Theatre Director Confessions, or How to Sabotage Your Career in Fourty-Four Easy Steps

As the more astute amongst you may be aware from the subtle hints I have dropped from time to time in this blog, my chosen career is that of theatre director (also it's in the sidebar).  I don't often delve into the world of theatre here - this is a sacred space reserved for vital and pressing journalism about which Batman is best, after all - but sometimes the muse pipes a tune and I must dance to it.  To put it in a way that is slightly less absolutely appalling, as the amount of time I spend doing my job increases, the amount of time available to spend thinking about Batman decreases.  Since I am unwilling to give up the one dominion in which I occupy the role of benevolent dictator, I thought I'd try combining the two.

The following is a sum total of all the things I will one day end up proclaiming loudly at the Oliviers at the same moment the room goes unexpectedly quiet.  Howard Davies will shake his head in dissapointment.  Rufus Norris will delicately avert his gaze.  Thea Sharrock will make an awkward face to her left.  I will drink champagne with great dignity, and trip as I leave the room. Thus:

Theatre Director Confessions, or How to Sabotage Your Career in Forty-Four Easy Steps

1) Sometimes when I watch Mark Rylance act, I hear Liz Lemon’s voice in my head saying “Nope. Hipster nonsense.”

2) Every time I try to read a Beckett play I giggle uncontrollably and have to put it down because it’s so very Beckett. Consequently the only Beckett play I have read is Waiting for Godot and it took me three goes to get past the first page.

3) I like Tom Stoppard. Haters to the left.

4) It is ridiculous that any high profile production directed by a female director should have to represent all work by female directors but I am irrationally panicky when such productions are anything less than flawless and I read the reviews poised in a state of hyper-tense paranoia, scouring them for anything that would not have been said about a male director.

5) I am more angry than I let on about the fact that Michael Grandage was allowed to spunk an astronomical amount of money on a season of work that never rose beyond “okay, I guess”, simply by virtue of being Michael Grandage.

6) I have only ever seen one Katie Mitchell production but sometimes I lie and say I have seen others.

7) I lied to Ben Whishaw about being a fan of Katie Mitchell.

8) I have never read Katie Mitchell’s A Director’s Craft.

9) I have never read Peter Brook’s The Empty Space.

10) I own both, and still believe that I will read them one day.

11) I have an irrational fondness for female directors who swear a lot.

12) I get uneasy when directors are criticised for having gone to Oxbridge because I went to Oxbridge and I try and calculate how much my level of privilege is offset by being female and always conclude that it is not enough.

13) I am far too easily influenced by other people’s opinions. I no longer know how I feel about London Road, having heard it praised and eviscerated with equal ferocity.

14) I sometimes have trouble telling Simon Stephens plays apart, which feels a bit like being racist.

15) I believe that everyone has the right to fail, and fail big time, at least once, but I am scared that the reality is such that I have to be hitting home runs from the start.

16) Sometimes my attention wanders in rehearsal. I am secretly convinced that no other director has ever let their focus slip, ever.

17) I would like to be able to point to a defining incident in my childhood that explains why I decided to become a theatre director, like a supervillain origin story. Sadly, I can’t get beyond ‘I like plays and I like being in charge and I have no transferrable skills.’*

18) I can, however, pinpoint the moment when I acknowledged to myself that I wanted to be a theatre director. It was New Year’s Eve 2009/2010 and after repeatedly being turned away from the club my friends were in for being too drunk, I was eventually allowed access, belted up the stairs just in time for the countdown and looked out through the floor-to-ceiling windows to see the National Theatre lit up across the river. “In ten years’ time,” I slurred to the assembled party, few of whom were paying attention, “I’m going to be on the other side of the river.” Four and a bit years later, I no longer retain the same sense of certainty, but have at least never been clubbing on New Year’s Eve since.

19) The best thing anyone has ever said to me over the course of my fledgling career is, "I'm not scared of Nick Hytner.  I'm scared of you."

20) The worst thing anyone has ever said to me over the course of my directing career was not actually a comment but they laughed openly at a play I had spent six months working on.  The play was not, per se, a comedy.

21) I am sort of waiting for a certain generation of theatre makers to die out.

22) I am definitely waiting for a certain generation of audiences to die out.

23) I will always rather go and see a Shakespeare play than any other writer, and I believe he is objectively the best playwrighdt in the English language. Fine if there is someone else you prefer, but do not fool yourself that there is someone better. There isn’t.

24) Equally, I sort of wish the RSC was just Greg Doran directing and no-one else.

25) I feel slightly sorry for the Marlowe Society. I feel like they sit around pretending Shakespeare doesn’t exist and if someone says the word ‘Stratford’ the room goes silent except for the sound of a single glass shattering on the floor.

26) I think less of people who dismiss Sarah Kane.

27) I worry that ‘edginess’ is going to become the defining factor in how well a play is received amongst my generation of theatre practitioners.

28) I feel like I should feel like more of a nonsense about using the word ‘practitioners’ but I don’t.

29) I feel guilty that I am more likely to remember young male actors I like than young female actors.

30) I find actors easier to get along with than playwrights, which is why I prefer working with dead ones.

31) I am a bit sad when actors like Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston find international film and television fame because it means I am less likely to see them in the theatre again and, probably, less likely to see performances as good as the theatre ones I saw at the beginning of their careers. Andrew Scott, stay with us.

32) I have invented a fictional Royal Court playwright whose work includes such plays as 'Savage Genuflection' and 'The Quiet of Skin'. The title of the play is said in context approximately two-thirds of the way through each.  I am not sure to what purpose this imaginary person exists but I'm sure I’ll find out in due course.

33) I’m pretty certain I’ll write a humorously personal yet insightful collection of essays about Shakespeare plays one day and when I do, I’ll probably call it ‘Lear’s Button’. It will have moderate success, read mostly by dramatically minded English undergraduates, being too academic for most theatre-goers and too silly for most academics.

34) I once had a whole conversation with another theatre director I was trying to impress that I thought was about the Marvel Comics Avengers but was actually about the 1960s television series Avengers.

35) I once thought my cast had locked me in the lighting booth where I was doing some work so they could order pizza without me.  It later transpired they were writing individual thank you cards.  I still would have liked some pizza though.

36) The fact that I will now never direct Richard Griffiths as King Lear almost makes me not want to bother directing King Lear at all.

37) I think anyone who actually likes Titus Andronicus will grow out of it.

38) If I were offered a choice between running any theatre building I wanted or being the next companion on Doctor Who, I am genuinely unsure what I would say.

39) Everyone always uses the example of a Shakespeare play 'on the moon' to denote ridiculous relocations of classics.  I have never seen a Shakespeare play set on the moon.  I would like to.

40) I thought Joss Whedon's Much Ado film was better than Kenneth Branagh's.

41) There is no role I would not like to see Cush Jumbo play.  Literally no role.

42) Going to see a high-profile production of a play you know and thinking to yourself ‘I could probably do that better’ is one of the most enjoyable feelings you can have in this business, and you must never ever tell anyone about it out loud.

43) I genuinely don’t understand why Hamlet at least is not played equally by male and female actors now. (Hedda Gabler is not the female equivalent of Hamlet. Hamlet is the female equivalent of Hamlet.)

44) Jerusalem wasn’t all that.

*Slightly disingenuous, but I don’t think you want to hear the long-winded, over-earnest version I save for job interviews.

Drop Everything, I'm Here to Fix Your Love Life (If You Fancy Dudes): The Jane Shakespeare Guide to Dating Fictional Men

Valentines Day. Boom. Just dropping that bombshell out there for all of you sad, lonely people too repulsive to find another warm body willing to let you lean against it for the 24 hours it takes not to feel like the unicorn that couldn't find its moving buddy for the Ark. And if you're a couple, go ahead and congratulate yourself on being candidates for contributing to the earth's overcrowding problem, and if you're not planning on having children any time soon, then everyone probably hates you two together anyway and you have to reasonably assess whether you can withstand that kind of debilitating social pressure.

Gosh, Valentine's Day. You thought it was over (this post is so late in the day, I might as well say it's in honour of next Valentine's Day) but I'm raking up those painful memories again because I want you all to feel shame about your life choices.

Not me though, because my life choices are and have always been beyond question or reproach. And you are all very lucky, because I am about to share with you one of those life choices. I was like you once. Lonely. Pathetic. Unable to hold down a good job and a stable relationship at the same time because being a fierce career-driven lady is hard work.* But then I found a light. A path. I started only fancying men who were fictional.

I know what you're thinking. Fucking genius.

A fictional man has never, let us say, forgotten a birthday or, to give another random example that has definitely never happened to me, squeezed your thigh and declared you to be “not that fat”. A fictional man has never seen you walk into a room visibly upset, ask if you're ok, then return to playing iPhone Scrabble when you say, “Sort of, I guess” in a tone that conveys broadly the opposite and when you point this out offers the rebuttal "You said you were fine".

Yes, fictional men have the decided advantage of being fictional. But wait. There are rules to this thing. You can't just make them do whatever you want heedless of the universe from whence they came and inherent traits with which they were gifted.** You must be accepting of your fictional man's flaws. You must love them because of their flaws, not in spite of them. Detractors of the Fictional Man System may say that this is akin to 'real life' relationships, that one must work also at relationships with actual breathing people, but to them I say shut up and you smell. My way is both quicker and easier and therefore correct.

