Category:

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Guilty Pleasures #1: The Phantom of the Opera (Musical)

8/30/2015

(Click the links to read Favorite Fictional Guilty Pleasure #2, #3, #4, and #5)

If you don't know, Phantom of the Opera, at least the version I’m talking about, is a musical (closer to a light opera by definition) about a mad genius living in and terrorizing the staff of an opera house by pretending to be a ghost (the eponymous Phantom), a chorus girl, Christine, whom he's obsessed with, and said chorus girl's boyfriend, Raoul, who comes to shake up the Phantom's fear-enforced status quo.

I’m not lucky enough to have gone to a stage production of it, so forgive me if my lack of knowledge of the movie adaptation’s liberties starts to show, but I believe it’s a pretty faithful one.

So, how does something that fits into a category as sophisticated-sounding as light opera, something based on a novel from 1910, end up topping the guilty pleasures list? Well...

Why it's guilty:

Oh god, this love triangle. This plot.

*Deep breaths*

Okay, basically, the Phantom's been courting Christine by pretending to be an angel sent by her dead father. Creepy, but it's supposed to be. So far so good. Then Raoul and Christine bump into each other, renewing their childhood friendship and sending it hurtling toward something more. Fine.

The Phantom gets mad, and Christine gets conflicted.

And that's pretty much the sum of Christine's plotline from then on. She's conflicted.

She's conflicted when the Phantom kidnaps her to his subterranean lair, plays music for her, yells at her that she'll never escape, and then changes his mind and kicks her out.

She's conflicted when he starts sabotaging rival performers and killing stage hands to impress her.

She’s clearly conflicted when he tries to kidnap her again, attacking Raoul when he intervenes, because she stops Raoul from killing the Phantom in the ensuing swordfight, exclaiming,

"Not like this!"

…And then, immediately afterward, agrees to act as bait in Raoul's plan to lure the Phantom to his death at the next performance, for the greater good.

Because tricking the Phantom into getting unmasked and gunned down in front of an unsuspecting paying audience is so much more honorable, tasteful and dignified than letting him lose the nice, private, relatively fair duel that the Phantom initiated.

And what exactly is Raoul's brilliant plan that Christine's so okay with?

Put Christine onstage so the Phantom will be sure to show up, and have guys with guns ready for when he's spotted. That's all.

This plan officially makes Raoul the smartest person in this particular universe other than the Phantom himself, because apparently no one else has ever thought of it before. True, it naturally leads to the Phantom using Christine as a human shield and whisking her back to his lair as counter-bait for a final showdown,

But hey, someone had to try it.

Oh, did I mention that the lyrics through all of this have a habit of rhyming the same word with itself? Because they do. And that constant warning to keep your hand at the level of your eyes? If you’re wondering what they’re talking about, it's based on an old French stage convention, but it's tragically wasted by not also being a warning about an eye-gouging booby-trap in the Phantom’s lair!

Why it's a pleasure:

Okay, I can do a little analysis of exactly how this tickles the girliest of the primal lizard parts of my brain.

…Yeah, sorry.

In spite of how far from a good character Christine is in every way, there's something relatable about the unfairness of her position, constantly being used in and blamed for the violence of the male characters she cares about, just because she refuses to validate it in the right ways at the right moments, and some unshakeable appeal in the theme of those attractive but violent male characters having to come to the conclusion that love can’t be won by force.

But there are also much simpler reasons to enjoy Phantom.

This is one of those mood pieces that takes you instantly away to someplace magical, in spite of the frustrating slightness of the plot there, or the fact that the magic isn't real even within that plot.

This has close to everything to do with the music. It just takes a few bars of the overture, and you're in a haunted old timey opera house, and something big is about to go down.

Okay, it's not Mozart, there are some annoying lyrical tics, and there are only a few melodies that get repeated throughout, but this score tells a story better than the story itself does. Every song carries exactly the feeling it's intended to, in such potent concentration that it hardly matters how clumsy the setups are.

The often repeating melodies have been called lazy, but I actually find them more powerful that the more common hit-or-miss variety of so many musical soundtracks.

Phantom's figured out exactly what works, for comedy, despair, drama, thoughtfulness, etc., and it goes straight for the note it wants.

There's a line sung by the opera house administrators that makes me think this is all entirely conscious:

"You'd never get away / with all this in a play / but if it's loudly sung / and in a foreign tongue / it's just the sort of story audiences adore / in fact, a perfect opera."

Minus the foreign tongue, that's exactly the phenomenon at work in Phantom itself. The intensity of the moments of musical feeling overshadowing the flimsy melodrama behind them.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

0 Comments

Fi's Five Favorite Alien-Related Moments in Fiction #4: Starcrossed (DC Animated Universe)

8/10/2014

0 Comments

Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the August countdown of my favorite alien-related moments in fiction, to celebrate the countdown to the release of Splinters, book 1 of The Prospero Chronicles!

(You can read favorite alien related moment #5 here, and check out Matt’s list on the same topic on his blog). On these lists, you'll find a lot of sources of inspiration for The Prospero Chronicles, some major, some minor, and some other alien moments simply too cool or classic to pass up.

