Monday 28 October 2013

Halloween- Sleepy Hollow

Well Halloween is once again almost here! I've already attended a house party, again as a Jurassic Park Ranger only this time my boyfriend joined me as one too. Browsing the net I came across this collection of wonderful links showing pictures of Halloween themed houses and parties with ideas for outdoors and indoors, ranging from flamboyent to subtle, steampunk to all whites and more- http://www.digsdigs.com/90-cool-outdoor-halloween-decorating-ideas/ for anyone looking for ideas to decorate their house this a must see!


I've also been continuing to watch Sleepy Hollow, perfect for Halloween! There's just something about this show that despite it's flaws just gets it so right for me. It's a combination of Buffy and Supernatural with a healthy dose of Sherlock/Elementary, with detective Abbie Mills and fish out of water Ichabod Crane, a highly intelligent man with wonderful witticisms and an outlook on life that seems odd in our time, trying to prevent the Apocalypse whilst battling horsemen, witches, sandmen, devil worshippers, demons and more.

This show has a fantastic cast with the promise of more familiar and talented actors and actresses joining it. Abbie and Ichabod are wonderful leads and the chemistry between them is very believable. Ichabod is cute, funny and smart, Abbie is tough and no nonsense but she's sympathetic to Ichabod's plight and willing to help him even if she doesn't believe him. As Abbie learns that the insane is the truth she begins to open up revealing a dark history and her own vulnerabilities and guilt.


My one big qualm with the show so far is the mixing up of the Apocalypse's horses, they manage to have a black horse, a white one, a red one and what looks like a pale one but for some reason Death is on the white rather than the pale and Pestilence/Conquest is on a black horse inexplicably. I can't understand the reasoning behind this error or the fact that they blatantly called Death Conquest in the pilot before correctly naming Pestilence as Conquest. In the Bible it is Conquest who rides out on a white horse but he is never mistaken for Death, Death in fact being the only horseman directly named in the Bible.

Given that this show seems to have done it's reach search and managed to have the four horses matching the colours in the bible it really is puzzling and highly irritating as to why they mixed them up. As horses can only truly be white if they are albino I could understand putting Death on a white (really grey) horse and passing it off as pale but Pestilence/Conquest on a black horse and Famine on a pale horse, why? It just seems like a shoddy error that could so easily have been avoided.

That said, I still love this show and there are plenty more inaccuracies in it than that. I especially loved the latest episode featuring the lost colony of Roanoke!


Friday 18 October 2013

Once Upon A Time In Wonderland- SPOILERS

Once's new spinoff, whilst Emma and the others are in Neverland Alice is in Wonderland chasing after her lost supposedly dead genie lover. The first episode opened promisingly enough with a young blonde Alice clad in the familiar blue dress running excitedly to her father to tell of her adventures in Wonderland. Her father far from receptive, explains she has been gone so long he thought her dead, now he thinks her mad. Flashforward to the future and Alice is now brunette and in the mad house after going to Wonderland one too many times for her father. After having spent years drifting to Wonderland after the White Rabbit, freeing and falling in love with a genie and then losing him to the Red Queen, Alice now faces a lobotomy as the doctors don't believe she will ever stop being mad. Sounds a bit like American McGee's heroine doesn't it?


We also have a brief scene of action in Storybrooke featuring a cameo from the all but forgotten Ashley and the more memorable Grumpy before the Knave of Hearts come to create mayhem. He's interrupted by the White Rabbit who tells him they must save Alice.

Basically this show opens as a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Aladdin with a lot of poor CGI. It's a story about Alice looking for her love a Genie, she is aided by the Knave of Hearts and the White Rabbit and thwarted by the Red Queen and, unknown to her, Jafar. As far as I can tell it's set during the same time as Once itself, as the Hatter is said to be gone, enjoying life in the real world, presumably by this they mean Jefferson, somewhere in Storybrooke presumably with his daughter. A huge pity given he's easily the most popular character in the Wonderland series and Jefferson himself proved a hit in the Once series. Instead of giving us a new Hatter or even a Hare and a Dormouse, the Hatter's house is sadly empty by since the White Rabbit heard news of the genie from the Dormouse, hopefully we'll see at least one of them soon.


All in all, it's only the first episode so time will tell how this show fares, especially with two other Wonderland shows said to be in the making and thus promising competition. For me I'll keep watching but I'm sure, the heroine is all corsets and lace, torn between being kickass and heartbroken, it's hard to connect with her and to me she's just not Alice. The look is almost there, trying to emulate the lacy Victorian feel of the Burton film, and abandoning the iconic blue dress for a variety of different potential looks, but I don't see any of her looks becoming iconic.


The Red Queen's looks are equally lacklustre, a grave pity when you consider all the glorious and beautiful costumes Regina wears and even the impressive dress her mother Cora received when playing the Queen of Hearts. Bordering on lingere her costumes look too much like Halloween costumes rather than expensive outfits and for all her beauty she lacks Regina's imposing presence. her character is cold through and through and often stiff, she does come across as ruthless, though wooden in some scenes, but she matched Jafar in a decent standoff and has potential as a decent villain.

The White Rabbit is a cute steampunk CGI version, with a questionably loyalty and a nervous disposition, he's faithful to the book and Disney version, skittish but adorable in a way. His gift is creating rabbit holes between Alice's world and Wonderland and possibly other worlds, time will tell.

I have to say more than anything this show reminds of Kingdom Hearts with Disney worlds crossing over, though it's following in the vein of Storybrooke of mixing Disney up with fairytales, myths and popular fictional tales (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Frankenstein, The Little Mermaid etc). Part of me wishes it could just be Wonderland but I suppose that's too simple and been done too many times these days so the creators of Once are trying to give us something new and unpredictable and with Zenescope's dark version being up for a tv series it's got the darkside covered so let's hope Once does the weird.

I also quite love Jafar! Can't help but wonder if Aladdin and Jasmine are going to be thrown into the mix, is the genie their genie? Will we have a White Queen to match the Red following in the vein of Burton's film version? Will there be other worlds and characters to appear? Certainly it's intriguing enough so far to stick with it.