It's important to know the territory, is what I'm saying. Each fictional man carries their own baggage with them. To help you on the first steps to a stress-free world of romance and talking to yourself on public transport, here are the pros and cons of ten of the best:

The Top Ten Most Eligible Fictional Males (from literature)***

A/N: To anyone shouting for Rochester or Heathcliffe: was your favourite film as a child Beauty and the Beast?

10) Satan (Paradise Lost, John Milton).

Why? Everyone loves a rebel with a cause, not least Jonnie Milton himself, who at several points of Paradise Lost clearly panics and throws in some shit about original sin and being the root of all the evil in the world to throw off any delicate female brains that may have been affected by this shape-shifting orator with cunning oral skills. Satan is the thinking ladies' crumpet. He ponders. He broods. Also, have you read the description of Adam and Eve's grown-up make-out fun post-apple? Good times, courtesy of Satan.

Why not? Approximately halfway through the poem, Milton realises everyone's rooting for the fallen angel and turns him into an underwhelming snake-thing. (Calm down, Freudians.) Also there's some minor stuff about raping his daughter Sin to produce his son/grandson Death and Death then raping his mother to produce hell-hounds that live inside her womb. But everyone has baggage.

9) Draco Malfoy (Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling).

Why? Blond. Mainly, blond. And again, blond. Probably more of a fling than anything else but if anyone in Hogwarts is making the most of their common room by installing a hot tub and hiring house elves as the wizarding equivalent of monkey butlers, it is the Slytherins. Malfoy also comes equipped with severe daddy issues, which makes him a shoo in for this list (to new readers, I apologise; to regular readers, you really should just expect this by now). Is willing to commit murder for the sake of family honour or some bullshit like that so presumably easy to manipulate. (What?) Also, blond.

Why not? Cries in bathrooms. Requires henchmen as living security blanket. Daddy issues go hand in hand with definite unresolved Oedipal yearnings: would probably still have been breastfeeding at an uncomfortably late age.

8) Eros (Greek mythology).

Why? Quite literally a love god. Forget all those fluffy little Cupids, before the Romans came along and enacted their subtle foreign policy of killing everything and stealing what was left, the Greek god Eros was all wings and abs.  And if you get bored, he has a twin brother called Anteros who avenges slighted lovers and is the deity actually portrayed in statue form at Piccadilly Circus (Eros has been getting the credit for over a hundred years now, it's time to set the record straight.  OPEN YOUR EYES.  SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE.)

Why not? Lack of experience – in the whole of Greek mythology, is only shown getting it on once, despite being aforementioned God of Love. Will also insist on having the lights off in case you realise the identity of your lover and his mother tries to kill you. And also was regarded as the protector of homosexual love between men.  So the takeaway here is that Greek mythology is not a great place for women.

7) Casanova (Histoire de ma Vie, Giacomo Casanova)(yes I know he was a real guy)(I'm examining his literary persona)(shut up)

Why? Come on now. Self-explanatory. Admittedly this is not for the lady looking for something long-term but I bet you'd have a good time along the way. As well as being world's first lad, he was also a spy, conman, linguist and librarian and spent most of his life rubbing elbows with royalty, popes, writers and musicians like Goethe, Mozart and Voltaire (and rubbing something else with literally all of the ladies).**** Factor in a slamming dress sense, a preference for eloquent woman, and an ability to make money out of basically everyone, including people who fired him, and that's a recipe for a fun weekend that you'll only remember as occasional flashbacks.

Why not? Have fun with all the venereal disease. Allegedly also had a threeway with his illigitimate daughter and her mother. (I must apologise, this list contains a significantly higher degree of incest than I had originally envisaged.) Also, as I said before, fidelity was not his strong suit. That was comic understatement. He had all the sex.

6) Peter Pan (Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie).

Why? Has three women after him for the duration of play/novel and, in most representations, clothes seem to be optional. He would be terribly exciting and there would be a large number of gap year style escapades and you would definitely probably have some kind of journey of self-discovery.  Also, property-owner. Peter has his own island, replete with mermaid lagoon (which must be better than a hot tub) and pirate ship (frankly, 'owns own pirate ship' should be a must on any self-respecting woman's list).  

Why not? Oh, where to begin.  Aside from the obvious fact that liaisons with ‘The Boy Who Never Grew Up’ have bad connotations in this day and age, Peter would be the ultimate bait-and-switch date.  "Come to my magical island where we'll fly into the night together holding hands and ultimately defy death itself and you will never feel so free or young or alive and I'll tell you how you fill this empty aching hole in my life but like would you be a total doll and do the boys' laundry first? Shit, I need to pay the delivery guy, have you got a tenner?" This is a short-term option. Wendy knew it, and you need to know it too – think of it as the best holiday romance ever. Enjoy the mermaid lagoon and get out before he starts encouraging his friends to call you 'mum'.

5) Victor Frankenstein (Frankenstein, Mary Shelley).

Why? It's easy to forget Mary Shelley was 18 when she wrote Frankenstein but I swear, somewhere in her notes is a scrap of paper that reads, “and btdubs, Victor is like totally hot.” Within the first ten pages, the manly and (I imagine) waxed-mustachioed explorer Captain Walton is waxing lyrical about his new bff Victor and the lustrous melancholy of his eyes, amongst other attractions. If you can manage to mentally strip away a few decades of Hollywood-distorted mad scientists cackling in castles, you'll find that Shelley's protagonist is a tender twenty-one years old when he stitches together a bunch of corpses and creates an abomination in the eyes of God. Plus, there's significant textual evidence that suggests Mary was basing some elements of Victor on her boo Percy Bysshe, so I think it's safe to say that in her eyes at least, Victor Frankenstein is one fine piece of grave-robbing ass. You heard it here first. Also Percy Shelley might have been a Romantic proto-douche (and there's a whole other blog post there) but his portraits can confirm that he was, indeed, totally hot.

Why not? Well, he stitches together a bunch of corpses and creates an abomination in the eyes of God for a start. Also, the whole Gothic-Romantic hero thing turns out to be something of a double edged sword because, as a direct result of his 'Fun With Cadavers' science kit, Victor spends significant portions of the novel proving his dedication to being sensitive and shit by fainting, and at the same time blaming, variously, dead authors, living authors, dead scientists, living scientists, fate, destiny, chance, his father, his mother, his best friend and, not kidding, a tree. So a) he probably wouldn't remember to do the washing up and b) when you get home and ask him to do it, he'll tell you all about how it totally wasn't his fault because someone made an offhand remark about Percy Shelley's poetry and that reminded him of sleep and he had to go and do that instead. (Meta-burn. Thank you very much.)

4) Bertie Wooster (many books, P.G. Wodehouse)

Why? Bertie Wooster is a magical human being who attracts charming happenings full of whimsy and gentle confusion into his life, and you could be a part of that.  Whether making off with Aunt Dahlia's cow creamer or concealing the music hall origins of your chum's latest squeeze from the uncle upon whom he is financially dependent, your existence could only be improved by having this man around.  Tell me you wouldn't want to be in a P.G. Wodehouse novel and I'll tell you your soul has withered beyond the point of redemption, you sick, sad bastard.  You would get to be a member of the idle rich.  Your job would be having escapades.  Also Bertie is just, like, the nicest guy. Like, actually.  Not in a Nice Guy way.  He genuinely is a nice guy.

Why not? Here be actually-quite-terrifying-when-you-really-think-about-it-properly valets.  A few women have threatened to intrude upon the domestic equilibrium enjoyed by one boy and his manservant and none were ever heard from again.  And as totes adorbs as Bertie is, things might get a little wearing once you realise that you are being woken up for the hundred and twelfth day in a row by an argument between your significant other and his significant other over his polka dot spats or whatever it is now in the name of christ I'm invisible in my own home help me god please.

3) Odysseus (The Iliad, The Odyssey, Homer). Why? Epic. Hero. Not just any epic hero either, but a smart epic hero. Odysseus is the Batman of the Bronxe Age: ain't no invulnerability or flying sandals here (take that Achilles. And you, Perseus.) Just a really really determined dude. So if he says he's going to put those shelves up, he's damn well going to put those shelves up, but he's probably going to Tom Sawyer someone into doing it for him by, once again, being really smart. And then taking all the credit. Like smart people do. Let's not forget either that there's a slough of goddesses, nymphs and princesses queueing up for their turn at The Odyssey: Boardgame Edition (there are two rules: 1) Abduct hero. 2) Bone.) Foremost amongst these is the goddess Calypso, who keeps the Big O (see what I did there?) on her island as a sex slave for seven years. Got to be a reason. All I'm saying.

Why not? Man, he really wants to get home to his wife. Have some fun by all means, but know you're just a pitstop along the way to an epic book deal and twenty years' worth of reunion sex. If Olympian goddesses couldn't keep Odysseus tied down, you probably won't fare much better. He'll give you some stuff about needing his space and being a free spirit and before you even get a chance to turn his men into pigs again, he'll jump ship (literally) and you'll be left looking for the next epic hero to fix that dripping tap you never got round to.

2) Mr Darcy (Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen).

Why? Self-evident. The ruder you get, the more he likes you in a tortured, brooding sort of way that doesn't involve murdering puppies (Heathcliffe, I am looking at you). Also a self-improving hero – Darcy walks the fine line between sociopath-god-help-you-restraining-order (Lovelace, Rochester, Heathcliffe again) and 'he's just shy' (literally any rom-com based on comic misinterpretation of character) meaning that he's genuinely the sneery hipster in the corner initially, but he works on not saying douchey things like “your family sucks and you're poor” and gets the girl eventually. The girl, incidentally, is too busy repeatedly saying things like, “Wow, I am a horrible judge of character” to fix his faults for him (Jane Eyre, you could learn something here), so just be chill. He'll get there. Also the whole book is basically about him trying and failing to repress his libido.