Splinters will be available September 23rd (my 25th birthday!), and you can already pre order it...

Here!

Next up is a season finale arc from Justice League.

Comics and their adaptations are admittedly almost too easy a place to look for alien moments, as your average scene involving about five characters will have at least two aliens, and the fact that they're aliens will usually be incidental to whatever's currently going on. Then, occasionally, other less relatable aliens invade, and the slaughter that ensues can be almost too generic.

It's okay! They're only parademons!

For reasons along these lines, Matt's banned DC and Marvel from his list on the same topic this month, but I couldn't resist this one moment, because it's the perfect meeting of traditional alien invasion with aliens as ordinary characters in the DC universe.

****Spoiler Alert****

The Starcrossed plotline is about the army of Thanagar arriving on earth, claiming to be our only hope to defend ourselves against an impending invasion by their enemies. They quickly institute martial law on earth while they do whatever work it is they're doing that they insist is for humanity's protection. Our heroes realize something's wrong.

Okay, pretty basic sinister alien invasion plot, right?

Naturally, we end up finding out that the Thanagarians plan to destroy the earth to create a hyperspace bypass,

Yes, like this, but said in a serious voice.

To give themselves a tactical advantage in their own interplanetary war.

So, we kill the alien bastards, yay earth?

It's a little more complicated than that.

The Thanagarians' arrival also reveals that Shayera Hol, a.k.a Hawkgirl, a founding member of The Justice League, main character since the first season and one of my personal favorites, isn't the lone, lost castaway forever cut off from her home planet that she claims to be. She’s an advance spy who's spent years gathering information on the weaknesses in earth's defenses, including The Justice League, so the Thanagarians are ready to subdue them.

Oh, and in her years on earth, she's begun a relationship with Green Lantern. She was engaged to the Thanagarian general back home.

Awkward.

Hence Starcrossed.

How does that unravel? It turns out that Shayera didn't know the mission she was gathering intelligence for would destroy the earth, and when she finds out, she turns traitor (again), helps the heroes of earth sabotage the bypass, and tells her former people they'd better get started on a new plan to save their own planet.

...Yay earth?

In the course of trying to do the right thing, Shayera loses the trust of both the planets (and both the men) she loved, resigns in disgrace from The Justice League, and ends the season leaving to get as far from the public eye as she can.

And we haven't gotten to the big moment that officially takes this spot on the list.

As disgraced main characters usually do, Shayera does eventually return to the main cast, and as main characters' exes do on occasion, her now ex-fiance eventually makes a reappearance to inform her that Thanagar lost its war. Countless millions of her own people are dead because she wouldn't go through with letting earth be destroyed.

Yeah, I couldn't find a screencap of this moment.

Right there, in the unsoftened consequences of Shayera's ultimate no-win situation, is the best meeting I've ever seen between sinister alien invasion and two-sides-to-every-story. The complexity of the storyline as a take on alien invasions is what wins it this spot.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

0 Comments

Fi's Five Favorite Uses of Silence in Fiction #1: "Sick" (The Walking Dead)

3/30/2014

2 Comments

(Click the links to read Favorite Use of Silence in Fiction #2, #3, #4, and #5)

****Seasons 1-3 Spoiler Alert****

This moment in the top spot is a quick and simple one, but it's one of the best demonstrations I've ever seen of the power of what goes unsaid.

It's season 3, episode 2, and the survivors have recently come to the prison that will be the iconic home base of this season and the next.

Much of the first two seasons revolved around the love triangle between Lori, Rick, and Shane. If you haven't seen it or read the comics, and you pushed past that spoiler alert anyway, here are the basics:

Rick and Lori are married with a son, Carl. When the apocalypse came, Rick was comatose in the hospital (28 Days Later beat the comic version to this by less than a year).

Shane and Rick were cops, partners, and best friends. Shane convinced Lori that Rick was dead so she'd go with him to one of the survivor camps. They had an affair, Rick woke up and came to join them at the camp, Lori went back to him, kicked Shane out of her life for lying to her, found out she was pregnant, tried to pass the baby off as Rick's at first, but eventually came clean.

Yes, The Walking Dead is an evening soap with zombies. You hadn’t noticed?

Anyway, when Rick takes Lori and the leadership of the group away from Shane, he kinda goes crazy.

Kinda really crazy.

Lori gets worried for her family and warns Rick that Shane's getting dangerous, and eventually (in the TV version this moment comes from) Rick has to kill him.

So Rick's got Lori, but she's pregnant with what's probably the baby of the former best friend he just had to kill, and Lori's got Rick and comparative safety for her kids, but Rick's too busy angsting about the rest of that scenario to be any good to her.

It's a pyrrhic victory for both of them, and it doesn't look like they're going to pull through it together.

Now, I'm not the biggest fan of Lori. She mostly serves as a triangle point and a paranoid, disapproving parental figure. She’s whatever Rick's storyline needs her to be and no more.

