The wisdom of Kenzi

Canada's current hit supernatural fantasy TV show Lost Girl is a pretty so so affair - kinda like Charmed but with more sex and skin. However Ksenia Solo as heroine Bo's streetwise sidekick Kenzi is great and single handidly makes it worth watching. Just give her her own show already. And it's not just me who thinks she's great either. Ksenia has a supporting role in Darren Aronofski's upcoming movie Black Swan alongside Natalie Portman.

In the meantime here's some of Kenzi's highlights...

Buffy: Season 2, Episode 4 ‘Inca Mummy Girl’

Willow's so snug.

Writer: Matt Kiene & Joe Reinkemeyer
Director: Ellen S Pressman

What's the sitch?

Sunnydale High’s student foreign exchange program is up and running with some of our key players hosting students from foreign shores – including Buffy. Meanwhile at the local museum a cursed Incan mummy of a sacrificed princess gets accidentally reawakened. Said mummy, newly revitalised as a pretty young girl going by the name of Ampata, manages to fool Buffy and co. by masquerading as Buffy’s genuine exchange student who she killed. She immediately makes a big impact on Xander and the two soon become romantically involved. But Ampata still needs to kill regularly, taking people’s life forces in order to keep from returning to her yucky mummy form. At the same time, Buffy and the gang are trying to find out what is killing people in such hideous ways and what has happened to the original Incan mummy that disapeared from the museum, not realising that the truth is right under their very noses.

What's the sitch beneath the sitch?

This one is about fate, destiny, duty and also romantic relationships. Ampata’s plight is a mirror of Buffy’s. She too was a “Chosen one” by her people who had to give up a normal life and life altogether in order to serve a higher purpose. Although she is the villain of the week she is perhaps the most sympathetic of all Buffy’s villains. Like Buffy she was just a young teenage girl who, given no choice, was forced to be who she had to be. Now all she wants is a normal life - even if she has to kill to keep it. Plus she falls for Xander and he likewise for her, which complicates things even more. That’s part of the relationship angle, as is Willow overhearing Xander telling Buffy how he loves Willow but only as a friend. However, unbeknownst to Willow, it’s in this episode that she is first noticed by her first true love interest of the show, Oz.

Who's giving us the wiggins this week?

Ampata, the Inca Mummy Girl of the title.

Why it rocks

1. Curse of the Mummy. It’s a classic horror tale (a resurrected mummy) that’s given a fresh new spin by the Buffy writers. Instead of some vengeance-seeking monster, Ampata is an innocent who just wants, like Buffy, a simple, normal life. She doesn’t want to hurt anyone, but she will because she feels (justifiably) hard done by. In fact the episode works well as a romantic tragedy. You can’t help but feel so very sorry for poor Ampata at episode’s end.

2. Nicholas Brendon. He does some very good work as the smitten Xander. His quips and jokes remain, but he also invokes a tender sweetness that really sells his feelings for Ampata.

3. Beautiful mummy. Ara Celi as Ampata also does good work and makes for a suitably sympathetic and tragic character. Her underlying sadness and her attraction to Xander is well handled. Plus she’s a very beautiful girl.

4. A normal girl. One of the show’s main underlying themes is hammered home in this episode: Buffy’s eternal quest to be just a normal girl and to have a normal life. But this time it is mirrored in Ampata. The bedroom scene where Buffy hides crosses, stakes and crucifixes from Ampata, while Ampata hides a desiccated corpse in her trunk from Buffy could have come across as really silly and light hearted but is played with a genuine melancholy that is actually quite touching.

5. Oz. Yep, Oz (Seth Green) makes his debut in this episode. The intelligent, taciturn Oz is lead guitarist with Dingoes Ate My Baby, a local band that plays at the Bronze regularly. His noticing of Willow throughout the episode – especially when she is in her Eskimo costume at the Bronze - is really cute. And speaking of…

6. Eskimo Willow. At the fancy dress party at the Bronze, Willow goes as an Eskimo complete with furry hood and fishing spear. Xander, dressed as a Sergio Leone cowboy, comments that she looks “Snug.” What she looks is utterly adorable. No wonder Oz is smitten.

