Reviews of movies and TV focused on women
The Defenders season 1 is part origin story for the supergroup known as The Defenders and part war against the Hand, a superevil power. Most of the supporting characters from the individual series for each of the 4 superheroes make at least a small appearance. There are a few mild spoilers in the review.
Continue reading “Review: The Defenders season 1”
The Defenders doesn’t start on Netflix until August 18, 2017 but we have the first trailer. And it features some of my favorite Marvel women! Continue reading “Watch This: The Trailer for The Defenders”
Ghostbusters is awesome. Don’t let anybody rain on your Ghostbusters parade. It’s hilarious. The special effects are excellent. The dialog is ridiculous. The actors are wonderful. It’s awesome. Continue reading “Review: Ghostbusters”
Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words tells the story of the famous actress through never-before-seen private footage, notes, letters, diaries, and interviews with her children. The documentary presents a look behind the scenes of the remarkable life of the Swedish woman who became one of the most celebrated actresses of American and the world. Even before the age of Facebook and Instagram, Bergman documented her own life in great detail. Continue reading “Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words”
Marvel’s Agent Carter stepped out of the pages of Captain America and filled a spot on ABC left empty by the hiatus of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Carter filled the spot so well, I don’t want it to ever be over.
I’m enjoying Peggy Carter so much I’ve decided there can never be enough of her. I haven’t heard there’s going to be a second season, but I’m ready for one to be announced. Here are my five top reasons to love Marvel’s Agent Carter.
Hayley Atwell is perfection as the under-appreciated feminist in a sea of 1940s patriarchy. Her get it done attitude, her body language, her English accent, and her disregard for authority combine to create a character to reckon with.
This is one of those roles. A role that sticks with you. It will stick with Hayley Atwell the way Jennifer Beals will always be the striving young dancer in the off-the-shoulder sweatshirt, or Sigourney Weaver will always be Ridley, or Audrey Hepburn will always be peering into the window of Tiffany’s. It’s THAT iconic.
Those guys think they’re tough, but it’s macho posing. The only really smart one in the bunch has a bum leg and doesn’t do much field work. He’s Daniel Sousa (Enver Gjokaj), and is both a danger and an ally to Peggy Carter.
Agent Carter even leads a team into combat in one episode, while her blowhard fellow agent Jack Thompson (Chad Michael Murray) cowers in a corner. Jabs at the sexism of the era do mean the majority of the men on the show are portrayed as ignoramuses, but I have faith that Peggy Carter will educate them soon.
She knows more, asks better questions, finds answers faster, and understands what is going on in the world better than anyone else, including her clueless boss (Shea Whigham).
The 1940s weren’t exactly the fashion decade of the century, but Agent Carter can rock an outfit and what she does to a red hat is downright amazing. It’s all attitude, not outfits, and Peggy Carter has attitude.
Peggy Carter’s friend and neighbor is Angie Martinelli, (Lyndsy Fonseca) who is cool enough to open her window to Peggy and let her in off a ledge 100 feet in the air without so much as asking a question.
I don’t want to forget her charming and hilarious relationship with Howard Stark’s man Friday Jarvis (James D’Arcy). Jarvis is the one man on the show who gets to be awesome. Jarvis and Peggy make a dynamite team. Neither would ever admit that to anyone, so keep it quiet.
The real reason I love Marvel’s Agent Carter is so obvious, you probably know what it is without me saying it. This is a female centric TV show with a story that revolves around a character named Peggy. Thank you MARVEL, thank you ABC. Give us more like this.
How does knockout lipstick work on the kissed person but not on the kisser wearing it?
Were there no people of color in 1946?
In the “Waves” episode of Lost Girl, two separate stories are told in tandem. One is a procedural crime-solving tale involving Kenzi, Dyson and Lauren. The other takes us back to the train and answers a lot of questions for us about Bo and Rainer. This being Lost Girl, the episode also sets up a lot of new questions for us to ponder as we wait for the next episode.
Bo (Anna Silk) hangs her head over the sink in the clubhouse bathroom, hearing voices in her head expressing doubt about her actions. She looks at herself in the mirror. She’s bloody. Rainer (Kyle Schmid) comes into view. Rainer says, “It had to be done,” but Bo looks skeptical.