Why not? I have to say, I don't have much here , assuming you can get past the initial insults to your appearance, family, manners, class, financial status and pretty floral bonnet (probably). Maybe if you like loud music or immoderate drinking or the drugs that all the young people use these days, then he's not the man for you? But then again, Austen says that Lizzie makes him more fun. Damn, she's good.

1) Hamlet (Hamlet, William Shakespeare).

Why? The prince (sorry) of the fictional men. Because, contrary to what I began this list by saying, Hamlet is kind of whatever you want him to be, while also definitely being in possession of cheekbones so sharp they refract light (science). Seriously, the Victorians even thought he might have been a woman, so if you are looking for a receptacle into which, Pygmalion-like, you may pour every quality you have ever desired in a lover, then start with the one who fundamentally embodies the pain and joy of the human condition, and also fights off some pirates.

Why not? Where do you want to start? His in-universe track record isn't great, breaking up with his girlfriend by stabbing her dad through a curtain, which ranks only slightly above dumping via text. There's also some astonishingly good (bad, I mean bad) work going on in the daddy issues department with him being the only one on this list taking orders from a Ghost Dad who may or may not be a fractured remnant of his own tortured psyche. On the plus side, he loves his mother very much. A little too much? Perhaps. Also, in brief: gets touchy when his best friend calls him out on murdering-by-proxy two of their old uni mates, hipster-postures about how poor people totally don't understand art, talks during the theatre, is generally a self-pitying, solipsistic, intellectually superior, emotionally anguished, sexually repressed, arrogant, moody philosophy student. And now I've totally lost my train of thought. I'm sure I was supposed to be listing bad things.

(See also: Constantine from The Seagull, Edmund from King Lear, Prince Hal from Henry IV, Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, any other character that could feasibly be played by Ben Whishaw.)

(It's possible I may have a type.)

*Was in university, watching Horrible Histories.

**If you find yourself doing this then congratulations, you are a writer of bad fanfiction. Now burn your laptop, you are banned from the internet.

***None of this TV or film bullshit. Characters represented in a visual medium are played by actors and, as we all know, actors are raging whirlpools of neurosis, insecurity and heart-breakingly blind optimism, plus when you Wikipedia them they're always married and at least, like, ten years older than you thought they were.

****Imagine how disappointed he'd be with his present-day descendents. Casanova never had to descend to thinly-veiled homophobia and misogyny. He had books.

Death of/to the Author: Nine and Three Quarter Thoughts on the JK Rowling Shitstorm

A quick disclaimer here: I know most of you have lives.  I know most of you don't care.  I know the extent to which this story has been reported as 'news' is the most trifling bollocks ever.  However, I feel something along the lines of "oh god hold me my world is crumbling".

For those of you who don't have Harry Potter as a Google Alert (like what are you, some kind of nerd) the furore is thus: Emma Watson has guest edited Wonderland magazine and interviewed J.K. Rowling*.  Quel horror, you gasp in sarcastic French.  Wait a minute, judgey, because there's more.  A sneak preview of this interview has been splashing about all over the shop because in it - buckle up - JKR says she should never have put Hermione and Ron together as a couple, apparently also stating Hermione should have ended up with Harry instead. (I have marked the crazy parts in italics for your convenience.)

Naturally, I have some thoughts.

1) UGH FUCK YOUUUUUUUU JK ROWLING LIKE WHAT DO YOU KNOW YOU ONLY WROTE THE BOOKS - oh my god, down Fifteen Year Old Me, get down - WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO RUIN MY LIIIIIIIIFE - like seriously shut the fuck up, you have an undergrad degree, you are doing a masters - IT'S SO UNFAIR - GET BACK IN THE BOX.

2) Rowling states that she wrote the relationship as a form of "wish fulfilment fantasy"and "for reasons that have very little to do with literature".  Rowling has perhaps revealed more about herself than she anticipated here, given that she has previously stated how much she identifies with Hermione, for I look askance at the woman who looks at the sulky, immature, petty, ginger sidekick and goes "sigh I guess that was just wish fulfilment" and then at the dark, brooding, angsty hero and goes "yeah, much more realistic".** But then I shrug because, whatever, I guess it takes all sorts to make a world.  However, if literally all that is going on here is that JKR's tastes have changed in the last seven years and she no longer craves the flesh of red-haired men, then bad form, madam, that is not worth my heartbreak.

3) Buried within this flippancy is a sort of serious point: I bet a sizeable chunk of the female readership identified with Hermione.  I did.  I was a school girl and I liked books and I had bad hair and I located my self-worth in my intelligence and not my terminally disappointing appearance so I obviously did.   This is important for two reasons: a) most of the time, fans who didn't want Hermione to end up with Ron meant "I don't want to end up with Ron" and b) most of those fans didn't want to end up with Ron because he was (apparently) stupid and poor. (What I am giving you here is a précis of the internet in 2006.) No book should have a duty to send a message of any kind, but in a series that was all about fighting arbitrary elitism, I find the union of muggle-born go-getter Granger and pure blood dependable Weasley much more positive than heroine-marries-lost-prince-of-fantasy-kingdom.  And by the way, self-insertion is a completely legitimate teenage response to fiction (hello Twilight) because it helps you figure out how you feel about the world.  Odds on, those Harry/Hermione shippers*** will go on to have a lifetime of polite, slightly boring relationships where they die a little inside each day and the Ron/Hermione shippers will have sparky, challenging, often difficult but also passionate relationships.  (Look, I never said I wasn't biased.)

4) Having said that, I cannot actually find a quotation suggesting that JK thinks she should have hooked up Harry and Hermione instead but since that's the headline everyone is leading with, I am forced to accept it due to the infallible integrity of the press (oh, just make up your own punchline).  This is what I find most upsetting (if you are not on board with me using the word 'upsetting' to legitimately describe my feelings towards a fictional relationship between fictional people, I feel this blog is not for you).  After calming down from my initial shuddering nausea, I was able to hear the small voice in my head saying, "Do you really mind if Rowling thinks Ron and Hermione shouldn't have ended up together? Maybe she just means they probably realistically wouldn't have got married and Christ knows, we all regret the Epilogue." Which, actually, is fair enough.  I'm not a huge fan of the Young Adult Fantasy trope of meeting your spouse at the age of twelve or whatever, and it's particularly egregious in the Harry Potter series.  There are so many teenage marriages I wouldn't be surprised if the next 'revelation' is that Hogwarts is located somewhere in the Bible Belt.  Also I hear if you don't get hitched literally right on graduation day you immediately become a spinster and have to live with Mrs Figg in a state of quasi-Sapphic tension.

5) Anyway, what I'm saying is that there was a part of me that was always expecting Hermione to pack up her bags at the end of the series and go and study History or Law at Oxbridge because settling for wizard A Levels wouldn't be nearly enough of a challenge.  (And how much do you want to read the spin-off series 'Hermione Granger and the Cambridge Law Degree'? She battles Finals.)  And maybe while she's there she meets a nice muggle boy and they have two children, and one is magic and one isn't but they are both excellent at referencing and their footnotes are divine.  What I don't buy is that if you take Ron out of the picture then there is literally only one other option for Hermione, and that is Harry "Stop Trying To Help Me Hermione Oh No Wait I Really Need You To Help Me" Potter.  Harry, who always complained about Hermione being "shrill" and "bossy" and "dull as shit to hang out with" (one of these quotes is not real).  Who, every time he was forced to spend time alone with her, spent the whole time going WHERE IS MY MANLY MAN FRIEND RON OH I WISH RON WERE HERE I LANGUISH I PINE.  Like, if we're rewriting history here, maybe it's Harry/Ron we should be focussing on, if you know what I'm saying.  And I think you do.

6) Actually I could probably get my head around Hermione ending up with literally almost any other character in the series.  Any of the other Weasley children, including Ginny.  Pansy Parkinson.  Ernie Macmillan. Mad-Eye Moody, for frick's sake (it would be like Dorothea and Casaubon in Middlemarch).**** Just... not Harry.   From the ages of seven to seventeen I enjoyed Harry and Hermione's friendship immensely, and I enjoyed it all the more because it was safe and loving and uncomplicated and without bullshit, and because it was different to the usual female-lead-hooks-up-with-male-lead-and-sometimes-there's-some-other-comic-relief-guy trope.  Which is something that His Dark Materials (a far superior series in many respects) did not do, to my eleven-year-old chagrin.  I don't know who Ron would end up with though.  Oh wait.  I forgot.  Harry.