For that matter, I'm not the biggest fan of early seasons Rick, either. He's the square-jawed hero we're supposed to love and follow, but who's wrong and/or unreasonable quite a bit more often than necessary to keep things interesting.

This is an odd trend of speculative evening soaps.

After all we've been through with the two of them, though, it's hard not to be invested in their marriage whether we like it or not.

In this episode, they've been following their separate plotlines, hardly having spoken to each other for weeks. Rick's been negotiating with the existing residents of the prison and clearing zombies out of more living space. Being a pregnant mom, Lori's been staying with the kids and the sick and injured, and ended up having to save Herschel with CPR.

Finally, at the end of the episode, Rick and Lori are standing in a chain link enclosed walkway, overlooking the horde of zombies outside the fence, tentatively beginning to tiptoe toward the massive rift between them.

Lori jokes, "What are we going to do, hire lawyers and divide up our assets?"

Rick reaches toward her (with difficulty, they're more than an arm's length apart), and has the opportunity to say that he doesn't wish that were still possible.

We think this might be it, they're finally going to work this out, and then he says the nicest thing he can bring himself to, which is just about the coldest, most distant praise imaginable.

"Everyone really appreciates what you did today."

That's all. The words of a dutiful leader, not a romantic partner. The episode ends on the silence and distance between where they stand.

Oh, and the season 3 spoiling part: this is the last time Rick sees Lori alive.

It's in the writing, the acting, and the direction, and it all adds up to a perfect less-is-more gut punch.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

2 Comments

Fi's Five Favorite Uses of Silence in Fiction #2: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt. 1

3/26/2014

0 Comments

(Click the links to read Favorite Use of Silence in Fiction #3, #4, and #5)

This is a moment from the first Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows movie not found in the book, again demonstrating the more obviously dramatic uses of silence possible onscreen, and it's another moment I nearly cut from this list at the last minute due to unforeseen circumstances, another moment I kept anyway because I love it that much.

In the case of this moment, those unforeseen circumstances would be J.K. Rowling's recent revelation that she thinks putting Ron and Hermione together was a mistake.

I didn't even want to touch that bombshell when it was dropped. I wanted nothing to do with it. But as a Harry Potter fan and blogger of YA literary criticism and analysis, I knew I'd have to make my statement on the matter sooner or later, and I can't talk about this moment without clearing the elephant out of the room, so here goes.

I've championed you nearly my whole life, Ms. Rowling. I've always been on your side. You earned your fortune. You gave the world something priceless. There's nothing insidious or corrupting about this incredible story that taught a generation the joy of books.

You want to say Hogwarts has a thousand students even though that doesn't come close to adding up, fine. Dumbledore's gay? Sure, what of it? And even though I'm a Heron shipper (that is the way you were leading us, after all), if you'd decided to make a complete turnaround by the last book and found a way to end things in the Harmonian camp, I'd like to think I could have sucked it up and accepted that.

But with this years-late backpedaling, you are officially George Lucas levels of mad with power, and I'm disappointed.

There, I said it.

Yeah, I'm taking this way too personally. You bet I am. It's hard not to, as someone who grew up more in the Harry Potter world than the real one, and as someone who's in many ways a Hermione who married a Ron.

It bothers me that Ron has never gotten the respect he deserves. It bothers me that people confuse being funny with being a joke. It bothers me that no one remembers things like "If you want to kill Harry, you'll have to kill us too," (yes, that was Ron in the book) because it's easier to remember him vomiting slugs instead.

Also, this happened to him in Hermione’s defense, if anyone cares to recall

Yes, Ron has a lot of demons to conquer and easily the most growing up to do of the three of them.

That's what we call a character arc, folks.

He's had a big one and earned his happy ending.

Oh, and it also bothers me more than a bit that everyone assumes that the three of them had to come to a love triangle at all in the end, because of course no two straight people of the opposite sex and same generation who aren't related are ever allowed to have a meaningful relationship that isn't about sex.

*phew*

Well, with all that said, this is a moment from the movie universe that actually Hollywood-izes the HRH relationship a little and takes it closer to triangle territory but does it so subtly and tastefully that I actually really love it.

This happens right after the only serious thing Ron does that anyone ever seems to remember, when the locket horcrux's evil influence wears its way into his head, the three of them have a fight, and he walks out on Harry and Hermione in the middle of their quest to destroy it.

Harry and Hermione are devastated, no closer than ever to destroying the horcruxes and defeating Voldemort, and left with only the two of them to split the locket's power between.

They've been keeping the radio on around the clock to listen to the death toll from the Death Eaters' rampage, hoping not to hear names they know.

They’re about as low as they could possibly be, when a song comes on.

Harry takes the locket from Hermione, puts it aside for the moment, and coaxes her into a dance.

It's not the kind of dance you get between a hero and heroine in the kind of movie where dancing is what clinches a romance, with the sweeping music and camera angles.

They’re stumbling, twirling each other around and laughing, without hiding the fact that she's a shade taller than he is, all to this soft, staticky, half melancholy broadcast.

And when it's over, there comes the silence.

Just a few seconds of it, while reality sinks back in for both of them, before they return to their opposite sides of the tent.

