Putting Renaissance Faires the world over to shame, WAG Screen is making a film of “The Lady of Shalott” to celebrate Tennyson’s bicentenary, bringing well-known Pre-Raphaelite paintings to life. They are doing a pretty solid job:

Waterhouse:

Movie:

Click on the links for bigger versions so you can click back and forth and nerd out like I did! These guys are not playing around.

It’s so…accurate! *happy sigh*

More pictures are available here, courtesy of The Costumer’s Guide.

Let’s talk Kings. Last night there was an episode. The real title is lame, so we’ll just call it, “Nobody Actually Likes Ballet,” since it’s true, even if whiny Princess Waspmilla seems freaked out by the idea.

The show is getting better…ish, except it still has the magical ability to have 800 things happen and yet nothing moves forward. I really feel like this show is the television equivalent of a those lap-pool spas where you swim in place while the water jets just…push on you. Is it just me?

Things I liked:

- Queen Badass! She’s all, “Everyone loves ballet! I’m a patron of the arts! Oh, I’m sorry, what I meant was, I’m the patron of the art of kicking your ass so hard you’re coughing up boot. Also, ballet is for nerds.”
- The security nickname for her is Wedgewood. THUMBS UP.
- I really love the picture that’s coming to light, where he’s the power hungry soldier and she’s the one who knows how to actually construct a monarchy.
- I appreciate that she knows about the second family, because seriously, King McShane was not being discreet about that and there was no way she wouldn’t know.
- Anything about the kingdom outside of the palace. It’s painfully slow, but still, I know now that there are delis in Shiloh. Progress!
- THOMASINA. She is awesome, she is gorgeous, and she is subtle. Please don’t let her disappear like you disappeared Wes Studi, okay?
- Eamonn Walker continues to be too good for this show. At least all his scenes are with Ian McShane, so there’s some good acting going on. I routinely feel sorry for Ian McShane sharing scenes with David.
- No scenes with Ian McShane and David this week!

Things I did not like:

- No Wes Studi! So now that there’s peace, is he gone forever? Screw you, show! We want Studi!
- Jack’s cohort is so one-dimensional that her “acting” just comes off like a bad impression of Eliza Dushku, which I would have thought was impossible.
- Jack’s boyfriend was supposed to be heartrending, I guess, but all I could think about was how freaking indiscreet this kid was. Jack is the prince, and clearly, for the heir to the throne, gay is not okay – would you PLEASE stop wandering around shouting how much you love him? You’re going to get your ass assassinated, stupid.
- Princess Waspy, who has the strategic acumen of string cheese.
- And the acting ability of string cheese, while we’re at it. (Seriously, this fixation on getting girls who look like Seventeen cover models to be on TV instead of actual actresses means we’re in for a totally talentless generation, and this girl is just a harbinger of things to come.)
- DAVID. Oh, man, David.

Listen up, show. In the Bible, David was a totally power-hungry, charismatic shithead. He was not beloved of God because of his good heart, okay? The whole “beloved of God” thing happened because people who wrote the Bible had to make the dude look like something besides just a power-hungry, charismatic shithead. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you. It’s what makes him interesting!

David as the good-hearted yokel is the opposite of interesting. I don’t want this guy to come to power. I don’t want this guy to come to BREAKFAST. Corrupt him soon, show, I am BEGGING you, or else hit him with a truck and let’s move on to any one of the much more interesting characters.

- Like Thomasina! Can we just have a Thomasina Show?
- OR WES STUDI.

Attention everyone who feels like howling with laughter tonight:

I’m just saying.

I will probably not be able to resist liveblogging some of this. If so, I’ll slap a cut up here to save people’s eyes.

9:05 Faye Dunaway is in this. She is attempting an accent; I’m guessing Cottonmouthian? (Faye, honey, was rent due? Tell me rent was due.)

9:10 This character’s name is Declan Fitzpatrick. That’s genius.

9:18 It would be awesome if this turned into some kind of J-horror and all the wind-moan sounds were from some girl trapped in a well or something.

9:20 Their copyright-free search engine is “WEB SEARCH.” They stole my idea!

9:38 Jerry goes for some supernatural help for the house, gets freaked out during a palm-reading, and leaves without asking for help for the house. I am not surprised his counterpart in the past met such an avoidable end.

9:42 The one next week has Ivan Sergei in it. Shame on you, Lifetime. You should know more than anyone that that man is danger! Tori asked to sleep with him, remember?

9:44 He asks her on a formal date. She changes from jeans and a black top into jeans and a grey top. When she comes out he whips off his sunglasses and gapes like the prom scene in an 80s movie.

9:51 He asks, “You want to get a cup of coffee?” They immediately have sex.

9:51 Oh my god, the bed spins. Oh, those poor actors.

10:00pm The heroine’s mother was a hooker? I don’t…really? (Also, she’s like, two years older than the heroine.)

10:15 My TV, in a desperate attempt to save me from myself, the move froze for two minutes.

10:15 Oh, Declan Fitzpatrick is the reincarnation of the woman. Dead Again: The Again-ening!