7. Sven and Cordy. Cordy ordering around her hulking Swedish exchange student throughout the episode is hilarious. The twist at the end only makes it funnier.

Why it sucks

1. Does Buffy really not know that her genuine exchange student is definitely a boy as well as what he looks like? Surely they’d have some contact info for his parents and have likely seen a photo. Even Joyce accepts female Ampata without question. No alarm bells ringing at all? No contact from real Ampata’s parents to confirm he arrived in one piece? Hmm.

2. The plotting relies a bit too much on coincidence and on the characters being dumber than they should be.

It's Buftastic

Willow dressed as a snug-looking Eskimo attempting to nonchalantly shrug when Xander asks her if she’s seen Ampata.

Dialogue to die for

Xander: “I think the exchange student program's cool. I do! It's a beautiful melding of two cultures.”
Buffy: “Have you ever done an exchange program?”
Xander: “My dad tried to sell me to some Armenians once. Does that count?”

Devon: “What does a girl have to do to impress you?”
Oz: “Well, it involves a feather boa and the theme to A Summer Place. I can't discuss it here.”

Buffy [to Giles]: “So, can I go?”
Giles: “I think not.”
Buffy: “How come?”
Giles: “Because you are the Chosen One.”
Buffy: “Mm, just this once I'd like to be the Overlooked One.”
Giles: “Yes well, I'm afraid that is not an option. You have responsibilities that other girls do not.”
Buffy: “Oh! I know this one. Slaying entails certain sacrifices, blah, blah, bitty blah, I'm so stuffy, gimme a scone.”
Giles: [sardonically] “It's as if you know me.”

And another thing

Along with Oz, nerdy Jonathan (Danny Strong) makes his series debut in this episode.

Ara Celi had a small role in Robert Rodruigez’s 2010 film Machete.

The Inca Mummy Girl of the title is actually based on a real female Incan mummy found in1995 in Peru frozen and extremely well preserved on Mount Ampato– hence the name Ampata.

How many stakes?

Xander wants his mummy. 3 (out of 5)

Buffy: Season 2, Episode 3 ‘School Hard’

The baddest bad couple around.

Writer: David Greenwalt
Director: John Kretchmer

What's the sitch?

It’s parent teacher evening at Sunnydale High which Buffy and fellow ‘troublesome’ student Sheila have been put in charge of organising by odious Principle Snyder. Snyder is looking forward to meeting Buffy’s mum so he can tell her all about how much trouble her daughter is to the school and how close she is to expulsion. So as well as arranging everything for the event and doing so with a largely absent Sheila, Buffy must also somehow keep her mum away from Snyder on the night itself. But that’s not all of her problems. For unknown to Buffy a certain badass platinum haired vamp has (literally) hit town for the first time and, along with his insane girlfriend, is looking to bag himself a third slayer scalp. Cue a vampire invasion of the school on parent teacher night and Buffy fighting back guerrilla style ala John McClane – hence the episode title.

What's the sitch beneath the sitch?
More high school is hell stuff along with the usual thing of Buffy trying to balance her school life, home life and slaying life which is made all that more harder by the odious Snyder.

Who's giving us the wiggins this week?

Who do you think?

Why it rocks

1. Vampire lovers. SPIKE AND DRU! SPIKE AND DRU! SPIKE AND DRU! The pair make their Buffy debut in this episode. The rest is history.

2. James and Juliet. James Marsters and Juliet Landau as the Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen inspired vampire lovers make an instantly unforgettable impression and become a firm fan favourite. Marsters is all cocky English swagger and punk rock anarchy attitude while Landau is eerily demented and deceptively fragile. And their chemistry together is explosive.

