Jeanette Battista

Star Trek: Into Darkness

Star Trek: Into Darkness Recap  Part I

“I’m Captain Kirk and I’m an enormous ass. RUN!”

“I’m Dr. McCoy and I’m cranky. RIGHT BEHIND YOU!”

“I’m Spock. It’s hot in here.”

“I’m Uhura and I’m making out with a Vulcan. Yeah, not sure how that happened either.”

“I’m Sulu. I’m really just going to yell about us dying a lot in this scene.”

Volcano does volcano stuff.

Kirk and McCoy leap off a cliff and swim down to the Enterprise.

Scotty: bitches about the ship being underwater.

Spock: Something appears to have happened to the line holding me to the shuttle. I am, apparently, quite fucked.

Kirk: We’re coming to get you, buddy!

Uhura: SPOCK! Who will I make out with?

Spock: You will be violating the Prime Directive. Just leave me here to turn into a charcoal briquette. I’m sure the sensation will be…interesting. Oh, and the needs of the many, blah blah blah.

Kirk: <saves Spock’s dumb ass because otherwise we wouldn’t have a movie>

Back on Earth—

Pike: Dude, you are totally demoted. I’m captain again.

Kirk: Seriously?! Save one freakin’ Vulcan and my world goes to shit.

Spock: I told you not to save me. It is illogical.

Pike: You two want to get a room so you can work out your “issues”?

In London—

Sad parents being sad over their sick kid. Sad father goes outside to be sad.

The Cumberbatch: Hey, hi, sorry about the kid. Here’s some of my magic blood that will help her—audience take notes—but I’m going to need something from you. I’m like the British Dr. Lecter and you are my Clarice. Quid pro quo, bitch.

Sad Father: <kisses daughter goodbye, goes to high tech place, pops a ring made of Alka Seltzer in water and blows the building into atomic particles.

At Star Fleet—

Peter Weller: Wow, I have seriously not aged well. But my eyes are crazy blue.

Kirk: Oh, hi Spock. (pretends to ignore him)

Spock: Captain.

Kirk: Dick.

Peter Weller: We have a situation—something really bad has happened. Shit done got blowed up in England by a disgruntled postal worker…I mean, ex-Star Fleet officer named Harrison. Let’s go to the videotape!

Kirk: I might actually have a brain cell functioning.

Pike: How’s about you shut the hell up before I jettison you out in space.

Kirk: But we’re not in space…

Pike: Yet.

Peter Weller: Gentlemen? Do you want to share with the class?

Kirk: So this guy is ex-Star Fleet? Wouldn’t he know that we’d all be gathered in this room and…

BANG! LOTS AND LOTS OF DEATH, DYING, and EXPLOSIONS.

The Cumberbatch: Knock knock, morons.

Pike: Dies.

Kirk: <saves the day with a fire hose>

The Cumberbatch: <beams away>

Kirk: REVENGE!!!!!!!

Spock: You should be logical about th—

Kirk: Perhaps you didn’t hear me. I said, REVENGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Peter Weller: Here, take these warheads. They were just lying around. Don’t bother looking inside them, they are completely normal. COMPLETELY!

Spock: So we’ll just fly out to the Klingon home world and hang out at the edge of the neutral zone and then go to this uninhabited part of the planet where Harrison is hiding and kill him. Am I missing anything?

Peter Weller: Yep. That’s about right.

Spock: Am I the only one seeing the problem with this?

Kirk: REVENGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Spock: Apparently I am.

Scotty: Those things are not coming on my ship!

Kirk: Cram it sideways.

Scotty: I quit!

Kirk: Fine!

Scotty: Good!

Spock: That went well..

Hannibal

AHHHHHHHHHHH! So much to process. So little time…

Suffice to say, I would marry this show and have little show babies. And I don’t even have a uterus any more. That’s how much I love this show.

Avatar: The Last Airbender—The Search Review

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Let’s get this out of the way: I am really happy we’re finally getting the story of Zuko’s mother. I am a huge Zuko fan in that I loved his character arc in the series, and I wanted to find out the rest of the backstory. So I was thrilled when I got an ARC of this graphic novel.

And then they went and did what they did. I will try not to spoil here, but I thought the series addressed why Ozai despised his son in a satisfactory manner. I did not need Zuko’s parentage thrown into turmoil just so we could have a compelling issue with his mother. They could have done many things to make the story of how she came to be the Fire Lady interesting, and they had a great built-in narrative when she killed the sitting Fire Lord and left the Fire Nation to save Zuko. They did not have to go around muddying the waters.

I am always happy to see Azula—she was another favorite of mine during the series. Still, it all seemed so contrived to get her out of her cell. Why would you let her out when you can’t control her? Zuko knows she lies just as easily as breathing. I find it very hard to believe—after all he went through—that he would be naïve enough to let her loose and hope he could contain her.

To me, this felt like fanfiction. Perhaps the story will get better, but I was not impressed with the tale being set up in this book.

Two Jennifer Lawrences.

