One of my study group members (I’m in law school) was, er, less than enthralled with whatever it was we were supposed to be doing so took a moment out to look up the upcoming movies for this week. One of them was described as ‘hot Regency chastity,’ I think by the New York Times, and was clearly a costume drama, so we made plans to see it as soon as possible. Directed by Jane Campion, it starts Abbie Cornish as Fanny Brawne and Ben Whishaw as the poet John Keats.

Fanny is young — late teens or early twenties — and rather more interested in fashion than poetry when she makes the acquaintance of John Keats and his friend and collaborator, Mr. (Charles Armitage) Brown. The two come into closer acquaintance and then fall in love, despite the fact that Keats has less than no money and Fanny, whose father is dead, cannot marry him. Nonetheless, they enter into an affair of the heart, and although the world — and Keats’s health — conspire to keep them apart, they find ways to remain together.

The phrase ‘hot Regency chastity’ is pretty accurate; there’s no on-screen sex, but Fanny and John’s closed-mouth kisses are hotter than they should be — on a par with Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis’s character) removing Ellen Olenska’s (Michelle Pfeiffer’s character) glove in The Age of Innocence. To give a better comparison, they’re as hot as the pottery scene in Ghost. No, really. Campion, the actors, and the scriptwriters all do a very good job of putting those scenes, especially the first, together.

Fanny’s interest in fashion isn’t superficial; she spends many a scene in the movie designing and sewing her own clothing, and it’s obvious seeing her in scenes with the other women in the film that she is wearing clothing that is significantly different from theirs. She wears more colors; she shows up in a dress with sheer sleeves at one point; she makes a statement about how she is wearing the first triple-pleated mushroom collar in the area. While some of these outfits look a little silly to modern audiences (especially modern audiences raised on the bland, albeit accurate, clothing from other BBC adaptations set in this era), by the end of the movie, Fanny’s obsession with fashion is not only accepted but interesting. Because of her rapidly-changing wardrobe, we notice a bit more that Keats pretty much wears the same blue coat for the entire film. We also notice that his friend, Mr. Brown (they take great pains to pronounce his name differently from Fanny’s) looks moderately silly in a plaid suit for nearly the entire film.

I don’t know that we’re supposed to like Fanny at first; she comes across as somewhat snobby and abrasive. Eventually we come to realize that it’s just Mr. Brown to whom she is actually mean; she’s much milder to Keats, and is downright sweet to everyone else in the movie. Keats is quiet; I think we’re supposed to see Mr. Brown as causing at least as many problems as he solves. Fanny and John’s relationship builds amazingly organically. For a story with very little plot, it (as my fellow student said) kept our interest surprisingly well for the two hours plus of the film. I wouldn’t call it my favorite example of romantic costume dramas — it would take more than an ill-fated pair of lovers to knock Andrew Davies’s Pride and Prejudice off its throne — but it is absolutely worth watching and has fantastic acting, cinematography, and costuming. 4.5/5 stars.

In the beginning, there was a brave young first officer named Kirk — George Kirk, thank you very much — who realized that he was in a no-win situation, and ordered the entire ship evacuated, including his wife who was pretty much in the process of giving birth at the time. Fast forward to twelve years later, and we see the baby — James Tiberius Kirk, after his grandfathers — has already started a life of rebellion and general James Deanishness. Eight or ten years later, after a bar fight, a Starfleet officer named Pike convinces the young Jim Kirk to join the academy. Three years later, while there, Kirk is on the verge of getting thrown out when a situation requires a good deal of the cadets to be used on ships, and via subterfuge, he gets onto the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701). Will they survive this situation?

Trekkies would already know by the time the first ten minutes of the movie are over that this is an alternate universe, being that in the regular timeline, Kirk’s father did not die at that time. Everything that happens after that is therefore a new canon, and the standard complaints about how the phasers didn’t match don’t so much apply. (Although I hardly think that will keep people from commenting.) Some things are different, although most remain pretty damn similar. I think the alternate-universe idea was dragged in just in case there were little differences that they had not foreseen — well, and also to allow the deaths of a couple characters that couldn’t happen in the original timeline. Otherwise, so much of the story could be said to be explicating the story that was behind the original five-year mission.

For example: the Spock/Uhura romance (which, of course, is the talk of the town) was, according to many, hinted at in ST:TOS (he teaches her to play the Vulcan lyre at some point, I guess) but that Spock is somewhat more reserved than new!Spock. (I liked it a lot, by the way. It felt believable, given that new!Uhura was intended to be the brainiest character there, other than Spock himself.) So many of the other characters have exactly the same personality — especially the ones we see in only one or two scenes (Scotty and Sulu, for example). Even Kirk is essentially the same, despite having grown up without a father (he does have a stepdad, though). He and Dr. McCoy become friends on the shuttle launch off to Starfleet Academy, and within a very short period of time, McCoy has managed to say, “Damnit, I’m a doctor, not a ___!”