3. This ep is a blatant but brilliant Die Hard homage with Buffy crawling through ventilation ducts and taking out individual vamps along the way then rescuing the trapped parents before having a final face off with Spike. A face off which ends in a way that could only happen in an episode of Buffy.

4. John Kretchmer who directed part 2 of the Buffy pilot does great work here. It’s tense, exciting, a smidgen scary and always tons of fun.

Why it sucks

It doesn’t. At all.

It's Buftastic

Two moments:

1. Spike’s iconic arrival in town by running over the Sunnydale sign

2. Buffy and Spike’s final battle with Joyce coming to her daughter’s rescue at the last moment.

Dialogue to die for

Spike: [to a rival vampire] "You were there? Oh, please! If every vampire who said he was at the crucifixion was actually there, it would have been like Woodstock. I was actually at Woodstock. That was a weird gig. I fed off a flower person, and I spent the next six hours watching my hand move."

Buffy: “Cordelia, I have at least three lives to contend with, none of which really mesh. It's kind of like oil and water and a... third unmeshable thing.”

Drusilla: [about her favourite doll Miss Edith] “Miss Edith speaks out of turn. She's a bad example and will have no cakes today.”

Joyce: [after braining Spike with an axe] "You get the hell away from my daughter!"

And another thing

Spike says that Angel was his sire but we later find out Spike was actually sired by Drusilla. Dru was the one sired by Angel/Angelus, thus making Angel Spike’s grandsire.

Spike and Dru were based upon Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen as confirmed by Joss.

Spike wasn’t for certain going to be English. Marsters did several accents before Joss and co settled on his English one.

In this episode we discover that the authorities are wise to the weird supernatural stuff that goes on in Sunnydale but are keeping it quiet. Mention is also made of The Mayor foreshadowing season 3.

Spike destroys the Sunnydale sign a second time in his one and only season 3 appearance ‘Lovers Walk’. Though that time it is an accident as he’s totally drunk.

Juliet Landau (Dru) is the daughter of Oscar winning actor Martin Landau and his ex-wife Barbara Bain and appeared with her dad in Tim Burton’s 1994 classic Ed Wood for which Martin Landau won his Oscar for playing Bela Lugosi.

How many stakes?

This time it’s 5 spikes (out of 5)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 2, Episode 2, ‘Some Assembly Required’

The moisturiser ain't working for him.

Writer: Ty King
Director: Bruce Seth Green

What's the sitch?
While on patrol, Buffy discovers the robbed grave of a recently deceased teenage girl. That same night, Cordelia and Angel discover discarded body parts of various other recently deceased girls. However some of the parts are missing leading the gang to believe that someone at Sunnydale High is pulling a Dr Frankenstein by trying to build a whole new girl from the dead parts of others. Meanwhile, misguided student Chris and his nasty science nerd friend Eric, who together are making this patchwork girl for Chris’s recently back from the dead brother Daryl, are looking for the perfect head for their Bride of Frankenstein. The only problem being said head can’t come from a corpse. It needs to be fresh. It needs to be taken from someone while they are still alive. And that someone looks like being Cordelia Chase...

What's the sitch beneath the sitch?
This is about relationships and about wanting to have someone to be with, to not be alone. Zombie Daryl wants a living dead girl of his own so that he won’t be alone. Meanwhile, Buffy is struggling with her relationship with Angel, Giles is trying to get together with Ms Calendar and Xander and Willow are complaining about being uncoupled and alone. The episode is also about the objectification of women, a theme that repeats throughout Buffy. Eric is a vile little critter who only sees women as objects to be used and abused as he sees fit. He gets off on it. He’s like a proto-Warren from seasons 5 and 6. Also present is what will be another recurring theme of the show: people dealing with loss and attempting to bring back loved ones that have died.

Who's giving us the wiggins this week?
Nasty Eric and zombiefied Daryl.