There are a lot of things that could have been put in that silence. The triangle could have been forced with an almost-kiss, or diffused with a "thanks, I needed that," but we don't get either of those things.

The scene brings out the very deep love between the two of them, built over the course of nearly seven years and countless shared life-and-death experiences, without explaining, defining, or apologizing for it. It just is, and this moment is just a moment, a stolen reprieve that ends, and I think it's beautiful.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

0 Comments

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional (Mostly Insane) Romantic Gestures #5: The Merchant of Venice (The Trial)

2/1/2014

0 Comments

Happy February! Last year, in this month of romance, I wrote my first blog countdown, honoring my favorite fictional couples. You can read it here, if you'll pardon the lack of pictures and general roughness.

This year I'm devoting February to my favorite fictional romantic gestures. Many of these are sweet, and many are downright crazy. Plenty are both.

(Disclaimer: I've actually never seen Say Anything, so don't hold your breath for the big boom box moment while counting down my far stranger selections.)

In the number five spot, we've got inarguably the strangest entry of all, the trial from Merchant of Venice.

If you haven't read or seen it, here's how it goes:

Bassanio wants to marry Portia, an heiress whose dead father has read too many fairytales and decreed that she can only marry a man who correctly guesses one of three caskets. Bassanio borrows money from his "best friend," Antonio,

Kinda like how these two are best friends.

...so he can take his turn guessing. Antonio's money is all tied up in some ships out at sea, but he takes out a loan for Bassanio, with a pound of his own flesh as collateral. Oh, and he takes this loan from Shylock, someone he's screwed over in the past and who he already knows hates his guts.

And that isn't even the romantic gesture that puts this play on the list.

Bassanio seems like the least dickish of Portia's suitors, so she and her servants rig the game for him, and they get married. Then Antonio gets word he's lost his money at sea, and Shylock's coming to collect.

Portia catches on pretty quickly to what she's gotten herself into and decides to do the nice thing and bail Antonio out, but it's too late, Shylock won't take the late money and demands his legal right to cut his pound of flesh out of Antonio’s chest.

Now, this is where a normal person says, "Sorry, I tried, and by the way, when were you planning on telling me how complicated your love life is?"

Or, more likely in sweet, feminine, Elizabethan style, "Sorry, I tried, and maybe you’ll grow to love me if I'm the one who’s here for you through this."

But no, not Portia. What does she do? She dresses up as a man, passes herself off as a lawyer from out of town, and saves Antonio's ass on a questionable technicality in open court. And she doesn't tell Bassanio her plan in advance, so the whole time she's monologueing passionately about the quality of mercy, she has to watch the two of them fawning over each other with the kind of fervor imminent death tends to inspire.

But she doesn't back down. She only checks to see if maybe, possibly, Bassanio might care about her for more than her money too, by giving him a ring as herself and then demanding it as payment in her lawyer guise.

He's reluctant, but he hands it over, staying as ambiguous and noncommittal as all his attention to her has been so far. So Portia confronts him as herself and makes it clear, in her lawyerly way, that if he can't prioritize her love from now on, he can't expect her fidelity. That's all, fair and simple. And then she tells him what she did.

Knowing the whole story, Bassanio chooses Portia... leaving poor Antonio, who would have died to buy him happiness, alone, and Shylock, who was only acting out a revenge fantasy cultivated by a lifetime of religious persecution, ruined and destitute.

I have a feeling the sad kitten's going to get a workout this month.

Have I mentioned it's a really twisted, mostly horrible play?

Okay, it's far from the most aww-worthy gesture on this list (don't worry, there's plenty of aww coming up this month), but I can't help loving its bizarre uniqueness. When asked "how did you win your spouse's heart?”, I don't think any of us can say we cross-dressed to save our romantic rival from being publicly gutted by his loan shark through Johnny Cochran-esque court drama audacity.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

0 Comments

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Love Triangles #1: Lena/Alex/Julian (The Delirium Trilogy)

8/27/2013

1 Comment

(Click the links to read Love Triangle #2, #3, #4, #5, and my defense of love triangles in general. Also see my review of Delirium.)

First,

****Massive Spoiler Alert****

I feel bad even putting all three of their names in the title and spoiling the fact that the trilogy contains a love triangle at all, that’s how expertly timed the progression of this storyline is, but if you’ve so much as glanced at the Goodreads threads about it, I’m sure you’ve figured out that much.

Now, there are a lot of love triangles in YA fiction of admittedly varying quality. The overload of interchangeable girl/good boy/bad boy setups in the genre is one of the main reasons for the recent backlash against love triangles of all kinds in all contexts, and understandably so.

As I’ve made clear in my Defense of Love Triangles, I think the backlash is excessive and enjoy many love triangles in and out of YA. So don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling this one a sole exception to a general rule, but when I told myself to choose just one favorite YA triangle to include on this list…

Um... no.

Uh-uh.

Closer, but no dice.

In spite of the many options that would have made finding pictures for this entry vastly easier, the winner was clear.

Sorry, Gale. You're just not that important.

