospective at a time just isn't enough, I'm also taking a look at the Disney Princess movies. ALL the Disney Princess movies, in chronological order, over an undisclosed period of time. I've also started posting reviews for some of the Star Wars books over at the library, so the first of those is here. I want this journal to be more active and do at least two or three posts a month. I know that's not super-active, but I'm learning.

Anyway!

The reason I'm doing the Disney Princess thing is I want to take a closer look at some of the criticisms and assumptions I've seen floating around out there about what sort of fantasy role models and heroes we have for young girls. So the obvious choice is to look at the fantasy role models I had as a young girl, and what they look like to me now that I'm older. My main questions/talking points are: Who is the main character and what values do they embody? & Is romance/marriage the driving plot or the goal?

Since this is the first post in the retrospective, I'm starting at the beginning.

Q: What's black and white and red all over?

A: Snow White. Also Goth chicks. Surprisingly, these two things aren't unrelated.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first of the Disney Princesses, and the first feature-length animated film ever made. This isn't one of the movies I watched over and over as a kid, and the parts I remembered before rewatching it mostly involved the Queen and how frighteningly relentless she is. I'm glad the live action reboot didn't forget that, and managed to make the Queen even more awesome. Snow White, on the other hand, is both the least interesting character and the most fascinating archetype of all the Princesses. Today, I'm focusing on how we went from this:



To this:



( I want...my prince to come. )

Next time: Cinderella (1950)

So hey, look at that, it's not March anymore! And it's DEFINITELY not February anymore. What happened? I'll tell you: I didn't finish my retrospective. Surprise! I'll tell you what else though: I kinda felt like I was biting off more than I could chew, trying to cover ten years in that time span. So I'm going to leave the Box Office Retrospective at 2010 for now, and come back with the next five years for the next Women In Horror / Women's History Month in 2016. Sound good? Good.

That in mind, I'd like to return to my Film of the Book series soon, since I finally got a chance to see Gone Girl and it's every bit as brilliant as you've heard. I also saw both The Maze Runner and Seventh Son, which were varying degrees of ridiculous and try-too-hard, but surprisingly enjoyable despite--or perhaps because of--those things. I'll expand on that later.

But first, I need to talk about something more important to me than box office numbers, badass women in horror movies, or even vampires.

I need to talk about Star Wars.

( Read more... )

Credit for this blog idea is due to fellow AW member Cyia, who made the following post last week: "Just an observation, but looking at the differences in the ages of the characters in the books [of A Song of Ice and Fire] compared to their portrayals on screen, all of the main favored characters, with the possible exception of Tyrion [. . .] would have made this one of, if not the most popular YA series ever written. The POV would just have to shift a bit. Even the biggest baddie, in the form of a psycho boy king, would have been YA territory."

Have to say, I've never thought of it that way before. But she makes a fascinating point: A Song of Ice and Fire is more densely populated with teen characters--properly defined, developed, plot-driving characters, not just stereotypes and fillers--than most of the actual category YA books I've read. Seriously.

It's hard to remember this if you come to the series through the show, because so many of the characters were aged up; HBO has fewer limitations than network television about what it can and can't show, but there are Rules about minor actors and the sorts of scenes they can legally participate in. In the books, an overwhelming majority of the POV characters--Daenerys Targaryen, Jon Snow, Theon Greyjoy, Samwell Tarly, Arya, Bran and Sansa Stark--are all under 18. That's not even counting secondary characters who don't have POV chapters but still play major roles, like Robb Stark, Joffrey Baratheon, Ygritte, the Reeds, and Margaery Tyrell, who are all teenagers. Hell, even Jaime Lannister, who is technically an adult when we meet him, spends a big chunk of his narrations in flashbacks from when he first became a knight, at age fifteen.

As it happens, roughly the same time Cyia brought this up, an article started making the rounds from Slate about how grown-ups who read YA should be ashamed of themselves because: "There’s room for pleasure, escapism, juicy plots, and satisfying endings on the shelves of the serious reader. [. . . ] But if they are substituting maudlin teen dramas for the complexity of great adult literature, then they are missing something." (Full article here.)



Back to this again, are we?

