tempestsarekind, posts by tag: karen gillan - LiveJournal

I saw a trailer for the film The Circle today. John Boyega showed up early, and I thought, "oh, is this that movie where he was going to play a computer genius? Cool." Emma Watson showed up, and I thought, "oh, I didn't know she was in this." And then I heard a familiar Scottish voice and saw a familiar face -

- and literally shrieked, "KAREN! HI KAREN!" Because I have problems. I guess the wires to that particular knee-jerk response are still hooked up?

Someone on the internet mentioned that "The Eleventh Hour" was five years ago today, and now I am all sad and nostalgic. :( I loved Eleven and my Ponds (River, too) so very much, and while I know that it wasn't to everyone's taste, I miss that fairy-tale quality that seasons 5 and 6 had, with their girls being brave in the darkness of the forest, and people being separated from their loved ones by dislocations in time - but finding them again, too, because they never stop looking and loving even when they can't quite remember… Without any particular reason, I was worried that Moffat Who without Eleven would become (as I put it right before seeing any of S8) colder, and flintier, and less full of joy. What's odd is that even though I had no particular reason to worry about this - no spoilers or interviews or anything like that - I wound up being right.

Ironically, given how much I loved "The Eleventh Hour" right away and how much real and proverbial ink I spilled over Eleven, Amy and the gang over the course of their run, I wrote almost nothing about it on my first viewing - just this lonely little sentence from April 4, 2010: I've only been watching for fifteen minutes, and Amy Pond has already broken my heart once.

I have a pretty full account of my feelings about S5 in real time, because by the second episode, "The Beast Below," I was already in full meta mode. But I've only ever written about this first episode in little dribs and drabs here and there, on the way to something else - a post about Amy's abandonment issues here, a disquisition on Eleven and his interactions with children there. I've never really sat down to write about this episode, and how joyful it was, how it felt like we were turning a corner away from the Last-of-the-Time-Lords angst of Ten and toward someone who could call yogurt "just stuff with bits in," like a child himself; how we were meeting a Doctor who could come to a child's rescue and take her seriously within moments of meeting her; how we were getting a new TARDIS that looked like inside of a mad inventor's shop and a girl who could fly off with the Doctor in her nightie like Wendy with Peter Pan. I've never written about how much I love the awkward gangly grace of Matt Smith in this episode, the way he struggles against handcuffs or leans out of a hospital window like a spaniel straining against a leash; or how I fell in love with Karen Gillan's odd, airily furious delivery of "Twelve years, and four psychiatrists," or how she broke my heart all over again with the way she yelled at breaking point, "Why did you say five minutes?" I've never written about little Amelia eating ice cream off of the ice-cream scoop, or that first time Eleven tastes the name "Amelia Pond" on his tongue. Until now, I suppose.

It's always hard to talk about what this episode, and season 5 generally, means to me. Other people have much more dramatic stories about how the show has helped them through hard times, and fortunately that isn't the case for me. But "The Eleventh Hour" felt like getting reacquainted with the stories that had shaped me as a child, getting back in touch with that magic after feeling for a long time that I had to put that sort of thing behind me. It was a reminder that stories don't have to be Serious and Important in order to matter very deeply to someone, that a little girl getting her prayer to Santa answered could be moving and true. I'll always be grateful for that, for Amelia Pond and her Raggedy Man.

Apparently HBO is filming a pilot currently titled The Devil You Know, set during the Salem Witch trials. Among the cast are Eddie Izzard and Karen Gillan. (Fans of later seasons of Being Human UK will note the presence of Damien Moloney; Doctor Who S8 people will recognize Zawe Ashton as well as Karen. People who are fans of…things?…many of? will note the presence of Julian Rhind-Tutt.)

[LJ won't let me include the URL of the article where I read this, because it keeps telling me that "spam patterns were detected" in my entry - what the hell, LJ? - so I guess you can Google this to find out more.]

[Let's see if LJ likes this URL better: http://io9.com/karen-gillan-joins-… ]

So that is a thing that is happening.

I should probably have a secondary tag "it's hard out there for a comedy," but oh well. An article from February 2014 that was linked in a recent Slate piece about the dominance of men's and boys' stories in movies:
http://www.laweekly.com/news/who-k…

I'm thinking about this slightly more than usual because I did two related things recently: I finished watching all of the episodes of Selfie that ABC put up on Hulu after canceling the show; and then, having felt the pangs of Karen Gillan-romcom withdrawal, rented Not Another Happy Ending on iTunes. Only one of these was really worth doing: I thought John Cho and Karen were delightful together on Selfie, and watching them develop a funny friendship was lovely. Not Another Happy Ending, on the other hand, was a romantic comedy in which the leads almost never shared scenes: there were two major scenes that should have been about interaction between them, to show us why we ought to root for them to get together at all, and the first one was a montage set to peppy pop music, while the second was drowned out by a pop ballad. In both scenes, instead of being able to hear anything of how they interacted - especially odd because the conceit of the film was that the male lead was supposed to "get" Karen's author character and provide her with excellent notes on her writing - all we could hear was someone else singing about something, as though the filmmakers didn't trust their own script, or the actors, enough to believe that their interactions would come across as convincing. Of course, not having any interaction at all in those scenes (at least not any audible ones) was even more unconvincing…

I know that romantic comedy relies heavily on a sort of alchemy between the material and the leads, and that mysterious thing known as chemistry - but why would you shoot yourself in the foot before you even had a chance by making decisions like that one?