Let’s start with the apex, Lena.

Pictured with one eye obscured, per the norm.

Lena is an everygirl protagonist reacting to a high concept universe who manages to do so in an uninsulting manner. That’s no easy task. In Lena’s world, love is illegal. It’s been classified as a disease, amor deliria nervosa, and great care is taken to protect the public “health” (and the docile apathy that comes with it). A mandatory surgical “cure” is administered to all citizens when they come of age, Uncured boys and girls are kept separate, and constant surveillance scans for hints of love in the underage population and relapses in adults.

Over the course of the trilogy, Lena has to go from being a by-the-book girl hoping to get through life without screwing up too badly, to a runaway willing to risk everything for her love, to a revolutionary who has seen the best and the worst sides of love and continues fighting for everyone’s right to pursue it.

No, she isn’t the most unique and colorful character ever designed, but she’s the kind of hero whose skin is easy to slip into, with none of the feeling of bland whininess that so often gets in the way.

Now her first love, Alex.

(As he would have appeared in the failed TV adaptation)

Alex is an Uncured from the secret, traveling camps outside the legally inhabited zones. You could call him the bad boy. He’s got some issues. He gets angry. He likes fire, a lot. He helps stage protests in the legal cities. He’s an embodiment of all the chaos and passion and impaired judgment the anti-love propaganda warns about. But as decent people do, he can also pull himself together for love.

When he falls in love with Lena, he wants so badly to do the right thing for her, and he’s trapped between the possibilities of drawing her into his dangerous outlaw lifestyle, or seeing her turn eighteen and be lobotomized. He comes clean to her about what he is after a few meetings, and carefully, when she asks, tells her about what life is like on the outside.

Lena’s tracking of the progress of her symptoms is one of the most vividly accurate artistic representations I’ve ever encountered of what falling in love feels like.

Ever.

Right after she asks to go with him instead of be cured of it, their cover is blown, and the authorities are sent after him, but he stays long enough to rescue her from her family and take her with him to the city wall. She makes it across and looks back just long enough to see him fall under a hail of bullets. End of book 1, Delirium.

Book 2, Pandemonium, is about the second love, Julian.

(Again, could-have-been TV version)

Julian is the son of a government official and a noted speaker in support of the cure. He can’t be cured due to a neurological condition, and his father uses him as a poster child for the cause of increasing the effectiveness and application of the procedure. He wants to believe that he’s part of a good thing, but the doubts are there.

After integrating herself into Uncured society. Lena’s sent to make contact with Julian, and they end up being held hostage together for political reasons that aren’t the point of this post.

Being stuck in the same room for days, then escaping together to contact Lena’s people for help, they naturally end up getting to know each other. He finds out that the organized Uncured aren’t monsters, and she finds out how conflicted he is about the propaganda he preaches.

Lena is the first girl Julian’s ever been allowed to be close to, and while she’s still learning to live with the worst part of love, the grief of losing it, she has to watch him go through the same process she did of falling in love and accepting it, hoping that she’s done him a favor. When they escape back to unregulated territory, he has just one condition. “We stay together.”’

She agrees.

… And that’s when Alex catches up with her, after escaping from the prison he was dumped in after all those bullets that should have killed him didn’t quite.

No image truly conveys that level of "ouch," but you can't say I didn't try.

Come book 3, Requiem, all three of them have to fight on the same side in the all-out war for the right to love, while warring with each other because of love.

That’s what’s so exceptional about the Delirium trilogy. It takes its love to depth most triangles fall short of. It isn’t a story about a fickle girl who can’t seem to help developing two relationships at the same time, or a decisive girl with one boyfriend and one sore loser stalker.

Ahem.

Lena gets a whole book to fall in love with each boy, and so do we. There’s a whole book of healing after Alex’s very believable death scene before he crashes the party. By the time we get the two boys in the same room, it’s hard to avoid feeling conflicted with Lena, let alone blame her (or anyone else involved) for it.

And it perfectly fits the theme of the story, celebrating love in all its beauty and ugliness.

How does it resolve?

Many a complaining fan will tell you, “It doesn’t.”

I disagree.

After all that time Alex spent in prison telling himself that he’ll never see her again, that he hopes she’ll move on and be happy without him, he doesn’t take it quite as well as he wants to when it appears she’s done just that. It takes a while before they can work things out, and in the meantime, Lena can’t instantly shake off the feelings she’s spent a while developing for Julian, especially with him right there, offering a shoulder to cry on.

In the end, Lena and Alex do agree that they still want to be together, with Lena adding, “But it’s complicated.”

Because it is, and it always will be. Cured life is simple, life with love is complicated, and that’s the life they’ve all chosen, for better or worse.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

1 Comment

Movie Review: City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments)

8/24/2013

0 Comments

Movie Review:

City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments)

August, 2013

D

Note:

Like most of my movie reviews, this one is written for readers of the book. In this case, I’m neither a great fan nor a determined attacker of the source material. I’ve read the first book in the Mortal Instruments series, the one this movie is based on, and enjoyed it, but the way the ending falls apart has prevented me from working up the enthusiasm to read the rest just yet, so forgive me if I misunderstand any bits of later canon this movie brings in early.

