It’s amazing. I haven’t disliked a Doctor Who story/serial/episode this much since Russell T Davies was at the helm. And for much the same reason I didn’t care for a lot of RTD’s work: a hamfisted attempt at social commentary coupled with carelessness about subtext creates an unpleasant and alienating story.
Continue reading “Doctor Who 9.07 and 9.08: “The Zygon Invasion” and “The Zygon Inversion””
Hello No Award! It is the day before a (really terrible reason for a) public holiday here in Melbourne, and our offices are empty. Maybe you are not at work also! (No Award is at work)
Anyway, here’s some culture we’ve consumed recently. Liz especially wants to get her ramble on.
Continue reading “media that No Award has recently consumed”
How great is Maisie Williams, eh? People are saying it’s a shame she’s too busy with Game of Thrones to be the next companion, but I say, wait until she’s 40, then she can be the sixteenth Doctor.
I probably didn’t need to review this as a two-parter — synchronicity of titles aside, these episodes didn’t have to be consecutive — but hey, I didn’t know that until it was too late.
(Beyond the cut are discussions of alleged spoilers published in the UK tabloid press — emphasis on “alleged”.)
Continue reading “Doctor Who 9.05 and 9.06 – “The Girl Who Died” and “The Woman Who Lived””
A whole episode set underwater (or in places that are soon going to be underwater), but it’s a submerged lake so my pedantry forbids me to make a single Harold Holt joke. Truly Moffat is evil.
Continue reading “Doctor Who 9.03 and 9.04: “Under The Lake” and “Before the Flood””
Let’s get some things out of the way first:
“The Magician’s Apprentice”, in which the Doctor meets a winsome child on a battlefield, Missy advances the asexual agenda, and Clara/Jane Austen is canon.
(Steph has proofread this post: There really is a lot about the Asexual History of Doctor Who, just fyi)
Continue reading “Doctor Who 9.01: The Magician’s Apprentice”
We’re restricting this post to upcoming releases, because if we covered all the media we have in our wishlists, Netflix lists and so forth (people who bought all three German St Clare’s DVDs: me), we’d be here all day.
In chronological order with a caveat that release dates may change!
1 September
The Handbook: surviving and living with climate change
Steph is already breaking the rule but only because it just came out last week.
22 September
Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho
This is already out in other markets, and the buzz is strong!
The Muppets, (US)ABC, Channel 7 in Australia, no airdate here
23 September
Avatar: The Last Airbender – Smoke and Shadow (Part 1) by Gene Luen Yang
My OTP might look at each other! (They broke up, like, three books ago. Stop judging me.)
The Scorpion Rules by Erin Bow
I’m clearly going to get a lot of use out of my new Canadian Kindle account. Someone should give me a large sum of money so that I can open a bookstore and import Canadian YA to sell alongside Australian books.
6 October
JUST GO THROUGH THE GHOST GATE ALREADY, BREQ!
18 October
Spear, Adelaide Film Festival, no general Aus release date
This has got to get a general release eventually, right? RIGHT?
21 October
Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
I die in this book. Also some other stuff happens, probably. I’ve seen an ARC, it’s pretty big.
26 October
Supergirl, CBS, no Australian network yet
The pilot was charming, and we are in favour of family-friendly entertainment about girls being superheroes. Also, No Award ships Kara/James Olsen.
27 October
Avatar: The Last Airbender – Legends
STOP LAUGHING AT ME.
A Thousand Nights by E. K. Johnston
The premise wouldn’t normally grab me, but I loved The Story of Owen and Prairie Fire enough that I’ll give anything Johnston writes a burl.
Sometime in November
If You Are the One / 非诚勿扰 Australian special
1 November
The Sea is Ours: Tales from Steampunk South-East Asia
19 November
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay (part 2)
(Steph will recuse herself here, she has Feelings about this franchise, both Casting Feelings and Archery Feelings.)
14 December
The Expanse, Syfy, doesn’t seem to have an Australian network yet
I quite liked the first book, and I’ve been meaning to read the next two. I’m mostly just happy to have some space ships on my screen.
