I have come to accept that The Secret of Moonacre, about whose costumes I have already written much, will never see release in the States because of magical reasons of which I am unaware but probably involve dragons and things. So, I will have to make up this damn movie myself. Luckily, the best website in the world The Costumer’s Guide, had a link to some new costume stills, so like photos of a crime scene, I can use these to piece together what’s happened.

P.S. From these pictures, what happened is not good.

Oh, you can run, young heroine, but you can’t hide.

Funny you mention a crime scene…
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So, I saw the new Star Trek movie. I wasn’t going to (J.J. Abrams is not what I would call a draw), but people loved it! People insisted! People told me it would be amazing!

All those people were high!

Talk about amok time, damn.

Okay, first blame first:

The writing. Flat, obvious, and more holes than a block of Swiss.

Absolute old-boy’s-club colonialism. Women exist to give birth or to make themselves available for men’s comfort. Thoughtless, ridiculous cockheads are recruited from bar fights they are losing badly because someone recognized that their dad accidentally got put in charge of a spaceship for twelve minutes that one time. Cadets fill up the flagships because the entire fleet is busy in another system (really, J.J.? The entire fleet? I mean, it’s certainly some ambitious handwaving, but come on).

A Romulan ship has come back from the future to make Spock sad. (The man in charge of the world’s spiniest ship decides not to save his own planet but instead blows up Vulcan.) Nobody really cares except Spock, and he only cares because his cameo-appearance mom died. Luckily, his human half wins out just in time for him to accept humanity as the only way to survive, which would be a totally racist philosophy if anyone was paying attention.

Also, that kid who got flunked from the Academy for cheating and broke laws to get on board because he was pissy about staying home gets to be the flagship captain forever.

The “big twist.” Ten seconds into the movie, Abrams decides he is already tired of recreating the original series and turns it into an alternate universe (his favorite!) by blowing up Kirk’s dad. This turns Kirk into an even more useless douche than normal. It also means that the villain has to hang around for 25 years picking his teeth with one of the prongs in his ship before he comes around to menace our hero again.

Our hero in this case is Spock, which would be an interesting twist except Kirk keeps photobombing the frame and running away with the plot, so forget that. Basically, when Vulcan explodes (spoiler!), Spock gets to emo around about his mom while Kirk does all the charge-taking. Now J.J. has made a huge AU high-school fanfic where he can do just as he pleases! Well done, J.J.

I mean, for real?

The aesthetics. You can try to explain to me why a backwoods mining vessel would have reason to look like a spiny sea anemone. You will not succeed.

Oh, and here’s a drawing I made of the new Enterprise, based on how the ship is presented in the film.

That is all.

The bridge. The first time I saw the bridge, I thought, “There are way too many people in this shot.” Then I realized that it was for the best, since they needed the coverage: that movie was 40% “people leaving the bridge when they’re not supposed to.” I mean, fewer people left the TITANIC than left that bridge.

The ladies. You can explain to me how we only rate four ladies in this movie:
- mom who gives birth and then goes “offworld” so her son can rebel
- mom who is quietly supportive and then dies so her son can rebel
- skanky chick who sleeps with Kirk so he can be in the room for an important piece of exposition
- Uhura, who sleeps with an Academy teacher and then spends the rest of the movie with her face turned towards him at all times like she’s a fucking sunflower.

You will not succeed.

The performances. Zachary Quinto, Simon Pegg, Karl Urban, John Cho, Bruce Greenwood – job well done. You may go home. The rest of you better be in acting bootcamp this second.

Its success as Trek. They used the same character names and costumes as the TV show. That’s…about it. (Fun fact about the bridge crew from TOS: a Russian, an Asian, and an African-American were groundbreaking IN THE SIXTIES. The fact that we have apparently not come any farther is just sad. Also, playing a character’s accent for laughs is sort of uncool in this day and age, I thought, but what do I know?)

Also there are Vulcans. For forty-five minutes.

I actually think the lack of thematic connection (not even talking about canon) to any existing Trek was intentional – aside from the minimal fan service, this movie was clearly made to attract people who would never otherwise have stooped to such a geek level. Mission accomplished! Lensflare!

Its success as a reboot. Well, I’ll say this much: now that J.J. has jettisoned all that canon, nobody even has to worry about watching that geeky TV show any more.* Well done, J.J.!

* Except for the people who are walking out of the theatre like, “Man, Kirk and Spock were really giving each other the eye!” and want to check out that hoyay for a while.**

** There is a squad of middle-aged women with back rooms full of mimeographed Kirk/Spock ‘zines who are going to strangle you in your sleep. Have fun with that!