You can read my B- review of the book here.

The Basics:

Clary develops the ability to see a hidden magic world of demons and Shadowhunters. When her mother is kidnapped, she has to cooperate with these Shadowhunters to get her back.

The Upside:

The movie starts out as a decent translation of the book with a few improvements. Some backstory is introduced earlier, giving hope that the end exposition might not end up as one long, dragging clump, and Clary gets to witness her first demon slaying across a crowded room instead of following the Shadowhunters she assumes to be murderers away on her own to threaten them.

Lilly Collins’ performance as Clary is a pleasant surprise. The trailers present her as even more bland and irritating than Clary is in the book, but she plays the material she’s given as naturally and convincingly as possible.

There are also a couple of cool action moments (Jace punching Valentine through the portal was a personal favorite).

The Downside:

Everything else that was wrong with the book, and then some.

One of the biggest problems with the book is how generic and derivative it feels. I’ll be the first to agree that there are no truly new ideas, that the value of new art is primarily in the execution, but City of Bones never quite manages to contribute any extra personal flourish to its tropes at all. It executes them well, however, if in a generic sort of way, so that can be allowed to slide somewhat.

The movie, on the other hand, does the exact opposite of executing its tropes well and seems to be actively trying to be as generic and derivative as possible. The sets of the Institute where Shadowhunters operate are glaringly precise reconstructions of the sets of Hogwarts, as if the filmmakers are doing their very best to remind everyone that Cassandra Clare got her start in fanfic.

The two love interests, Jace and Simon, who were only annoyingly archetypal while otherwise likeable in the book, are flat-out annoying for most of the movie, all the competently constructed moments and dialogue between them and Clary lazily reduced to the simplest, most nauseatingly cliché common denominators.

Then there’s the other biggest problem with the book, the long, complicated backstory that ends up being treated as more important than the story itself. The hope that the opening of the movie offers that the backstory might be distributed better than in the book is dashed the moment the big bad guy, Valentine, shows up and starts babbling about things that take much more time and effort to understand than their relevance to the current action can justify.

As in the book, the last thirty percent or so of the movie is spent with the main characters pushed off to the side of battles and monologues of inadequately conveyed importance, burning quickly through the patience stockpiled by, in the case of the movie, camp value rather than competence.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

0 Comments

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Love Triangles #2: Juliet/Peter/Mark (Love Actually)

8/20/2013

4 Comments

(Click the links to read Love Triangle #3, #4, #5, and my defense of love triangles in general)

If you haven’t seen it, Love Actually is a collection of different kinds of love stories loosely woven together into one movie. It’s one of my favorites, one of the required movies I must see every holiday season.

This triangle isn’t a sweeping epic plotline, just one little vignette, and its simplicity is part of what makes it so perfect.

Peter and Juliet are newlyweds, as ecstatic as newlyweds should be, their wedding serving as one of the opening scenes tying many of the characters and their stories together.

There’s just one problem.

Yes, the best man is Rick, sans cowboy hat, hereafter known as Mark.

Mark is Peter’s best friend, and he does everything he can to give them a happy wedding, but he can’t quite convince anyone that he’s happy about it himself. One of the more sensitive guests even asks him out of nowhere if he’s in love with Peter, “just in case he wanted to talk about it and no one had ever asked.”

He responds honestly in the negative but turns down the opportunity to talk about what’s really making him miserable.

When Peter and Juliet get back from their honeymoon, Juliet goes to talk to Mark, to see if she can smooth over some of the frostiness he’s always had toward her, thinking Peter’s life will be easier if his wife and best friend can manage to get along.

Basically, it's the exact opposite of this.

Mark tries to brush her off in his usual forced politeness, but Juliet’s other reason for visiting, her quest for some video footage of her wedding that wasn’t ruined by the official videographer, compels her to play a tape she finds on his shelf labeled “Peter and Juliet’s Wedding.”

What she finds is a lovingly assembled montage of nothing but shots of her. It’s painfully romantic. And inescapably creepy. Rarely does anything so perfectly strike the balance between the two.

As Juliet struggles to process this and reconcile it with his usual aloofness, he explains, “It’s a self-preservation thing,” and walks out.

While he waits for her to leave, he has this freakout on the street to Dido’s “Here with Me,” silently debating whether or not to go back to talk to her, that still makes me tear up every time I watch it.

How does this one resolve?

Mark comes over to Peter and Juliet’s on Christmas Eve, pretends to be a chorus of carol singers so he can speak to her privately at the door, and confesses his love via a series of poster boards. In his words, “without hope or agenda.”

Juliet kisses him, just once, before returning to Christmas with her husband, and as he walks away, Mark says to himself, “Enough. Enough now.”

