alex_beecroft

I guess the big news is the new Thor trailer

To which my major reaction is What the hell have they done to Malekith? This is what Malekith looks like in the comics

and this is what he looks like in the trailer

Why? Are they afraid we won’t know he’s evil unless he’s ugly? Concerned they’ll end up with another Loki on their hands with everyone fangirling the wrong bloke? If so, they should put some thought into making Thor himself more interesting, because I generally don’t end up on the side of the villains unless I’ve already dismissed the heroes as not being worth my while.

Which, you know… God, Thor, could you be any more offputting? “Hello Jane, you haven’t seen me for years, you’re coming with me to Asgard and I’m not even going to ask if now is a good time.” “Hello brother, I despise you, come and help me save all the things I love, and when you try to turn the situation to your own advantage, I will kill you.”

I always used to derive the only pleasure I ever got from James Bond films (of the classic Roger Moore era) by hoping that this time the villain would give him the kicking he so richly deserved. It’s pretty much the same for Thor, I live in hope that one day Loki will really show him what humilation means – because the three days he spent with Jane in film 1 was not it.

Thor represents privilege piled upon privilege – white, male, warrior, prince, hero, god. For me, having been born a second class citizen by virtue of my sex, Loki’s struggle to get someone to take him seriously despite being born wrong is much more easily empathized with. There is a vicarious delight in watching him not let the bastards grind him down.

On a happier fandom note, I managed to finally catch two shows I hadn’t managed to see when they were first out – Stargate: Universe, and Once Upon a Time.

I’m surprising myself by loving Stargate Universe. I was on the verge of never watching it again after the first episode I saw (which was the one in which they have to find lime to renew the air-purifiers), but something kept me hooked. I liked the fact that the entire plot of this episode involved such a non-glamourous but vital task. It was refreshingly realistic for space opera. Plus I had an argument with DH over whether Dr. Rush, the rebarbative scientist, was going to end up as a bad guy or not. He was on the side of ‘Rush is obviously going to turn out evil.’ And I was on the side of ‘Nah, people will realize that his apparent cold heartedness is actually only a concern for the big picture, and he and emotion-driven military leader Young will end up working together like Spock and Kirk.’

So far it seems that we were both wrong, which I think is marvelous. Rush and Young have both turned out to be morally ambiguous ruthless gits, and I am very much enjoying the Rush and Young show.

I can’t quite see what all those other people are doing on board, mind you. I suppose there’s Chloe, the damsel in distress, Eli the author self-insert (plump geek boy saves the day on a regular basis?). There’s TJ, the potential love interest for Young and… and there are some other people, who I’m hoping will become relevant later.

I feel bad for liking a show where there aren’t any main female characters at all, and the real interest of the thing is watching the power struggle between the man of science and the military man. But it’s done so well, and I care about both of them so much that I can’t really mind. (Seriously, Thor, you need some nuance, like these two.)

Once Upon a Time, I’ve only watched one episode of this, and while it was pleasant and surprising to watch a questing party comprised entirely of women set out to battle a female villain, what was with the relentless focus on family? The whole “OMG, I’m barren, it’s the worst thing in the world. I’m so ashamed, I can’t tell anyone.” “Never mind, we can fix it by magic if I, an older and therefore expendable woman, sacrifice myself for the purpose.” “Huzzah, now my life is worthwhile!” really bugged me. I felt embarrassed and apologetic on behalf of women everywhere who either can’t have or don’t want children.

And you know, it would be really nice if some of this plethora of female characters was interested in something other than their family. So far only the evil queen is interested in anything outside her home, and she’s evil… So I don’t think this is quite as progressive as it maybe thinks it is.

At any rate, I won’t be watching again. I’m going back to watch Young and Rush dither over whether to kill each other or not, while trying to get around the fact that a small community of people on a knife edge of survival would really be much better served if they learned to work together.

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft - Author of Gay Historical and Fantasy Fiction.

This is not a review of the new Spiderman film because I don’t have an awful lot to say about it. I went to see it yesterday with the kids, and we all enjoyed it (verging on ‘enjoyed it very much’.)

I certainly enjoyed it more on the whole than The Avengers. That is, while I loved The Avengers immoderately for the first three quarters, I came out of it bitterly disappointed in the end. Partly I think this was because there had been enough time spent on the characterisation in Spiderman for me to really care about what happened to the characters. And a 17 year old can get away with being emotionally constipated and unable to express himself far better than the more grown up heroes. Also because the end of the film made sense in the context of the rest of it. The build up was good, the climax fitted it, and the whole thing reinforced the film’s theme of there being something noble in everyone, which is a theme that I like to see.

