More of that other drabble

Had some fun this morning watching the featurettes on S6 and S7 DVDS. Must say they are far better than the ones on S1-3. Actually so is the quality of the picture. Nice thing about DVDs, you skip the scenes you aren't fond of, and focus on the ones you are. Watching them reminded me of why I became so obsessed with the show in the later seasons, so intrigued with certain characters and plotlines. The commentaries, however, are a tad grating at times - a little too self-congratulatory for my taste, far too fawning. (Oh as an aside, I never realized that Drew Goddard resembles buffyannatator/Rob. Or vice versa as the case may be. True I've never seen Drew Goddard before, just a few pictures here and there. But on the featurette, where they actually show the writer talking, they look a lot alike, right down to the body language and facial expressions and vocalization. Weird.)

Little more of the Buffy - Spike future fic I was writing or as my friend cjlasky calls it, Buffy as Proust (never read Proust, so will have take his word for it) - "No Regrets". (Where we left off - Buffy had just told Will that yes she did love him before he closed the hellmouth as she believed he loved her and love was messy.)

( drabble... )

DVD Reviews...etc

The rain cleared and it actually became sunny today. Didn't partake of it. Busy doing other things, such as dusting my apartment, watching the DVDs I bought, and writing a little. Wrote a bit more of my own story - got my protagonist unstuck - oddly enough writing those two bits of fanfiction and watching the DVDs unfroze me. Weird that. But whatever works, right?

On the DVD front - West Side Story, The Collector's Edition at $22 at Amazon, was far and away the best buy. The commentary was quite good. Didn't realize that Rita Moreno and Russ Tambolyn were also dubbed by professional singers. I knew Richard Beamer and Natalie Wood were. Also Tamboyln's voice wasn't all that different from the person who dubbed him. Wood's was slightly different than Marni Nixons (who also dubbed Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady). For the curious - Natalie Wood isn't a horrid singer, somewhat off key on the high notes, but Maria's songs in West Side Story are opera singer soprano range, not pop singer range. High sustained arias. Natalie actually sounds exactly like Sara Michelle Geller did in Once More With Feeling. So, depending on how you felt about SMG's singing voice - would pretty much state how you feel about Natalies. (In my opinion - neither can hit high notes without their voices cracking. But Geller gets away with it because in OMWF the characters aren't supposed to be great singers - it's a spell.)At any rate, they do in this commentary what you are supposed to do, which is talk about the process - oh there is a lot of self-congragulatory fawning, but it is toned down.

Compare to the utterly horrendous commentary on Conversations With Dead People, S7 DVD, where the commentators tell you little about the process, almost nothing about direction of scenes, and spend the whole time going on about how great they are and how funny and tremendous some of the actors are. It's embarrassing. I fast-forwarded through a good portion of it, then threw up my hands in disgust. Outside of maybe four lines, the commentary is a wast of time. Chosen's commentary was marginally better. I honestly think the less people you have commenting on these episodes, the better off you are. For good commentary - get Firefly. Yes, there's lots of fawning on that one too, but they do go a bit more in detail on the process. Have yet to see Lessons, LMPTM,
Killer in Me, or Dirty Girls. Did see the season Overview, which was okay.
The Emmy Panel - which was also interesting, but a bit forced in places.
That said? Still happy I bought it. Some of my favorite episodes are in this season. I adore the first nine and unlike most fans enjoyed several of the episodes in the second half of the season. I do sort of wish they'd left Angel out of it, he doesn't seem to quite belong, yet at the same time, is essential to the closure. In Chosen, Whedon delicately and subtlely screws down the lid on that romance as well as the Spike and Buffy one, it's a work of art to see how he does it, allowing all three characters to move on in their own right and be richer, more interesting characters than they would have been if she'd sailed off into the sunset with either vamp. He even states, in his commentary, somewhat wryly, that romance, lovely as it is, was never his mission statement nor what interested him. Tend to agree - romance is so limiting - there's what two options? But when you tell a tale that has aspects of romance but is really about something else, than well you capture in my opinion what romance novelists want to, but can't, the essence of love. He has a nice line in the overview of Season 7, regarding Spike's journey that I rather liked - it's about a man figuring out what it means to be a hero in his own right and stumbling along the way to that discovery. What kills him is the same thing that elevates him - his soul, his desire to care about others, to sacrifice for someone outside himself. Course if you disagree vehementally with all of this, I wouldn't recommend buying the DVD. What's great for me, is not necessarily great for anyone else.