That’s all there is to their story. No back and forth, no fighting, no debate. Just love, bubbling up in the most hopeless and inconvenient place. It’s painful and beautiful and sweet and sad. And then it’s time to move on.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

4 Comments

Fi's Five Favorite Love Triangles #3: Sawyer/Kate/Juliet (Lost)

8/14/2013

4 Comments

(Click the links to read Triangle #5, Triangle #4, and my defense of love triangles in general)

First, no analysis of any element of Lost can be responsibly handled without a giant one of these:

****SPOILER ALERT!****

Ah, much better.

Next, it must be acknowledged that this isn’t one of those tidy stories that focus on about three main characters. Lost is an ensemble series, so this isn’t the most insular of triangles. In the third season, it intercepts the original, first season Kate/Jack/Sawyer triangle and spends some time as a love parallelogram, with Jack getting involved with both women as well, and all four of them have other love interests of varying levels of seriousness over the course of the series.

I’m going to go ahead and call it a triangle, though, on the grounds that it involves two characters who are both in love with a third who has feelings for them both, for an extended period of time, to an extent that overshadows all those characters’ other connections. Sound right?

Sorry, Jack. Please don’t hit me.

Let’s start with the apex of the triangle.

Oh my, so many pretty pictures from which to choose.

Sawyer starts out the series as the bad boy corner of Kate’s more traditional (and less compelling) triangle. As the series goes on, and Jack spends most of his time worrying about either being a leader or being batshit crazy…

There’s a scary abundance of good shots of this too.

…while Sawyer comes out of his near-villain shell to reveal himself as an antihero and then flat out hero, it becomes pretty obvious who the real catch is.

Pictured: No-brainer.

Ordinarily, that would mean that he gets the girl, or that he tragically loses the girl, or that Lost dropped the ball and made us root for the wrong team by accident. But this is Lost we’re talking about, a very adaptable show with a knack for choosing option D. It also happens to have no problem coming up with diverse, well-developed, interesting female characters. So instead of six seasons of waiting for Kate give her very easy answer, we get a new question. Not “Who gets Kate?” but “Who gets Sawyer?”

You already know who’s first in line.

Kate starts out as the generic triangle girl. You know the kind. Sweet, pretty, bland, beloved by default, trying to be tougher than she is. Bases her every action on what one guy or the other tells her, or the exact opposite if she’s feeling contrary. Cries at the drop of a hat. There’s a reason (other than Jack) why she couldn’t carry a triangle and make it the best of the series.

She’s the original, though, the first connection we see Sawyer make, the one who’s with him through his evolution from one of the most detestable to one of the most trustworthy people on the island. Whatever Kate’s general shortcomings, there’s no denying the chemistry between these two.

Kate grows too, when her main purpose isn’t to act as a middle corner, and it’s easy to get used to thinking of Kate and Sawyer as meant-to-be.

Now Juliet.

I’m not even going to try to come up with labels for Kate and Juliet along the lines of the good boy and the bad boy. No set of opposites perfectly fits them, but suffice it to say, they’re about as distinct as two heroines can be. Juliet doesn’t appear until season three, already a strike against her team, and when she does, it’s as one of the Others, the main villains since season one.

That’s how special Juliet is, though, enough that all of that quickly stops mattering. She’s strong enough to be a villain, but she’s not, and that strength covers heartbreaking vulnerability. She’s a fertility doctor who was lured to the island by the Others with the promise of participating in groundbreaking research. Since then, she’s been prevented from leaving or even forming close on-island relationships by Ben, their leader, thanks to his unrequited obsession with her.

I’d be scared to cross this guy too.

She’s more or less resigned herself to never being happy, until some of the survivors escape, the island gets plunged through space and time, she and Sawyer find themselves left behind in the same time period, hopelessly separated from both Kate and Ben (among others), and they have three years to build a life together before the escapees come looking for them.

So how does this one get resolved?

As is only possible on a show like Lost, both ways.

When the escapees do come to rescue the group including Sawyer and Juliet, Sawyer doesn’t want to be saved, but Juliet can’t shake the programming that tells her that her happiness is impossible, and she sees Kate’s return as the end of the illusion. She conspires with Jack to change time so the crash that brought most of the characters to the island will never happen, by setting off a nuclear bomb, believing that if Sawyer never comes to the island, he’ll be happy, and if she never meets him, she’ll never have to lose him.

Trust me, it makes sense on Lost.

This results in Juliet having TWO of the most heart-ripping death scenes you’ll ever see, one in the season five finale, when she falls down a well with the bomb and ends up lying at the bottom, hitting it with a rock, begging it to go off, and then another in the season six premier, when it’s revealed that the next time jump separated her from the bomb just as she detonated it, before it could kill her, and Sawyer digs her out of the demolished well just in time to watch her die.

The plan to change time doesn’t work, and the main timeline leaves Sawyer and Kate with the rest of their lives to mend their rift, with Juliet and Jack both dead in the last battles of the island.

This is Lost, though, and things aren’t that simple. The final season also includes what turns out to be an afterlife timeline that I’m sure most of the people reading this are waiting for me to rip into with a hacksaw, but I’m not going to. The afterlife plot is neither the best nor the worst way to end a great long story, and it’s not the point of this post. It only requires mentioning because it’s where Sawyer and Juliet find each other again, and after his implied lifetime with Kate, Sawyer spends eternity with Juliet.

