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Jun. 7th, 2015 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Watching the Tony's, which are boring me. Come back, Neil Patrick Harris, come back!
Also, Fun Home reminds me a lot of Next to Normal, while American in Paris reminds me of Singing in the Rain and On the Town. Something Rotten seems sort of different...But nothing is really grabbing me. Which is a good thing -- since I can't afford to go to the plays being honored at the Tony's.
2. They are adapting Neil Gaiman's Sandman for film. Joseph Gordon-Levit is doing it. Gaiman's one requirement was that there is no punching. Sandman does not punch people.
3. Five things that did not work in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or made you scratch your head or fanwank the hell out of them. This occurred to me over the weekend...via circumstances that are better left unsaid.
* The Buffy Cookie Dough Speech. This is the speech in the beginning of Chosen that the writer inserted to, as he explained in the commentary, to justify the heroine's jump from one vampire lover to another. Except that's not the speech. The speech is - how Buffy can't commit to a meaningful relationship with a vampire, cursed with a soul, who heads an evil law firm, and has just brought her a mystical amulet from the law firm, because...she's unbaked cookie dough and unready for a deep relationship with anyone. And you know, maybe one day, she'll be mature enough to commit to a guy who can lose his soul at any moment and slaughter all her friends or will manipulate them to his own ends, without necessarily losing his soul.
* The Scythe -- this is the mystical weapon that Buffy is told to hunt down in the last five episodes and drops into the story out of the blue. It is in a rock. And only the slayer, the chosen one, can remove it from the rock a la King Arthur. The weapon is an ax and a stake - sort of double duty vampire killing - because a stake just isn't that useful against the old deformed vamps. The only ones who can explain the Scythe are The Guardians...who appear out of nowhere in a tomb in the Cemetery. Which apparently is so huge that Buffy never bumped into them until now. But now that she has, coincidentally so does the villain, Spike and Angel. As if suddenly there's a huge target over it.
* Apparently there's an ancient box revealing the orgins of the Slayer - which only Nikki Wood's Watcher had, and was passed down to her son, Robin. Not any of the new slayers or their watchers. And the legend isn't known by anyone but Nikki's Watcher and the magical box.
*The Demon Eggs in AYW: Spike, who is unable to remove his chip or fend for himself and is constantly making deals with Buffy and her gang for money, not to mention helping them, and now in debt to a land shark, out of the blue is a major arms dealer -- called the Doctor. And is hiding nasty monster eggs in his crypt, even though Buffy and all her friends visit him all the time and without knocking. Somehow they never notice the eggs. Or that he is the Doctor. Yet, Riley and his wife manage to track the monsters to Spike's lair within 24 hours of their arrival in Sunnydale.
* The AR Scene in Seeing Red: 1)Buffy's mysterious back injury in Seeing Red - after fighting off Hyena!Xander, being staked by a vamp, fighting Spike when he wanted to kill her and getting the better of him, fighting and beating Angelus, fighting Glory, and not to mention falling from various heights - Buffy injures her back when she falls against a headstone. As if she'd never had this happen before? Keep in mind this woman was thrust up against the wall of a building that fell around her, while having sex.
2) Spike enters Buffy's bathroom. Not her bedroom. Or any other place, but the "bathroom" which to date we've never seen. 3) Buffy is depicted as weak and not super-strong in most of the scene, then suddenly is...
And if that one didn't work for you...
* In S7 Spike is tortured with drowning, can't see in the dark, and has a reflection. While Angel is doing quite well six feet under, can see in the dark, and doesn't have reflection. Did Spike become somewhat human when he got his soul?
[Since this is being pimped, I'm going to shamelessly tout my book "Doing Time on Planet Earth", it's a work of fiction - which you can go buy HERE.]
Also, Fun Home reminds me a lot of Next to Normal, while American in Paris reminds me of Singing in the Rain and On the Town. Something Rotten seems sort of different...But nothing is really grabbing me. Which is a good thing -- since I can't afford to go to the plays being honored at the Tony's.
2. They are adapting Neil Gaiman's Sandman for film. Joseph Gordon-Levit is doing it. Gaiman's one requirement was that there is no punching. Sandman does not punch people.
3. Five things that did not work in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or made you scratch your head or fanwank the hell out of them. This occurred to me over the weekend...via circumstances that are better left unsaid.
* The Buffy Cookie Dough Speech. This is the speech in the beginning of Chosen that the writer inserted to, as he explained in the commentary, to justify the heroine's jump from one vampire lover to another. Except that's not the speech. The speech is - how Buffy can't commit to a meaningful relationship with a vampire, cursed with a soul, who heads an evil law firm, and has just brought her a mystical amulet from the law firm, because...she's unbaked cookie dough and unready for a deep relationship with anyone. And you know, maybe one day, she'll be mature enough to commit to a guy who can lose his soul at any moment and slaughter all her friends or will manipulate them to his own ends, without necessarily losing his soul.