7) On that note, let us face it, there are other relationships we could be regretting in the series.  If Rowling really wants to revisit the past then let's embrace this opportunity to find out what in the holy fuck was Harry and Ginny about? She pretty much decided to marry him the first time she saw him when she was a child.  She wanted to be a child bride.  Run, Harry, run.  Then come back and try to explain to me how vaguely Oedipal thoughts about sunlight glinting off red hair constitutes the basis for a marriage.  And let's not even start on Remus "Totally Heterosexual" Lupin, shall we?  (Except to say Professor Lupin, teach me about grindylows, I will be your best student ever, you patchwork, chocolate-eating hero.) All this is ironic because, of course, Ron and Hermione's relationship does work and, as someone who has never quite given up on the tactic of saying "I find your arguments unconvincing and you smell" instead of "I fancy you", I also always found it to be by far the most realistic. (Having said that, there is no greater turn-off than a poorly conceived argument.  I have standards.) It's mostly comprised of huffy silences and irritable jealousy, which is exactly how polite British teenagers who are attracted to each other behave, with the occasional outburst of sniping and just a few moments that, though simple, are unbelievably tender.  Brainy, overly intense self-starter with a propensity towards merciless observation of the rules seeks combative, insecure but quietly selfless funny man for argumentative but mutually supportive relationship.  It doesn't have to work, but you know that it really really does.

(I'll leave it there because Fifteen Year Old Me is clamouring for me to write another four pages about how Hermione constantly expects more of Ron than anyone else does, and how Ron makes Hermione laugh even when she's at her most disapproving, and how Hermione goes pink around him like a million times and how Ron's compliments are always a bit adorably too extravagant and also how Harry and Luna Lovegood were meant to be together in a holy union of weirdo outsiderdom and caps lock rage and - BACK. IN. THE. BOX.)

8) I've see a quite a few comments on various articles talking about Rowling's 'right' to say what she said.  Let's be clear: of course J.K. Rowling has the right to say she would do some things differently if she could.  She wrote the series, I think she is allowed.  As a writer, it would be strange if she hadn't developed in the intervening years.  Even Shakespeare re-wrote King Lear, y'know? Dickens gave Great Expectations a whole new (sappier but better written) ending.  Rowling is invested in her work as  - I'm gonna say it - an artist, and I'm sure wanted to discuss her writing as an artist in that magazine interview.  BUT (because you knew it was coming), should she have?  I spent most of the Literary Theory sections of my degree drawing cartoons of Tony Harrison from The Mighty Boosh but I'm pretty sure some guy (was it Derrida? It's usually Derrida) said that once you put your work out there you cease to have agency over it.  It exists only in the minds of your readership.  The author ceases to have a say.  In other words, sorry JKR but you wrote Ron/Hermione so shut up and deal.  But that doesn't take into account the relationship Rowling has always had with her readers, which is to say she's active, she engages, and it's not the first time she's revealed information about the world of the series after the fact.  She knows that she can't comment on any part of the books without it having significance to the readership (in the interview she says she can "hear the rage and fury") - in the wake of 'Dumbledore is gay', Pottermore and the attendant books, Rowling has a track record of expanding her universe in interviews and more, building herself up as the divine (and perhaps only) authority on the series, and ultimately that just picks the pocket of the reader's own imagination.  So, knowing that anything she said about the series would have its own kind of truth to it, and knowing how loved her characters and their relationships are, I think yeah, it was a bit of a dick move.

9) And that's the big takeaway from all of this.  The word to describe the series that has come up most frequently in all the articles I've read is "beloved".  Harry Potter mattered to a hell of a lot of kids (and continues to matter to a hell of a lot of young adults).  I fell in love with those books not because they are perfect (spoilers: they are not) but because my reading experience of them was treasured and brilliant and intense.  I fell in love with them as they were, and though I may have grumbled about things here and there, it was with the affection that one uses to complain about a sibling.  I never really wished anything to be different - even the things I would have changed were part of my deeply unique relationship with the series.  For the same reason that I never wanted to see it on film, I don't want that world to shift.  And if Rowling says it, some part of me will take it as gospel, and it will change the characters and relationships I grew up with.  So I hope Rowling does not, in future, choose to share her doubts with us - or at least phrases them in a more equivocal way.  I hope she acknowledges that, whether she meant to or not, she has created something that has a life of its own, that means a lot to its readers, that was always so much more than a franchise, and that, in all its imperfection, is perfect to me, and to so many others.  And that, if you're looking for tips, Jo, is true love.


Three Quarters)
*I am lucky Internal Feminist Me has powerful slapping hands to beat down Jealous Bitch Me who frequently screams "GODDAMMIT WATSON GIVE ME BACK MY LIFE".
**Ron is one of my favourite characters, FYI.  Don't be all up in my grill.  I'm just saying it's whack, is all.
***Shipper = internet slang for a fan who is a proponent of two characters entering into a sexual or romantic relationship (the internet is clever this way).  Can also be used as a verb, as in "I kind of ship the Tenth Doctor and the Eleventh Doctor but don't tell anyone because I think that might technically be either incest or masturbation". Or "I very much ship Me/Ice Cream." Use it in a sentence today.  It'll make you feel better.
****I originally put a whole spiel here about how Dorothea and Casaubon's relationship plays out and then I realised that was major spoilers for Middlemarch, so if you have read it then high five, you know what I'm talking about, and if you haven't then now you'll have to in order to understand that joke, and I will have done a little bit of good today.  (Fred Vincy/Mary Garth = OTP.  You can look that one up on your own.)

The Blacklist: Five Films I Hate That Everyone Else Loves

When I was a young lass with barely a handful of overreactions and needlessly capitalised opinions to call my own, I had a school teacher who offered me this sage advice when it came to debating: "Don't rant.  When you rant, we stop listening." Which - don't get me wrong - was all well and good within the confines of structured debating competitions largely dominated by chinless male adolescents whose sense of self-importance was directly proportional to how much they wished their voice would just drop already.*  But this is a blog, so sorry Mrs Edwards, I am going to rant my little digital socks off.

In summary, the following films are abominations and deserve to be fire-bombed out of existence.

The Jane Shakespeare Blacklist: Five Films I Utterly Loathe That Everyone Else Inexplicably Loves (and Obviously Contains Spoilers For Those Films)

Now look.  Most of the time, I get by ok despite being an emotionally neutered wasteland of a human being whose ability to respond appropriately to the adult world has been unalterably decimated by years of learning my life lessons from TV. I grew up reading books and then I went to university to read more books and realised that watching shitty children's films on the internet was much quicker and less effort. I feel more strongly about television about than I do about some actual human relationships (when I started watching Orange is the New Black, I genuinely think I was more psyched to spend time with my Netflix account than I was with my first boyfriend). What I'm saying is that I watch a lot of stuff, good and bad, so I don't usually judge others on their choices (in fact I detailed my love of crap TV here). However, there are a few films, just a few, that I loathe and every time I say I loathe them, someone looks at me like I just expressed indifference towards a Youtube video of an ocelot forming an unlikely friendship with a penguin.**  They're both small animals, I get why it's cute, I just...god, don't you people have anything better to do with your lives? You could be writing blogs justifying your deep-seated aggression towards humanity. Anyway, here they are.

5) Titanic

Now this is an obvious choice to kick things off and maybe kind of a cheat because actually there are a lot of people that don't love it. It's just that the people who love it really love it. And I hate those people. I've also never actually seen it all the way through. I just can't. Every time it comes on TV, I think, “This time, this time, I will respond to this film that makes people cry their innards out through their noses.” And every time I have to stop watching because I can feel bile rising in my throat at the first few strains of that Celine Dion wankfestival of over-literal interpretation of the concept of undying love. It brings out the absolute worst in me. It only takes a few minutes and I'm treating human tragedy like it's the funniest thing I've ever seen (cf also: Forrest Gump). Also obligatory mention of get on the fucking door.

4) The Lion King

This is potentially where I lose some friends.  But actually let's be clear.  I do not hate The Lion King.  But I am happily indifferent to The Lion King.  But the world, as always, will not let me be.  "How can you not like The Lion King?" they gasp, as though I have expressed a neutrality towards breathing oxygen, and that incredulity has pushed me dangerously towards hatred.  Easily, is the answer.  Bloody easily.  Anthropomorphism has never been my thing, not ever, and when I watched Bambi as a kid I asked my mum whether Bambi's mum had just been shot and she nodded sadly with soft, compassionate motherly eyes ready to leap to the rescue of my tender psyche and I said "oh ok" and went back to wondering what exactly his dad had been doing all that time.  Nature is not cuddly, it is red in tooth and claw, and it will thank you for showing some respect (I mean you Ang Lee). Also if I want to read Hamlet I will definitely just read Hamlet.  So let me be, in my joyless, loveless bubble.  I'm not telling you not to enjoy it but I will not pretend I enjoy it either.  I am the Andy Murray of film watching, refusing to smile, and winning at Twitter.

3) 500 Days of Summer

I have been told so many times by so many folk that I just didn't "get" this film.  No, you see, it is a deconstruction of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, the magical quirky girl who pinwheels into the life of the male protagonist and heals his damaged first world soul, it is a warning against projecting unmanageable expectations onto someone.  Is what they say.  Well, no.  Is what I say.  Because a) if that were true, why is the last thing we see in the film Joseph Gordon Levitt hitting on an identical woman (Zooey Deschanel just wasn't the right Manic Pixie Dream Girl! Keep searching, entitled white boy, there's a Manic Pixie Dream Girl out there for you too!) and b) even if the film was pointing out the folly of their relationship, so what?  The idea that putting women on a pedestal ends badly is not a blinding revelation.  I think most of us do not need a film to tell us that you cannot build a lasting relationship on shared love of The Smiths.