Why it rocks
1. Teenage Frankenstein. It’s a good, solid story and a fun and creepy riff on Frankenstein.
2. Someone to love. It works thematically being all about relationships and not wanting to be alone.
3. It’s gross! The concept and its execution is pretty yucky. And I mean that in a good way. The half-built dead girl glimpsed in portions along with some discarded body parts is rather unpleasant…just as it should be.
4. Giles and Jenny sitting in a tree… Giles’s jittery courtship of Ms Calendar is funny and cute and gives Xander and Buffy plenty of opportunity to poke fun at him.
5. Daryl and Chris’s mum, Mrs Epps, being so wrapped up in her obsessive grief about Daryl’s death is possibly the creepiest thing about this episode.

Why it sucks
1. Though creepy and icky, neither Chris, Eric or zombie Daryl pose too much of a threat to Buffy. And Chris never seems keen on what he’s doing anyway so you wonder how he got this far.
2. Cordy is in peril once again. Yawn! Plus she gets to act in that traditional horror movie girl in peril role i.e. doing stupid stuff and screaming a lot. Exactly the kind of thing Buffy was supposed to subvert.
3. It is a blatant use of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein and despite some great dialogue and the solid thematic base it doesn’t really excite all that much.

It's Buftastic
Giles is in the library nervously practising his lines to ask Jenny out…and then Buffy and Xander make a sudden and embarrassing entrance.

Dialogue to die for
Buffy: (to Xander after he asks for hers and Willow’s help in digging up a grave) “Sorry, but I'm an old-fashioned gal. I was raised to believe that men dig up the corpses and the women have the babies.”

Cordelia: (sarcastically) “Darn, I have cheerleader practice tonight. Boy, I wish I knew you were gonna be digging up dead people sooner. I would've cancelled.”

Buffy: “Love makes you do the wacky.”

Buffy: [giving Giles advice on his pick up lines] “You also might want to avoid words like 'amenable' and 'indecorous', you know? Speak English, not whatever they speak in, uh... “
Giles: “England?”
Buffy: “Yeah.”

And another thing
This episode sees the first use of the Buffy/Angel theme by Christophe Beck, a piece of music that will become known as ‘Close Your Eyes’ by seasons end.

How many stakes?
“SHE’S ALIVE! SHE’S ALIVE!” 3 (out of 5)

Going postal in 60’s L.A.

Based on the recommendation of a friend I’ve just finished reading the novel Post Office by American author and poet Charles Bukowski.

This was an interesting book for me as it was well out of my comfort zone and not the sort of thing I’d usually go for. For a start, there’s no real story, just a collection of fairly random events covering over a decade in the life of Bukowski’s close-to-home alter ego Henry Chinaski. Chinaski is an alcoholic, womanising, gambling low life who aimlessly lurches from one menial job to another before ending up working for the US Postal Service where he remains for eleven years stuck in the soul destroying limbo of brain dead and degrading work. According to Chinaski the Post Office is a place populated by all kinds of annoying, repulsive loudmouths, dictatorial jobs worth managers and other assorted broken and downtrodden characters. Chinaski survives the place and his years spent there through copious amounts of booze, women, and his extremely cynical view of the world. To note: the term going postal comes from the fact that in the past quite a few US postal workers have snapped and done the whole workplace murder spree thing. Reading this you can see how that could happen.

After a slow and wary start, and after putting it down for a few weeks due to not really feeling the vibe of the thing, I persisted and picked the book back up a couple of days ago. And for some reason I got in to it a lot more this time and finished off the remaining hundred or so pages pretty quickly (it’s only one hundred and sixty pages in total so is more of a novelette than a novel). And I gotta say...I enjoyed it a fair bit. It’s still not really my cup of tea but it is an interesting look in to a life totally alien and in to the world of sixties America - specifically Los Angeles when many of the riots were kicking off. But even though Chinaski’s sort of life is alien to me, I could still kind of identify with some aspects of it such as the sheer drudgery and boredom of menial work and the attitudes of some of those little Hitler types who when they get the slightest whiff of power just love to make others life hell. Luckily I haven’t had too much experience of that, but I have had some, just as many surely have. So you can’t help but smile and give a silent cheer when Chinaski, through his cynical wit, or a small act of defiance, gets one up on em and on the system.

