Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

Let’s start this review with the three big elephants in the room. Avatar was fairly criticised for its white saviour dialogue. While I’m not the best one to judge all the ins and outs of that trope (I’m a lousy saviour but I’m certain white), it certainly feels like they tried to both correct that and address it to some extent. People are boycotting ATWOW for the sins of the past, which is up to them, but it doesn’t seem like this film deserves to bd boycotted on its own merits. The wait for “the technology to be good enough.” There is a lot of water and a lot of CGI and water in CGI has been janky for a long time but that has improved recently - more computing power and tied to that better CGI around animating water have come along in the last five years or so. Here we have the Reef Na'vi and their marine animals that they interact with in the way the Forest Na'vi of the original interacted with the “dragons” and land animals of the forest. Of course that means both underwa...

Wednesday is, of course, an adaptation of The Charles Addams cartoons and their other adaptations, particularly the two films with Christina Ricci et al (you can find little and not so little easter eggs scattered throughout the episodes). This is also identifiably a Tim Burton series (you can find easter eggs for his previous work too) but this is more an adaptation like Sweeney Todd than Alice in Wonderland - I think the source is macabre enough he sprinkles his touches throughout rather than twisting it too far. However, it would be fair to say that this show owes as much to the success of Harry Potter, and it’s far less TERF-associated spin-offs, as it does to the original material. In the vast majority of the earlier material we have the family together, by and large. This series sends Wednesday away to boarding school, which is distinctly not Hogwarts in many ways but, equally, could have come from the mind of Tim Burton but probably wouldn’t have been funded like this in a...

Warrior Nun doesn’t pick up where season one finished, but it’s relatively close, there’s a two month gap rather than the two years we’ve had to wait. This is just long enough for the plans of various factions to have started to develop. Adriel is using his powers to create new followers, human possessed by wraiths he is calling over of course. The nuns are on the run, hampered by the fact that Father Vincent is thoroughly on Adriel's side. Beatrice and Ava are trying to lie low in a bar in the Italian Alps, but Bea is super-organised and Ava is… well Ava so it doesn’t go too well. There’s a new, anti-Adriel group called The Samaritans, and Ava gets mixed up with one of them in the bar. Because this is television, this is obviously significant, but the ways it’s significant turn out to be complex and interesting. Lilith’s story keeps developing, as does Jillian Salvius' story and the new pope’s. Some of these story developments are in moderately predictable ways, some are fr...

Because this year the autumn internationals ended in a bit of a mess, with two games played after the end of the official test window, I’m going to stop and quickly give my opinion of the state of the teams after the whole run of matches. Note that not everyone played the same number of games, so I’m going to give their record too. France. W3 L0 100%. A very rusty France relied on their winning habit to beat Australia, then relatively comfortably beat South Africa and finished at the canter with a nice victory over Japan at the latter's RWC base. France unbeaten this year, beaten all the other top ten sides since last year’s AIS and built some depth. Injuries could still rob them of lifting the cup, but they look like the favourites for next year. Georgia W1 L0 100%. Like a lot of tier two sides, Georgia only get one or two games but what a game. Wales looked clueless in the second half, Georgia pounced and a famous upset. Georgia have both Wales and Australia in their pool for th...

Before we dive in, during the matches the sad news of the death of Dodie Weir from MND was announced. While we’ve known it’s coming, and he looked really frail a few weeks ago when he came onto the pitch before the Scotland v New Zealand match, he battled to the end, raising millions for research into MND and always with a smile. A great man and the world is diminished without him. On to the rugby. Only two matches both on 26/11 Wales v Australia If I’d written this report immediately, I would have had to have tagged this blog for adult content given the amount of swearing. I’m still wondering how Wales lost, even being down to 13 for basically the last 15 minutes, but we did. However, we still scored the most points ever against Australia, we were pretty good at converting our chances and until losing two players we were doing well at closing down the Australians in all aspects of the game. Although Wales didn’t have as many injuries as Australia, between injuries and players un...

19/11 Wales v Georgia This match really lives up to a couple of sporting cliches. One is that you must take your chances, which Georgia did better than Wales. The other is that this really was a game of two halves. In the first half, Wales really created three, possibly four, depending on how you count them try scoring opportunities and scored two tries, plus one chalked off for a forward pass. (The fourth possibility was a chance that was created, Georgia turned the ball over and cleared, but not far, then Wales scored basically straight away - to my mind that was long continuous period of pressure and so one long chance.) They weren’t perfect but they were good and Georgia were doing a lot right for a few phases on both sides of the ball but Wales could extend it past that and Les Lolos lost their shape more and more. That was fine, and Wales should have kicked on after the break. What actually happened was that Wales created exactly one scoring opportunity and were again (absolu...

In general British spy dramas, and have no doubt, Slow Horses is a thoroughly British spy drama, fall into two camps. You have the Bond Camp, everything is glitzy, high tech and high adrenaline, high paced. You have, whether in the book or film style of this, peaks and troughs of tension that are really well suited to the film but work well in a book too. The other is the Smiley Camp, quite slow paced, seedy and the most high-tech thing is usually the photocopier. Sifting through papers and bins is often the height of the action but the stress builds and builds inexorably. Interestingly, both of the authors behind the typonyms are former spies, but one was there during WWII and the other during the Cold War, so perhaps it reflects the way things changed from hot to cold espionage. I’m not aware of a spy novelist coming out of the social media iteration of spy craft, although I’m sure there will be one, if there isn’t one already. I wonder what they will look like? While you can argue...