It is not a deconstruction of the trope because it does nothing to deconstruct the trope.  The story is still told from the viewpoint of the aforementioned lost boy who pursues a woman because she symbolises a meaningful existence and ultimately 'wins' her, despite her free-wheelin' ways and initial reluctance.  The fact that he loses her again means nothing for, as the film makes clear, he will do this again and again and again.  A deconstruction would tell her story, show her agency and inner life rather than just informing us that she totally has them, and focus on her choices because of what they mean for her, not as and when they affect him.  In the end, it still reinforces the stereotype that women's lives are plot points in men's stories.  No amount of non-linear storytelling and cutesy Expectations v Reality set pieces can disguise that.  It's hollow, it's twee, and it challenges nothing.  Mic drop.

2) Juno

It is not the miracle of central heating or the tender embrace of a lover that keeps me warm at night, it is my hatred of this film.  It nourishes my soul.  It gives me energy.  Why?  Because it's fucking annoying.  Basically.  But oh, such annoyance.  My intolerance of this film is nigh on Biblical.  The smug Dr Seuss dialogue, the lazy mumblecore performances, the appalling manner in which Michael Cera continues to exist, the vicious desperate straining towards being alternative (and yet at the same time so painfully afraid of offending anyone - no it's totally cool that you support abortion! It's just not for our did-we-mention-ADHD-but-not-in-a-way-that-is-ever-really-represented-as-anything-other-than-edearing-in-an-offbeat-way heroine!  Oh, and by the way, all abortion clinic picketers are also quirky and adorable!).  At no point does this film celebrate anything difficult or unusual or uncomfortable (spoilers: the baby ends up with sweetly middle class Jennifer Garner, bad Jason Bateman with his ephebophile tendencies is banished, and Ellen Page goes to the prom with Michael Cera, the poor, poor girl) and it pretends it does because it comes packaged in The Moldy Peaches***, ironic euphemisms for penises, and a fucking hamburger phone.  I really hate that fucking hamburger phone.

1) Love Actually

Ok, this is it.  The big one.  I don't want to overreact here but everyone involved in this film deserves to be put up against a wall and shot.  Even you Colin Firth.  Especially you, for trying to trade off against Darcy goodwill by jumping into a lake.  Every character in it is a borderline horrendous sociopath and every one of its hoard of dead-eyed paycheck-visualising actors has done a better performance than this at some other point in their careers, and for Kris Marshall, it was his mugshot when he was arrested for drunk driving.  This film goes out of its way to tell you that any option - literally any option - is better than just talking to a woman.  Hold up passive aggressive placards about how your entire existence has been destroyed by a woman having the temerity to marry someone else, learn to play the drums, buy a woman on the white slave trade market, decide you have no future together because she committed the heinous crime of electing to look after her brother instead of having sex with you, offer to have her ex boyfriends killed because they called her fat (because no woman of yours will bear the shame of being called fat) but for the sake of all that is holy, do not simply talk to her about your feelings, she will not respond to your simply and sincerely expressed feelings.

Oh Gentle Reader, I cannot truly express to you the depths of my antagonism towards this film.  I hate it with the gnawing, churning, all consuming darkness of a black hole, and were I possessed of ungodly  reality-altering powers, I would rip it out of existence itself and send it spitting and cursing back into the howling chasm from whence it came.  I hate the way, the truly tragic way, it takes actors that I like - Laura Linney! Andrew Lincoln!  forever to me to the most perfectly cast Edgar Linton there ever shall be, decent and strong-jawed and faithful! - and buckles them into this devil spawn of a roller coaster ride to hell.  Oh, I am sorry Linney, Lincoln, Firth, Ejiofor, Freeman and company (Not you, Knightley.  Never you.) but I cannot forgive your presence in this cynical money sink of a film (that does not - has never - really believed that love is, actually, all around but knows that you will believe it for long enough in your wine-addled Yuletide fugue of loneliness and existential despair to rent it off LoveFilm or add to the royalties by watching it on repeat) on the basis of previous and subsequent good form.

And the turtlenecks.  Dear weeping Jesus on a two-wheeled canoe, the fucking turtlenecks.


*I was actually really good at debate.  I once did a public speaking contest where they invented a prize to give me because I had written my speech the day before and not followed any of the rules about structure or having an actual argument but was apparently "utterly charming". But I am fucking charming, so you know.
**Actually that does sound fucking adorable.
***Who I liked before this film, goddammit.


A/N: Bonus Extra Episode of a TV Show I Hate That Everyone Else Loves, Incidentally Also Written by Richard Curtis: Vincent and the Doctor (Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 10)

Snow Patrol is just the tip of the appallingly twee iceberg here.  No one - no one - can straight-facedly call someone "my friend" in continuous prose and not sound like a twat.  Just - just go and watch it again, and this time listen to the dialogue.  Consider the incredible crassness of the metaphor of Vincent van Gogh being haunted by an "invisible monster" (DEPRESSION THE REAL MONSTER IS DEPRESSION).  And ask yourself whether you actually thought it was good, or whether you just felt like you should because Matt Smith and Bill Nighy compared their bow ties.

(IT'S ABOUT DEPRESSION.)

Very Boys Such Bromance Wow So Unlikely Alliances Much Cheekbone Part 2: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

2013: Year of the Colon.

So basically I'm linking together Thor and The Hobbit and Sherlock (forthcoming in Part 3) because they are all such utter sausage-fests about the manly bonds between manly men and why would you think we're gay we're not gay and maybe we should get a new joke for this show, Stephen Moffat.  It's particularly noticeable to me right now because I've been watching Battlestar Galactica again and I have to say, actual realistic representation of women as fifty percent of the population never felt so good. I watched a scene today where three politicians discussed the impact that a particular issue would have on an upcoming election and they were all women and nobody commented on it. I nearly wept.  Anyway, I really enjoyed The Hobbit but Middle Earth sure has been struck by some tragic ovary-targeting wasting disease.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: Review: I Knew Aidan Turner Was In It For A Reason

So on the whole, it was a ton of fun.  It has the same flaws as the first film, only bigger, and the same strengths as the first film, only bigger.  It's bigger.  Is what I'm saying.  It also has that Middle-of-a-Trilogy-itis thing where the director gets excited by not really having introduce anything or tie anything up so it's all action, bitches, because it's 2013 (well, it was) and that's what we like, amIright? This is a good thing or a bad thing depending on your tastes - some of the action sequences are epic and beautiful and brilliant and so much wow (the dwarves going all Home Alone on Smaug and DON'T FUCKING TALK TO ME ABOUT THE SPEED THAT GOLD MELTS AT BECAUSE THEY'RE FIGHTING A DRAGON AND THIS IS YOUR BEEF) and some were sort of 'ok so this is still happening' (endless chases through Laketown, endless). 

Like the first film, it's a big, heavy juggernaut and it takes a while to get going and it stutters and chokes a little bit to begin with but then heave-ho, everyone puts their shoulders to the wheel and suddenly its weight is helping it gather momentum and oh wait, I am really enjoying this film, whoosh dragons molten tacky gold dwarf statues fabulous elves OH IT'S OVER.  Which was also exactly like the first film.  But also like the first film, it revels in the delight of this being a familiar universe, deftly balancing new elements with old favourites. Wisely, it doesn't dwell too much on episodes like Beorn's house because it knows that we know - and it knows that we know that it knows - that Mirkwood is just around the corner and that can mean only one thing.

Hey baby.  It's been a while.

Legolas: still sexy.  Still confused as fuck.  What's going on? Who are we fighting now? Legolas doesn't care.  He's going to stand on the heads of two dwarves in barrels and shoot arrows from his seemingly infinite quiver because he literally has no other clue about what he should be doing right now and the soundtrack in his head is going "dun dun dun LEGOLAS dundunnnn".

Stumbling in the direction of something more serious, the Mirkwood elves are a perfect example of what the film does right: "less wise and more dangerous" is how they're described, and it takes everything we love about elves (shiny) and invests it with personality and flaws and other tasty and sumptuous things.  I mean, man, these elves are such bitches.  We always suspected it and we were right.  They are the Regina Georges of Middle Earth.  Take Thranduil, for example.  All he wants to do is just comb his hair because what if it gets a kink in it, and then it won't go with his glittery mini-antlers and god Legolas, daddy is busy right now with his straighteners and for the last time Tauriel, the order of precedence goes Picking Up Robes from Dry Cleaner, Booking Facial, Giant Spider Attack in that order.  If you couldn't tell, Thranduil is my new favourite character.

Sorry, we were being serious.  For me the elves worked particularly well because book-universe-wise, there is nothing to say this wasn't going on, it's a logical extension of the Mirkwood plot, and film-universe-wise, we didn't really get to see communities of other races in Lord of the Rings, just societies of humans and the tagalong duds the other races sent along ("yes Legolas, it is a very special and important mission and you should on no account try to call or write and really, stay away as long as you need to").  If the mission statement behind fleshing one small book into three films is to deliver a richer and more complex universe as a reward for investing our time in it, then showing us not only a community of elves but a community of elves that is specifically different from other elves and have their own customs and hang-ups is a very good use of time and resources.  And now I have to stop typing "community of elves" as I can no longer keep a straight face.

