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The Hour

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Season 2 of The Hour premiered in the US last night! I want to talk about it, but to talk about Season 2, you have to talk about Season 1. Let’s do that. (Mild spoilers for Season 1, obviously.) ** The Hour loves its puzzles. There’s the investigative puzzle-piecing of a political thriller: on a large scale, newsmagazine The Hour covers the burgeoning Suez Crisis; on a smaller one, there’s a mole in the BBC with their eyes fixed on the fledging show. There are the half-spoken dialogues of a character drama: between quasi-romantic leads Bel and Freddie, among colleagues who have too much to lose if the show goes under. And there are the moving parts that must fit in order to make television, which frames the logistics of producing a live weekly news hour on the BBC in 1956, with its attendant postwar complications around censorship and journalistic ethics. But crosswords are the show’s emblem. They make up the entirety of the opening credits, they embody the show’s subtext that everything fits together… Read more »

On Sagan.

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If you wish to talk about what Carl Sagan means to science fiction, you must first invent the universe. It’s a universe filled with science. That doesn’t mean a universe in which science is the order of the day — that’s unavoidable and ever-present. Carl Sagan’s particular cosmos is a universe in which the existence and interaction of natural forces according to the rules of science is, in fact, a recipe for endless and amazing things with which the sky is just bursting – a fourteen-billion-year-old box of secrets waiting to be examined and marveled over, a series of marvelous stories the universe just couldn’t wait to tell. When I was a kid, Contact was the gateway book that brought me over from fantasy to the world of science fiction. It was a woman-led space opera mostly concerned with women’s opportunities in science and the tangles of earthly politics, one that ends with first contact and never even touches another planet, but I didn’t have the genre vocabulary yet to classify it. I only knew… Read more »

Questionable Taste Theatre: “Starcrossed”

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[Channel Flip resumes shortly; in the meantime, this was too good to miss.] Thanks to late nights and decisions that seem poor but are in fact awesome, I’ve seen some truly amazing movies. The most recent is Starcrossed, otherwise known as The Movie Nicholas Winding Refn Probably Secretly Saw Before He Made Drive. The movie isn’t just that, but at intervals it’s pretty markedly that, what with its car-mechanic hero willing to give up everything to protect a particularly winsome young lady whose love he can never keep, illustrated by montages of driving at night, the best car chase ever committed to film, and everyone’s favorite Pink Neon font. You give me a time and a place, I give you a five minute window. Anything happens in that five minutes and I’m James Spader. No matter what. What this movie also is: the ’80s-est movie you’ve never heard of that features a beautiful alien who comes to earth seeking freedom, but finds James Spader instead. She knows nothing of love; he just knows nothing. Never… Read more »

Ten Things You Should Know about “Solomon Kane”

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Sometimes, in a sea of movies trying their best, you appreciate a movie that is ambitiously bad. (For example, I appreciated the preview for a horror movie about what happens if you don’t hold your breath as you pass a cemetery, actual thing.) You want the sort of movie where three times as much money was spent on Fancy Scar Makeup as on script. The sort of movie where it feels like every major decision was presented to someone whose response was, “…Okay, sure!”, and most of those people were British character actors whose numbers had come up in Rent Roulette. In related news, let’s talk about Solomon Kane. Extremely short version: “Verily, Those Monsters Stole My Hot Chick – to Battle!”: The Motion Picture. Short version: Solomon Kane used to be a ruthless mercenary, but after realizing his soul is bound for Hell, he tries to mend his ways and redeem himself as a man of peace. He even falls in with Puritan family the Crowthorns and contemplates following them to America to start… Read more »

Red Carpet Rundown: the 2012 Emmys

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The Byzantine luxury-turf war that is the red carpet came alive last night for the Emmys! Sometimes, a clear trend rules the red carpet, and everyone shows in shimmering beige and you have to sort them out based on a Martha Stewart paint chips with names like Tawny Lint. Not so this time! This was a year of so many trends that nobody knew quite what to do, except some people who looked amazing, and some other people who accepted bad advice by stylists who were probably secretly paid out by enemy factions. One of those people put Michelle Dockery in this dress: Even though it had been wadded up in their trunk for a week first. But we’ll get there. First, some sartorial delight!… Read more »

Victorian Etiquette and “The Dancing Master”

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So, I have a story in the out-now anthology Willful Impropriety (Wilful Impropriety for those who live outside the US and/or hate excessive “L”s). “The Dancing Master” is about Leah, the dancing master her parents hire for her, the cousin the family invites for her, the paid companion who Leah idolizes, and what happens after. (Spoilers: pining, sadness, kindness, rebellion, and the Mazurka.) But it’s also a story about the constraints of Victorian etiquette, because it is out of control. It’s almost hilarious reading through etiquette manuals, in all their specificity and emphasis, right up until you realize that this was, in fact, internalized code designed to create and perfect a rigid class system, entangle women in a microcosm of concerns to keep them from activism in the public sphere, and demonstrably “elevate” the Victorian above the people they were colonizing and repressing, who did unforgivable and “vulgar” things like eating with their fingers or speaking vociferously. Then it’s less funny. (I wrote about them in a much darker story, The Burmese Tailor, a few… Read more »
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