Miranda Phipps

I believe there are Spike girls and Angel girls (just in the same way there are Bronte girls and Austen girls–hat tip to Lucia Macro for the distinction).  I would be shocked to learn if there are any Riley girls.

I fall decidedly within the Spike camp.

Favorite line?  This is a hard one because Spike is so quick with a good comeback, not to mention that he plays the role of a truthsayer throughout the series.  He sees straight into everyone’s motives.  (As an aside, I love that Spike’s vampire self is a foil to his former human self, the maudlin poet who’s unlucky with the ladies but loves his mother enough to turn her into a vampire.)

In the end, I’ll have to go with a line from Dead Things in Season 6, one of my all time favorite episodes.

“You always hurt the ones you love, pet.” 

Spike says this after Buffy’s beaten his face to a pulp and assured him he’s an unclean, soulless thing.  And despite this, he still sees she loves him.  He even calls her “pet,” reminding her that, no matter the violence of her actions and her words, he loves her too.

I’m still suffering from PTSD after Spike’s total character violation in As You Were, a later episode in Season 6.  If you’ve watched, you know.

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I watched the BBC adaptation of Gaskell’s North and South while I was flat on my back unable to sleep due to a nasty back injury. If you’ve ever had sciatic pain, you’ll know that it takes a lot to distract you from that gnawing, nervy feeling. It’s just hideous.

But this miniseries did just that, no small thanks owed to the character of John Thornton.

My favorite line?

“Look back at me,” he says as he watches Margaret Hale’s carriage leave Milton.

Richard Armitage’s intense eyes are all you see in this scene. The camera never pans back to the carriage because Margaret Hale doesn’t look back. A brutal moment, but I loved it.

Thornton is an unusual hero because Margaret makes him deeply aware of his perceived shortcomings. He comes to propose marriage to her and tells her, “I’m well aware that in your eyes at least, I’m not a gentleman.” Ouch.

John Thornton seeks to improve himself through classical learning even though those skills are essentially useless in his role as a Master of a cotton mill. And he doesn’t do this to impress Margaret Hale-he does it because he believes he needs improvement.

And it also intrigues me that John Thornton is man enough to fail. He sticks to his business principles even though it results in the loss of his mill. He has enough confidence he can rebuild himself in some other way that the loss of the mill doesn’t fundamentally destroy him. In fact, this choice brings the woman he loves back to him.

The layered notions of class in this film are something else I enjoyed. Margaret Hale, from the South and the daughter of an Oxford-educated gentleman, perceives herself to be of higher class than John Thornton and his family who’ve earned their way through trade. Within the confines of Milton, however, John Thornton is decidedly upper class as compared to the Hales.

Class was everything in English society in the nineteenth century. In romance, we often see class as a fixed concept with the hero (most typically) being of a higher status than the heroine. There isn’t exploration of the fluidity of class. I’d love to see more of this in historical romance novels.

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Rick O’Connell is pretty basic guy.  He fights the mummy, he gets the girls and he tosses in a self-deprecating line once in a while.  He’s a man who takes care of business and then heads home to crack open the nineteenth century Egyptian equivalent of a beer.

He’s no different when it comes to his love for Evie when you think about it.  Rick O’Connell doesn’t hem and haw about whether he likes this girl and what he’s going to do about it.

From that very first kiss through the cell bars, you get the impression he’s committed to this woman.

So I can’t remember a favorite line.  Rick’s funny, but not in a cutting or intense kind of way.  He’s an action man, so my favorite part of this movie is just one very small scene.

It takes place on the boat, where he and Evie are (I think) talking about how he has been to Hamunaptra.  They’re bickering, really.  And Rick unrolls this giant cache of guns onto the table.

He’s showing Evie that Hamunaptra is not a place to be taken lightly, but he’s also showing Evie that he’ll protect her.  That implicit in him taking her to this ruin in the desert is that he’ll protect her from the dangers there.

None of this is spoken, and (if asked) Rick O’Connell would swear up and down that he was only in it to save his own skin.  But we know better, don’t we?

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I was reading Michelle Styles’ blog today and saw that she posted a picture of Richard Armitage in a historical role that I didn’t recognize. A little bit of research on IMDB, and I quickly figured out he has a recurring role on the BBC series Robin Hood.