But as well as the excitement of meeting new characters and catching up with old ones, what really made the film worth it for me was the plethora of little moments that just flicked out the paintbrush and added a little more dimension to the cast of fantasy archetypes.  Nearly every character gets one, which is just a nice reassurance that Peter Jackson knows what he's doing as a storyteller and - moreover - has probably spent more time immersed in the Tolkien universe than anyone else ever and really actually deserves to take The Hobbit and spin it into three films of (let's face it) ultimate nerdy self-indulgence.  My favourite of these little moments has to be Legolas literally being so hugged so hard by one of the Big End of Level Boss Orcs that he nosebleeds (well, we've all had that urge).  It's great because, again, it fits with the expanded view of these new flawed, impulsive, human-like elves and along with Thranduil's magicked-away dragon-flamed face (he must get through a lot of concealer) it suggests that actually elven beauty is a very important external symbol of immortality and imperviousness to the passage of time and how elves are a race apart, standing outside the natural ebb and flow of things, but basically also because my viewing companion and I showed our age and simultaneously went "You made me bleed my own blood!"*  And after a cursory google, I found that half the internet thought the same thing, so, Orlando Bloom: bringing people together through looking confused and outraged since 2001.

Speaking of new characters, I don't think anyone was a disappointment. I'm also just not sure how absolutely necessary Stephen Fry as the Master of Clumsy Social Commentary on Good Governance was but hey, it was still all super-delightful in its way.  Bard the Bowman** and his Adorable Children were all you could ask for in the way of good, decent, not terribly interesting salt of the earth folk, even if I did spend much of their scenes going, "Why is Bard the Bowman also sometimes Orlando Bloom but maybe also Welsh?"  He's not though, it's Luke Evans, and he is definitely Welsh.  Maybe.  I mean, his kids were.  But why they emigrated from Wales to Middle Earth, I couldn't tell you.  As a side note, a friend of mine described him as "bang tidy", a phrase which - regardless of whether or not I agree with its application in this particular instance - surely deserves more exposure.  Bang tidy. Hee.

And, of course, everyone is getting their robes in a twist over the inclusion of a character who - gasp -isn't even in the book (Deviations from the source material! Imagine!) and who is - double gasp - a lady.  Well let's all just unclench because Tauriel was basically pretty great and a very welcome addition to the series.  The problem, of course, starts when female characters have to represent their entire gender because they are the only female character in the whole thing and in this respect it would be very easy to bitch about the only significant female character in the film being shoved into a love triangle of sorts*** but you know what? Eh.  Besides, it must require a lot of fortitude being an elf lady in love with a dwarf dude, it is basically like Romeo and Juliet with an added height difference.  I mean, the romance plot was obviously horribly executed, it must be said, and happened in about five minutes flat and everyone was bandying the word 'love' around after a single conversation about the relative descriptors for starlight (dwarf chat up lines, ring a ding ding) but Tauriel as a character, on her own, was boss.  I'm not hugely bummed about the film introducing this warrior-lady and then shoving her into a romance plot as she also had agency and strengths and other stuff going on, whereas ironically it was at this point I went "oh so that's why they cast Aidan Turner" because Kili really was basically there to be dwarf totty.  I was a bit sad that his bromance with Fili wasn't so in evidence but this was also the time at which the film chose to take a firm stance on that particular relationship and went with "definitely brothers, however you may interpret Fili choosing to stay behind with his dying bro instead of going on the adventure of a lifetime to the mountain he has literally been waiting to see for his entire life".  Oh shit, I've just remembered how The Hobbit ends. Oh, fuck you, Peter Jackson.

Martin Freeman and Richard Armitage continued to rom-com it as Bilbo and Thorin, with Smaug as the conniving ex ("oh you think he's into you but you just try and get him to commit, there is no way he's coming all the way down here to save you").  Less smouldering for Thorin this time and more "slow descent into madness" but that sounds like a recipe for brooding to me, so I'm still happy.  Also it must be said that while his plan to get rid of Smaug was flawlessly executed, it was also dumb as shit. Oh Thorin, he has fire literally inside him, all you did was make him more bling.  Also was there just a giant gold dwarf statue hanging around and they melted it? Or - even weirder - a mould for giant gold dwarf statues because they were in such hot demand back in the day? Yeah, that was strange. 

La la la, a quick rundown of the rest because I think you can tell by now that I liked the film and just want to make affectionate sarky comments about it.  Benedict Cumberdragon was on good form, particularly the "I like you" line, a thought which I finished as "In another life, I feel like maybe we could have lived in a flat together and solved crimes."**** The problem is that while his voice is awesome and dragon-y and villainous, he's also - in my mind - clearly actually the nicest guy in the world which kind of confused me about Smaug so I came out of the film thinking of him as that friend who you all know is kind of an arsehole but then, like, he's got a big house and loads of cool shit and he's a bit lonely, and really his douchebaggery just mostly makes you laugh and he only sometimes tries to incinerate you. I actually could have watched Smaug and Bilbo chinwag all day and it was half the movie as it was.  Loved Smaug's design too, that slightly Keira Knightley-esque amount of jaw really putting the smug in Smaug (yeah, SORRY NOT SORRY).

What else? Gandalf, yes, cool, great.  He should be nicer to Radagast, though, since something tragic is clearly going to occur to explain his absence in LOTR.  Also, actual magic! I feel like up to this point wizard-magic in the LOTR universe has been more along the lines of New Age positive thinking and supreme good luck.  I mean, Voldemort would be all up in Gandalf's grill and Gandalf would be all "it is small acts and small people who stand against the dark" and Voldemort would like "Bitch be trippin', I'mma AK that shit."  I'm sorry, I've also been watching a lot of Orange is the New Black lately.

So yeah.  In summary, I couldn't take any of it seriously, not for a moment - but in the best possible way.  It's all so dear and familiar, it basically feels like a constant stream of in-jokes, heightened to increasingly ridiculous levels, and even when it's slow or clumsy, I just - oh, Lord of the Rings universe, I can't stay mad at you.  I just can't.  I'm not sure I'll pay to see it again but when it crops up on Netflix in six months time, I will most definitely grab a bottle of cornershop plonk and be glad to make its reacquaintance.

*If that's the wording you thought in, you're referencing The Simpsons, congratulations.  If, on the other hand, you thought "Nobody makes me bleed my own blood!", you are referencing Dodgeball and might be still in your teens, and also Blades of Glory is the far superior work of that particular cinematic movement. 

**Incidentally, Bard the Bowman is the character that I assumed Richard Armitage had been cast as when I first heard he was going to be in it.  I hadn't read the book for a good fifteen years and filtering amongst my hazy watercolour recollections of it, my brain clearly felt that 'heroic lost prince man who slays dragon' was a better fit for him than 'slightly pompous and kind of useless dwarf king'.

***Personally, I feel like the inclusion of an elf v dwarf love triangle is just Peter Jackson sticking two fingers up at Twilight, but that could just be wishful thinking.
****To be discussed in rabid, devoted detail in Part 3 - coming soon! Actually soon, not 'half a year' soon.

Very Boys Such Bromance Wow So Unlikely Alliances Much Cheekbone Part 1: Thor: The Dark World

Blimey, it's been a while, eh?  Not to worry, adulthood hasn't got me yet.  If you're wondering why I've decided to title this three-part blog post* with a variant on 2013's strangest yet most persistent meme, it's because these three works of media degraded my ability to think in full sentences to about that level.  Really.

...

Thor: The Dark World: Review: Basically I'm Reviewing Loki: Just Loki: Where Do I Stop Putting Colons

Ok. So. I'm going to preface this review by saying that when I saw the film, I was suffering under the combination of having just said farewell to a supremely lovely cast of actors on an excellent production I'd been working on for a few months, and that farewell came in the form of excessive drinking and very little sleep, so my emotions were already dancing a merry dance all over my nervous system. The result of this was that when the film finished, my immediate instinct was to go and light up a cigarette that can only be described as post-coital. I collapsed, limbs splayed in my cinema seat, hyperventilating with the sheer force of ALL MY FUCKING FEELINGS.

And then I snapped out of it and remembered the first half of the film. Because the first half of the film is, frankly, dull as fuck. It starts ok (gratuitous crotch shot of Loki) and then just kind of stops (very little Loki until halfway through and then it's All Loki All The Time).  And for once in my life, I'm not just being a fangirl (I said not just being a fangirl). Basically, there's not enough Loki to make this film deliver on its promises. It was marketed as 'Thor must ask Loki for help, angst ensues' and that's just not really what it is. Tom Hiddleston has been walking the earth like the Wandering Jew with cheekbones, to promote a film that he's barely in.

To be honest with you, I don't even remember that much of the first half (something about Christopher Eccleston's career not quite panning how he expected) and awkward segues into comic interludes, mostly courtesy of Kat Dennings as Darcy, though even her infallible ability to be deadpan and awesome seems strained in the odd, tired energy of the events. There's also a cameo appearance from Chris O'Dowd, going on a date with Natalie Portman and let's all back the fuck up and read that again because CHRIS O'DOWD WHAT ARE YOU DOING ON A DATE WITH NATALIE PORTMAN GET BACK TO THE BASEMENT. So there are more jokes than the first film but none of the effortless delight of, say, Thor walking into a pet shop and demanding a horse. In fact, there are actually too many jokes to sit comfortably with the amped-up grit factor and the tone lurches drunkenly all over the place from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again via a rainbow bridge**.