17 December
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
I saw The Phantom Menace on opening day, and it marked the very first time she walked out of the cinema, went home and started writing about a movie being Problematic, although I didn’t know that word then, so I just said “majorly racist”.
AND YET.
2016
24 January
The X-Files, FOX, doesn’t seem to have an Australian network yet
I’m slogging through season 9. It’s a struggle, but I’m determined to finish the damn series. The reboot cannot possibly be as bad as this … can it?
5 April
The Nameless City by Faith Erin Hicks
What’s it about? I have no idea! But I love Hicks’s art, I’ve been seeing snippets on her Twitter for ages, and it’s blurbed by Bryan Konietzko. That’s enough to make me curious, despite the cynical marketing ploy of putting the Avatar: the Last Airbender font on the cover.
16 March
Exit, Pursued by a Bear by E. K. Johnston
July 2016
A good portion of the No Award staff writers are planning to see this one!
The Three-Body Problem
Did you think we wouldn’t be seeing this? The only thing holding us back will be the inevitable delay between the Chinese release in July, and whenever the Australian distributor deigns to bring it here.
(Stephanie, of course, is not limited by puny things like “needing subtitles”. Note to self: learn Mandarin asap.)
Some time in 2016
Cleverman, the ABC
Indigenous Australian dystopian SF on Our ABC. We have high hopes for this! (Of course, we also had high hopes for Serangoon Road, and look how that worked out.)
Icon by Genevieve Valentine
The sequel to Persona, YA about politics and beauty pageants and spies.
The Federal Election, all the networks
Election routine: vote, eat democracy sausage, watch results come in, drink.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Green Legend
No one knows anything about this, but it has Michelle Yeoh in it, so we’ll be there with bells on.
When Sergeant Hayes is called to Yoorana cemetery in the middle of the night, he makes a discovery that turns his world upside down – six people with no memory of their identities. Who are they and what has happened to them?
It took me a while to get around to watching Glitch, because I’m neck-deep in The X-Files right now, and frankly, season 7 is so dire that I’m slightly afraid that if I stop now, I’ll never start again. But then came “Hollywood AD”, and I was like, “Right, we need a break. It’s not me, The X-Files, it’s you.”
Every girl dreams of being part of the line – the chosen seven who tunnel deep into the mountain to find the harvest. No work is more important.
Jena is the leader of the line – strong, respected, reliable. And – as all girls must be – she is small; years of training have seen to that. It is not always easy but it is the way of things. And so a girl must wrap her limbs, lie still, deny herself a second bowl of stew. Or a first.
But what happens when one tiny discovery makes Jena question everything she has ever known? What happens when moving a single stone changes everything?
A Single Stone is a deliciously claustrophobic piece of semi-dystopian body horror for middle grade readers, inspired by Kafka (because why not?) and The Silver Chair (because it is the best Narnian book FIGHT ME).
Continue reading “Aussie spec fic for young readers: A Single Stone by Meg McKinlay”
Infini was written and directed by an Australian, features an all-Australian cast, and was filmed in Australia. It should rocket straight to the top of the No Award List Of Things We Really Like.
If only that were true.
The all-Aussie cast are doing American accents — except one guy who I think is meant to be British, but he sounds like an American actor trying for Aussie — and it’s just a tedious fest of rehashed Star Trek plots mixed with manpain.
Now, I don’t mind a bit of rehashed Trek. Serve it up with some shiny low-budget effects and local accents, I’d have eaten it up with a spoon. (And then whinged here about the dude-heaviness of the whole thing, but that’s half the fun!) But setting it in the US is just … lazy. Everyone has seen this before. Why not change it up a bit? (Answer: the accountant was in charge.)
Similarly, the casting is just woefully dull. Of the fourteen cast members — that includes bit players — ten are men, and nine of those are white men. I’m not great at distinguishing faces, so I knew them as Lead Guy (aka The Dancing With The Stars Host), The Other Other Hemsworth (turns out there are three!), Beardy McBeardsalot (aka Guy From Animal Kingdom), REX MANNING (that was his character’s name — I could recognise him because people kept saying it in allcaps), Is He English Or What?, The One With Dark Hair, and The Rest.
