Archive for January, 2009
Saturday, January 31st, 2009
As You Were (Douglas Petrie)
A wise person (somewhere on the Internet) said that there are many ways to watch an episode of BtVS because each person has their own biases towards story elements and characters and different levels of tolerance towards plot deficiencies and contrivances.
Sometimes I care a lot about deficiencies and contrivances and sometimes I don’t care at all. I don’t mind at all that Spike is the Doctor (although making him sound less like Doc might have been a good idea) because after all he is “Deadly. Amoral. Opportunistic.”
And it is cheesy but no more so than a popular (not round this way) episode like “The Zeppo” (ha, my review of that totally demonstrates my lack of tolerance). I like Xander and Willow’s over the top admiration for Nick and Nora Fury – it reminded me of “Ted”.
Whenever I said the name of this episode I would shudder and mutter “Riley and his wife, yuck” which is no surprise since the time I saw Riley my blood was boiling with Marti Noxon induced indignation.
My hat has a cow
I am happy to announce that upon watching this for only the second time I have to admit to appreciating it a lot more and actually finding it incredibly sad. Riley and Sam separately and together make Buffy hyper aware of how sucky her life is. She makes the welcome and healthy decision to end her relationship with Spike and the rest of her season is set up. In addition, any episode that makes Willow a little more lovable than she has been recently can’t be so bad. Her “chipper” moment in the Bronze with Dawn is sweet.
Nice bathroom. Like the glass.
Anya and Xander stuck in the traffic listening to hell radio and stuck in their nice bathroom were funny and sad scenes particularly in light of what is to come.
Posted in Buffy Season 6, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Television | 4 Comments »
Friday, January 30th, 2009
Older and Far Away (Drew Z. Greenberg)
OAFA is way down on most people’s lists of favourite Buffy episodes and is often very high on people’s worst ever episode lists. However, I have recently realised that if you like Tara and Dawn then it’s not so bad.
They didn’t think further than the end of season five for what to do with the character of little sister, Dawn. Their first mistake was to make her behave younger than her screen age and Michelle Trachtenberg’s rapid maturing didn’t help matters. She is just a human now but that still doesn’t take away her mystical beginnings and they really should have developed that. Otherwise she’s a teenager and sometimes that’s not a lot of fun for the audience except when they get to say “shut up, Dawn”. With “get out, get out, get out”, legions of haters were born and this episode lost some potential friends.
Dawn's Exorcist moment
Why else might this episode be bad? There is the introduction of a random new friend (never seen before and never seen again); a genuine red shirt in Richard (some people complain about the cheesiness of that which seems weird to me in such a pop culture rich series); Spike and his friend Clem turn up uninvited; and Buffy guesses about the wish extraordinarily quickly. None of those things bother me in the way that inconsistent characterization, poor taste jokes and a bare-chested Spike do.
Anya is mighty fine because she is absolutely right to criticise Willow while Tara is right to intervene. I remember being rather thrilled when I first saw this scene. Two essentially underused characters are now in the process of getting more interesting screen time.
"Back off"
Kali Rocha is a hoot as the vengeance demon Halfrek: “Most of us try to be a little more well-rounded. And actually, we prefer “justice demon”. Okay? FYI.” I think it’s odd that the vengeance served up included Dawn who after all was the wronged party. On the hand, she did get exactly what she wished for.
Kali Rocha as Halfrek
All in all, I do like this episode except for Tara joking about Spike’s pants. The jokes just fall flat for me and I am disturbed by the fact that pants aren’t trousers but are underpants.
Andy ruined my viewing of one of my favourite scenes in BtVS because he was complaining about Willow’s top which was perfectly fine while he should have concentrating on Buffy’s off the shoulder top.
Awk-ward
Tara and Willow’s awkwardness is so adorable and Tara swigging down Buffy’s drink is perfectly timed. And Richard is cute – cuter than Spike.
Posted in Buffy Season 6, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Television | 4 Comments »
Friday, January 2nd, 2009
I love Christopher Nolan’s Memento and The Prestige was interesting but felt like two films stuck together. It took me two viewings to appreciate Batman Begins – the first time I fell asleep – but second time I thought it was pretty good – certainly better than any of the Batman films of the late 80s/early 90s. I was quite looking forward to seeing The Dark Knight and here are some things I don’t mind about the film:
- I don’t mind Batman’s stupidly deep voice.
- I don’t mind the detour to Hong Kong.
- I don’t mind the contrived and idiotic scenes on the ferries.
- I don’t mind people criticising Katie Holmes’ performance in Batman Begins as if it is bad.
- I don’t mind people pretending Maggie Gyllenhaal’s performance is any better just because she isn’t married to a Scientologist (because that is what it’s about, isn’t it?).
- I don’t mind that Rachel Dawes isn’t as interesting in this because we have Harvey Dent instead as our person/man/knight on the side of good.
- I don’t mind that there is a variation of the “Mind if I borrow your girlfriend?” line used in this film (“Mind if I borrow Rachel?” says Dent to Wayne).
- I don’t mind that Rachel is refrigerated. It’s boring and predictable for a woman to be killed (sometimes a child) in order to motivate heroes and villains but it’s been happening for a long time and we don’t need anything fresh.
- I don’t mind that women are almost completely unimportant in this Gotham. There may have been one with dialogue on one of the ferries. And, of course, we do have Rachel and Detective Ramirez.
Actually, I have just got to the point of this post, women are so completely irrelevant in this film that James Gordon Jr is the focus of the scene between Two-Face and Jim Gordon at the end. However, if you ask anybody who knows the tiniest thing about Batman to name Commissioner Gordon’s children, they will say he has a daughter (maybe a niece) called Barbara Gordon and I bet most of them have no idea there was a son called James Jr.
So, when I say I don’t mind, I mean I do but not as much as I mind that during the climax (okay, one of the climaxes) the daughter of Jim Gordon (who is likely to be the future Batgirl) is barely considered as one of Gordon’s choices (in fact, her face is hardly even seen). Sorry dear but Jr is so much more important.
[Heath Ledger is good though.]
Posted in Female thinking, Films | 1 Comment »
Thursday, January 1st, 2009
Top artists
Top tracks
Top albums
Posted in Music | 2 Comments »
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