You don't care what I think? Oh well...

This show… wow. This show was a combination of ‘Holy Shit, did that just happen?’ and ‘OMFG, stop acting like a child and get over it!’ This show was a little all over the map, which is pretty standard in these historical Chinese soaps. Not gonna lie. I loved almost every second of it.

I preface this with the fact that historical mainland Chinese soaps are basically my favorite genre in Asian TV so I may be a little biased(even tho, I’m a white chic from Texas and can never hope to speak a word of Chinese). I watch historical dramas from other countries such as Korea and I watch a lot modern dramas from all over the place(Taiwan has the best ones, IMO). I generally watch shows set during the Qing Dynasty focusing on the Kangxi Emperor or the Yongzhen Emperor so this is my first one outside that time period.

Beauties of the Emperor is 32 episodes of epic dynastic drama and marks the beginning of the Han Dynasty in China and Emperor Gaozu’s rise to power in 202 BC. But this show isn’t really about him as you can tell from the title. It’s about his wife and her adopted sister. The main characters are Le Er and Miao Ge. Le Er is the daughter of a well off merchant family and they take Miao Ge in after she is orphaned.

Le Er is the sweet minded individual who always wants the best for everyone and it seems like Miao Ge starts out that way but eventually gets fed up with not being treated as well by the family and the shit really hits the fan when Miao Ge falls for the guy the Le Er is basically already engaged to. Which btw, that whole thing with her falling for Yun Kuang was total BS. He saves her from falling off a cliff or something and suddenly she’s completely infatuated. She doesn’t even know him.

I should also say that Yun Kuang is NOT the future Emperor Gaozu, while Le Er is the Future empress Liu Xi. That should tell you something about where this is going. Anyway, Yun Kuang is the head of a large rebel faction that is plotting to overthrow the last Emperor of the Qin Dynasty(not to be confused with the Qing) and he and Le Er meet and after a few other chance meetings, they fall in love and are genuinely happy together. Eventually, though, Yun Kuang has to go back to the war and he leaves promising that he’ll marry Le Er when he becomes emperor.

Here’s where things start getting a little crazy. Enter Hai Tien(the future Emporer Gaozu). He’s a scruffy captain who’s trying to make a name for himself and bring honor to his family. Well that gets screwed to hell when he meets Le Er who has somehow been picked up by government officials to be buried alive with the recently deceased emperor.

He lets her and the other women go and his family is slaughtered because of it. This causes him to start his own campaign against the crown and eventually he totally falls for Le Er. She’s not really into him at all because she’s still holding a torch for Yun Kuang.

Miao Ge ends up in the palace as concubine to the emperor but when he dies, his heir ascends the throne. Coincidentally the heir is in love with Miao Ge(they’ve known each other for a while) and makes her his empress. This is really the beginning of the end. Miao Ge is still in love with Yun Kuang(despite being married to another guy) so her first act of business is the marry her rival, Le Er to someone else, that someone else being Hai Tien.

Hai Tien knows Le Er in love with Yun Kuang but he’s still in love with her so he’s not going to let this chance slip away and marries her. I said this was the beginning of the end before because, Hai Tien and Yun Kuang were allies and Xiongdi(symbolic brothers) but Yun Kuang comes to look for Le Er and Hai Tien lies to him about her and doesn’t tell him that Hai Tien married Le Er.

This all eventually comes to a head when they overthrow the emperor and Yun Kuang finds out the Hai Tien lied to him. Yun Kuang crowns himself the new emperor and attempts to kill Hai Tien. And not knowing that Miao Ge forced Le Er to marry Hai Tien, he thinks she betrayed their love and marries Miao Ge.

Hai Tien is shipped off to some outlying province because Yun Kuang hates him and now Hai Tien is pissed so he beings training an army himself. And apparently Yun Kuang is a shitty ruler because he never does anything. It’s practically spelled out that he sucks because he’s heart broken over losing Le Er and that if he had been married to her, he would have been a better leader.

Anyway, Hai Tien invades and Yun Kuang is forced out and eventually kills himself after Miao Ge commits suicide. Le Er becomes the Empress Lui Zhi when Hai Tien takes power. It’s honestly not a very happy ending and to me it’s almost a tragedy.

I very much glossed over a lot of this story. It’s 32 hours long, you can’t fit everything into a thousand word synopsis. I enjoyed watching this drama, though there were parts that had me getting super pissed because the characters were acting like punks. I would tend to think people didn’t act like some of these characters tend to act, however after reading so much about how the historical figures, poisoned one another and plotted against their rivals to take power, I’m not sure that some of this isn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility.

