My current routine for this blog is that I try and do Saturday posts about culture and Sunday posts about other things, with book reviews the rest of the week and also (until November) my regular look back at previous months of blookblogging every six days or so.
So today I’m doing a quick look at two things we’ve enjoyed a lot recently, both featuring young women in the title role of kickass heroine. To be honest I’m a bit under the weather today, so this is just mild squee rather than deep analysis.
Wednesday, in case you don’t know, is an eight part series from Netflix about the daughter of the iconic Addams family, with Tim Burton as executive producer. Wednesday Addams (played by Jenna Ortega) is sent to Vermont (played by Romania) to attend a boarding school for magical kids. Magical boarding schools go a long way back – there are echoes of Roke as well as Hogwarts – so some of the story writes itself; there are also interesting bits of tension between town and gown (a theme that goes back at least to Chaucer) and the persecution of the Other.
Ortega really makes Wednesday watchable, as a girl who doesn’t care what the hell anyone else thinks. There’s one scene near the end which I thought went too far, where she is particularly nasty to a fellow student. But otherwise you hardly care about the plot, you wonder what she is going to do next. The high point is her dance at the school ball, which apparently was choreographed by Ortega herself.
Similar and yet also different, we had watched Enola Holmes a few months ago, and have now got to Enola Homes 2, in which Sherlock’s younger sister (played by Millie Bobby Brown, who is also one of the producers; she turns 19 later this month) uncovers sinister industrial secrets in a match factory and ends up instigating the 1888 match girls’ strike. It’s not in the same league as Wednesday, but it’s very entertaining to see the Sherlock Holmes mythos subverted in this way, and ignore the historical inaccuracies. Oddly enough this too has a memorable dance scene, though it’s more of a distraction from the plot.
Anyway, just to say that we enjoyed both of these a lot.