Rabbits, Blinkity

So right about now, you're thinking, oh, great, another tribute post, blah, blah, blah. But this one has a twist. I have never consciously listened to a Whitney Houston song. No idea why, it just never came up. I'm sure I've heard at least a few before (we'll just have to see), but if you were to ask right now, "name a few of her songs," I wouldn't be able to even get one right. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to listen to 5 Whitney Houston songs, one after the other, at random. As I do this, I'll type about them. It'll be different, at least. Here we go!

My Love is Your Love

First, the obvious: yes, she had a fantastic voice. Particularly in the lower register. In the context of this song, it's kind of simultaneously light and heavy - she's almost mumbling or whispering a good part of the time, but her voice just cuts through the bass and the backup vocals like a red-hot feather.

Relaxing.
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The really interesting thing about The Good Wife is that the "wife" in question wasn't ever actually that good - at least not in the way that the obvious connotation of the phrase would indicate. "Principled," or even "Pragmatic" might be a more accurate choice of word, if less provocative. Alica Florrick is, in fact, so principled that her morals wrap from "good" right back around to "evil" on a regular basis. So it was something of a relief last season when she finally hooked up with Will and threw Peter out; at the least it should have relieved her of some of her tension. And it worked! Sort of.

Alica's Nerves

On to the episode: Alicia's been having sex, and is therefore enormously pleased with herself, complete with new bangs. She gets over herself pretty quickly, though, when she manages to get her client implicated for murder, via the usual shady-sounding leading questions. Add to that her... uncomfortable relationship with Kalinda, and not wanting to be seen with Will ever. Sure enough, it's business as usual. But with unusually passionate arguing.
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"Deals. Why, they're the very foundation of civilized existence."

This was a bit unexpected. Rumpelstiltskin... blew up the token black (seriously, TV Godesses?) fairy godmother. And then made the Rapunzel deal with Cinderella in exchange for the ball ticket.

This episode was all about favors, in fact, and who owes whom. Ashley/Cinderella owes Mr. Gold her baby. Shawn owes Ashley and their child a chance at a family, complete with tiny glass slippers. Emma owes Henry time, and a whole lot of slack for annoying but right. We already know that Regina owes Gold seemingly unlimited favors. Graham owes Regina his job and possibly a sexual harassment lawsuit. And now Emma owes Mr. Gold a favor as well. Not to mention, everybody owes magic (aka life?) a favor, starting with not leaving town. As in, it literally cuts them off at the sign by crashing their car.

But nobody scares Emma, so she plants her feet, shakes Mr. Gold's hand, and takes the sheriff's job offer.
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"It was the honorable thing to do."

So Snow White is entirely modernized in this edition. Instead of creepily keeping house for dwarfs, she's robbing stagecoaches to save up for a run to the border. Until she falls in love, at least. While it's possibly not quite at first sight, it's pretty close, but the part where Prince Charming - sorry, James - permanently dumps his fiancé is left for another flashback.

My jab in the deck of this review isn't quite fair - the Manic Pixie Dream duties are actually shared between Prince Charming and Snow White fairly equally. Sure, she convinces him that his arraigned marriage isn't all that, but he convinces her that there's more to life than running. Which is a nice twist. But neither of them grow up, which is my slight gripe about this episode, and Charming/White's characterization overall: the Evil Queen, Rumpelstiltskin, et. al. are all very complicated, conflicted, and interesting. Snow is still a bit 2D - her modern incarnation is a kindergarten teacher, for goddess sake! Couldn't they be a bit less, I don't know, like fairytale characters?
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"Who will protect Henry if you won't?"

In the opener, we see that clocktower (previously frozen) is now keeping quite reasonable time. Certain people are not so happy about this, as it turns out. So does our favorite fairytale town Mayor know she's an evil queen or not? Presumably she does, unless she has some other reason for not wanting the clock to run.

Meanwhile in flashback land, we see the first big deviation from the traditional tales. Snow White, it seems did something quite nasty to the queen - something worse than simply being beautiful, at least. Which explains a lot, I suppose; people don't usually destroy the world quite that randomly. I very much like where they're taking this: thanks to a nice combination of acting and writing, she's far more sympathetic and three-dimensional than might be expected. Which, in turn, makes her far scarier than your average villain. I rather hope they don't go the full tragic route, but we'll see. Very well done thus far.
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Let me get this out of the way first: I haven't read Fables - I hear it's wonderful, but I haven't the time or inclination. I haven't seen any of the various 'serious' fairy tale movie treatments that Once is going to be invariably compared to. I'm also not going to watch Grimm. My knowledge of fairy tales is this: I read the 'traditional' kiddified version as a child, watched the Disney versions then too. As a teenager, I read the originals, and also re-tellings/take offs by I believe Pyle. Later, I read a bunch of feminist deconstructions (the Bloody Chamber and so forth). So yes, I'm aware Once has been done elsewhere, but this is my perspective and I'm sticking to it.

With that in mind, the pilot of Once shows real promise. It's been suggested that Once is effectively "in a world where all fairy tales are true...", but frankly I don't see it, if only for the simple fact that, the "real world" seems quite irrelevant. In fact, the only non-fairy character was the bail-bond skipping dude in the opening act, who was promptly knocked unconscious by our hero. Symbolic? Well, she's a bondswoman who's supposed to bail the fairy talers out of their magical time-prision, so...
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Before I start actually reviewing this, I should mention that I've at least casually followed Riese aka Marie Lyn Bernard and her various exploits since she was an ultra-weird, sexually confused proto-hipster who started a blog with perhaps the strangest name ever and wrote long rambling brilliant self-indulgent posts that were simultaneously suicidally depressing and fantastically uplifting. Her writing style has influenced mine to an entirely unfortunate extant (when I use text-speak you should totes blame her; I've sent, like, 5 texts in my whole entire life). So, I'm not really capable of fairly judging things she's involved with: damn you, emotional baggage with complete strangers!

That said, Unicorn Plan-It is very, very good, and I say that having seen a substantial majority of the video produced by the lesbihipster-pop-culture-obsessed corner of the internet that Autostraddle lives in. It's clever, it's snappy, but the episodes aren't rushed, and they don't contain too much filler. Perhaps most importantly, it's not full of itself. The actors and writer seem to know they're in a goofy web show; they're not pretending it's anything else. It's the comedic answer to Anyone But Me, but with a name that's many, many times as memorable*:

Visit the main site for the rest.

Why you should watch this, and you should

The premise of the show is the old standby classic: a bunch of nuts franticly try to do absolutely nothing. But they all do it so very differently:
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Today, our webseries is "Verbal Vogueing", the vocabularic masterpiece by Louis Virtel. Judging by his name and general attitude, one would almost expect him to be writing for the high-class publication mentioned in the title, or at least plying the aforementioned name as some sort of "agent" or "image manager." But as we all should, he firmly believes that when life gives one a lemon the best option is to make a wildly inappropriate, sarcastic remark about it: (Livelihood alert: totally NSFW, get outta here wage slaves!)

You can find the rest on the author's channel, of course. Still not convinced? Listening to music and don't want to stop just yet? Read on!

Why you should watch this, and you should

For starters, he makes up words, and does it well, which is enough in my book. He also makes a fine joke, most of which you won't have heard before. Seriously. I mean, I'm usually satisfied with comedians and other funny folk who recycle the same old joke in a brand new context, but comparing Picasso (sorry, Pica$$o) to Ke$ha? That's pleasantly unexpected. He's one of the few to recognize that computers are excellent singers. Moreover, words can definitely describe the quality of his opinions about the mall; I know this because he uses them to do just that.
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