* The Scythe -- this is the mystical weapon that Buffy is told to hunt down in the last five episodes and drops into the story out of the blue. It is in a rock. And only the slayer, the chosen one, can remove it from the rock a la King Arthur. The weapon is an ax and a stake - sort of double duty vampire killing - because a stake just isn't that useful against the old deformed vamps. The only ones who can explain the Scythe are The Guardians...who appear out of nowhere in a tomb in the Cemetery. Which apparently is so huge that Buffy never bumped into them until now. But now that she has, coincidentally so does the villain, Spike and Angel. As if suddenly there's a huge target over it.
* Apparently there's an ancient box revealing the orgins of the Slayer - which only Nikki Wood's Watcher had, and was passed down to her son, Robin. Not any of the new slayers or their watchers. And the legend isn't known by anyone but Nikki's Watcher and the magical box.
*The Demon Eggs in AYW: Spike, who is unable to remove his chip or fend for himself and is constantly making deals with Buffy and her gang for money, not to mention helping them, and now in debt to a land shark, out of the blue is a major arms dealer -- called the Doctor. And is hiding nasty monster eggs in his crypt, even though Buffy and all her friends visit him all the time and without knocking. Somehow they never notice the eggs. Or that he is the Doctor. Yet, Riley and his wife manage to track the monsters to Spike's lair within 24 hours of their arrival in Sunnydale.
* The AR Scene in Seeing Red: 1)Buffy's mysterious back injury in Seeing Red - after fighting off Hyena!Xander, being staked by a vamp, fighting Spike when he wanted to kill her and getting the better of him, fighting and beating Angelus, fighting Glory, and not to mention falling from various heights - Buffy injures her back when she falls against a headstone. As if she'd never had this happen before? Keep in mind this woman was thrust up against the wall of a building that fell around her, while having sex.
2) Spike enters Buffy's bathroom. Not her bedroom. Or any other place, but the "bathroom" which to date we've never seen. 3) Buffy is depicted as weak and not super-strong in most of the scene, then suddenly is...
And if that one didn't work for you...
* In S7 Spike is tortured with drowning, can't see in the dark, and has a reflection. While Angel is doing quite well six feet under, can see in the dark, and doesn't have reflection. Did Spike become somewhat human when he got his soul?
[Since this is being pimped, I'm going to shamelessly tout my book "Doing Time on Planet Earth", it's a work of fiction - which you can go buy HERE.]
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Date: 2015-06-12 05:56 pm (UTC)Gabrielle
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Date: 2015-06-12 05:58 pm (UTC)I keep forgetting it was that episode! (Love your icon, btw. *lol*)
That moment is gold, the rest please just toss out the trash. It feels like a Season 1 ep that got postponed to season 2 because I literally keep forgetting it's an S2 ep.
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Date: 2015-06-12 06:05 pm (UTC)Gabrielle
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Date: 2015-06-12 06:30 pm (UTC)But I agree with you 100% on the difference re: annoying/boring vs truly terrible/hateful and AYW is a vast sucking hole of hatefulness. Watching it I had the impression that the writers were just having FUN humiliating Buffy, so it was like reading a fanfic where the author is consistently bashing a character. NOT FUN. (I came across yet ANOTHER S6 Spuffy "fix it fic" that bashes Willow and I stopped reading.)
Maybe that's part of the point of AYW, that the show writers were writing a parody of fan fiction. I suspect the comics are mostly a parody of fandom. If that is the point, it isn't clear, and why would I want to watch a hateful parody of a hateful practice? Any way you slice AYW, it's all bad.
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Date: 2015-06-12 07:44 pm (UTC)Gabrielle
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Date: 2015-06-12 08:04 pm (UTC)I think......Which is where your nail-on-the-head assessment "inept" comes into play.
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Date: 2015-06-13 09:41 pm (UTC)Whedon is a frustrated film scholar. Most of his work tends to be commentary on others works, similar to Quentin Tarantino, who sort of did the same thing. If you have ever seen Cabin in the Woods - that's perfect example of what I'd call a meta-narrative.
In which the entire film is a commentary on other films, referencing and commenting on those tropes.
Superstar and Storyteller aren't really parodies per se, but commentaries on pop culture tropes or how pop culture reacts to stories. Meta-narrative can be fun -- see Once More With Feeling, where the writer has his characters commenting on the ridiculousness of musicals. I mean come on, we stop the action, just to burst out in song? Is someone watching this? He pokes fun at the trope and the structure of the musical - honoring it and commenting on it at the same time. An example of meta-narrative in a book is - say Terry Prachett's footnotes at the bottom of Good Omens. The author commenting on his own story.
But Superstar and Storyteller in my opinion (this is all subjective after all) were heavy handed about it - and took it a step too far, sacrificing plot and character in the process.
As You Were didn't feel like either a parody or a meta narrative. I'm not quite sure what they were going for there, exactly. Except that it just didn't work for me. And it remains the one episode, outside of Superstar and Storyteller that I find difficult to rewatch. Others, I will rewatch and fast-forward through the crappy stuff (Inca Mummy Girl, Some Assembly Required, the Snake episode, Go Fish, etc.). But those three episodes I find difficult to re-watch at all.