Something that struck me through out the series is that pretty much every bad thing that happened to the main characters can be traced back in some way to Miao Ge’s manipulations. Everything from Miao Ge hoping to get Le Er in trouble in the second episode by letting her escape a punishment by her father(followed by Miao Ge hitting herself in the head in order to make it look like Le Er attacked her) which eventually leads Le Er to actully meeting Hai Tien, to the complete breakdown of relations between Yun Kuang and Hai Tien and Yun Kuang’s eventual death.

It’s almost ironic(and incredibly sad) that Miao Ge wanted so badly to be with Yun Kuang that she did some pretty sketchy things and in the end he died because of her. If she hadn’t been so selfish, he could have lived and been a great emperor.

Also, Le Er is a pretty tragic character because all she really wanted was to marry Yun Kuang and for he and Hai Tien to be friends because she genuinely likes Hai Tien. In the end, the guy she truly loved and her sister are dead and she’s married to someone that, while she likes, she isn’t in love with. Though she did try for a while.

And Hai Tien knows this. He is hopelessly in love with Le Er but he’s well aware that he wasn’t her first choice. He got her in the end but he didn’t really get all of her. And that has to be enough for him.

I know I’m making this show sound super depressing and it kind of is, however the journey is so worth it. Let’s be honest, girls don’t love Titanic because of the sinking ship(which they know is coming), they love the story along the way. It’s the same thing here.

Something that also bothered me in this show was that it seemed somewhat cheap in comparison to other historical dramas that I’ve seen. This was glaringly obvious in the outfits that the women wore. It’s very hard for me to believe that an Empress wore the same (almost plain) hair pins and clothing every day. :/

I watched every episode as this show came out and while it wasn’t a homerun, it was pretty epic so:

Heather Rating: 7 out of 10

Watch Beauties of the Emperor for free at Drama Fever. <—Love this site :)

P.S. If you want to watch another show that chronicles what happened historically after this show, try Schemes of a Beauty. That show had me looking up info left and right because I thought the storyline was so outlandish that it couldn’t be true. I was wrong. lol.

When exactly did becoming too lazy to keep up with your dye job classify as a ‘style’?

I asked one of my friends why she hadn’t fixed her roots after four months because they looked aweful and unkemp(though I kept that last part to myself). She says to me that she’s doing the ‘ombre’ thing. It’s apparently super popular now.

Maybe I’m just too old now to appreciate certain trends.

You ever do something that’s kind of mundane and ordinary but somehow feel extrodinarily proud? Well that was me yesterday when I reconstructed a very ill-fitted men’s shirt into a fitted woman’s shirt. 

I always like all those fun shirts with the funny or trendy phrases and pic on them but because I am a bigger girl, It’s very hard impossible to get these things in my size, fitting correctly. I really wanted this loki charms shirt for a while but as you can see from the pic below, I had very good reason to avoid it. Ladies sizes go up to XL usually which doesn’t cut it by a long shot and men’s shirts just don’t fit well because the shoulders are too wide which makes the arm too low and there is no shape at all.

I found some tutorials online for resizing a shirt and just decided to buy one and see if I could make it work. I tried to follow several tutorials, but if I’m being honest, they made the process WAY harder than it needed to be. I’m positive someone else has already done what I did just because it’s so simple but I kind of thought of it on the fly while looking at peices of shirt sitting everywhere. In the end, what I did was faster and had much less chance for error. I love the pleated puff sleeves. :D

I actually tried do this on another shirt this morning and it took me maybe an hour or an hour and a half to complete. 

I already have my next shirt picked out that I want to do this with. :)

So yeah, this is my very ordinary occurance that I felt extrodinarily proud of for actually doing it and doing it right. 

I’m not really a gushing reviewer… at all. Very few things make it to my list of Awesome Must See film and tv. This show, however, does.

I thouroughly enjoyed Arrow from start to finish. It burst on to the scene in a spectacular fashion and for the most part this show seems like it really could share a universe with Nolan’s batman. It’s grounded in reality though sometimes it seems to take itself way to seriously. The characters work well together for the most part. I really loved Felicity Smoak and at the same time I could have done without Laurel. She was so boring to me. I really couldn’t wrap my brain around these two guys both wanting her as much as they did.

Maybe it’s because I’m a chick and other chicks don’t really appeal to me(usually) so I couldn’t see it. Same thing happened with Thor. I got why Natalie Portman’s character practically fell all over herself for Chris Hemsworth but I still don’t get Chris Hemsworth becoming a neutered house husband in like a day for NP. :/

But I digress. The story was spot on with very few plot holes that really stuck out. I loved the inclusion of Roy Harper later in the show. Green Arrow fans know that he will later become the Red Arrow. Thea annoyed me at times but then she is a teenager and most teenagers annoy me.