10:25 I thought the bad ye olde brother had a hooker in the living room. It’s supposed to be a brothel. My bad?

10:27 This movie is seriously people in the past doing interesting things, and people in the present just standing around slackjawed.

10:32 The junkie mom threatened to tell people Declan Fitzpatrick is a child molester, which will hurt his law practice day care center? I…wish the people from the past would come back.

10:41 The junkie mom is possessed by the evil ye olde brother and knocks Jerry down a flight of stairs. She speaks for us all, Declan Fitzpatrick!

10:42 Her: “Who did this?” Him: “Your mom.” APPLICABLE AT LAST.

10:50 Uh, thanks for that graphic screaming rape/murder scene, Lifetime! (I am not sure how this twist was a surprise to anyone, since it’s been obvious from flashback one, but okay.)

10:55 An athletic man gets his ass beat by a female, middle-aged drug addict, who is possessed by the spirit of ye olde bad brother, while the ghost of the evil mom looks on and the heroine rushes back to the scene of the crime as the wedding goes on downstairs and Faye Dunaway is wandering around being ominous. Dear movie, next time you could maybe front-load a little of this.

10:56 We have push-the-dagger-back-and-forth-itis!

11:00 Blah blah denoumentcakes. Jerry O’Connell, make a note: “fuhward” is not a word.

It’s airing again as of 11pm!

Over at Tor.com, I talk about one of the great movies of our time: Hackers.

By all means, head over there to read the column, in which I tried to keep it together. Because below this cut, I just nerd out ridiculously.

Hackers: when cargo pants were king.

There is no good and bad. There is only fun and boring.
Continue reading

Today’s world speeds ahead faster than anyone can keep track. No sooner does Facebook oust MySpace when Twitter swoops in to dethrone them both; paperbacks are threatened by the Kindle, and CD players are obsolete. In this swiftly changing culture, sometimes it’s nice to revisit a simpler era, when camouflage was edgy and passwords were letters–only: the world of 1995’s Hackers.

One of the most rewarding guilty pleasure movies of all time, Hackers explores the life of a handful of cooler-than-thou tech savants who find themselves framed for a virus written by a snotty over-thirty systems admin. These hackers, who look like the bridge of the starship Enterprise after an run-in with Hot Topic, have to escape the Feds, unite the hackers of the world, and break into the mainframe of an oil company from some payphones in Grand Central.

Ah, cinema verité!

As a technology time capsule, the film’s a scream. The hackers crowd into a bedroom during a party to drool over a laptop with a 28.8 modem; the main MacGuffin is a 3.5″ floppy disk. (Imagine how an entire sequel could be framed around the desperate search to find a computer that can read a 3.5″ floppy in time to discover what’s on it before evil plan launches.)

However, the film functions beautifully as a snapshot of the computer culture of 1995, when most people were fumbling their way through Windows and tearing the edges off their dot matrix printers, but some people had discovered the potential of socially networked computers. In 1995, the Internet was still a brave new world that only the elite could grasp, an alien landscape of translucent skyscrapers through which the hacker could fly, searching for the file that would set him free from the clutches of The Man.

Aesthetically, the film is a checklist of Things Moviemakers Hope Young, Edgy People Liked in 1995:

- Rollerblades. (The first sign that corporate system admin Plague can’t be trusted is his arrival by skateboard, a tool of The Man.)
- TV stations that run off a single modem.
- Well-behaved rave parties.
- First-person, blurry, public video game consoles.
- Techno music. All the time.
- The Canadian mom from La Femme Nikita.
- Rollerblades.
- Jolt Cola.
- Pay phones.
- Mock turtlenecks.
- Matthew Lillard.

The film holds up remarkably well even against the many and egregious infractions against reality, largely because of the cast, which elevates the script from workmanlike to quotable. (Let the one who has never used “It’s in that place where I put that thing that time” cast the first stone.)

The archetypal plot, which pits a spunky band of outsiders against the powerful machine of the state, is nothing new; the hackers who join our heroes’ cause and overwhelm the Gibson mainframe at the film’s climax are PVC-armored Rohirrim, marshaling behind Johnny Lee Miller’s comely Frodo. On the other hand, if your archetypal trope ain’t broke, don’t fix it—and the idea of a company out to smother the spread of information is a theme that has become more, not less, timely in the last decade.

But it’s not the attack on freedom of information that has kept Hackers popular; the key to Hackers’ enduring camp appeal is that, like all weirdly–costumed cinema manifestos about our future, Hackers is 90% deliciously inaccurate and 10% frighteningly prescient. When Acid Burn summons Cereal Killer and he gets the emergency message on his beeper, howl with laughter and record the sound as your iPhone ring. When the Secret Service hands Plague a police report and he groans, “Ugh, hard copy,” realize that someone looked into the future and saw us all.

Remember, citizens of 1995—on the Internet there are no text prompts; there are only imaginary buildings that you hack into with a four-character password.

[This post originally appeared on Tor.com.]