Violet is a hemophage (that’s like a vampire except you don’t drink blood, you just have seizures sometimes and people hate you for no reason and make Holocaust metaphors about you in flashbacks and kill your babies) who hates humans for being mean to her, so she steals a suitcase that has an anti-hemophage weapon in it and escapes by running on the ceiling and flying a motorcycle off a building and through a helicopter and into another building, which is great except that on her way to deliver the case she opens it and it’s a kid torso floating in static, which is some kind of future-stasis you put hostage kids in in the year 22whatever, but when she tells her French boyfriend about it he’s all, “Whai should Ai cayre,” and shoots the kid, only it’s not the kid, it’s a PROJECTION of the kid, because Violet took the actual kid out already, and the dictator dude wants the kid back, so she escapes a pile of Chinese gangsters and goes to her friend Garth to find out why, and it turns out the kid’s a clone of the dictator and the virus he’s carrying will actually kill HUMANS unless they get a daily antidote and Violet’s all, “So, we have to stop him,” even though she hated all humans twenty minutes ago (behold the power of moppets!), but in an unexplained detour she and the kid go to a playground, where he dies and gets kidnapped by the dictator, which Violet can only hope isn’t permanent as she’s gunned down dead – well, dead except that Garth resurrects her because he’s warm for her form, except Violet does not even have time for those shenanigans because she has to infiltrate the impenetrable One Dictator Plaza (it takes her five minutes) and have a showdown with the dictator, who’s actually a hemophage himself, not that it helps him when Violet slices him into little pieces, after which she rescues the kid – who wasn’t dead after all, because when she cried into his eye after he was shot on the playground he became a hemophage and hemophages can’t die, ever, except for before when Violet was dead and Garth had to resurrect her because she was dead.

The end.

So, after last week’s happy-go-lucky tale of nice girls with the memory capacity of a goldfish, we get into the gritty reality of what life was like for the ladies of the 1850s. (Answer: sucky.) Behold, The Girl!

Note: There are Cooksons worse than this, but few Cooksons duller. We will be skipping over large portions of repetitive, depressing malarkey. The point Cookson is trying to make: sucks to be a lady in the 1850s who had to make a good marriage Or Else. Point we take away from it: sucks double to be a lady whose only options are your rapey husband or that dude down the street who gets drunk and insults you. (Also, you fall in love with the second guy, which means in this scenario you probably have a concussion. I’m sorry to hear that.)

Era: 1850
Heroine: Hannah Boyle, the young illegitimate daughter of gentleman Mr. Thornton. OR IS SHE?
Siblings that require looking-after: She has three half-siblings who mostly suck, but in case she’s the one that requires looking after, because oh my lord, girl gets beat on.
Illegitimate (Self or sibling): Hannah. Sort of. Whatever.
Asshole Father?: Uh, not to Hannah, but uh, wow.
Romantic interest(s): Ned. Fred, who marries Hannah, is not a romantic interest. It gets gross. *shudders*
Bairnsketballs: Hannah gets one, though technically it’s legitimate since she’s married. Even though it’s not her husband’s. It’s all very Jerry Springer.
Fistfights: Yep. And caning. And bear traps! And they burn someone’s finger off.
Assaults: Innumerable; we see one, and one other that’s interrupted by one of the best conversations the world has ever known.

“You’re trouble!”
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So, there are two or three more really dismal installments of The Catherine Cookson Experience coming up, and I thought that before I hit all the marital rape and spouse-slapping, everyone could use one that’s pleasantly absurd. Behold, The Tide of Life!

Here’s the thing about this miniseries; Gillian Kearney is a really good actress. She worked her ass off in The Forsyte Saga, and I really love the sort-of-documentary biopic she did on BBC, and – she’s not the poor soul who played Cissie Brodie, is what I’m saying. She has genuine charisma, and you root for her.

The problem with The Tide of Life is that while she seems perfectly sweet and capable of making normal-person decisions, she agrees to go steady with any dude who enters the frame, so you end up wondering if she has a concussion. Also a problem: the title sounds like a tampon ad. (Not Cookson’s fault; just saying.)

Era: early 1900s
Heroine: Emily Kennedy, housekeeper and concussion victim
Siblings that require looking-after: One sister, also a concussion victim
Illegitimate (Self or sibling): Shockingly, all the major characters are legit.
Asshole Father?: Nary a dad in sight.
Romantic interest(s): Sep, her first employer; Larry, her second employer; Nick, who wanders into frame in the last twenty minutes.
Bairnsketballs: One for our heroine, one from an extra, plus a tumor everyone thinks is a bairnsketball. (Nobody in this movie is very bright, come to think of it.)
Fistfights: Hell yes. Also, murder, pistol-whipping, chasing someone into the ocean, and lighting a houseful of stuff on fire.
Assaults: Two (attempted)

“That’s what you are – NOWT!”
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