A blonde woman (Karen Cliche) is on the phone threatening business associates. She’s by a pool, which she walks into for a swim. Something disturbs the water behind her, there are a couple of thunks in the music.
When she pulls herself out of the pool, her legs are missing.
Lauren (Zoie Palmer) and Dyson (Kris Holden-Ried) are at the boxing ring. They complain that Bo has locked them out, has taken off for the train on her own. Kenzi (Ksenia Solo) comes in with giant coffees for everyone and a case to solve. Lauren and Dyson thinks she’s nuts talking about cases when Bo is off on the train alone, but Kenzi says, “A woman’s legs went missing.”
They argue about Bo, whether they should do something or trust her to go it alone.
In rolls the aforementioned legless lady. How are Dyson and Lauren going to ignore that?
Bo is cleaned up, sitting on her bed in a kimono, looking worried. Rainer comes in wearing a towel. Bo says, “I need to understand. What if this is a mistake?”
“I had to go back to the train for you. I went dark for you. I did the impossible. But this. . . . What we did.”
Rainer says it was necessary. Bo says the memories are back, but now that they are in her world, the real world, she needs to understand. The camera moves to some candles, a train whistle sounds, and we go into an extended flashback of Bo’s time on the train. The explanation for all the blood and her concern over what they did will come later.
Bo enters the train, mad about her friends being harassed, the pub being blown up, and being kidnapped. We’re at the start of her train ride. Rainer stands beside a windup record player, spinning “The Wanderer.”
Rainer is tired of brunettes, tired of the music he’s playing and not interested in answering questions. As he sees it, her choices are stay while he pretends to court her until he’s tired of her, or she gets off at the next stop. Either way, she’ll remember nothing.
Bo suggests option 3. He tells her why he kidnapped her. He claims he doesn’t know why she’s there. He calls the handmaiden (Linzee Barclay) to show Bo her chambers and says she’ll be getting off at the next stop if she knows what’s good for her.
Lauren offers the legless lady a drink of water, which she refuses.
Dyson, Lauren and Kenzi listen to legless Diana and her tale. She claims she’s a pixie. She points a finger of suspicion at at dude named Darren in her corporation. Diana will get them into the corporation undercover. Dyson says he and Kenzi will go undercover because he’s been training her.
Kenzi says, “Shadow thief. Check your panties. Anyone missing any panties?” She waves a pair of purple panties in the air. Lauren grabs them and says, “You have got to stop doing that.” Dyson says, “I did not teach her to do that.” These three together are better than a vaudeville act.
Undercover at the corporation, Dyson was supposed to be an efficiency expert but we see him rolling a mail cart. Kenzi was supposed to be a mail girl, but she’s in an office in a red suit, looking at a computer. Not the kind of role switching these two have done before, but still pretty funny. The three investigators are connected to each other by earpieces. Lauren’s back at the boxing gym, doing science with her phone, iPad, and a water hose.
Dyson delivers mail to Darren’s office, but is stopped by Tad (Matt Lemche). Nobody gets to go to Darren’s office. Since he can’t deliver the mail, Dyson attaches a heat sensing band aid to the the mail. Kenzi will follow the heat trail by climbing through the vent system. Yeah, you kinda had to be there to get it.
Kenzi drops out of a vent into a room full of disembodied gams. Legs everywhere. She hears a noise. It’s Darren’s mail dropping into a vat. Kenzi finds a medical report for Tad that involves big money. She sends photos to Lauren.
Dyson is at the swimming pool where he sees a plant Lauren is interested in. He grabs some for Lauren. Dyson notices the pool is salt water and he finds a pearl.
The handmaiden enters Bo’s chambers on the train, only to be grabbed and threatened. Bo and her knife are always ready for action.
The handmaiden tells Bo that the next stop isn’t for 3 days. If she jumps off before that, she’ll evaporate or get transcendental sickness and die. (Where is Clio when you need her?) Bo lets the handmaiden go. She lays out a dress in which Bo will look ravishing and gives her an invitation to dinner with Rainer. She says they all need Bo.