Stylewise, Bukowski’s writing is refreshingly basic, unfussy and to the point. Description is brief and limited and mostly focuses around the size and shape of women or the things he particularly dislikes about a person or a place. Sentences are short and dialogue dominates. And that dialogue is usually dry, cynical and bleakly humorous. And it does make you laugh. Bukowski constructs short, punchy, (oft dark) comic set pieces throughout. The one about the two birds Chinaski’s wife keeps in a cage that keep him awake with their incessant chatter and then what he decides to do with them is particularly funny.

Post Office was Bukowski’s first novel. It was released in 1971 and is said to be an autobiographical account of the writers own experience working on and off for the US Postal Service. Bukowski was quite a fascinating character. He became a willing alcoholic from his early teens saying that it helped him overcome his chronic social ineptness and withdrawn nature. Arguably it also helped fuel his writing ability giving him that extra dimension through which to tell his low life tales and to impart his poetry. The alcohol did harm to him for sure (bleeding ulcers and other complaints) as well as hindering him socially as much as he thought it helped him. But the argument that says how drugs and booze have helped form some of the greatest art, literature and music through the ages could be applied. For without the booze, Bukowski would probably not have become the renowned and influential writer he did. He died in 1994 from Leukaemia aged 74.

I may go on and read some more of his stuff, the continuing saga of Henry Chinaski in the likes of Ham on Rye, Factotum and Women. But the relentless low life, cynical (though amusing) gloom might be too much to take in extended doses. So I think I’ll leave it for a while. As a total antithesis to Bukowski I’m currently reading the official 2009 sequel to the wonderful A Little Princess entitled Wishing for Tomorrow by Hilary McKay. Then it’ll be Stephen King’s Cell, all being interspersed by the odd Edgar Allan Poe poem and short story. Some nicely eclectic reading over the Christmas period.

Emma scores an Easy A from me

It’s official: Emma Stone rocks!

You might remember pretty red head Emma from her supporting roles in The House Bunny, Superbad and Zombieland plus her various TV appearances. And she was uniformly excellent in all of them. Because what Emma has is an aura of sharp intelligence to her acting not to mention bags of natural charm to go with her impeccable comic instincts and timing. As a result, she’s been at the top of the list of the new generation of Hollywood up and comers to watch, in the same way that Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock were twenty or so years ago. Because just like those two, as well as having bags of talent, Emma also has that certain indefinable something that quite simply makes the camera and the audience love her. She has star quality.

In Easy A, written by Bert V Royal and directed by Will Gluck, Emma plays socially invisible high school student Olive. Mostly ignored by her fellow students, the whip smart, witty Olive tells a little lie to avoid going on a camping trip with her best friend and her best friends weird parents. Said little lie involves a fictitious date with a college freshman. Well, one thing leads to another and the little lie soon gets out of hand evolving in to a much bigger lie about Olive losing her virginity and engaging in all kinds of freaky sex games with the made-up boy. Unfortunately this bigger, badder lie soon spreads further afield than it was intended, mutating ever more as the school rumour mill goes in to overdrive. And before poor Olive can say ‘woman of easy virtue’ the entire school now thinks she’s a (insert derogatory word for a woman who has lots of sex with lots of different men.) Despite her protestations of innocence, the rumours still continue to grow and she very quickly becomes a social pariah and a target for the schools group of creepy Christian holier than though kids. Olive is so incensed by what’s happened that she decides if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. So, taking payment in the form of cash/vouchers/coupons etc. she pretends to have had sex with several dopey boys in order to help them out of various social jams. All the while she starts dressing like a burlesque dancer and wearing a scarlet ‘A’ on her clothes mirroring the book her English class have been reading, Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter, a story of adultery and hypocritical puritanical persecution in 17th Century America. Interwoven in to all of this is the fairly standard romantic story of the one boy Olive has really liked since they were both small and who can see through all of the lies about her.

