deerstalker
The saying goes that the first murder is the hardest. For Olivia Foxworth (Jemima Rooper) in Lifetime’s new miniseries Flowers in the Attic: The Origin, the hardest is her first turn of the outside lock on a door in the east wing of Foxworth hall that leads to an infamous attic. No, this moment is not the one where she locks her four grandchildren away.
This first turn of the key is years before when Olivia and her perverted husband Malcolm (Max Irons) lock up his 19-year-old stepmother Alicia (Alana Boden), pregnant with Malcolm’s rape baby. A baby who would one day become the Corinne Dollanganger we know from VC Andrews’ still-scandalous Flowers in the Attic. She marries her half-brother and eventually schemes to kill off their four children to access her significant inheritance. Depravity runs in the Foxworth family.
VC Andrews fans are a peculiar bunch. So many of us read the books way too young in the 80s and were forever marked by the twisted story. Even those coming to the Flowers in the Attic series more recently go through the same shock as we younguns did back then.
This disturbing five-book tale of incest, child abuse, generational trauma, and arsenic-laced donuts has aged like gothic wine in a blood-soaked barrel thanks to VC Andrews’s lyrical and compelling prose. Yet the film adaptations have left much to be desired — filmmakers shied away from taking the source material as seriously as it has deserved. That is, until Lifetime’s new miniseries, Flowers in the Attic: The Origin.
The show is based on the posthumously published, Garden of Shadows: a prequel started by Andrews before her death and finished (rather perfunctorily) by her ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman. The Origin takes its time developing the back story. The Origin also adds important important new characters and fleshes out existing ones to make a three-dimensional portrait of Olivia and the Foxworths unlike any that has existed on the screen to date — or even comprehensively in the source material.
In Garden of Shadows, Olivia Winfield begins as an unattractive, cold, hardened, and bitter woman whose resentments, in particular, towards other women only grow. It’s easy to imagine book Olivia would eventually reap such cruelty on children and even delight in it. But the Olivia Winfield of The Origin created by writers Connor Good, Amy Rardin, and Paul Sciarrotta, is brought to painful life by the extraordinary Jemima Rooper. She has a much more dramatic character arc that is so compelling we end up at times rooting for her, even though we all know where her horrible story ends.
In The Origin, Olivia begins as a genuine, intelligent, and independent woman who gets sucked into Malcolm Foxworth’s world of abuse and is broken down by it over the decades. Her process of disillusionment is heartbreaking to witness. Unlike the book where Olivia has her own money and could leave at any time, always choosing the violence of remaining, The Origin’s Olivia is trapped by a lack of economic opportunity. This makes her descent all the worse.
“I met a man who turned out to be a monster,” Olivia says and The Origin becomes a cautionary tale about how spending extended time with a monster will inevitably turn you into one, too. It also shows how religion can be used to manipulate a traumatized person to lead them to things they never imagined doing, but can now do under the eye of a vengeful god-figure.
Yet through Jemima Rooper’s exquisite and controlled performance, she never fails to portray Olivia’s innate humanity. This is one of the most challenging characters, arguably of all time, and Rooper has managed to embody her with empathy and compassion. Thanks to Rooper’s artful character development, Grandmother Olivia has gone from a stock villain to a complicated woman whose life went off the rails — and she could never get it back on track. I never, in my VC Andrews-loving life, imagined I’d ever feel anything but disgust for Olivia. Now I do. Give Jemima Rooper an Emmy for each part of this series already.
But Jemima Rooper isn’t the only marvel in The Origins. The writers have added key new characters in housemaid Nella (T’Shan Williams) and her daughter Celia (Evelyn Miller), two of Malcolm Foxworth’s original victims. The fact that they are Black adds an entirely new level of nuance that this story needed as Nella’s family becomes the conscience and heart of this gruesome tale.
Their presence also acknowledges Virginia’s Confederate history and the Foxworth family’s history of slave-owning — an important detail left out of Andrews’ books entirely. That Malcolm Foxworth essentially developed his future MO as a rapist and serial predator of Black servants. This reflects a history of the south that many conservatives are trying to erase from the history books.
