Black Gate

All the goofy best somehow heartfelt drama one could ever ask for

Good afternoon, Readers!

I’m ill today (currently accepting all the pity), and blogging from the couch, where I’m sitting with a hot cup of tea and binging Netflix. In fact, I’m binging an old show that is the equivalent of comfort food.

Look, this show is absolutely the goofiest thing you’ll ever watch. It’s also genuinely funny, dramatic, tear-jerking, and eye-rolling. In short, it’s that peculiar mix of drama and whimsy that the BBC excels at producing. It’s very much part of the British sensibility, I think, this mix of whimsy and drama… and terrible CGI. There’s just something about that mix, and the peculiarly Britishnes of the whole thing that is somehow a killing combination.

Since I’m watching it anyway, I figured I chat about the show, and how it both adheres to and breaks some of my favourite fantasy tropes.

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Good afternoon, Readers!

Last week, I headed out to the Mayfair Theatre in Ottawa (Canada) for a screening of the film Level 16.  An aside, the Mayfair is a quaint little theater that has been in operation since 1932. The interior doesn’t seem to have been changed since it’s early days, and the in-house film graphics haven’t changed since the 70’s, I’m certain. Anyway, I figured I could turn the visit into a film review. For true transparency’s sake, I have to state that my flatmate and good friend worked on this film. I guarantee you, though, that I’m being as impartial as I can about it.

Level 16 is a sci-fi thriller (stronger on the thriller than science fiction, though there is enough of the latter to qualify, even if it’s mentioned only briefly) set in a “post-apocalyptic” world (there are reasons for those quotation marks, I promise you). From IMDB:

Sixteen-year-old Vivien is trapped in The Vestalis Academy, a prison-like boarding school, keeping to herself and sticking her neck out for no one. Until she is reunited with Sophia — the former friend who betrayed her. Together the girls embark on a dangerous search to uncover the horrifying truth behind their imprisonment. Soon running for their lives, the girls must save themselves or die trying.

This is a female-led production; a female writer and director (Danishka Esterhazy) with female leads, Vivien and Sophia, brilliantly portrayed by Katie Douglas and Celina Martin respectively.

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Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu

We live in a movie-saturated society, so much so that a real film fanatic may occasionally experience a blurring of the line between everyday reality and cinematic fantasy. In the middle of spinning an anecdote to an acquaintance, such a person may have to stop himself and say, “Oh… wait a minute now. I wasn’t the one who made the Enquirer the biggest newspaper in the country and then went on to build Xanadu. That was Charles Foster Kane!”

Well, maybe things rarely get that extreme. But sometimes, one kind of reality actually does impinge upon the other kind, and you experience a moment in your waking life that has come straight out of a celluloid Hollywood dream. Let me tell you what I mean.

John Huston’s 1941 film The Maltese Falcon is one of my favorite movies. It may be blasphemous to say so, but in some ways I consider it superior to Dashiell Hammett’s brilliant novel, as Huston’s screenplay wisely omits the book’s only misstep, a bizarre dead-end subplot involving, of all things, the Fat Man’s daughter. Back in those long-gone days when the advent of the VCR suddenly freed us forever from the tyranny of station scheduling (days I look back on with nostalgia, now), The Maltese Falcon was the first videocassette I bought, the first movie I had to own. I can’t even begin to estimate how many times over the years I’ve seen it.

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