DO: Make your daughter Anne of Avonlea! Remember, puffy sleeves mean you love her more than Marilla does.
DON’T: Put your eleven-year-old in a saloon girl costume, okay? Just, really not something an eleven-year-old needs to be.
DO: Make an owl costume for yourself or your child!
DON’T: Make EVERYONE an owl, for god’s sake. I said OR, not AND. Just look at what will happen. Every single member of that fake family is smiling through their tears
Tango is strange; danced socially, so much of the nuance is in the feeling between partners that what seems to you like a spectacular dance can look relatively low-key to other dancers. To casual observers, it can look dead boring.
There are things that are easy to notice. In the video below, it’s clear that the embrace is fluid, opening and closing a few inches as needed. You can see the perfect balance of each dancer (wheeee!); you can see her articulate adornments that accent the music; you can see the skill and precision of their footwork.
What I can’t know any more is what else comes across, things that I didn’t know before I started dancing it; the invisible third axis created in the space between partners? The ease of long partnership in the way their chests always meet, even in the wider embrace? The way he adjusts the embrace before the complicated steps when he knows she’ll need his support? The drawn-out pauses that highlight the melancholy chorus? How GOOD they are? How much they love it?
P.S. If social dance in New York was anything like this, ever, I wouldn’t have stopped dancing. I couldn’t have; just look at them.
So, FlashForward aired last night! My official review is up at Tor.com.
My unofficial review: when it gets better, someone call me.
This show lost me at the thirty-minute mark, when three characters are talking about the flashforwards in someone’s office. Joseph Fiennes turns to his partner and the FBI director and says, “I saw something.” CUT TO: The sunny atrium in the middle of FBI headquarters. The same three characters are there. The FBI director says, “What did you see?”
Any show where they interrupt a conversation so they can pop out to the atrium for a minute and get a nice quick-cut to build fake suspense is a show that has lost me. See you!
Then it lost me AGAIN at the forty-minute mark.
The surgeon-wife character (who is exactly like every surgeon wife ever on TV) sees a vision in which she is divorced from Joseph Fiennes and is instead dating a shirtless, shoeless, black-pants-wearing, into-the-fire-staring Jack Davenport. She cries a lot, because this makes her sad, because somehow Jack Davenport is worse than Joseph Fiennes.
…girl, do you have a concussion? Upgrade.
I still want to know why the sneaky person who managed to stay awake decided to spend their moment of omnipotence on a baseball field in Detroit. When the show has told me this, I will consider watching again. Maybe.
There was an era (and by “an era” I think I mean “a period of three years”) when Disney set aside the cavalcade of animated princesses and made a couple of unusual movies. They were unusual because of their settings, unusual because of their gentle skew to the adult, and unusual because they were good. Perhaps the best, certainly the most adult of these movies, is The Rocketeer.
And by “adult” I mean, “Turn the Lech-o-meter down a notch, Tim Dalton, damn.”
Andrew Niccol was asked to direct the movie adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s The Host; I wrote it up for Tor.com, though there’s not much comfort in it except that he probably could use the money. (S1m0ne didn’t do so hot.)
Readers of this blog know how much I love GATTACA. (Hint: A LOT.)
S1m0ne was botched in the execution (no little credit for which goes to Al Pacino, who did his bug-eyed creepster routine instead of acting), but he managed to look slightly ahead of where we are now, and every time I see people clawing their faces over the Avatar trailer, S1m0ne is the first thing I think of. (“I guess what I like most about my movies is that they’re not about special effects.”) She also dropped some hilarious one-liners in that movie. Not saying it was great; just saying it had the right idea, and it gets a lot better when you ignore Al Pacino and the last twenty minutes.
He’s certainly too good for the material he’s getting this go-round, but I wish him well, in a general way, and hope this is the beginning of better things for him. Much, much better things.