Nella also gives us fresh contexts in which we witness Olivia’s own privilege through her whiteness. She denies to herself that she and Nella are friends, even though she knows nothing of Nella, her family, or even the fact that Olivia’s own husband had abused her. When Nella finally calls Olivia out on the power dynamic of servant and mistress, Olivia flips into Karen mode.
She reminds Nella that Olivia has promoted her “beyond her station” and could take her livelihood at any moment. This was such a white woman interaction that Black and other women of color experience regularly, with a varying spectrum of awfulness, even now, 100 years after the events of The Origin. Olivia Foxworth in this iteration is all too real, on so many levels.
The Origins has also made Olivia’s second son Joel (Luke Fetherston) explicitly gay. This is something only suggested in the book — and incredibly eschews the “bury your gays” trope. The writers reimagined Joel’s story from the book of a freak, accidental death in an avalanche and instead turned it into a stint in a sanitarium to cure his homosexuality resulting in his escape from the toxic Foxworth family with the man he loves, Nella’s step-grandson Harry (Jordan Peters). Finally, someone gets a happy ending in Flowers in the Attic. Maybe we will get a Joel and Harry spin-off series one day.
The fantastic new characters aren’t the only thing that sets this miniseries apart from every other VC Andrews adaptation. The female gaze is ever present in The Origins. It serves to handle so much difficult content sensitively, including scenes of sexual assault that contribute to the plot and character development. The production value is stupendous. Every actor is on point. There are no hokey performances here to be found, even if Malcolm’s southern drawl might come and go.
One of my favorite things is how, once again, there is a new version of Foxworth Hall itself. We could read this as a continuity error, but I interpret it as the inconsistency of memory. Nobody remembers things the same. We often don’t even remember our own memories as they happened, especially after trauma. It serves an internal logic that every on-screen version of the Foxworth mansion looks different, and The Origin’s version is it’s most imposing.
Flowers in the Attic: The Origin is the adaptation of our weirdly beloved VC Andrews stories fans have been waiting decades for. Finally, someone took the books seriously and put together a production that matches the tone and content, bringing the story to life in its most realistic version yet.
I sincerely encourage Lifetime to follow in The Origin’s footsteps and create a miniseries of each book in the Dollanganger series. All of those so-bad-it’s-good adaptations could use a proper retelling that embraces the gothic power and horror of these twisted tales, rather than the camp. The Origin sets a new bar not just for Flowers in the Attic and VC Andrews adaptations, but book-to-screen adaptation in general: a rare example of the miniseries far surpassing the book.
Flowers in the Attic: The Origin is streaming on Lifetime TV and Lifetime Movie Club.
The saying goes that the first murder is the hardest. For Olivia Foxworth (Jemima Rooper) in Lifetime’s new miniseries Flowers in the Attic: The Origin, the hardest is her first turn of the outside lock on a door in the east wing of Foxworth hall that leads to an infamous attic. No, this moment is not the one where she locks her four grandchildren away.
This first turn of the key is years before when Olivia and her perverted husband Malcolm (Max Irons) lock up his 19-year-old stepmother Alicia (Alana Boden), pregnant with Malcolm’s rape baby. A baby who would one day become the Corinne Dollanganger we know from VC Andrews’ still-scandalous Flowers in the Attic. She marries her half-brother and eventually schemes to kill off their four children to access her significant inheritance. Depravity runs in the Foxworth family.
VC Andrews fans are a peculiar bunch. So many of us read the books way too young in the 80s and were forever marked by the twisted story. Even those coming to the Flowers in the Attic series more recently go through the same shock as we younguns did back then.
This disturbing five-book tale of incest, child abuse, generational trauma, and arsenic-laced donuts has aged like gothic wine in a blood-soaked barrel thanks to VC Andrews’s lyrical and compelling prose. Yet the film adaptations have left much to be desired — filmmakers shied away from taking the source material as seriously as it has deserved. That is, until Lifetime’s new miniseries, Flowers in the Attic: The Origin.