(There was so much about this film that would have been so much better if they'd bothered to tell us anything about anything! Karen's character - Jane - has a broken relationship with her father because he abandoned her, and I guess she wrote about this in her first novel; then her father shows up at one of her book signings and they just…hug it out, like, "I haven't seen you in years, Dad, but that's fine"? I could have understood a story where Jane was so afraid that he might leave again that she wasn't willing to say anything, but they didn't really tell that story, or any other story, beyond a couple of part-for-the-whole anecdotes that didn't really work. Then Jane spends most of the movie hallucinating Darsie, the heroine of the new novel she's writing…which I guess is supposed to have some connection to Jane's life or something, but since no one ever tells us what this novel is about, or what kind of character Darsie is, that subplot goes absolutely nowhere. It's the strangest thing. Why would you expect any of this to have meaning if you left out any of the actual details and character development?)

What do the kids on the internet say these days? "Leave me here to die"?

http://doctorwho.tumblr.com/post/5…

I actually wrote this over the weekend, and have just been failing to post it for one reason or another (including feeling oddly sensitive about it after having written it, and I still don't know why). And I'm sure everyone knows about the spoiler by now, but just in case:

( Collapse )

I'll...just sit over here in this corner and cry, shall I? Don't mind me.

Oh, Amelia Pond, you brave, fierce, stubborn, glorious girl, never anything less than fully and unapologetically yourself: I will miss you. And Rory Williams, patient centurion, always being left behind; voice of caution and caretaker: you too.

Bye-bye, Ponds.

And goodbye, Karen and Arthur, you ridiculous hipster stupidfaces you. I am so going to miss watching you three be ridiculous and darling.

( Collapse )

Just assume that I wrote an actual post with words in it, all about how I love Amy Pond to bits and pieces, okay? Because I love Amy Pond TO PIECES. ( Collapse )

(Any time anyone official refers to "the Ponds" or "the Pond family," it just makes me really happy.)

I...might be more excited about this "Pond Life" mini-adventure than I am about the premiere of series 7? (Excited and WORRIED, but I won't stop being worried until I know what's going to happen to my beloved Ponds, so. If all turns out well, I'm sure I'll be retroactively excited about series 7, when I'm not worrying anymore. And if bad things happen, I suppose it won't matter.) And I love it when the everyday gets a look-in in the middle of the fantastic, so this is right up my alley anyway, Ponds or not.

http://www.doctorwhonews.net/2012/…

Also, Arthur and Karen remain adorable.

The adorable stupidfaces, aka Karen and the Babes, aka Matt Smith, Karen Gillan, and Arthur Darvill, were at Comic-Con. Which is an introduction, basically, for a picture that is so hipster it hurts:

http://doctorwho.tumblr.com/post/2…
(You can't really see the bizarre horror that is Arthur's cardigan in this photo, but trust me, it is inexplicable and terrifying.)

(This post is not inspired by any actual spoilers. Just me failing to be a real human and caring too much about fictional characters when I ought to be doing something useful with my time and emotions.)

On Sunday I went out for drinks to celebrate a friend's birthday, and at one point I said "fezzes are cool" as a reflex. Luckily this friend had started watching Doctor Who, at least from season 5 (I am a pusher...I don't even *mean* to be), so she didn't think that was weird. She mentioned, instead, that she hadn't finished watching season 6 because she was worried something horrible was going to happen to Amy Pond - and when I said nothing did, she muttered darkly, "yet."

At the moment, there is not that much that Moffat could really do to turn me completely off the show; I have a reasonably high tolerance for brushing off ridiculous plots with "LOL what" by this point, as long as the emotional underpinnings are decent. ("Last of the Time Lords" would just be funny and embarrassing if it didn't reflect the recurring deification of Ten.) But if my Ponds don't get a happy ending, we might have to break up. I have really strong Pond feelings, okay. But it's also that the Ponds have been a welcome challenge to the RTD-era ethos that The Doctor Is Always Alone, and that this is The Burden of the Time Lords. Eleven has gone from being a little girl's imaginary friend to being a member of a family; the entire point of the most recent Christmas special (the ending, anyway) was to say to the Doctor that it's not *right* that he should be alone, that there are people who set a place at the table for him. And over and over, the show seems to emphasize this, from Amy's stubbornly dragging him back into the world again when he says he doesn't belong in it any more, to River's turning up the sound of the stars so that he will know that he's loved. He seems to be re-learning, bit by bit, that the fact that he can't save or protect everyone, even just from ordinary death, doesn't mean that he can't love them in the moment. (Obligatory flail for "Vincent and the Doctor.") River has been instrumental to this, given how they meet, but Amy has, too - because he has failed her, and let her down, and she still loves him. He doesn't have to be the Doctor, Savior of Worlds; he can be her best friend instead of just her imaginary one. And that hopefulness and generosity has been so important to me over the last two seasons, even when Moffat has bitten off more than he can really chew in terms of the narrative.

So it's not *just* that it's my Ponds, or that seriously, Rory has to stop it with the dying, or that they have really suffered enough as a family already. It's that if the Ponds don't get a happy ending, I'm afraid that the show will go back to being a show about the Lonely God instead of the madman with a box, and the lesson will be that the Doctor should keep closing himself off, because his story is always a tragedy. And I don't know if I could deal with that, after the comic possibilities of seasons 5 and 6. (Hey, they both end with a marriage.) I'm not saying I would never watch the show again...but I'd probably go back to watching it like I watched season 4 and the specials, without my heart in it.

(Also, I *really* could not deal with the Doctor being a jerk to the next companion because something bad happened to the previous one, if that happened. Been there, done that, still mad about it.)