He plays Guy of Gisbourne–Marian’s alternate love interest to Robin Hood, and he’s great. (I love YouTube! And I espectially love the person who clipped all the Marian/Guy scenes, so I could just watch their subplot.) He’s totally conflicted. He’s allied himself with the Sheriff of Nottingham (one bad dude), in an effort retore his family’s title, land and honor but he chafes at having to work for sucha slime. Marian, of course, gets to see him struggle with the outer goal of trying to achieve his goals and the inner goal of doing what’s right.

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I’m still figuring my way though Capt. Malcolm Reynolds.  It doesn’t help there’s only 14 episodes of Firefly and the Serenity movie.  (I haven’t read the comic books yet.  The TBR pile is too staggeringly tall without heaping on stories in graphic form though I’m always sorely tempted.)

So despite Mal’s capabilities as a captain and his war credentials, there’s something that scares him stiff about Inara.  On some level he knows it and on some other level he’s in total denial.

This little snippet of dialogue  is one of his more lucid moments.  He and his crew members are discussing whether Inara’s invitation (via videotelephone call to Mal) for Serenity to visit her planet is a trap.

Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: [about Inara] Did you see us fight?
Kaylee Frye: No.
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: Trap.

Good old Mal, he’s jumps headfirst into the trap to save Inara, too.

One thing about Mal is that he’s obsessed with the fact that Inara is a companion (essentially a space courtesan) and he repeatedly calls her a whore throughout the series.  My arm-chair psychological view is that he’s projecting his own issues of unworthiness onto her—that he in fact sees himself as a whore having lost the war and having had to become a space privateer.

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I find I have the greatest success in wresting control of the remote control away from my husband when he is physically out of town. (My viewing of Penelope the other night occurred under such circumstances.)

Earlier tonight I managed to find my DVD copy of the The Illusionst, which had been hiding on the top shelf of my closet next to all seven seasons of Buffy. Man, do I ever love this film. Even on the first viewing it had me at “hello.” My favorite bits: the sepia tones, Edward Norton’s mane of black hair, that little locket with the hidden mechanism, the simultaneous allusion and foreshadowing in Eisenheim’s offer to make his lady love disappear, the subtlety of the dialogue and the acting, and–*sigh*–the happy ending.

It isn’t often I see a movie and conclude I must own it. Nor is it often I see a movie with a new male actor who really intrigues me. Unlike in the case of Johnny Depp or Edward Norton, my newfound affection for James McEvoy falls a little bit in the cradle-robbing category, but now that I’ve hit my mid-thirties, I need to accept that this occurence is only going to become more likely. James McEvoy is a fine intitiation into the ways of the cougar.

Here’s a quick overview of what worked well for me in this film:
–The aesthetic of the Penelope character appealed to me totally. I need to find the source of those fabulous pea-green maryjanes. In thinking about my own work, I’m reminded of the need to have characteristics of the heroine appeal to the reader so that she can identify with her.
–I loved how Penelope broke her own curse.
–It isn’t often a movie can surprise me with a plot twist like the one involving Max’s character. It worked well and accounted for Max’s actions in a completely credible way.
–They handled the attraction between Penelope and Max very well.
–GREAT kiss at the end.

So I’ve been waiting for the new Batman movie for ages. Like a lot of people.

Today was a good day for hookey, so I took advantage of the lull in lawyerly e-mails to indulge myself.

It was a good movie, but not the movie I wanted to see. Heath Ledger was great. Christian Bale’s Batman remains to die for. I’d been so looking forward to seeing Batman evolve and especially to watching the layers of complexity woven into his relationship with Rachel Dawes (who THANK GOD is now played by Maggie Gyllenhall). But there we have the big letdown. The are spoilers ahead, so stop reading here if you don’t want to know.

You see, Rachel Dawes dies at the Joker’s hands. Batman doesn’t save her. And even worse, Rachel Dawes doesn’t want Batman, she wants Harvey Dent. The worst sin of all, though, is that Batman doesn’t even mourn her.

I struggle to understand why these choices were made. Why can’t Batman’s love for Rachel and the wholly valid reasons which keep them apart be used as a way to develop Batman’s divided personality? I’ve been thinking about this all day. If I figure it out, I’ll let you know.