Regarding the acting, I thought that Zachary Quinto did a marvelous job as Spock, as did Zoe Saldana as Uhura. Those two, as well as Simon Pegg, thoroughly managed to inhabit their characters and remake them anew. Some other actors didn’t do as good a job; I do not know whether it was because of the script or their general acting ability. Occasionally McCoy, as much as I loved him, appeared as if he were playing DeForrest Kelly playing McCoy, rather than just playing McCoy. John Cho didn’t show up enough for me to be able to differentiate him from George Takei (other than, you know, being Korean instead of Japanese), but his scene with the sword was pretty damn awesome. Kirk, I must say, was probably my least favorite character in the movie. Chris Pine didn’t have the charisma that William Shatner has — say what you will about his acting ability, but the man has charisma — and the script didn’t allow for anything particularly lovable about Kirk. Without the charisma, he’s basically a bad-boy slacker with a pretty face and no other redeeming qualities, and that didn’t particularly engage me. In some ways, I felt the story could have been a little more explicitly about Spock (put the Spock-birth scene back in, please!) and it would have been a better movie.

There were a few things about the movie that bothered me. Why on earth did Pike make Kirk first officer, if he’d basically been brought aboard the ship illicitly and was about two seconds from getting kicked out of the academy? Even if his father had been the subject of Pike’s dissertation (also, apparently it’s Dr. Capt. Pike), that doesn’t mean that Kirk should have been first officer. Second — spoilers ahoy — why did they give Kirk captain status at the end of the movie? I would think he would deserve not to get kicked out of the academy, primarily, and perhaps a lieutenant status if they were feeling particularly generous (i.e., skipping ensign). Third, there was a scene with a smallish, Ewok-like alien who was actually a full member of Starfleet, but the humans around him kept treating him like, well, an Ewok, or cross between a child and a dog. Considering that in order to have that insignia on his uniform the small alien dude would have had to graduate the Starfleet Academy, same as the rest of them — oh, right, Kirk hadn’t even graduated yet — why were they treating him so poorly? It implied a sort of racism with which I was not comfortable at all.

Overall, though, I loved it. I’m really looking forward to future installments — I’d like to see how the actors can grow in their roles. So many parts of the movie were put in to establish the new actors as the characters we all know and love — the catchphrases and the miniskirts, for example — and I’m very much expecting that they can lose those trappings in the next film. Hopefully these new actors and the new franchise will be able to grow into their own branch of the Star Trek tree. 3.5/5 stars.

Well, I put off watching them until the series was over (but I did DVR them, for ratings purposes), but I finally succumbed last week, and absorbed all 23 episodes over a very short period of time. Our basic plot, shared between the books and the show, is that Vicki Nelson had to leave the police force, due to failing vision, and she started her own private-investigation career. One of her cases turned out to be . . . weird, and not only did it throw her back into contact with her ex-partner on the force (and ex-lover) Mike Celluci, but it also had her meeting a vampire, Henry Fitzroy (bastard son of Henry VIII), and encountering a demon. Well, now the ‘otherworldly crimes’ are a specialty . . .

That’s, at least, the plot shared by the books and the show. In the books, they defeat the demon and Vicki goes back to chasing down cheating husbands. The other weird stuff — only three more books’ worth — happens over the course of the next couple years. In the show, Vicki acquires some demon marks, and they start drawing weird stuff to her every week. Clearly, that was a change they had to make to lead to the weekly episodes. They also gave Vicki an office and a sidekick — Coreen, who hired her for the first job. (I can’t even remember if Coreen survived the first book. They also turned Coreen from a slightly-gullible rich girl into a working-class Goth, but hey.)

I know that Tanya Huff strongly approved of the series — well, really, how could she not? — and while I agree that some of the changes were necessary, I still felt like a few things weren’t. Getting rid of all the queer references (Henry’s bisexual; another character, Tony, who had his own trilogy, is gay), sure — primetime TV, after all. But why did they make Henry a graphic novelist instead of a historical romance author? The latter is much funnier. I understand it’s probably a bit hard to get extremely tall, extremely beautiful, cop-looking black-haired Italian guys, but, uh, it can’t be that hard — in other words, they sanitized all of Celluci’s ethnicity. The fact that Celluci swore in Italian, crossed himself, and worshipped/feared his grandmother was practically his entire personality in the books. They also turned his partner, Dave Graham, into a joke. (Also, I’m pretty sure Dave was white and married with kids, and the police chief was the twice-divorced black guy, but they turned him into a woman.)