Hemlock Grove and Gender

Hemlock Grove and Gender Issues

 

Let me first say, I enjoyed the hell out of Hemlock Grove. I liked what the story was doing, I like the tropes it was using, I LOVE the gothic sensibility that informs the series. However, that doesn’t mean I loved everything about it; there were a number of gender issues that really REALLY bothered me now that I’ve had a chance to digest the series.

Spoilers AHOY!

1. Only women died. Seriously. Only women/girls. And they didn’t just die, they were mutilated, eaten, dismembered, disemboweled, flayed, and killed in a variety of really horrible ways. I understand that it was important to the plot—it was a key thing and I’ll get to how pissed off I was about that reveal in a sec—but it just felt like, well, overkill. The only man that dies commits suicide and the graphic nature of the gunshot wound is never shown.

Why was this the case? Why did the camera seem to revel in revealing women in various stages of grisly, bloody death? I love horror, but after a certain point, I get tired of the ladies always being the ones to pay the price just by because they’re…ladies. You have the crack team of Werewolf and Babyvamp on the case—both young men, btw—not to mention a host of other men running around (sheriffs, priests, random guy out for a walk)—one of them couldn’t have been et? (And before you go telling me I missed the point of the bad guy, let me stress that I did get it. Which brings me to point 2)

2. Hello to the Slut Shaming. I mean, WOW. So young women are being mauled by a wild animal and its going after their ladybits first? I mean, really? Believe me, I understand the trope of the wolfman representing the animalistic side of man, the unrepressed sexuality that can turn men to beasts. At first I thought this was an interesting twist on that trope (what with the creature doing the killing being a female), but then we got the name-calling and the not so subtle comments about the twins loss of virginity and that whole girls shouldn’t be having “experiences” (sex) vibe came into play. I can’t tell you how tired I am of seeing this in the horror genre. Only the virgin survives the night—all the sluts having sex with their boyfriends are killed by the psycho in the mask. Um, no. Aren’t we done with the tired sex = death metaphor yet? And why isn’t the pretty manwhore getting gacked? Oh wait, because it’s okay if a guy gets some—it doesn’t endanger his life because it’s expected.

3. Christina—the White Wolf—Yup. She’s the one doing all of the killing. A 14 year old girl that just wants to be a writer, so she decides to turn herself into a werewolf, because, hey—it would make one helluva story. At this point, I’m unsure what the narrative was going for because she seems at times to be oblivious that she’s the creature and then, when the story calls for it, completely aware of her changes. In fact, she’s in control of them. When she’s in the midst of her villain reveal to Peter, she vacillates between obsession with him (she has been sort of stalking him since he came to town and she also blamed the werewolf attacks on him) and a certain kind of anger at girls in general. Is it jealousy of Peter that makes her target Letha? Is it the fact that Letha’s pregnant, so obviously she’s had sex (which, HI INCEST, I didn’t see you lurking there!)? Is Christina representative of the frigid, frightened side of female sexuality and thus acts out against it?

I don’t know the answers to these, and I suspect the show doesn’t either. What I would have liked to see in Hemlock Grove is a true reversal of the trope. Fine, the werewolf is a girl—how’s about she target young men, for a change? What if she went after the sex parts of nubile, sexually active teen boys instead of her female friends? How would that have changed the story? Wouldn’t it have raised the stakes for the Hardy Boys—put them in greater danger beyond just hunting the beast?

4. Roman—yeah, totally called the creepy incest vibe with Letha (when they were still cousins and not half brother and sister). I noticed that the girl children born before and after him were discarded. Supposedly he was the only one born with a caul (which, at least in medieval times, is a mark of the devil) but I find it interesting that the only children mentioned in conjunction with Olivia are girls. Juliette and Shelley are the only ones given names, so there could have been boys born besides Roman, but the one’s we see in particular are these two girls. Olivia snaps Juliette’s neck and Shelley is reanimated in some way over at the Godfrey Institute. Why the girl baby hate?

5. Dr. Chasseur—She kills a pregnant girl to be initiated into the Order of the Dragon (run by elderly white men, it would seem). The girl happened to be a werewolf but she’d already been imprisoned. She meets a messy end via Olivia and you almost feel bad for her except that she was so willing to follow orders—collect Peter for the Order—that she was turning a blind eye on the real problem.

6. Olivia—oh, there’s a whole bag of crazy there. I can’t even begin to quantify the different tropes she represented. We have devouring mother, femme fatale, mistress, haranguing wife that belittles her husband, abusive parent. Complex, sure, but not a particularly pleasant person.

On the other hand is Peter who treats all the women he meets with a respect seriously lacking in most other male characters. I don’t know if it was done to emphasize his otherness, his outsider stigma, besides being a gypsy, or if it was just how the character was written, but he was always unfailingly kind. He was one of the few people to see Shelley as she was on the inside, able to see beyond her “monstrous” outward appearance. He genuinely loved Letha AND her unborn baby. He had the only loving, normal mother in the group. It is odd that he would be more in touch with the female than most of the female characters.

I have more, but this is getting long. I plan to watch the series again to see if my thoughts clarify on a second viewing.

The Gender Coverup