So, every few months or so an article like this surfaces to scold the general populace for enjoying things that someone's decided are unworthy of being enjoyed. I still don't know why this is important. Since the Slate article has already been roundly debunked by a number of bloggers much more prolific than me, I don't even have to go there.

What I do want to ask is this: What is YA? The trouble with this question is, when you start trying to work out what YA is, you find it's a lot easier to dig up false assumptions about what YA isn't. There seem to be a lot of rules and expectations that actual YA books pretty much ignore, such as whether or not you can have gruesome violence, detailed sex scenes, foul language, etc., etc., etc. Look, either a given story calls for that kind of thing, or it doesn't, and all you need to do is pick up a handful of real live books in any category to discount any of those elements as qualifiers. Still, there are a few elements some say are required in YA that I find more compelling. But not entirely convincing.

( Read more. . . )

*Let's leave Battle Royale out of this for now--it's a great piece of work, but reached a much narrower audience, and didn't spark the global phenomenon that The Hunger Games did.

(Cross-posted to rhoda_rants.)

First, a bit of background:

When I was little, I had a healthy-sized collection of My Little Ponies. Still do--let's be honest. One particular collection, the Sparkle Ponies, was very special to me because Mom used them as rewards when I did well in school. One at a time, she put each of the ponies on top of the refrigerator, and if I had good grades and good comments from my teachers at the end of the week, she'd take that week's pony down and give it to me. I loved those Sparkle Ponies not just because I'd earned them, but because they were space ponies, and that was awesome. (In retrospect, I don't know if they were actually from space, but that's what I decided. Because space ponies are awesome.)

I also had the castle with the working drawbridge, and I still remember how the heirarchy was ranked in my collection. When I turned . . . 8, I think? I had a pony-themed birthday party with official My Little Pony paper plates and cake and party favors, and real live ponies for me and the rest of the kids to ride in the park.

I never watched the show that was on at the time. I think I tried to once or twice, but I just got bored. I was always more interested in shows like Thundercats and later Inspector Gadget; when it came to the Ponies, I prefered to make up my own adventures in the privacy of my bedroom.

Fast-forward to mid-April-ish of this year, when I started to watch the rebooted My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. This newer incarnation of the show is the brainchild of Lauren Faust, formerly of The Powerpuff Girls and Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends. I became interested based on the sheer amount of buzz the show was getting on the Internet, and lo and behold, I was hooked in one episode flat. Friendship is Magic, in my opinion (and the opinions of countless others) is a vast improvement over the previous incarnation of the franchise due to its intelligent script writing, memorable cast of characters and streamlined animation, and all those things contributed to its success and popularity.

However, that's not what so remarkable about it. I'm talking, of course, about the Bronies.

( Read more here... )

Last book read: Shine, Shine, Shine, by Lydia Netzer
Currently on: American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis

I've been staring at this screen for close to two hours, wondering what I should say to commemorate a loss such as this. And I'm still staring. So I'm going to tell you a story:

Today, for no particular reason I can put my finger on, I thought back to a nightmare I had about a year ago, about the world ending. In the dream, I escaped, along with a handful of others, but we watched the world burning and there was nothing any of us could do to stop it. We were alive, but displaced and homeless with nothing but the clothes on our backs.

That was the dream.

I don't know why I was thinking about it today, but I wondered what I would do to cope once the shock and grief faded. In the end, I decided I'd do what I've always done: write everything down, everything I could remember, relentlessly and completely so it wouldn't be lost. I would keep the world as I knew it alive through stories.

When I first read Farhenheit 451, I knew going in one of the major themes was censorship and book-banning. But the thing that struck me the most wasn't the stifling of the written word. It was the way the characters ultimately discovered how to keep the great stories alive even after every book was turned to ash: they remembered them. Every word, by heart. The message that I took from that book was not that it's wrong to destroy stories, but that stories by their very nature cannot be destroyed. The medium for passing them on might change, but the stories themselves last.

I thought about all that today, and then I came home from work to find out the author who had put that idea into the world had left it. I can't help but wonder if the cosmos were trying to send me a message, seeing as I had Bradbury and his stories in my thoughts before ever hearing the news of his passing. Believe what you want about that, but know this first and foremost: nothing is ever really lost. As long as you can read stories, and pass them on, and remember them, they can and will last. And so will the people who gave them to us.