There were a few things that had me either rolling my eyes or raising a brow. First off you don’t spend five years on an island and come off it looking the way oliver queen does, scars not withstanding. It’s pretty common knowledge at this point that to put on that much muscle, you need to have a pretty strict diet of lean meats, veggies, and certain proteins up to 3500 calories a day with many hours spent in the gym. 

People who would truely be in such a situation would find themselves loosing fat and muscle as they scrounged for food, eating whatever they can find. And then his ass comes off that island looking like model made for a billboard… oh wait.

(Note: I actually saw this banner in real life while I was in LA last year. It was quite massive.)

I also like how Oliver’s blood ends up everywhere and somehow the police can’t trace it back to him. He has invisible blood. :0

And then my favorite item is that apparently every criminal in Starling City is shooting blanks. No matter how many bullet casings hit the ground, not one thug ever actually manages to shoot the hood. After the first couple of episodes I just got over it and accepted the fact that the only time Oliver was ever going to get shot was when it served the plot in some way. 

But I can totally brush those things off normanlly so the only thing that really dragged the story down, IMO was the flashbacks to Oliver’s time on the island and his dealings with some dude named Fyres. I really found I could not have cared less about that sub plot. I honestly found myself skipping over it because it was just so boring. I get why it was there, showing the audience what Oliver went through and getting us to understand how he came to be the way he is. But Christ Almighty, it was mind numbingly tedious at times.

Thankfully that is a subplot and not a main item. The other 75% is what keeps me coming back week after week and these complaints are pretty minor.

There aren’t really any special effect like you would see in your usual super hero movie and I’m glad of that. Green Arrow isn’t a super hero, he protects his city from crime without the option of some otherworldly power.

I don’t really consider myself a CW fan, I watch Arrow, Vampire Diaries, and supernatural but that’s it. I wasn’t a fan of Smallville(I REALLY tried to like that show) and I don’t watch Gossip Girl or Hart of Dixie or Nikita. But this show had me hooked from the first episode and it will for sure be added to my blu-ray collection when it comes out in september.

Heather Rating: 9 out of 10 :)

P.S. was anyone else confused in that last episode as to how oliver stabbed himself through the heart and into Malcom Merlyn and Merlyn died but Oliver walked away like it was just a flesh wound. o.O

So this review has been eating away at me because I felt like I really needed to think about the movie for a while and let it stew in my mind rather than just doing a knee-jerk reaction review to the movie. There was a combination of feelings where on the one hand I was like, “It’s a iron man movie, what’s not to love?” but then I was disappointed in some ways.

I set the stage for this by saying that I loved the first Iron Man movie so much that I saw it six times in theaters. Iron man 2, I saw the one time in theaters and then again after I bought it on Blu-ray and I haven’t seen it since. I almost feel bad because I have absolutely no inclination to see this movie again in theaters which is never a good thing. 

The premise of the film is that Tony Stark is going through a bout of PTSD from his near death experience in New York in the Avengers. While he’s dealing with this, there is this dude called the Mandarin running around who looks like the lovechild of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein(We’ll get into that in a sec) and he’s going around blowing shit up like a terrorist asshole.

Well, Tony’s former driver makes the dubious decision to follow a shifty looking dude who was acting as a driver for a rival super genius named Aldrich Killian. So the shifty guy goes to the Chinese Theater in LA and does some shifty stuff and there ends up being an explosion, ostensibly by the Mandarin, and Happy the driver is seriously injured. Que, Tony deciding to dip his balls in steel and announce to the world that he was going to take the Mandarin down and giving out his home address.

This would have been fine except like five minutes before he did that, he was telling Pepper he would do anything to protect her. So yeah, way protect your lady love there, Stark. I did get a good laugh because the next scene is Pepper packing her shit up to get as far away from that situation as fast as her stilettos will carry her.

Well, as we saw in the trailer the house gets blown to hell and Tony ends up in Tennessee. I read a lot of other reviews of the movie where people seemed confused as to why this happened and the point of him being there along with a host of other nit-picky things about charging the suit and Tony getting a car, ect. TBH, I didn’t really have an issue with this, I understood how he got there, why he was there, and the plot devices used there to further the story along. If you got confused, rewatch the movie, the info is there.

And as for the kid, I thought his interactions with Tony were pretty funny, mostly on Tony’s end. “Dads leave. No need to be such a pussy about it.” Priceless.

And as for the twist… I’m conflicted on this. One the one hand, it was such a smart choice. I’m still amazed by the sheer fact that it happened because I’ve never really seen it done like that before. It makes the fact that the Mandarin looks the way he does that much perfect because he was manufactured to look like every stereo-type we as Americans have come to associate with terrorists. This to me is so brilliant.

Where I’m conflicted is that I while I love the concept used here, I wish it hadn’t been used here. There was so much more back story that could have gone into this that was just thrown away because they did this. If you go back to the first movie, the Ten Rings is the name of the terrorist group that kidnapped Tony. That entire plot point was basically banished. Killian was rather explicit in his explanation that he created the Mandarin in order to cover up his experiments so when one of his guys went boom, the Mandarin would take credit for it and investigators would not look for any other motive or suspect. 

With that in mind, I’m not sure why they even had him wearing the ten rings on his fingers. In the comics, those rings were alien technology that granted the wearer powers over all sorts of things like the elements and the human mind. In the trailer they show not only those rings but also that shield tattoo on on the back of the Mandarin’s neck. Neither one of these things comes into play in the movie and thus they served no purpose. It’s like the trailer was telling me that this movie was going to have more in the movie than was actually there.

And while I know a lot of people had an issue with Pepper kicking ass at the end of the movie, that really didn’t bother me at all. I liked the fact that for once, SHE was doing the saving. What got me was when Tony blew up all his armors and then had his arc reactor removed. That whole scenario almost ruined the movie for me. Objectively, I know why this happened. RDJ doesn’t have a contract for any more movies so they decided to wrap it up nice and neatly just in case Marvel doesn’t get him back.

To which I say, “Marvel, get your collective heads out of your ass and sign the damn check.” Downey Jr. MADE this franchise, hell he made the Avengers. Arguably none of this might have even happened without him there. Interesting tidbit with this though is that there are a lot of rumors going around that RDJ hasn’t signed the contract because he’s upset over the fact that Marvel screwed over the other actors so badly financially.  

Most of the other actors look up to Robert and he apparently cares enough about them to be pissed on their behalf that many of them only made around $200,000 on the Avengers. There are rumors as well that people such as Chris Hemsworth may not even return for Avengers 2 unless Marvel ups their salary significantly and I can’t really say I blame them when they’re looking at 200 Gs vs RDJ’s 50 million on a movie that grossed 1.5 billion.

But I digress, I liked the movie up until the last ten minutes or so. I didn’t love it. It wasn’t the perfection that is Iron Man 1 but it was a better movie than 2. And something that surprised me was how funny it was. I laughed throughout the entire movie and very few of the jokes failed. It was surprising because the trailers sold it as being a much more serious movie than the first film but this one is, perhaps funnier than that one.

Over all I liked the film quite a bit. The twist was amazing and the comedy was spot on and I believe had I not had such high expectations, this would have been an awesome movie for me. I think I was just expecting a more streamlined and epic movie that did a better job tieing up the loose ends and then perhaps brought in further references to the MMU with regards to the Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man.

Heather Rating: 7 out of 10

PS… that easter egg was crap. :/

PPS: God this took me FOREVER to put together. I’ll never do a review this long again. >.<

So I just finished the first season of Red Widow. This was one of those shows that I stumbled on completely by accident. I actually saw the first two episodes when they premiered on TV while I was visiting my cousin’s house.

The first episode was kind of all over the place but the gist of this show is that you have this soccer-mom named Marta Walraven who is the oldest daughter of a Russian mob boss(played of course by Rade Sherbedgia). Marta is quite certain she wants nothing to do with the family business so you can see why she would be furius when she finds out in the first episode that her husband has been working as a drug runner for another mob boss named Schiller.

She tells her husband to either drop the illegal dealings or she’s going to leave him. She sticks to her guns and good for her, except the next day her husband is shot and killed in her driveway in front of her nine-year-old son. Apparently the husband decided to make a little extra cash and rip off his employer for a couple million dollars worth of cocain and that’s why he was killed. So now, according to Schiller, she has to work off her dead husband’s debt or she’ll be killed as well. Hijincks insue.

The fact of the matter is that this plot line is nothing really new. Weeds pretty much did this years ago and while Melissa Rosenberg can act decently, she’s no Mary Louis Parker. I knew the story wasn’t terribly original, but there were two things that kept me coming back every week and that was Marta’s guts and Nicholae Schiller(but we’ll get to him in a second).

I like strong women. I enjoy women who will see their job through to the end. I like that she does things in the show that show her to be a resourceful and determined lady who will do almost anything to get the job done.

And speaking of her job, her boss, Nicholae Schiller, played by(the very gorgeous) Goran Višnjić, is constantly coming on to her. Not overtly of course, after all her husband was just killed, ostensibly by Schiller himself, so he is definitly giving her a respectful amount of time to greive. But it’s in every conversation that they have that she second she signals back that she’d be receptive to his advances, that he would be all over her faster than she can say, ‘gun runner’.

The biggest fault I had with this show is that I saw everything that was going to happen coming a mile away. When Marta’s husband was killed, I guessed fairly quickly who dun it. And the second I saw Nicholae Shiller and his brooding bedroom eyes, I knew exactly where that was headed. Let’s be honest you don’t cast someone who looks like that and then bench him.

And while I really liked that Marta was willing to do anything to keep her family safe, I did not like that she acted like an idiot half the time and then seemed so easily manipulated the other half. An example of her idiocy was when she decided to work with the FBI to try and get Schiller on tape.

Instead of waiting until he called her in and just letting him run his mouth, which he does(all the time), she basically marched into his office and was so aweful at trying to be subversive that she might as well have had a blinking red sign on her head saying, ‘DON’T TRUST ME!’. He picked up on it and was discreet for the first time ever. And then when she didn’t get what she wanted from the FBI fast enough, she just dropped that whole thing with no thought to the reprocussions.

And her family is constantly manipulating her and doing things that are against her wishes behind her back, but all she does is yell at them and storm off in a huff. That brother of her’s was the worst. ugh.

All that being said, I really did enjoy the show. This sort of Weeds meets Scarface thing is right up my alley and I watched it almost every week which is saying something for me. If you’re the type of person who enjoys shows like Weeds, Revenge, or Castle, you’ll probably like this show as well, and I would recommend at least giving it a try. And at only eight episodes, all available on demand on Hulu, it’s not exactly a huge time commitment either.

Heather Rating: 8 out of 10

This review is mostly spoiler free

Continuum is a show I heard about a couple of months ago but I hadn’t seen until now. I’m a cord-cutter and I don’t download illegally so I don’t get traditional TV stations and I rely on Hulu and Netflix for my viewing needs. And recently, this show popped up on my Netflix recommendations so I stuck it in my queue and began to watch it. 

I wasn’t initially going to write a review but I thought that in the interest of possibly spreading this to others so they too can watch it that I would write one anyway. And I’m going to keep this one relatively short and spoiler free.

The back story on this show is that sixty years from now, corporations will be running the show in liu of a democratically elected government and there are freedom fighters known as Liber8 who seek to topple this regime through acts of domestic terrorism.

In the middle of this is Kiera Cameron, a police officer who is in the wrong place at the wrong time(allegedly) and gets sucked back in time along with a half dozen or so of the Liber8 leaders who were to be put to death. There, Kiera makes contact with a teenager who will eventually be the person who runs the cooperate congress and the two work together to eliminate the threat of Liber8.

The interesting thing about this show is how the audience is supposed to empathize with Kiera while at the same time we are all well aware that a dictatorship isn’t right. In this future there is no free speech or right to assembly. Heck people just sitting on their own property talking about freedom is grounds for arrest, apparently.

Kiera, to a certain extent, is well aware of the faults of her government and though she(and the audience) is sympathetic to the cause of the Liber8 movement, killing thousands of people is against her moral beliefs as well as ours. So she and thus the audience is torn on where they stand. 

It’s an interesting show that is fairly original and had pretty good sci-fi visuals. I usually write these reviews espousing the good and the bad but there was no stand out moment where I was like, “This is Awful!” or “This is the best damn thing I’ve ever seen!”

This show is a bit different because I think I’d classify is as a solid tv show. It’s well written with decent visuals and an original-ish plot. It’s not forgettable but I won’t be breaking my rule of ‘no illegal downloading’ for it either. And while I didn’t feel super invested in the show even after ten episodes, I am hoping this pops up on Hulu in July when season 2 makes its state-side debut.

Heather review: 8 out of 10

PS. I’m kind of loving the fact that she isn’t a stick figure. She seriously looks like she could kick your ass from here to next week. 

heezyduzit asked: Where were/ What happened to Christina Wendall's parents? Did i miss something?

As far as I know they never make an appearence. They are mentioned by the sworn sisters as the reason that she stays with the sworn family. I think this was a plot device designed to be the reason that Sheriff Sworn is so attached to her and to explain what he did in the last episode. (not sure if you’ve seen all of it yet and I don’t want to spoil it)

werewolf-teeth:

So let me get this straight you know like nothing about this kid and met him only a few times and that merits enough trust to show him you’re a werewolf? What the fuck is wrong with you

I totally left that out of my post about the show but this is sooooooo true!!!!!