Part of this is the criminally under explored villain, when the film can actually decide who the main antagonist is - Malekith or Loki.  If the rumours are true that a bunch of Malekith's stuff was bumped from the film to make way for Loki, then it raises the horrifying possibility that Tom Hiddleston's original role in the film was confined to maybe just one eyebrow raise and that is a world that I want no part in.  I am disappointed in the disservice done to both Chris Ecclestone and his character, not least because when they announced him I spent two days in a sort of glee-coma unable to say anything except repeat, "Malekith the Accursed.  Dark elf.  Christopher Ecclestone." But things were always going to be difficult post-Avengers. The first Thor had the advantage of being largely encapsulated in its own universe, the action confined to the remote realms of Asgard and New Mexico. Now the Marvel Cinematic Universe's internal public is aware of superheroes, the threat level has to be very finely judged for solo outings because otherwise just, like, call the other Avengers, y'know? And frankly, all the known universes collapsing in Greenwich kind of seems like at least an equivalent level of threat to a leather clad sociopath letting aliens on flying bikes into New York. But whatever, maybe Bruce Banner was on holiday. 

And I suppose things were also always going to be difficult in terms of how to write Loki. After going gloriously and hammily full villain in The Avengers, giving him any kind of arc must necessitate a little backtracking - bringing him home is a start (and let's not forget the moment in The Avengers when Thor tells him he can stop and come home and goddamit it, you can see in his eyes that that would actually maybe be really nice were it not for the whole attempted genocide and mass murder blips) but in The Dark World, it's just done in far too broad brush strokes. This is where the lack of Loki becomes problematic. There's not enough time to make this film what it deserves to be, which is Thor-and-Loki-go-to-family-counselling. I'm not quite sure that the MCU appreciates what it has in Hemsworth and Hiddleston, which is a few dozen gallons of heartbreak and an effortless chemistry. This film feels like it was written for lesser actors, ironed out into Hero and Villain, and yet the Brodinsons of Sassgard*** run away with every scene they're given (in Loki's case, cackling). Hiddleston's least subtle character elicits, weirdly, his most subtle performance,**** doing more acting with his eyes in one scene than there is in the rest of the film combined, and Hemsworth leads the film with lovely sincerity, retaining the streak of self-effacing humour brought out in The Avengers (I mean, thank all the Nordic gods, because the lack thereof in the first film was what sent me running into Loki's mad arms in the first place).

The fact is, the greatest superpower any of these films possess is humanity - that's what gives us the hook to keep us coming back, and is also why Superman movies are doomed to fail in comparison.  Tony Stark has his inner demons, Bruce Banner has his rage issues, Steve Rogers is a good man in a bewilderingly and increasingly complicated world, and Thor has a dysfunctional family. It's even ironic, maybe, that the most ridiculous Avenger (space-god-thing-with-science-magic) has the most affecting and, dare I say it, relatable backstory. Not so much with the frost giants, obviously, but the fuck-up sibling and the inability to ever really give up on family when they're threatening to take over the world that your signifiant other lives on, well, we've all been there.

Or maybe at this point Hiddleston's popularity with the fan base is just becoming a hindrance to writing a well balanced story.  I mean, there's a right way and a wrong way to love Loki. The right way is to appreciate him for the magnificent bastard he is, in which case you probably like Avengers Loki best, slasher smile, death metal hair, eye-ripping and everything. And there's the wrong way, which is to watch him whilst silently keening "MY BABY YOU JUST NEED A HUG", in which case you probably like him best in the first film, all wobbly bottom lip and palpable and justified sense of betrayal. (I'm somewhere in between the two, since you ask, feeling somewhat relieved at the last second reveal of him finally sitting on the throne of Asgard, with a moment of "oh thank god, that's my clever little psychopath", but far far too many moments of "JUST LET YOUR RIPPLING BLOND BROTHER SAVE YOU WITH HIS LOVE" for me to be entirely comfortable with myself. It is not, after all, a million miles away from "he just gets tense when he's trying to usurp a throne, he loves me really!")

This film was stuck between the two, flirting with both sides enough to be really really frustrating but not nearly enough to be satisfying. What we want, I suspect, is for Loki to be - like any good trickster figure - consistently and ambiguously using his emotions for his own gain. Like Sherlock. Or Artemis Fowl. Or - Loki's classical ancestor - Edmund in King Lear. We want a conman who is always ultimately up to something but in the moments when he displays vulnerability, left wondering whether it was all an act or possibly, maybe just a little bit sincere. We were almost there with this film. His 'death' is a particularly egregious example - the redemption, the regret, it should have been a Type 2 Loki fan's wet dream (and also how I was predicting they would write him out of the franchise). But there just wasn't time to process it. The quick cut to the gags about Chris O'Dowd and Thor hanging his hammer on the coat rack undermined it so quickly that there was no way he was really dead. Similarly, perhaps showing Loki's lonely displays of grief over Frigga's death (Frigga, my thoughts in brief: wow someone had some awesome in their coffee this morning, oh wait look she's dead in order to further the character development of the male protagonists, colour me shocked) would have made the later bluff too obvious, but it was obvious anyway because this film took a fond farewell of subtlety in the opening credits, so lingering just a little bit longer on him blowing stuff up with his mind would have been an infinitely more satisfying exploration of character.  That, in the end, was the core disappointment - everything was undercut so swiftly that you hardly knew how to feel about any of it (ambiguity is great, confusion is not). We're invested in these characters now, and not for the big explosions. Iron Man 3 was a darkly sincere look at the individual, not the costume. The Thor story should be an obvious contender for this type of treatment and yet became something so much less than the sum of its parts.

Look, it's not all bad. It was worth the ticket price for Hemsworth and Hiddleston alone, frankly. From the moment they Reservoir Dogs their way down the halls of Asgard, through the chase on the spaceship ("Well don't hit it, just press it gently." "I AM PRESSING IT GENTLY.") to Loki's deadpan "Ta-da" upon emerging into Vanaheim, the central section of the film is a pure joy. And, crucially, it's set us up for a Thor 3 in which the action is Thor-Loki centric, and me being the eternal optimist that I am, I'm going to hope for all the bickering, sparring, betrayal, game playing, double bluffs and tentative reconciliations we were promised this time. And after all, Loki essentially won this one. I can't really hate that. So until then I'm going to wait for the DVD and play a specific twenty minutes of it nonstop until my laptop breaks (cf also: War Horse) or Gotterdamerung occurs.  Whichever happens first.


*THREE PARTS.  Seriously though.
**A mysterious repaired rainbow bridge - how? It was a massive deal that Thor couldn't go and see Natalie Portman at the end of the first film and there was a shoehorned-in mumble about dark energy in The Avengers and now it sort of turns out that, basically, Asgard engineers totally could have done it, no problem, but the thing is, like, union stuff, and also they'll need to get some parts in.
***Kudos for this outstanding piece of wordplay goes to my colleague, Kate. Good writers imitate, great writers steal etc etc.
****No seriously.  Go and watch his other stuff and tell me he doesn't bring unnecessary melodrama to more conventionally written roles.  Then watch Thor again and tell me why and how he's finding deft emotional complexity in Giggling Space Despot.

How to Be a Man: the Totally Slammin' Gender Politics of 'The Apartment' and 'Say Anything'

First up, if you haven't seen the two films this blog is discussing, why are you even reading this? Go re-evaluate your life choices, watch those films, and then come back here. If you have seen them, congratulations on having reached the minimum requirements for being an intelligent human being.

There's a lot of excellent discussion these days about how the media constructs femininity in various bad ways. We still live in a world where female characters make up only 15-20% of major characters in films, so it's no wonder our perception of womankind is somewhat skewed. As well as the obvious things like the very narrow standards of attractiveness that women are held to, women are also portrayed largely as being capable only of taking on auxiliary supporting roles: wives, girlfriends, mothers, sisters, secretaries, etc etc etc. There's a great thing called the Bechdel Test, wherein a work of media has to feature a) at least two named female characters, b) who talk to each other about c) something other than men, in order to pass. It's not an exact science because there are many great, positive works of art that portray women in a well rounded way that don't pass the Bechdel Test (a lot of Jane Austen, for example) and there are equally works that do pass the test but suck in misogynist ass-sucky ways. But all this has been documented elsewhere by people much smarter than me and who devote much more of their time to tracking gender politics in pop culture (yes, there are people who spend more time doing that than me). For further reading, I'd particularly recommend this article on the different between Strong Female Characters and Strong Characters who happen to be Female.

But I want to talk about something else. I want to talk about Strong Male Characters. Or at least, films that portray what it means to be a man in a way that isn't demeaning or patronising. It's kind of sad that the two films I want to talk about came out in 1960 (The Apartment) and 1989 (Say Anything) but whatareyougonnado?* Let's start with The Apartment, one of my favourite films of all time. It's a romantic comedy that deals with the subject of suicide, obviously. It follows the story of CC “Buddy Boy” Baxter (the always effervescently wonderful Jack Lemmon) who works out that the way to get ahead in the monolith insurance firm he works for is to rent out his apartment, one night at a time, to his superiors so that they can have their extramarital affairs there. While it gets him a promotion at work, it comes at the expense of being shunted out of his own apartment at a moment's notice, an undeserved reputation with the neighbours as an indefatigable Casanova, and one vicious head cold. It also (of course) gets in the way of him pursuing his affections for fabulous and vulnerable elevator girl, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine).