It’s a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too ending, but I love it anyway, because it explores the way people heal and grow and adapt to multiple possible ways of living their lives, but unlike so many triangles that play with this, the second love isn’t second-best. Juliet is Sawyer’s soul mate, even though it took being separated from Kate for him to find that out.

Oh, and the fact that the smart, less elvish-looking blonde gets the guy?

This guy.

That might have something to do with it.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or join me on Facebook or Twitter for more fictional musings!

4 Comments

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Love Triangles #4: Viola/Orsino/Olivia (Twelfth Night)

8/6/2013

0 Comments

(You can read the #5 entry here and my defense of love triangles in general here.)

More Shakespeare! ’Tis the season, after all. Well, not really, in the case of Twelfth Night, since the title refers to the twelfth night of Christmas, in spite of the fact that the plot has nothing to do with Christmas whatsoever.

A fun fact not often mentioned at summer Shakespeare festivals!

Anyway, we’re jumping from the most traditional triangle on the list in the #5 spot to the most unconventional at #4. This one’s less a love triangle than a love recyclables symbol.

It's mostly triangular

If you haven’t seen or read it, here’s how it goes:

Viola gets separated from her twin brother, Sebastian, in a shipwreck that leaves her stranded in Illyria, a place she knows nothing about. This being a dangerous and inconvenient time to be an unescorted woman, she disguises herself as a man, the way all the coolest Shakespearean women do, puts on her best impression of her brother, and gets herself a job running errands for a local Duke.

Seems like a perfect way to take care of herself in a strange place until she can figure out her next move. Except that Duke Orsino turns out to be hot.

Sure, I could have found a pic from a legitimate production of Twelfth Night, but this was easier and more fun.

Now she has to decide if and when it might be worth the risk to tell him the truth. To make matters more uncomfortable, those “errands” she signed up for turn out to include wooing the lady Olivia on behalf of Orsino, who can be excused for never having read Cyrano de Bergerac on the grounds that it wouldn’t be written for nearly another three hundred years.

Poor guy.

Viola goes on the errands, being as big a bitch to Olivia along the way as she can possibly get away with, at first for the obvious reason that Orsino’s pining makes her jealous and protective, but then because she genuinely feels bad for Olivia when she realizes where this is going and wants to spare her some fruitless pining of her own.

Unfortunately, Olivia’s a sucker for the bad boy. She falls harder for Viola’s new male persona the more Viola tries to stop her.

So Viola loves Orsino loves Olivia loves Viola.

Got it?

Soak in those comic romantic misunderstandings. Enjoy them. The rest of this list was selected for being rip-your-heart-out painful, as most well-executed fictional love triangles must necessarily be in order to do justice to the human realities they’re drawn from.

****Spoiler Alert****

This one’s a comedy, where all will be well. Our heroine gets the guy, and Olivia is not forgotten. Remember that twin brother Viola copied her appearance and mannerisms from? The two of them hit it off nicely when he washes ashore and comes looking for his sister.

****End Spoilers****

So why is Twelfth Night on this list? Because as useful as stories are for brutally mirroring the hardest parts of the human experience, sometimes we need one to help us laugh at a good, silly caricature of our problems. Love belongs in farces as much as tearjerkers.

This is also one of those rare love triangles involving two women who aren’t interchangeable, neither of whom is evil. Those certainly deserve credit wherever they come up.

And the fact that it involves a guy who starts out wrapped up in a shallow, aesthetic, abstract idea of love coming to appreciate the cool, practical girl waiting under his nose, oh, and that it was written in 1602…

Have I mentioned in the last five minutes how much I love this guy?

Yeah, that qualifies as favorite material.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or join me on Facebook and Twitter for more fictional musings!

0 Comments

<<Previous

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Guilty Pleasures #1: The Phantom of the Opera (Musical)

Fi's Five Favorite Alien-Related Moments in Fiction #4: Starcrossed (DC Animated Universe)

Fi's Five Favorite Uses of Silence in Fiction #1: "Sick" (The Walking Dead)

Fi's Five Favorite Uses of Silence in Fiction #2: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt. 1

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional (Mostly Insane) Romantic Gestures #5: The Merchant of Venice (The Trial)

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Love Triangles #1: Lena/Alex/Julian (The Delirium Trilogy)

Movie Review: City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments)

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Love Triangles #2: Juliet/Peter/Mark (Love Actually)

Fi's Five Favorite Love Triangles #3: Sawyer/Kate/Juliet (Lost)

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Love Triangles #4: Viola/Orsino/Olivia (Twelfth Night)

Search This Blog:

Support Fiona J.R. Titchenell and get exclusive content:

Find
Fiona J.R. Titchenell:

Archives

Categories

Search This Blog:

Support Fiona J.R. Titchenell and get exclusive content:

Find ​Fiona J.R. Titchenell:

To receive email updates of Confessions of the One and Only F.J.R. Titchenell (That I Know of), enter your info below!

Archives

Categories

Find
Fiona J.R. Titchenell: