(no subject)

[girlofprey]

Sometimes I wish we could see the routines the celebrities do after a few weeks of training, maybe after they've performed them once and have a bit more confidence in them, and they're properly sort of 'finished'. I really really liked Matt and Aliona's tango to Bat Out Of Hell, and I even loved that he didn't seem to get into the 'Mr Darcy' character very well, and was just kind of lovely and romantic without being 'in charge' necessarily. But I did see his nerves, and yeah. I feel like I'd like to see it after a few weeks of perfecting it, but that probably isn't going to happen.

I was said to see Peter and Erin go last week, mostly because I love Erin, and Peter did really quite well in his quickstep I thought, and because I was more attracted to Erin than perhaps ever before dressed in that outfit and doing the Charleston. But Peter wasn't very good really, so it seemed pretty fair that he went.

But tonight's was a Halloween special, which I loved, and with Peter and Erin gone, the people I like at the moment are:

• Felicity and Vincent. I can see that Felicity is totally not the best dancer there, but I love her, I genuinely do, and I love her arms and legs. I think she might be in danger this week, and it was a little underwhelming when they got onto the floor, but I hope they don't go this week.



• Patsy Kensit. Mostly because she's so nervous, and she's not always great, but she's getting a lot better I think. I really like it when she really enjoys a dance and really gets into it and puts on a performance. I didn't see all of her dance tonight, but what I saw looked pretty good anyway.



• Matt and Aliona, obviously.



• Gavin Henson. Mostly because when it first started up, my parents didn't like him because they'd just seen him in 71 Degrees North, and the only reason they specifically gave for not liking him was that he was always checking how he looked and messing with his hair for ages, which I didn't think was a great reason for not liking someone. So I sort of decided to try to like him in spite of them, and then he did a pretty good waltz and was quite sweet. But he's not doing very well at the moment, and it is irritating because there are moments when he DOES do very well, but he doesn't seem to be able to manage a whole dance anymore. And he is a bit irritating about being competitive. But I thought his dance tonight was a lot better than the previous ones, although his chest was a bit distracting. I'd like to see him stay in for another week or so, and maybe try to keep improving, but there are a lot of other dancers who are doing better and don't really deserve to go, so it'd be fair enough if he did go really.



• Michelle and Brendan. Wow, there was almost an actual fight tonight! That was a bit weird. I did think at one point 'This bit is just the Time Warp', but I do think a lot of it was good, and definitely an improvement on her other dances. I hope she doesn't end up in the bottom 2 again this week. Sadly we watched it too late for me to be able to vote, for her or otherwise.

And people I don't so much like:

• Scott and Natalie. I can see that Scott is a good dancer, and I could see that their dance tonight was really good, and I quite liked Natalie dressed up as a witch. But there's not much about them that interests me, and I often find myself kind of switching off when they dance. So I wouldn't mind them going, but I don't think they will, somehow.



• Jimi and Flavia. Again, I'm not really a fan of Jimi's, and his face with it's almost permanent smirk kind of irritates me. Again, I can see that he's a good dancer, but I also kind of see what the judges were saying last week about his dancing is a bit neurotic sometimes, and a bit sort of jerky. I don't know. I don't enjoy a lot of their dances, is all. Tonight he was in character as a zombie and he kept moving around really jerkily, and I couldn't tell if it was him or because he was meant to be a zombie - I wasn't sure he'd be able to get away with zombie moves instead of dancing. But the judges seemed to really like it, so whatever.



• Ann and Anton. I'm ready for it to be over, and we don't even have the fun of the judges getting onto them because on gets there first, and she doesn't seem that interested in dancing so I don't really know why she's there. But whatever. I am ready for them to go but they probably won't.

The rest - Tina, Kara and Pamela - I quite like but am not that bothered about either way. Pamela I could see was a really good dancer in the first episode, but she only had one expression on her face throughout the whole of the dance and it really irritated me. But she's sort of fixed that lately and is really really good, I just don't love her as much as some of the others. I didn't actually see any of these three dance tonight though, because my parents decided not to tell me they were watching it, so I had to watch from after Felicity and Vincent when they put it on again later. Possibly I would be a bit more positive about them if I had.

Other things I have been doing in my life, apart from watching Emmerdale:


• Watching Coronation Street. The thing I love most about David's current court case/possible epilepsy storyline - aside from watching David freak out and worry and pass out occasionally - is that he's having massive friction with his mum over it, he's bonding with his gran because she's on his side and believed him all the way through, and his mum and gran are having massive friction over it...and his brother Nick, who lives on the street, is nowhere to be seen. I don't think I've seen David have a single scene with him since it all started. At one point someone asked Nick how David was, before they found out it might be epilepsy, and he said David was in bits over it all. That was it. He doesn't seem to care if his brother tried to kill his best friend, if his brother was about to get charged and possibly sent down for attempted murder, or if his brother has epilepsy or possibly something worse, like a brain tumour. It's kind of amazing.
  
  Also, someone has been leaving flowers at the factory, and it's all to do with the John Stape storyline, and I HATE HIM, I HATE HIM SO MUCH, and even Fiz is kind of being awful now while standing by him, and oh God. But because most people don't know what's going on with that, a lot of people assumed it might be something to do with Tony Gordon, and eventually Michelle heard about it and went to speak to Maria about it. And Maria was just sort of beautifully serious and not really that ruffled about it, she'd heard from Fiz about the flowers and wondered if it might be something to do with Tony. Michelle asked if there was anything special relating to Tony this week, his birthday or something. And Maria said no, and the wedding was in December, so it couldn't be that, and that she could phone his brother Patrick to ask, maybe. Then Michelle said something about how she didn't want Carla to know, and Maria kind of scoffed about her being upset by it, but Michelle said she thought that for all Carla's front, she thought a lot of that front just sort of melted away when she was in her own home, on her own. And that Maria acted all "girly and helpless", but underneath she was probably tougher than most of the rest of them. Mostly I like this because when I was dreaming up a prison AU for Coronation Street, I decided because it was my fantasy world the characters would be in one prison with a block for women and a block for men, and I was thinking that Maria would probably have her baby taken off her if she went to prison, and how that would be for her, and how she would probably end up going off the rails a bit, getting hard and maybe acting out a bit out of the pain. And Tony would hear about it in the other block through the prison grapevine, and just be horrified, and start sending her letters, and arranging for them to end up alone together somehow so he could talk to her (how? Because he's Tony Gordon, that's how). And she probably wouldn't want to talk to him, but he would just insist that look, he was worried about her, and he completely understood the getting hard, but acting out wouldn't get her back to Liam any faster, and she didn't have to like him but she really had to think about this, and oh God, stay okay, please just stay okay. Basically, I quite like the idea that Maria is tough as nails under it all, and actually think it's quite true to the character. So hurrah.
  
  It's Halloween tomorrow, and it's seeming more and more likely that Coronation Street aren't going to make me that 'Ghosts of dead characters haunting people on the street' episode I wanted. Sigh.



• I have been watching Hollyoaks and Hollyoaks Later, and I didn't really want to watch Hollyoaks Later because I don't even love Hollyoaks that much and it sounded like it was going to be all about footballers and possibly have a gang rape in it. But then it turned out that Mitzeee, who is a character I've heard good things about and quite liked when she was onscreen and hasn't been onscreen much lately, was going to be in it, so I tried to watch it when I could. Happily, there wasn't a gang rape, and especially since Mitzeee seemed slightly in danger of being involved, she wasn't gang raped. But oh my God, dudes. She's - so beautiful, I'm actually finding it hard to look at her sometimes. Not in the way I used to be with Michael Bluth, where I actually had to look away from the screen, but where I find myself focusing on just one part of her face, like her hair or her eyes or her teeth. She has AMAZING teeth. And I don't even care about teeth. This is her:
  
  
  
  Isn't she amazing? And she has a beautiful accent. And, unless I'm massively lowering my standards because I'm watching Hollyoaks, she can act. I think I'm a little bit in love with her. Oh my god.



• I have been to two Halloween parties in the last two days, with my nephews. They put on some quite nice dos for Halloween in my home town, and the kids seemed to be enjoying themselves. So hurrah.



• I'm kind of irritated with my dad at the moment, because he shut the car door on my back while I was trying to strap my oldest nephew into his seat tonight. After, I thought, huffing about having to take my youngest nephew over to the side of the car where his seat was, rather than just putting him in the back and leaving him there. And then he didn't even bother to strap him in. But I'm sure that irritation will pass. Ow.



• I saw the film RED/R.E.D. So, they killed the black guy first, after kinding of making it make sense because he had terminal liver cancer. But still. And of the two main female characters, one ended up kidnapped by the end, and the other ended up getting shot and needing to be rescued by her ex-boyfriend/love interest. But she was back in action for the last showdown of the film, which was nice. Even so. Those things happened.
  
  But I quite enjoyed RED. I'm kind of interested in CIA agents in films/tv shows at the moment, because MI5 and British spies have the whole cool/Queen and Country thing going on, what with Bond and all I guess. But in a recent film I couldn't honestly tell if one CIA agent was meant to be evil, or the entire CIA was, and it made me wonder exactly how Americans often think of/portray the CIA. It seems an odd attitude to take to one of your own government agencies, although frankly it's not as if they don't have enough real-world reasons to be suspicious of them. But anyway, it was nice to see an entire film about them, and about them not (necessarily) being bad guys. Just not generally being good guys. But anyway, yeah, I liked it. Some things didn't quite ring true. I don't believe the CIA don't have cameras in their lifts. I don't believe that, having seen that Frank had recruited Marvin onto his team, and possibly having seen Victoria at that guy's house, that they wouldn't be on the lookout for people who looked like them as well as for Frank at that function at the end. But whatever. It was fun. I like how they all just mostly went around judging the young new dudes they were fighting against, and how the records guy said they didn't make agents like Frank Moses anymore, while pointedly looking at Cooper.
  
  I quite liked the relationship Frank had with Sarah at the beginning, and how he kind of had to kidnap her. But again, if she was that upset about having duct tape on, she could clearly have taken it off while she had her hands tied in front of her in the car. I liked how she got to join in with the mission even though she didn't really have any skills, but then she got kidnapped and she became kind of a plot point at the end, so I wasn't really all that into their relationship by the end. Frankly, I was a lot more convinced that Frank was in love with Joe, or with any of his team, or that he might have fallen in love with Cooper by the end of the film. I really liked Cooper. I like that he was working against them, but didn't necessarily have to be a bad guy. I liked that scene they had of Frank going into his office basically for no other reason than to beat him up, or maybe test out how good he was. I liked how Frank trained the guy who trained Cooper, so that probably did make him kind of Frank's grandad, and it wasn't until Cooper called him 'grampa' again at the end that I realised maybe that's what they were going for. I liked how Cooper had to get kind of awesome, jumping over cars and stuff, to try to beat Frank and everyone. And he still couldn't really do it. I quite slashed Frank and Cooper, obviously, but then that scene at the end kind of put a funny twist on their relationship, and how I thought Cooper would be feeling about Frank by the end, so I'm kind of not bothered again now. But it was a good film. I really enjoyed it, at any rate.



• Other things probably, but I have to go and watch Casualty now.