cabinessence68

This finally became free to stream so I watched it. Well I FFW watched. I really liked the way this film looked except for the spaceship which looked like two paper plates glued together. It very slow and boring. There is hardly a plot. I think JP has run out of ideas. There are some great alien invasion films from the 50's where ordinary people encounter a spaceship and there is a lot of tension about how to handle it. I wasn't really interested in the characters. They wasn't any character arcs to keep me engaged. To be honest I didn't even make it to the end because I had completely lost interest. I do appreciate JP using black actors. It's refreshing and a good thing. He needs to work harder on script development though.

This is a wacky idiosyncratic show. I didn't know what to make of it at first other than that the cinematography and production design was gorgeous. It tells two parallel stories. Helena as a young girl navigating through her parents loveless marriage, and her as a twenty something struggling to find love and a career calling. Of course these stories are intwined and often the young Helena's story sets up Helena's struggles as a young adult. Did I say struggles? She really doesn't struggle, in fact she skips through life quite joyfully. It's a sort of fairytale of disfunction. I really love this show. I cannot recommend it enough. The young Helena is played by a great actress. Keep an eye on her.

As I started to watch this, I was very distracted by the short girl's gigantic eyebrows. I keep thinking that they were purposely trying to make her look unattractive so that maybe when she became a princess they could make her look pretty. I was wrong about that. I didn't know anything about the books, but to write a book about good and evil without really exploring at all what it means to be good, or how evil corrupts it, seems like a major misstep. They should have called it the school for valley girls and goth kids. The other lead actress was very good though and my two stars are for her.

In full disclosure, I fast forwarded through much of this because the story was so stupid.