Firstly, no, I'm not cheating on my resolution (yet). I checked out Alison Goodman's Eon from the library late in December, and got around to finishing it only a week ago. (I am a slow reader.)

Secondly, the January pick for the YA Floating Diversity Book Club is up: I'm doing Libyrinth. And I'll be reviewing that, and the December pick sometime later. (Yes, a very slow reader.)

So, Eon is the story of the Dragoneyes--young men trained from an early age to commune with the spirit dragons of an alternate universe Asia, and thus control things like weather, the health of the emperor, crops prospering, and all kinds of good things. There's one dragon for each of the animals in the Chinese zodiac (although it's not called that in this universe), except one, the Mirror dragon (associated with the dragon zodiac), which has disappeared for centuries. And then Eon, a young apprentice Dragoneye with a lame hip and the unprecedented ability to see all twelve dragons without any prior training, comes to the ceremony that selects the Rat Dragoneye for that season, and the Mirror Dragon resurfaces and chooses Eon as its Dragoneye.

The catch is that Eon is actually Eona, not a young boy but a girl, and women are forbidden from using dragon magic--not only forbidden, but it's assumed that women have no power, so her training as a Dragoneye is not only prohibited but laughable.

This setup is pretty basic, actually, and I was expecting a good swashbuckling adventure with some high-minded preaching maybe about gender roles. However, what's amazing about this book is that it captures perfectly what it feels like to go through life closeted, to stifle your true identity so completely that you forget who you are and how to reconcile your role in life with what might happen to you if your secrets are discovered.

It's remarkably well-written to start with, so I knew by the first page that I was in for something more interesting and original than what I expected. Eon/Eona is an active protagonist, forced to grow up quickly make her own choices early on, and her growth and maturity were both believable and painful to witness.

She also has a close friend and ally in a character named Lady Dela, a transgendered female, who is described as having "the body of a man, but the spirit of a woman"--perhaps the most poetic and elegant description of a transgendered person I've ever seen. Goodman doesn't shy away from the malicious hazing this character has to endure either--Lady Dela has scars from where someone carved the character for "demon" into her skin, and she travels with a bodyguard to keep from being attacked. Also, Lady Dela is consistently referred to as "she," never casting any doubt on her feminine nature.

There is plenty of adventure here--mystery and hidden conspiracies, political intrigue handled in a way that stays interesting and holds the reader captivated, and Eona's budding friendship with the Prince which may turn into something more in the sequel, I'm not sure, but even if that's the case it's, again, handled in such a way that it comes off beautifully. But it's also a coming-of-age story about gender identity and knowing one's true self. Eona goes through an internal struggle on how "female" she really is, whether this masquerade is becoming part of her identity or whether she is just denying the female part of her nature for her own safety. The author brings up with deft subtlety the difference between conforming to prescribed gender roles in whatever society you're in, and claiming whatever gender you are as part of your being.

I don't know that this is really a metaphor for the closeted teenager, but boy does it have a lot of the same feeling behind it. That itch to confide in someone is there, coupled with fear that she might be exiled or even killed just for being what she is, and also the doubt about whether her friends will ever trust her again once they know she's kept such a big secret from them.

My looming TBR pile is the only thing stopping me from reading the sequel right now, but I highly recommend this book regardless.

I mentioned this book briefly, in my rant about YA a few posts back. Several things prompted me to read it myself--curiosity, plain and simple; my bizarre liking for books that make me angry; my previously mentioned and still relevant belief that if you're going to scold the teachings of any book, you better read it first to hold your ground in your arguments; and the existence of real life teenagers who flock to dangerous partners against all sense and reason, no matter how hard the people who love them try to talk sense to them. This last one became all too real to me after spending some quality time in the court house, on account of my new job. I won't go detail, but I will say that it made it easier for me to see why some girls might pick up a book like this and, unlike me, be able to see themselves in it.

( Read on... )

Some examples of good YA fiction:

Scott Westerfield's Midnighters and Uglies series.
Catherine Jinks's Evil Genius
Koushun Takami's Battle Royale
John Connelly's The Book of Lost Things
Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book

And a couple more I haven't read yet, but boy do they look interesting:
Brenna Yovanoff's The Replacement
Rick Yancey's Monstrumologist

(Cross-posted to glitter_n_gore.)