The show is based on the posthumously published, Garden of Shadows: a prequel started by Andrews before her death and finished (rather perfunctorily) by her ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman. The Origin takes its time developing the back story. The Origin also adds important important new characters and fleshes out existing ones to make a three-dimensional portrait of Olivia and the Foxworths unlike any that has existed on the screen to date — or even comprehensively in the source material.
In Garden of Shadows, Olivia Winfield begins as an unattractive, cold, hardened, and bitter woman whose resentments, in particular, towards other women only grow. It’s easy to imagine book Olivia would eventually reap such cruelty on children and even delight in it. But the Olivia Winfield of The Origin created by writers Connor Good, Amy Rardin, and Paul Sciarrotta, is brought to painful life by the extraordinary Jemima Rooper. She has a much more dramatic character arc that is so compelling we end up at times rooting for her, even though we all know where her horrible story ends.
In The Origin, Olivia begins as a genuine, intelligent, and independent woman who gets sucked into Malcolm Foxworth’s world of abuse and is broken down by it over the decades. Her process of disillusionment is heartbreaking to witness. Unlike the book where Olivia has her own money and could leave at any time, always choosing the violence of remaining, The Origin’s Olivia is trapped by a lack of economic opportunity. This makes her descent all the worse.
“I met a man who turned out to be a monster,” Olivia says and The Origin becomes a cautionary tale about how spending extended time with a monster will inevitably turn you into one, too. It also shows how religion can be used to manipulate a traumatized person to lead them to things they never imagined doing, but can now do under the eye of a vengeful god-figure.
Yet through Jemima Rooper’s exquisite and controlled performance, she never fails to portray Olivia’s innate humanity. This is one of the most challenging characters, arguably of all time, and Rooper has managed to embody her with empathy and compassion. Thanks to Rooper’s artful character development, Grandmother Olivia has gone from a stock villain to a complicated woman whose life went off the rails — and she could never get it back on track. I never, in my VC Andrews-loving life, imagined I’d ever feel anything but disgust for Olivia. Now I do. Give Jemima Rooper an Emmy for each part of this series already.
But Jemima Rooper isn’t the only marvel in The Origins. The writers have added key new characters in housemaid Nella (T’Shan Williams) and her daughter Celia (Evelyn Miller), two of Malcolm Foxworth’s original victims. The fact that they are Black adds an entirely new level of nuance that this story needed as Nella’s family becomes the conscience and heart of this gruesome tale.
Their presence also acknowledges Virginia’s Confederate history and the Foxworth family’s history of slave-owning — an important detail left out of Andrews’ books entirely. That Malcolm Foxworth essentially developed his future MO as a rapist and serial predator of Black servants. This reflects a history of the south that many conservatives are trying to erase from the history books.
Nella also gives us fresh contexts in which we witness Olivia’s own privilege through her whiteness. She denies to herself that she and Nella are friends, even though she knows nothing of Nella, her family, or even the fact that Olivia’s own husband had abused her. When Nella finally calls Olivia out on the power dynamic of servant and mistress, Olivia flips into Karen mode.
She reminds Nella that Olivia has promoted her “beyond her station” and could take her livelihood at any moment. This was such a white woman interaction that Black and other women of color experience regularly, with a varying spectrum of awfulness, even now, 100 years after the events of The Origin. Olivia Foxworth in this iteration is all too real, on so many levels.
The Origins has also made Olivia’s second son Joel (Luke Fetherston) explicitly gay. This is something only suggested in the book — and incredibly eschews the “bury your gays” trope. The writers reimagined Joel’s story from the book of a freak, accidental death in an avalanche and instead turned it into a stint in a sanitarium to cure his homosexuality resulting in his escape from the toxic Foxworth family with the man he loves, Nella’s step-grandson Harry (Jordan Peters). Finally, someone gets a happy ending in Flowers in the Attic. Maybe we will get a Joel and Harry spin-off series one day.
The fantastic new characters aren’t the only thing that sets this miniseries apart from every other VC Andrews adaptation. The female gaze is ever present in The Origins. It serves to handle so much difficult content sensitively, including scenes of sexual assault that contribute to the plot and character development. The production value is stupendous. Every actor is on point. There are no hokey performances here to be found, even if Malcolm’s southern drawl might come and go.
One of my favorite things is how, once again, there is a new version of Foxworth Hall itself. We could read this as a continuity error, but I interpret it as the inconsistency of memory. Nobody remembers things the same. We often don’t even remember our own memories as they happened, especially after trauma. It serves an internal logic that every on-screen version of the Foxworth mansion looks different, and The Origin’s version is it’s most imposing.
Flowers in the Attic: The Origin is the adaptation of our weirdly beloved VC Andrews stories fans have been waiting decades for. Finally, someone took the books seriously and put together a production that matches the tone and content, bringing the story to life in its most realistic version yet.
I sincerely encourage Lifetime to follow in The Origin’s footsteps and create a miniseries of each book in the Dollanganger series. All of those so-bad-it’s-good adaptations could use a proper retelling that embraces the gothic power and horror of these twisted tales, rather than the camp. The Origin sets a new bar not just for Flowers in the Attic and VC Andrews adaptations, but book-to-screen adaptation in general: a rare example of the miniseries far surpassing the book.
Flowers in the Attic: The Origin is streaming on Lifetime TV and Lifetime Movie Club.
At this point, we’ve got nearly 70 years of kaiju and giant monster movies baked into the fiber of our cinematic brains to know the basic order of events. A giant beast attacks, a group of humans from different government organizations come together to fight it, they succeed, end of movie. Sometimes you can throw in a good kaiju to battle it; also a space giant named Ultraman if ya nasty. But ultimately, you know what you get. But what about what happens after? This monster just destroyed half of a city, what is the cleanup effort? What about the corpse? That question lies at the center of Satoshi Miki’s new film What to Do with the Dead Kaiju?, which played Fantasia Film Fest 2022.
If you liked the disaster movie vibe and bureaucratic red tape of Shin Godzilla, then you’ll love the same bit with a satirical edge of What to Do with the Dead Kaiju? When the movie begins, the giant reptilian monster lies dead. Who knows why it died. All the Japanese government knows is it’s dead and lying there. Every department thinks it’s a different department’s job. The military doesn’t really know what to do. It’s up to a small group of young, smart underlings at various positions throughout the cabinet.
What makes Miki’s film so engaging is the way it deftly straddles the line between satire/parody and legitimate disaster film. A million people are in the cast but they each manage to stand out, and even if you forget character names, you get their characters completely. The Prime Minister seems like a genuinely noble dude who wants to do right by his people. The problem is, all the other ministers look at the kaiju’s rotting corpse as something to garner tourism dollars. Or, once that seems less likely, as a way to make other department heads look bad.
The closest we have to main characters in the movie constitute a love triangle. Yukino (Tao Tsuchiya) works for the health minister. She’s married to Ame (Gaku Hamada), a former military guy who moved into the government. Their marriage isn’t all that strong, however; especially not when Arata (Ryôsuke Yamada), a former colleague of theirs and suitor for Yukino, reappears. The movie very much leaves it to the younger generation to do anything useful, but even they feel the weight of government inefficacy and spin.
Essentially, What to Do with the Dead Kaiju? escalates its problems in the environmental and governmental. After they decide to strip the meat from the rotting corpse because it’s starting to smell, a blister begins to grow on the body. The blister, they learn, has a noxious gas within it. (The government needs to decide the official smell of the gas, either puke or poop, or perhaps a mixture.) So do you pop the blister? What will happen to the surrounding area if the gas proves to be toxic? Or, as happens, the gas is actually spores for enormous fungi? The issues are both granular and ridiculous.
I will say, for as entertaining as I found the movie, I think it maybe overstays its welcome ever so slightly. By the middle of the second act, it seems like the escalation had reached its natural end, and yet we still had a ways to go. As fun as new characters popping in are—like Rinko Kikuchi (Pacific Rim) as a badass government operative and Joe Odagiri (Kamen Rider Kuuga) as a rockstar munitions expert—they eventually run the risk of dragging rather than heightening.
Still, I enjoyed What to Do with the Dead Kaiju? a lot. It has a lot to enjoy for people for whom Godzilla movies are second nature. The jokes on the genre land super hard, but they land just as well if you mistrust government red tape. Would you trust the US to effectively clean up a natural disaster, kaiju or otherwise?
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.
The post WHAT TO DO WITH THE DEAD KAIJU? Is a Razor Sharp Satire appeared first on Nerdist.
You read comics, right? Of course you do. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t, or maybe you would, I don’t know you like that. Either way, comic books are at the forefront of pop culture right now whether you realize it or not. Though, I guess it would be hard not to realize it. Countless movies, television shows, and video games are out there adapting famous comic books. The staple of most of them? A symbolic superhero. We’ve got Superman from DC, and Spider-Man from Marvel. These characters represent a staunch moral compass that almost never wavers. They’re the best of us and are a beacon of hope for us to strive for, but they’re also owned and operated by mega-corporations, so variety, in the long run, can be hard to come by.
What happens when you have a superhero universe where you aren’t hindered by the agendas of a larger company? Well, you get the Massive-Verse from Image Comics.
At this point, the Massive-Verse spans four titles, with an OGN coming later this year pushing that number to five. Debuting with Radiant Black, from the creative team of Kyle Higgins and Marcelo Costa, it follows a down-on-his-luck writer who gains gravitational powers from a tiny black hole. The Massive-Verse has continued to expand and fill in the void of that original series with an entire multiverse of stories and possibilities. It’s truly inspiring.
The Massive-Verse is stylistically reminiscent of Power Rangers, where Kyle Higgins formerly revitalized that franchise in the comic book medium. From a narrative standpoint, as stated by the elevator pitch on the back of the book, fans of Invincible will love it.
I’m here to give you some more insight into why you should take a deep dive into this superhero universe if you haven’t already. You won’t regret it. Well, you might regret reading this, but you won’t regret checking out the Massive-Verse.
Go Go Radiants
As I stated before, it’s no secret that a lot of the Massive-Verse is aesthetically inspired by Super Sentai and Power Rangers. Kyle Higgins spent years reviving the Power Rangers franchise for American audiences by taking the characters we all fell in love with in the ‘90s and adding depth and nuance to them. In addition to that, he crafted a story spanning the multiverse, linking multiple eras of Power Rangers under the same umbrella. It’s absolutely incredible stuff.
But like those money-hungry companies I mentioned before, Power Rangers is an IP licensed through Boom! Studios and owned by Hasbro, formerly Saban. With that, there was likely a lot of hindrance on what the story could and should be, and outside marketing materials like toys and games, all provide money for the companies, not so much for the creators who worked on the books.
When you read Radiant Black, the flagship series of the Massive-Verse, the inspiration is apt, all the heroes have the dopest-looking helmets you’ve ever seen, and they all have different colors that denote their powersets and abilities. But most of the similarities stop with the visual elements. The Radiants aren’t a teenage crime-fighting team like the Power Rangers are. They have wide gaps in age and at this point you could barely call them a team. It would be a stretch to say that any of them particularly like each other. Instead of banding together and answering the call like people with an unwavering moral compass would do, they are stumbling mightily through what it means to be a hero, and what their place in the world should mean. That type of depth is what makes these heroes so fun to engage with. The Supermans of the world definitely have their place, but the Radiants show a more grounded and realistic take on what the burden of power looks like, simply because they are regular people.
Gray Area Heroes/Powerset
Speaking about the burden of power, the different types of powersets for each of the Radiants have been so fun to explore over the course of the different series, and in their own way, they kind of inform what the characters are going through.
The aforementioned Radiant Black has gravitational powers, meaning he can fly and lift and move things with ease. Radiant Red has density absorbing and redistributing powers. She often absorbs matter and uses it to create armor around herself, which is really dope. Radiant Yellow can mess with time, and Radiant Pink can manifest and jump through portals, seemingly to anywhere.