What I like about Spidey (as opposed to Batman) is that he’s light on the angst and the manpain. Batman, frankly, takes itself far too seriously. I don’t want my superhero films to be ‘realistic’ – where ‘realistic’ means ‘believes that everything is shit.’ I want my superhero films to defy that, to dare to have hope. This version of Spiderman’s origin story didn’t quite escape the canon angst, but at least there were some moments early on that made me laugh, and a genuinely heartwarming moment later (with the cranes) that made me think ‘yes, humanity is worth saving, so there!’

I didn’t come out with a buzz and an urge to write fanfic, which is my test for a top quality film, but I did enjoy it more than most things I’ve watched recently. Hm, I think for me that makes it good but not great.

Do I want to go and see The Dark Knight Rises? I’m not sure. Because of the ‘realism,’ Batman is often too nasty for me. I like Nolan, I like Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon Levitt, but I don’t like the nihilism. I don’t think it’s really realistic at all, though like all ideas it forms human reality around it. I may pass and watch it on DVD later.

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft - Author of Gay Historical and Fantasy Fiction.

What a great year it’s been so far for films I wanted to see!  I can’t remember another year like it.  But perhaps I’m getting jaded as a result, because I went into X-Men: First Class with high hopes and found it very … meh.

Part of this may be that I’m still obsessing over my newly kindled Thor fannishness.  It’s funny, I could see that First Class was a better film than Thor – it had character arcs and important issues and slicker special effects and better fight scenes.  But, deary me, it was so very worthy with its earnest examination of social and self-acceptance issues that it seemed to forget to have any fun.

In that, I’m sure it’s quite realistic for a super-hero film, and maybe the realism is why I didn’t like it very much. 

It was nice to see some new mutants, and Banshee’s appearance caused me to lose a 5p bet I’d had with my daughter a couple of years ago.  (I maintained that you will never see any red-headed heroes, red hair usually being reserved for villains.)  Banshee wasn’t exactly the hero of the film, and his hair was more auburn than ginger, but it was close enough.  It still doesn’t count as a great step forward for inclusivity, though, when set beside the fact that the one black character was there to be canon-fodder, and all the female mutants were on the ‘wrong’ side.  (You can see why they would be, mind you.  That’s the side I’d have chosen too in the circumstances.)

The scene with Magneto pulling the submarine out of the water would have been awesome if it had come before the scenes of Magneto doing even more awesome things in the last two pictures.  I did enjoy the final showdown, and thought it was cool that Xavier got to share in that death (nice to see his telepathy has its downsides too.)  I also thought “you killed my mother!” made a nice change – so many heroes are fixated on their fathers to the point where you wonder if they had a second parent at all.

But setting it in the 60s and being faithful to a certain amount of the skeevy sexism of the period meant that quite a lot of it left a bad taste in my mouth.  I remember what that was like, and it was no fun the first time.

Magneto pretty much stole the show, and Xavier came across as such a self-centred dimbo that I wasn’t really able to feel the central ethical tug of the story at all.  Someone more eloquent and likeable should have been on the “humans are not necessarily our enemies” side, particularly if all the evidence of the film was going to be weighed against them.  Perhaps the film makers thought that was obvious, but it wasn’t obvious enough for me, given that every character on the other side had perfectly good reasons to be there.  Someone who was slightly less oblivious of society’s dark side than Charles would have been a better choice for the mouthpiece of the ‘right’ side.  As it was, he failed to convince me to cheer for him – which meant I didn’t enjoy his victory as much as I should have.

So yeah, this is not much of a review because I can’t find much enthusiasm for the film.  I don’t really want realistic politics from my gosh-wow, “isn’t it fun to blow things up in awesome ways” escapist super-hero films.  At least, not this much of it. 

I guess I also feel that there are things too terrible to be used – or at least used like this – as melodramatic backstory to the wish-fulfilment fantasy of being gifted with cool powers that set you outside the normal run of humanity, and the holocaust is one of them.  I don’t know why I feel like that with this film, and didn’t with Magneto’s backstory in the previous ones, but perhaps it’s because those terrible things are that much closer in this one and cast a denser shadow as a result.  Or perhaps it’s because the social outcast/super-hero metaphor breaks down for me when it’s looked at as closely as this – none of these super-powers leave you exactly powerless in the face of human evil, after all.

I went to see The Eagle last night.  I’m fairly certain that I read the book in my youth, but it must have been at least 30 years ago, and the only thing that struck me as familiar in the film was “Roman discovers that his slave is actually a very important person & undergoes a kind of role reversal.”  I didn’t remember the book as having so many fight scenes in it.  It’s all very clouded but I thought it was mostly travelling and conversation – quite tense conversation, true, but not full out warfare.

I’m also uncertain as to whether it was my own imagination that made me expect torcs and round-houses and more of an Asterix the Gaul look for the Celts than a Last of the Mohicans.