On the other hand, I loved Vicki (other than her habit of removing her glasses every two minutes — book Vicki didn’t even take them off for, uh, intimate activities), liked Coreen despite her bad makeup and clothes for half the first season, thought Celluci was exceptionally good-looking, and found most of the plots pretty solid and one even legitimately frightening. (To me, serial killers are significantly scarier than werewolves.) The coroner/ME, whose name I never quite caught, was also awesome, and I wanted to know her in real life. Yes, she was pure deus ex machina, but I didn’t care.

Some of the acting is kind of bad — Henry, for example, had two facial expressions, and no vocal ones other than I AM SEXY VAMPIRE. Some of the special effects are borderline cheese, but they’re significantly better than Forever Knight (the last low-budget Canadian vampire show I’ve seen). Fans of Forever Knight might enjoy it, but there’s significantly more (intentional) humor in Blood Ties. Fans of the books could very well find themselves drawn in, despite the differences. I’d recommend the series for fans of things like The X-Files, I guess, and other supernatural cop dramas. I will warn all potential viewers that it ends in a very uncomfortable place; the last four episodes are pretty depressing, actually. 3.5/5 stars (for the whole TV series).

I love Firefly. I haven’t watched any Buffy (or its spinoff) to date, for various reasons (mostly an irrational dislike of Sarah Michelle Gellar), but I’ve seen Firefly and I thought it was an awesome show. Joss Whedon is the creator of both of those series, plus the movie Serenity (based on the first episode of Firefly) and a new series that started last Friday on FOX entitled Dollhouse. Some think he’s a genius; whether he is or not, the general hallmarks of his writing (as far as I can tell) are great one-liners, humor, weird random things happening, and hypothetically strong female characters. The show is available at the moment on Hulu.com, and I’m sure there will be reruns in the future.

Dollhouse starts with an older woman trying to give a younger woman all the information she needs before she signs a release form. We’re informed that it has to do with wiping away one’s entire personality, and I doubt there are very many people going into the show who didn’t read the press releases that have been coming for a year now. The base idea is that there is a group of scientists who have discovered how to erase personalities in women and implant them with new ones, either from a single person or a conglomerate. These women are used hired by men with insane amounts of money for nearly everything: assassins, secret agents, and whores.

Honestly, if I didn’t know it was by the same guy who did Firefly, I wouldn’t feel that compelled to watch any future episodes. One reviewer on Hulu compared it to Alias, only with them implanting the personality rather than Sydney (Jennifer Garner’s character) being a good actress/secret agent. That’s basically it, plus some awful psycho-sexual dynamics that make things awfully uncomfortable for me. There wasn’t any of his signature humor, and none of the characters were interesting enough to provide what would seem to be a future storyline.

There was a doctor with scars on her face whom they tried to make interesting, and a handler who was an ex-cop who actually was slightly interesting, but I didn’t really care about either of them much at all. The rest of the characters were either blank-slate females, the arrogant men who run the company (plus the token hard-as-nails woman at the top), or red-shirts who will never show up in another episode. (Well, all right, there was an FBI agent, but he was so generic that I think they took him out of his stock-character box that day.) Eliza Dushku’s acting was good, but not good enough to carry an entire series. What with the whole revolving-personality thing, I’m sure she’ll have to be a great actor in the future to play other roles, but again — I don’t think it can hold an entire series.

Lastly, the disdain and low regard in which women are held through this entire pilot rather disgusted me. The women who are the agents (or whatever) are generally desperate — at least, if Echo’s (Eliza Dushku’s character) story is representative. They’re all, of course, supernaturally beautiful (which doesn’t make sense — real secret agents are supposed to be average-looking, so they get lost in a crowd) They are being used in nearly the worst way possible (as another character points out, they’re basically being murdered) and despite what these women may or may not have been in the first place, now they’re whores. (Not to be offensive to actual sex workers, but these women are, in fact, also hired to be the perfect romantic/sexual partner for however long the man can afford. It was in the first part of the episode.)

Mr. Whedon’s ambiguity on the subject — but they’re doing good!/but this is horrific! — and the fact that he even chose to make a show about it in the first place kind of disgusts me, and unless the entire place gets taken down in a blaze of glory and they manage to re-implant all the women’s original personalities, I don’t think I’ll be particularly satisfied. Also, why can’t they do the whole process to men? I’m sure there’s a perfectly good and logical reason for this *cough*, but it makes the dynamic even worse for me. One would think that an infinitely reprogrammable man would be just as useful as an infinitely reprogrammable woman, but they only have women — only beautiful women — who lounge around getting massages and wearing tank tops with no bras. And I’m supposed to believe that these are strong female characters because they kill people occasionally? Really, it just sounds like one of Mr. Whedon’s top sexual fantasies, and I don’t even know that I want to see any more of it. 2/5 stars.