Wonderfalls
(2004)
(2004)
We're bobbing along in our barrel.
Some of us tip right over the edge.
But there's one thing really mystifying
It's got me laughing, now it's got me crying
All my life I'll be death defying
Till I know...
Some of us tip right over the edge.
But there's one thing really mystifying
It's got me laughing, now it's got me crying
All my life I'll be death defying
Till I know...
*I wonder wonder why the wonderfalls
I wonder why the wonder falls on me
I wonder wonder why the wonderfalls
With everything I touch and hear and see.
As soon as you see the first scene of Wonderfalls , you just know it’s a creation from the misunderstood genius that is Brian Füller. Maybe it’s the campiness, or maybe the dialogs full of that subtle, sharp humour that is so Füller, or maybe the characters, one more weird and perky than the other, or maybe it’s the awesome music.
Anyway, when Jaye Tyler, retail clark in a souvenir shop in Woderfalls, a small town situated above the Niagara Falls, stares aghast at the wax lion that opened its mouth and talked to her a second before, you just know that it’s going to be magical. In true Brian Füller fashion, the show was cancelled too soon, after only one season, and we are left wondering about many unresolved questions, like what or who is behind the orders Jaye gets from any inanimate objects with a face? Does destiny really exist or the world is just led on by an endless train of coincidences? Will Jaye screw up again with Eric, the (un)married bartender, whose wife cheated on him on their honeymoon, and who’s head over heals in love with Jaye? What happened to Sharon, Jaye’s lesbian sister, and her girlfriend? And what about Aaron, her brother, and Mahandra, her best friend?
We can’t know about that; what we can do though, is enjoy their crazy adventures in these 13 episodes, laughing our asses off, and wishing we lived in a place as colourful and as interesting, wishing to meet our own personal Eric or Jaye or Aaron or Mahandra.
I loved every minute of Woderfalls, because it’s about things taking a swift you never expected in the first place, it’s about weird people and change and irony and sarcasm and flaws. Also, I have to admit Jaye’s piercing blue eyes played a relevant part in my being sucked into the show because I was totally mesmerized by her adorableness; and, even though I prefer girls, I’d totally marry Eric if he was real and lived in my town, I mean, the guy is such a sweetheart (very similar to Ned the pie-maker in Pushing Daisies . Funny fact: Lee Pace -aka the pie maker- plays Aaron here. I was delighted to see him, his smile is heart-melting.).
Although I enjoyed the show, I also understand because it was cancelled. It’s not one of those easy tv-shows, meaningless and superficial, the majority of Americans likes to watch. It’s very much like Dead Like Me , a funny story with deeper meanings and they make you think and ponder and reflect, something the 80 % of people doesn’t want to do while watching television. I’m not saying all American popular tv-shows are stupid, because, come on, I live of American television, but there’s a reason why once-good-now-trash shows like Gossip Girl, Smallville, One Tree Hill and always-been-trash-but-fun-to-watch Vampire Diaries, True Blood, and 90210 are still around. (Of course there’re always exceptions like Lost or Buffy, which are or were popular and still meaningful.)
Back to Wonderfalls, I think it’s a very unique show, like every other Füller show, after all. It’s fun, and it’s campy and it’s cute and you’ll totally have the time of your life watching Jaye freaking out when random plastic or stuffed animals tell to her to do things, or keep her up at night with their (very bad) singing because she won’t do what they asked her. And you’ll totally watch in awe as the apparently random (and stupid) things Jaye does, in the end fall in their places like a puzzle, having a much bigger effect you would have predicted.
So yeah, awesomeness ensued ;)
Watch it ;)
mpre if Barcelona is one of those cities was able to evoke any kind of story, its timeless beauty and mystery hidden in massive gothic buildings makes it ideal setting of the most grotesque and surreal events, always on the border between reality and legend. Oscar, a young college, loves to get lost in the alleys and abandoned villas, surrounded by magical aura, estranged from reality. Navy enters the scene: the life of Oscar is upset. Like the lightning that announces a storm, the mysterious figure of Marina introduces the boy to one of the deepest secrets of Barcelona, but suddenly things get out of hand. A spiral of events at the edge of the nightmare engulfs the two naive guys: a greenhouse in the darkness enveloped filled with strange puppet incomplete, an album which contains photos of the most grotesque physical deformities, a lady dressed entirely in black who visit a unmarked grave, a cemetery not be found wrapped in fog, and a man whose origins seem lost in myth. It is the early history of the world, that of death and life, leading up to the world's oldest questions: What is death anyway? Can man be remedied? Yet it is always in the Navy, with its evanescent and delicate contours, close but distant impression of a moment, a lifetime of memories, which Marina is in the end everything comes back, inevitably. Read this book in low light, at night, when everyone has a different color, when thoughts are beyond the heavy mesh materialistic world and wander aimlessly in that place between sleep and waking, between dream and reality. Zafon gives us a novel as usual with a capital R, with a style snake charmer and a plot made up of people with their most secret desires and nightmares. But as happens with good books, when the end comes, you do not know whether to be sad because it is over, or happy because you found out how it ends. 