These are some powers rooted mostly in the laws of the universe, and they’re now bestowed upon some scared humans with shitty lives. That’s a recipe for disaster, and I’ve got my popcorn fresh out the microwave.
My favorite part of these books is that while the Radiants might be heroes, they are deeply, deeply flawed. They aren’t symbols for morality like a lot of Big Two comic book characters are. They are representations of real people and how they would act if suddenly they had a fundamental universal power at their beck and call. Because of that, these characters are much more shades of gray than they are black and white. They might want to make sure the world doesn’t end and will do whatever it takes to stop that from happening, but when that’s not happening, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re running patrol and fighting crime all the time.
They use these powers to their advantage, just like most people would. Your friend is in a coma because a building fell on him? Well with these powers, you can make those responsible pay. You’re about to lose your home because your husband is a gambling addict and washed away all his money? Time to rob a bank for 2.5 million dollars.
These are just a handful of the things the Radiants have done in their spare time. They aren’t necessarily good people, but they’re trying. It makes for an incredibly engaging read.
Subverting Expectations
Another thing that I absolutely love about this universe is its dedication to subverting the audience’s expectations. Aside from looking like the Power Rangers, but being nothing like the Power Rangers, the creative teams have an ongoing trope where they set up a story a certain way, get the audience comfortable with that status quo, and then flip it on its head.
Almost all of the main characters in this universe were not initially the main characters. Without going too much into spoiler territory, Kyle Higgins and co. do such a good job of rooting us into a particular character’s story, giving us a reason to cheer them on, or want more from them, and then lifting the rug from underneath us and going in a completely different direction. At this point, it’s happened three times, and each time is just as brilliant as the first.
It can be hard to be original in storytelling, but somehow, the Massive-Verse continually finds new ways.
Expanding the Universe/Large Scope
At San Diego Comic-Con, I sat at a Massive-Verse panel put on by Kyle Higgins and other creative teams featuring Cherish Chen, Melissa Flores, Ryan Parrott, and Mat Groom, and for the first time, I was able to see just how large the scope of this universe is. For lack of a better term, it’s… massive.
Radiant Red, from Cherish Chen, David LaFuente, and Miquel Muerto just concluded its first volume. The story follows an angry schoolteacher whose roped into using her Radiant powers to pull a heist.
Aside from the Radiant-centric books, we also have Rogue Sun, from the creative team of Ryan Parrott and Abel. It spins out of the Supermassive event from earlier this year, that gives us our first glimpse into some of the supernatural sides of this universe. Instead of a tiny black hole, Rogue Sun gets his powers from the sunstone gem, and he fights a lot of ghouls, werewolves, and vamp-like creatures.
We’ve also got Inferno Girl Red, who is also from the Supermassive event book. We know a little less about her, but we do know that she’s from another universe. Her story will be explored more in an OGN from Mat Groom and Erica D’Urso due out late this year.
The newest series to debut is The Dead Lucky, written by Melissa Flores with art from French Carlomagno, and it’s coming out this week. It follows a veteran with PTSD and electrical powers who comes home to find a tech company encroaching on the civility of its citizens in the name of peace. She also wears a dope luchador-esque helmet. Man, helmets are so cool.
I was sitting in that audience in awe. Not only are these books so good, they’re also so personal, and you can see it in the creative teams. All of this falls under the umbrella of Kyle Higgins’ initial brainchild, but he’s giving other creators the chance to tell stories with meaning within this universe. And at this point, some of these stories are only tangentially related. Some, seemingly not at all. Maybe they will be at some point, but even if they don’t that doesn’t change the richness of the story.
Creating comics for the Big Two isn’t that easy, and that’s not to knock those companies. It all depends on what you want as a creator and what you want as a fan. For big companies, oftentimes, creative decisions or ideas get bogged down or blocked because topics might be too sensitive to tackle wholeheartedly. That’s not the case when you run your own world.
So if nothing else convinces you to check out the Massive-Verse, that should. Story, character, and personality take precedent in all of these stories. The flash and awe are just the cherries on top.
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