Lauren examines the pearl. She asks, “Has Bo called, pool boy?” Nope, not yet. Lauren says the pearl is actually a crystallized salt deposit, which makes Dyson all upset. “We should never have taken this case. Kenzi, you need to get out of there!” Lauren and Kenzi ask, why, what is it? Dyson answers, “Mermaids.” Mermaids are the absolute worst!
Kenzi gets excited because of Darryl Hannah movies, but Dyson says mermaids are the psychopaths of the sea. Kenzi wants to stay and fight the mermaid.
Bo goes to dinner (in her regular ravishing leather, not in the ravishing dress the handmaiden brought). She sticks her knife in the roast and is not making friendly gestures toward Rainer. He again says he didn’t bring her there. He puts the knife to her throat and says, “You are not going to change anything.”
Bo steps back and her eyes go blue. Rainer’s interested in that. He smiles and wants to know what the dark fae devour these days. Bo says she’s unaligned. That’s impossible, says Rainer.
Bo says, “What kind of Fae are you? Some kind of memory wiper?”
He holds up a Wanderer card. “Memory is not my power. It’s my curse.” She walks out on dinner with a to-go plate. Rainer’s plate.
Kenzi tries her luck with Tad in her quest to save the world from mermaids. Guess what? Tad’s legless, too. He loves Darren because he saved him from something that took his legs. He leaves for a meeting. She digs through his file cabinet and finds a folder full of “creeper mail.”
Rainer plays the organ in Bo’s room. (An organ with a keyboard. You know. For music. We don’t get to the other organ until later on.)
Bo interrupts him and he tells her his power was foresight in battle. He could see his opponents attacks before they happened. He says he put it to good use trying to end light and dark. Wow, that gets Bo’s attention. He says he’s seen slaughters over light and dark and tyrannical rule on the rise. Bo wants to know whose rule? Nobody mentions the Blood King, but she has to be thinking it.
She’s looking at him sympathetically. I think he just reeled her in. He talks about not being able to remember why he’s there and who cursed him. She says, “It’s torture. It’s not living.”
Kenzi’s snooping around in the room full of floating legs again.
Darren (Brandon Firla) enters and does some magic by waving his hand at Kenzi. It makes her bork up what looks like plain water. He finally lets her stop barfing water and digs through her purse, where he sees the creeper mail. The mail is from his sister and contains pearls. Translation: she’s going to kill him.
Kenzi’s figured out Darren is a merman. Tad was his first set of donor legs. His sister Dominique took off Diana’s legs but she doesn’t know how to attach them to herself. He asks her to take him to Diana. He talks about needing legs to be part of a world he doesn’t belong in. Kenzi can grok that.
Dominique will have to be captured in water.
Lauren takes off a thick terry robe and steps in the salt water pool. Yes, Lauren in a swim suit. 10,000 photos of this moment are available on Twitter and Tumblr, so I’m skipping to the action.
Lauren wades out into the pool and waits to have her legs bitten off. Dyson lurks nearby ready to snare a big fish. There’s a disturbance in the water, Dyson says, “Now,” and Lauren pushes the button on a device in her hand.
The device sets the fish to flopping and Lauren’s legs are saved. Thank goodness.
The train conductor announces the next stop will be in two minutes as Bo steps into a baggage car. She goes up to a glass bell jar. Inside is something that takes her all the way back to her childhood when she found a blue butterfly.
We see young Bo (Sadie Alter), a tear streaming down her face as she holds the butterfly. Adult Bo has a matching tear as she remembers.
Bo removes the glass covering and picks up the butterfly. Rainer says, “What did you do?”
“When I was seven . . . ” but Bo doesn’t finish the sentence because Rainer takes her hand. He says, “It is you.”
The butterfly flits away. Bo turns and looks at Rainer. It’s Bo’s I want you right now look, which can only mean trouble if you ask me. She says, “What’s this? Us?” He pushes her away because she’s going to miss her stop.
He turns back to the empty butterfly container and yells, looks frustrated and angry. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.
Bo comes back and plants a big lip lock on Rainer. She says, “What am I doing?” Then she does it again. What IS she doing? Your guess is as good as mine.
