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...