The film's central message is delivered by one of the aforementioned neighbours, Doctor Dreyfuss, in the aftermath of Ms Kubelik's narrowly non-fatal suicide attempt, which appears to be Jack Lemmon's fault (it's not, but he has to pretend it is, and this is why you should just go and watch the film): “Why don't you grow up, Baxter? Be a mensch! You know what that means?...A mensch - a human being!” Even though the criticism is wide of the mark in this specific instance (he's actually protecting Shirley MacLaine), it's still an apt summary of the circumstances. Baxter lives a comfortable lie, using what he has to acquire the lifestyle that he thinks he wants. He confesses later in the film to Ms Kubelik, “You know, I used to live like Robinson Crusoe; I mean, shipwrecked among 8 million people. And then one day I saw a footprint in the sand, and there you were.” This admittance of loneliness, though apparent to the viewer from the start (the first major sequence of the film depicts him sitting alone in Central Park at night), can only come after trying and failing to be a man in a myriad of other ways.

By renting out his apartment to his adulterous bosses, he implicitly condones their behaviour and, while he doesn't quite join in with the what would today be termed 'banter', he also tolerates it. It is only after his promotion that he starts trying to woo Fran Kubelik with theatre tickets; in success, he grows more self-absorbed and goes from the man who could count how many colds she'd had to holding an entire conversation with her about his new hat, failing to pick up on her distress at something else. He even starts affecting the speech patterns of his superiors and is given the key to the executive washroom: all in all, he gains entrance to an exclusively male club, one full of wealth, power and, of course, abuse of those first two things. His lowest point comes when he tries to pick up a girl and bring her back to his apartment himself for once which, predictably, ends badly – it is at this point that Dr Dreyfuss has to step in with advice about being a mensch (my latent Jewishness might well account for my affection for this film). The film's climax – its real climax – is fairly unique amongst romantic comedies in that the two romantic leads don't 'fix' each other: quite separately, Ms Kubelik ends her affair with the married head of the company, played by Fred MacMurray (“When you're in love with a married man, you shouldn't wear mascara.”), and Baxter quits his job and thus the whole apartment-renting scheme, relinquishing his executive washroom key along with his high-stakes male persona. “I've decided to become a mensch,” he tells aforementioned married boss. “You know what that means? A human being.” Being a man sometimes means poverty and loneliness, but when the credits roll, C.C. Baxter is the only real man left in New York.

What is particularly wonderful is that a film that nominally looks like it's about saving the damaged, fragile woman from the bad, bad man turns out to actually be about saving the male protagonist from his slide into cynicism. Let's not forget, it's Shirley MacLaine that runs to catch him at the end, it's the woman who gets to ride in on the white horse and save the man from his solitary, poor existence. It's implied, as well, that part of her haste isn't just her sudden crushing self-realisation that Fred MacMurray is, as I said, a bad bad man, it's because she thinks Buddy might be about to hop on the suicide wagon himself. (Interesting how in life, male suicide rates are much higher than female ones, but in film it is always a form of tragic, poetic violence that we see visited on female forms.) It is of utmost importance that she rescues herself: while Jack Lemmon certainly plays his role in nursing her back to health and convincing her of the existence of men that aren't complete scumbags (through being utterly and completely non-pushy, I feel like this film should be shown in sex ed classes), it is her who gets up and leaves Fred MacMurray on New Year's Eve, in their favourite restaurant, while playing 'their' song. That's just as brave as Buddy walking into the office to give back his bathroom key, if not moreso.  Plus it's also just so damn cool.  Sorry, Some Like It Hot, in my book the Best Last Line Award goes to “Shut up and deal.”

Say Anything deals with maturity and manhood a little differently. Now, Lloyd Dobler might actually be my personal hero. He's kind of unique amongst film protagonists in that he doesn't grow as a person or have a character arc – rather, his lack of a character arc is his character arc. He begins the film by saying he wants to be with Diane Court and he ends the film by damn well being with Diane Court. He says it himself to Diane's dad: “What I really want to do with my life – what I want to do for a living – is I want to be with your daughter. I'm good at it.” He lets others perceive him as a slacker because he doesn't pretend to have interests outside of what he genuinely likes, chiefly kickboxing and the aforementioned Diane Court. Every word out of his mouth is genuinely, brilliantly honest: when he says at a dinner table of wealthy professionals that he doesn't want to sell, buy or process anything to earn a living, what could come across as adolescent naivety is simply a statement of fact. Lloyd knows himself. In this respect, he is the opposite of Buddy, who spends most of the film convincing himself that he could be happy living as something he's not (a cynical bachelor). Lloyd spends most of the film grimly clinging to being himself, when the whole world is telling him it would be easier if he were someone else – or, at the very least, his girlfriend's dad, who comes to represent the adult world and its deceptions. Lloyd makes a better adult than most of the adults in the film because of this honesty.

But what I want to talk about is the moment when this honesty wavers. After Diane breaks up with him (that goddamn pen, I'm in tears just thinking about it) because she thinks it's the right thing to do, Lloyd goes through his dark night of the soul. He refuses to talk about it, he refuses to open up to his trio of female friends, claiming “I'm a guy, I have pride”. It is the only moment where he gives in to self-indulgence or tries to put up a barrier between himself and his girl-space-friends and, rightly, he is called on his bullshit. “The world is full of guys!” snorts Corey, played by the wonderful Lili Taylor, “Be a man! Don't be a guy!” It's one of the most wonderful lines I've ever heard in a film and encapsulates something that every present day comedy in which a schlubby dudebro likes getting stoned with other dudebros until some nice women convinces him to be maybe a little less stoned sometimes, but in a way that doesn't threaten his male friendships that still somehow end up central to the film, misses: guys are homogenous. To be a guy is to make a safe choice. To assume that being a guy in a group of other identical guys who are exclusively (male) guys somehow qualifies as maturity is erroneous and does a disservice to men. Say Anything says that being a man means knowing yourself and being around people who know you and like you because of it, even if it's difficult and sometimes lonely and it means standing outside someone's window with a boombox playing Peter Gabriel.

Lloyd experiments with being a guy when he tries hanging out with the film's collection of erstwhile guys outside the Gas 'n' Sip. The guys (who include, by the way, Jeremy Piven, whom I kind of love solely on the basis of his association with John Cusack) offer Lloyd various pieces of post-break-up romantic advice of the 'nail someone else', 'bitches, man' variety. Lloyd considers the specimens before him, asking, “If you guys know so much about women, how come you're here at, like, the Gas 'n' Sip on a Saturday night completely alone drinking beers with no women anywhere?” Thus proving Corey's other great line true: “I'm a good person, Lloyd, but you're a great person.” Wait, maybe Corey is my personal hero for being so brilliantly perceptive and also brilliantly flawed (“I wrote 63 songs about Joe this year and I'm going to play them all tonight.”) As he walks away from the Gas 'n' Sip, Lloyd says, “Well, that was a mistake.” Being a man is not only about being truthful to and about yourself, but acknowledging bullshit in others, even when not doing so is the easy option.

What I find most interesting about the cases of both Buddy and Lloyd is how, in one light, stereotypically female their situations are. Buddy is a character who watches his ideal romantic partner waste their time on someone else while pretending to be a collected, well put together grown up and, just at the moment when he appears to be losing it, his love interest rides in to save him. Gender flip it and I'm pretty sure Sandra Bullock already made that one. Lloyd falls in love at first sight (kind of, even if it is before the film starts) and spends his time hopelessly devoted to that one person, 'just knowing' they're meant to be together. In the scene where Diane and Lloyd lose their virginities in the car, it is Lloyd who trembles and cries and Diane who holds him. Flip it and you get an unimaginative but much more typical Twilight-esque teen love story.

Boys are not raised in our culture to be 'men', they are raised to be 'not women': they are taught not to pine, not to mope, not to be a 'pussy' or a 'little girl' because the worst possible thing a man can be is a woman. This is the kind of binary that films thrive off, and one that society is increasingly entrenched in (think 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus'), because it's an easy shorthand.  Lazy films rely on cliches and stereotypes as shorthand in order to tell a story in 90 minutes and gender cliches are amongst the most common offenders. These two films portray great and truthful male protagonists because they don't subscribe to gender cliches at all – instead, they take the radical view that women might just be people too, messy and flawed, and in doing so, create male characters who – gasp – sometimes act like women. And, indeed, vice versa.  Everything I described about being a man in The Apartment and Say Anything could just as equally be applied to becoming a mature adult woman. This is no coincidence. I picked these films to talk about because they both understand that when we say “Be a man”, you could interpret it as “Be a neanderthal” or “Be a cliche” or “Don't be a woman” or indeed anything else that patronises men just as much as women, or you could interpret it in a way that actually makes sense. Be sensitive to yourself. Be truthful to yourself. Be a human being. Don't be a guy. Be a mensch.

*On the topic of watching films made several decades ago, I went back to the original Star Wars trilogy after my Pegg/Wright post. Do you know what's awesome about Han and Leia? Apart from everything obvious, like them both being blindingly hot and having sexy belligerent tension? He actually asks her opinion. Repeatedly. And he defers to her when the situation is clearly more in her remit than his. It's a mark of how horribly rare that is in action films today that it stood out to me. And this is from a character that's supposed to be full of deliberately retrogressive macho bullshit. You guys, we are doing so badly.

(NB to a footnote: Uh, Star Wars is obviously not perfect in its depiction of women, mostly because there are none and most of them seem to be strippers of some variety. Leia, however, is badass in a way that doesn't consist of her simply amalgamating 'masculine' traits, and therefore is awesome. Remember what I was saying about films that fail the Bechdel Test and yet are great?)

[P.S. to an NB to a footnote: I don't think the scene in Return of the Jedi where Mon Mothma is briefing them on attacking the second Death Star counts because she's not really talking to Leia specifically.]