Lauren looks at the mermaid and says, “God, she’s beautiful.” Brings back happy memories, that remark.
Dominique the mermaid (Kate Todd) wants legs. Wants to walk. Lauren tells her it’s wrong, she’s hurting people. She says she needs legs to get to her brother, Darren. He didn’t come home like he was supposed to. She says, “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be ignored? To be locked out by someone you love?”
Lauren and Dyson both can grok that.
A tear from the mermaid’s eye forms into a pearl. She’s been sending them to Darren. That’s her 18th, which means she’s suffered enough to kill someone. But she won’t kill Darren. Her sister, on the other hand, she’d love to kill. Her sister’s a liar so that’s why she took her human walking sticks.
About the time Dyson and Lauren learn that Dominique has a sister whose legs she snatched, Kenzi touches Diana and discovers what a cold fish she is. Well, damn, she’s not a pixie. Nope, another mermaid. This mermaid thinks Kenzi is her new bottom half and brother Darren is there to help make it happen.
Darren prepares to sever Kenzi’s legs as Dyson and Lauren show up with Dominique.
Dyson’s wolf lunge for Darren is interrupted by the mermaid magic that makes Dyson toss his last drink of water. Pisses Lauren off, it does. Lauren has the scientific presence of mind to notice that the plant from the swimming pool is dying in a beaker of tap water near the sink.
The whole family is together. Darren proposes a plan that will keep them together.
They’ll all get legs and live happily ever after. Nothing can stop them. Except tap water. Lauren gives them a huge drenching with plain old tap water. Take that, fish faces.
Bo and Rainer are in bed, smiling, happy, laughing about how many stops of the train Bo has missed while boinking Rainer. She says, “Are my friends still safe?”
He says, “Kenzi and Dyson are coming close to finding the compass. When they do, you won’t remember me.”
“Screw your curse,” Bo says. “Everything’s ready.”
They sit up in the bed and review Bo’s plan to come back to release Rainer from his curse. The opera singer, Hugen in a jar, and the biggest clue of all – Bo signing a contract with the dark. She asks him to witness it. She knows that she would never align herself and finding out she’s dark will lead her to find the answers, to him.
“What if I’m a monster?” he says. She answers, “Then I’ll kill you myself.”
Bo puts her hand on his chest. He puts his hand on her chest. There’s dramatic music and gasping and light coursing through Rainer’s arm.
A fast rewind through Bo waking up on the train, jumping off, running through the woods, getting her agreement to be dark from the Archivist.
We are back in the present. The Una Mens receive a surprise visit from Bo and Rainer.
He tosses a Wanderer card at The Keeper (Christine Horne). She makes it disintegrate. Rainer’s Fae powers are restored when the card burns. He foresees her attack. The Keeper says he was cursed because he had too much power as a rebel. For helping him, The Keeper tells Bo they will kill the claimed human, the doctor, the wolf, the siren and everyone she loves. Then they will kill her.
The Keeper orders the Una Mens to attack.
Bo and Rainer take fighting positions back to back. He tells her when to duck, when to kick, when to block and together they battle the Una Mens.
Lauren, Kenzi and Dyson mop up all that’s left of the mermaid family after their demise by tap water. Lauren says, “We make an excellent team.” Kenzi checks her phone and says, “Bo never called. What are they even doing?”
Well, Kenzi, to answer your question, Bo is running a sword through The Keeper. I’m pretty sure killing off the Una Mens is going to bring all sorts of trouble to our girl Bo. The Keeper mentioned right before Bo poked her real hard that if Bo followed Rainer she would suffer a fate even worse than her own whore of a mother’s.
We go back to Bo’s bedroom where we began the episode, where Bo and Rainer have washed off all the blood. Trick comes in.
Trick warns Bo that Rainer will ask her to slay the Una Mens. He begs her not to do it. The power will be amassed into the origin seed that was stolen from him. In the wrong hands . . .
We see the origin seed as currents of power collect in it.
Bloody fingers reach out to take the seed. Care to guess whose fingers they are? My bet is on Aife, but we have to wait to see for sure because the episode is over.