(I should note that Kevin Copeland, The One Guy Who Isn’t White, is in fact American. He does a lot of Australian stuff, though. I totally forgot he wasn’t One Of Us.)
One of the film’s four women is a bit player. The remaining three are:
If you’re keeping track, that’s two-thirds of the female characters having uterus-related character development. 
Claire is played by the beautiful and underrated Grace Huang, so that’s two non-white people in the cast. There’s a moment where, as she goes mad from PLOT REASONS and also Abortion Angst, she says goodbye to her mother in Mandarin, and that’s the closest we come to further character development for her.
Not that the men fare any better. These characters are strictly cardboard cut-outs. Lead Guy bonds with Is He English Or What? over fatherhood, and has high level manpain because What If He Dies? REX MANNING shouts and shoots things.
There’s quality dialogue like, “I’M TALKING TO MY FUCKING KIDS, MOTHERFUCKER!” The final act is basically just guys screaming at each other, while I texted Stephanie to ask if I had to keep watching. She said yes, which I’m pretty sure is a human rights violation.
Maybe Australian accents wouldn’t have saved this movie.
The highlight, for me, was the repeated shots of Sinister Wind Farms On An Alien Planet. A lot of the dialogue was mumbled, so I’m not sure why they were sinister, but there they were. Wind farming. Ominously. Maybe Going Crazy In An Isolated Facility On An Alien Planet is one of the symptoms of Wind Turbine Syndrome? I made a joke on Twitter about this being what it takes to get an arts grant these days, but it turns out Infini received no taxpayer funding. Thank heavens.
Oh, and the plot — a mining operation on a distant planet turns out to be digging up an alien life form, and it’s maaaaaaaaad. Star Trek did it with “The Devil in the Dark” (TOS) and “Home Soil” (TNG); Doctor Who did it with “42” and, like, every third Pertwee serial. This is entirely skippable.
Infini was released direct to iTunes and maybe other video on demand sources, who knows? Liz paid AU$6.99 to rent a HD copy of Infini from iTunes and kind of wants her money and her two hours back.
That awkward moment when you’re looking for lobsters and find volcanoes.
“That’s what happened between me and Clark” – Revising Hollywood’s Greatest Scandal
Loretta Young has been excoriated for decades for presenting herself as a moralist while raising Clark Cable’s secret love child. Anne Helen Petersen uncovers the sadder, darker story behind the rumours.
It was in 1998 — in the wake of Judy’s memoir — that Young, by then in her eighties, first heard the term “date rape” on Larry King Live, at home in Palm Springs with Ed Funk. “She asked me what that meant and I explained to the best of my ability,” Funk told me.
…“And there was this whole dawning,” Linda said. …She said, ‘That — that’s what happened to me.’”
New from Telstra: the Time Phone
Normally, of course, No Award gets a bit shirty when the US media reports on Australia — not that it shouldn’t, it’s just that defensive reflex — but we make an exception for hanging shit on the Abbott government: “If the Koch brothers ran a country, it might look like what’s happening in Australia.”
Steph isn’t sure what’s happening here: Skip Showers for Beef (please note that all figures appear to be in USA measurements, ie, weird shit like ounces.).
(As always, No Award recommends 4 minute shower timers, and also civil disobedience).
13 interesting things you can see out your Melbourne train window. The Heavenly Queen Temple and Franco Cozzo mural are the highlights of Liz’s commute.
Actual discrimination against a ginger! (Not really, but the phrase “not sick, just Scottish” will live in Liz’s ginger-haired Anglo-Celtic heart forever.) (Steph notes this is what our dystopias will be: the brown morass discriminating against pale people for obviously being deficient. So great. So exciting.)
If you, too, enjoy filling your kitchen with completely useless and ridiculous appliances, The Guardian’s Inspect A Gadget feature is for you.
While preparation of leaf tea is traditionally a ritualised communion with ideas of elegance and solemnity, there’s always room for novelty pants.
Teen spends babysitting money on getting vaccinated; parents mad.
Friend of No Award, In Which I, posts about tea.
Important Hanging Rock update.
no-award.net 