Ellie and Sandie from Last Night in Soho – Fiction’s Fearless Females

By Kalie Zamierowski of Just Dread-full

Every year a group of bloggers and I write about fearless fictional women to celebrate International Women’s Day. Each of these bloggers will be featured on my blog this year. The blog-a-thon started with Michael of My Comic Relief and, after my post, will go on to feature Nancy and Kathleen of Graphic Novelty² and Jeff of The Imperial Talker. Here’s my contribution to the Blog-a-thon this year!

Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho opens in the warm home of a quaint British town, a home where main character Eloise basks in her vintage-inspired bedroom listening to music from the 60s. The opening scene is so reminiscent of life sixty years ago, in fact, that we may suspect that we are in 1961, not 2021, and because of Wright’s ability to establish a scene we may also feel like we’re temporarily inhabiting a much more idyllic time period than our own. Certainly, that is what Eloise/Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie) imagines, the main character who we meet in the film’s beginning. Ellie has just been accepted to fashion school, and we get the impression, based on her excitement, that a glittering life in Great Britain’s fashion hub looks just as perfect, just as idyllic, as the 1960s do in her eyes. But sometimes attractive surface appearances mask a more insidious lurking reality—a fact which may be true of Soho in general, and is definitely true of Soho in the 60s, a reality that Ellie will soon find out.

The Doctor Is Real In

Like many a comic fan I was counting the days to opening night and excitedly saw Dr. Strange on Thursday!  My intrigue couldn’t have been higher for a film that a) opened the door to the mystical in the MCU and b) was based on a character I only ever read when he’d guest-star in a comic I already liked.  THEN I went to see it again this afternoon.  I had to!  I couldn’t get it out of my head!  The movie I found was so much better than I was prepared for.  So here are my SPOILER-FREE thoughts on why I found the themes in Dr. Strange to be so captivating!

The Joker Examined – Jack Nicholson and Batman (1989)

Last week I wrote about Cesar Romero’s madcap 1960’s take on the Clown Prince of Crime as an introduction to a Halloween series about two things that terrify me – clowns (gah!) and the struggle to understand the very real evil in our world.  The Joker, a character I feel personifies evil incarnate, will continue to be the star as we jump from 1966 to 1989.  It’s time to explore Tim Burton’s Batman, a film that succeeded in putting the “gothic” in Gotham and making Jack Nicholson even more unnerving.  Look at how the menace glints in his eyes with that smile!  Aaaagghh!