So, essentially, Easy A is The Scarlet Letter transposed to a contemporary Californian High School in a similar way to how the great Clueless transposed Jane Austin’s Emma.

However, where Easy A differs is that it is not an adaptation but rather the Scarlet Letter is a touchstone for the story. Olive openly references The Scarlet Letter and identifies with its heroine Hester Prynne even going as far as wearing the same scarlet ‘A’ on her clothes to make a point and putting up with hypocritical religious persecution from her peers. But Easy A also openly refers to other more contemporary sources for inspiration – mostly 80’s teen movies by the likes of John Hughes. Olive makes the point that her story is not like any 80’s teen movie. She wishes it was and that she could get the same cool but pointless musical number ala Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (she does), or get Judd Nelson from The Breakfast Club (she does…kinda), or get the same romantic John Cusack boom box moment from Say Anything (she gets that too…also kinda). So as well as being a modern take on an old literary classic, it is also an open love letter to some of the great teen angst/romance movies of the last twenty plus years.

But Easy A also happens to be very funny and very cool in its own right. The script is snappy, witty and sharp. The performances likewise with the quality of the cast being pretty darn impressive. For your money you get:

Emma Stone
Thomas Haden Church
Lisa Kudrow
Malcolm McDowell
Amanda Bynes
Patricia Clarkson
…and Stanley Tucci.

Clarkson and Tucci especially do some truly great work as Olive’s funny, loving, supportive yet rather offbeat parents. You can tell they were having a blast.

But, y’know what? The oddest thing occurred to me while watching Easy A.

The style of acting, of dialogue and delivery…I almost felt like I was watching a Shane Black film.

Or rather a Shane Black/Joss Whedon/John Hughes hybrid film.

It has that same cool, snarky, one liner, insult filled attitude of Shane Black mixed with the witty, pop culture/classic culture references, verbal word play and thematic layering of Whedon, plus the whole teen angst/wish fulfilment thing of Hughes. I was watching Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang the other night and loving it. And watching Easy A reminded me (rather bizarrely) a whole heap of that film.

Sidebar: how bloody great is Kiss Kiss Bang Bang? I adore it. Best Downey Jr role ever. Period. So why is Shane Black not making more movies? Answer: cuz judging by Kiss Kiss Bang Bang he pretty much hates Hollywood. End of sidebar.

Now, stay with me here.

Okay, so why does a violent, sweary comedy/action thriller from 2005 remind me of a teen high school comedy drama from 2010? Like I said above, Easy A shares with Black’s film that same style of clever, witty, smart-ass talk and ‘tude along with some great insults and put downs. Like KKBB, it also has the central character telling their story to the audience and narrating that story all the way through. Plus, both films main characters start out as total nobodies, rather hopeless cases. Though smart and sweet, they are both social outsiders who, through lies and some stupid decisions, become involved in a series of events that they then try to use to their advantage but which rapidly spiral out of control. There is also a childhood crush in both films who become part of the ongoing plots. Of course, there are no violent gun fights, fist fights or car chases in Easy A, just a swift, snappy, witty script and some top notch acting all round. Plus Emma Stone. And Emma Stone is great. She alone would make this film worth seeing. The script, style, and remaining cast make it pretty much unmissable. Sure, it all ends happily and the resolution is kinda formula and cheesy, but then Easy A is partly an ode to those kinds of films. And, anyway, the journey to the film's end has been an immensely fun one so I can forgive it.

So, yeah, Easy A. It’s a really good movie and a star making turn for Emma Stone who has the talent and the charisma to be big…Bullock and Roberts big.

In 2012 we’ll see Emma in the Spider-Man reboot as Gwen Stacey, Peter Parker’s love interest. Of course she’ll be great in it. We know that. I just hope she doesn’t get stuck in the girlfriend role too often and gets to have plenty more of her own leads. Cuz this lass certainly deserves 'em. Nice one, Emma. 4 (out of 5)