I enjoyed the finale of Heroes very much, but there were a couple of bits in the final scene that didn’t sit quite right with me. (Well, the climactic scene, I mean. Not the actual final one.) They were almost right, but I’m amending them in my head to be better.
*** Spoilers below ***
Here’s the thing about Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies: they never let me down. Yes, there are always a few pieces I would have done differently if it were up to me. (HA! Yeah, easy to say.) Yes, they pick, choose, and rearrange bits of the mythos, and they leave out some important character pieces (like Spidey being funny). However, I think it would be a huge mistake to try to be stickler-faithful to the comics, and the translations that these movies do are full of great choices.
Mainly, what they do is choose excellent actors, give the characters emotional depth, and allow them to move through arcs that aren’t just about who punches the hardest, but who can summon the most inner strength, and what it costs to do so. By focusing on emotion, they faithfully render the spirit of the best Spider-Man comics. I hoped that Spider-Man 3 would continue this trend. It didn’t let me down.
*** From here, it gets spoilery. ***
Loved it loved it LOVED IT! That one joins the Hall Of Fame. It ended too soon.
The soundtrack is now on my Amazon wish list.
I have never been much of a fan of Nicolas Cage, nor of Ghost Rider. The former always struck me as immensely overrated — capable of only a tiny range of emotions, generally unappealing in what he could convey, and ridiculous even when he means to be serious. As for the Ghost Rider, he’s from that period in the 1970s when Marvel was cranking out superheroes who started not as character concepts but rather as attempts to cash in on the popular trends of the day. I can almost hear the pitches for these guys. “Let’s have a kung fu superhero!” (Iron Fist.) “How about a blaxploitation superhero, like Shaft but with superpowers?” (Luke Cage, Power Man, from whom Nicolas took his last name.) “Hey, maybe a superhero who’s powered by disco music! She could roller-skate around and her superpower could be creating a big light show!” (The Disco Dazzler, and no I’m not kidding.) Then there’s Ghost Rider: “We should have an occult-type superhero who rides a badass motorcycle! His alter ego could do big jumps like Evel Knievel!”
So a Ghost Rider movie with Nicolas Cage in the title role was not exactly calculated to please me, but I went ahead and bought a ticket anyway, because I’m interested in superhero movies. Also, while I don’t care for Cage, I like several of the other principals — Peter Fonda, Wes Bentley, Sam Elliott — and I’ve got nothing against Eva Mendes. Besides, sometimes the low expectation theory works out really well. However, that was not the case with Ghost Rider. People, this movie was so dumb. It was so, so, so, so dumb.
It could be fun to underline all the reasons why I felt this way, but who has that kind of time? Instead, let me just give you a few of my favorites:
What was good? Well, one thing Ghost Rider has going for him is a cool character design, and the movie does a creditable job of bringing this design to the screen. Peter Fonda is brilliantly cast as the devil, bringing both cycle-movie cred and genuine acting ability to his scenery-chewing role. Wes Bentley also does a fine job in his role — I always thought he had the perfect look for a really creepy villain. Finally, there are a number of funny moments, some of them even intentional.
Overall, though, man what a stinker. All the pieces clicked into place when I saw that the film was both written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson, the guy who inflicted the Daredevil movie on us. Please, somebody stop this guy before he directs another Marvel film!
I went to see Bob Seger in concert last week. This came as something of a surprise to a few of my friends, who don’t share my appreciation for Bob. Apparently, Seger has become uncool. I’ve been listening to his music and enjoying it for over 20 years, and it never occurred to me to question why, but after that conversation, I started thinking about it. Of course, there are lots of reasons why somebody likes a particular flavor of music, and many of them are hard to define, but for me, a big factor is always the songwriting. So I want to go to bat for Bob Seger as a songwriter.
This season of Angel is all over the road, veering from the very very dark into the very very kooky, sometimes quite abruptly. It’s also pretty inconsistent in terms of structure, starting with a long arc and ending with a short one, and stringing a few individual pearls between the two. Still, I found a lot to enjoy at both ends of the spectrum.
1) The Host, and the whole karaoke bar concept. Last time around I complained that the whole “visions-from-the-Powers-That-Be” thing was a little too much naked plot machinery for my tastes. Now, not only do we still have those, we also have this daffy device. Still, as exposition factories go, this is a very entertaining one. The idea that people must sing in order to advance the plot allows us to gain some surprising depth on villains (Darla’s rendition of “Ill Wind”, and Lindsey’s guitar playing) as well as some very funny moments of tunelessness. Angel’s “I’m very sorry” after singing Wang Chung is great, and Harmony’s awful butchering of “The Way We Were” brought back memories of some of the hapless talent show auditions I’ve witnessed, though those were usually to Andrew Lloyd Webber rather than Streisand. Having those music cues is always entertaining at the very least, and often enlightening. Also, Andy Hallett is terrific. I was suspicious for a while that Lorne was somehow an agent of darkness, or being used by them, but after a few bum steers he redeemed himself, and his role in the final arc made him a full fledged member of the cast, as far as I’m concerned.
2) Besides the visions and the Karaoke, there are two other plot drivers: Angel’s past and Wolfram & Hart’s machinations. Sometimes the former can seem a little too convenient, as in Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been?. Overall, that episode did a good job of moving smoothly, combining plot points with twilight zone story, but I wouldn’t want the show to pull the “Angel had a big important past here” card very often — it feels a little heavy handed. On the other hand, I quite enjoyed seeing more of Wolfram & Hart — I like to see villains undercutting each other even as they try to foil the heroes.
3) Darla. Now I understand that Darla’s power is not about what she can do as a vampire, but rather all about her relationship to Angel. She’s one big Oedipal tangle — the mother whom he both slept with and killed. Not only that, she’s his ex. Who doesn’t dread having an ex come back to make life hell?
4) There seems to be some blurriness about how much an accepted part of the world the demons are. Gunn says, “How’d I live in L.A. all my life and not notice weird-ass stuff was going on?” I say: yeah, what’s up with that? The way Angel is playing it right now reminds me a bit of things like Howard The Duck and Get Fuzzy, where animals can talk and nobody really seems to find it that remarkable. This plays more weakly than in Buffy, where most of the evil is underground enough that it can pass for normal, at least to a person with a reasonable amount of denial.
5) The direct superhero homages are toned down, but much of the season’s main story arc seems to me to be an examination of “grim-n-gritty”.
Another aside for the non-comic-book-geeks out there: In 1986, Frank Miller wrote a series called The Dark Knight Returns, which featured an aged Batman in a dystopian future where crime runs rampant under the complicit eye of the Establishment and the press. This Batman is brutal and relentless, the polar opposite of the campy Adam West portrayal. The series makes explicit some of the more fascistic undertones of superhero fiction, and helps return Batman to his roots as a dark and morally ambiguous night warrior. It became wildly popular, and Marvel soon imitated its style with dark quasi-heroes like Wolverine and The Punisher. The phenomenon became known as “grim-n-gritty”, an era (lasting from the mid 80s to the early 90s) where hordes of superheroes became (to plagiarize from myself) clench-jawed desperadoes struggling against a poisoned culture by any means necessary.
Angel’s plunge into darkness during the Darla arc takes a pretty blatant cue from the grim-n-gritty era, and I felt like part of the work it was doing was holding the assumptions of that era up to scrutiny. In the end, the series rejects this approach to heroism, and puts its message into the mouth of The Host: “Blood vengeance is a luxury of the lesser beings.” Happy Anniversary in particular is a great juxtaposition of a grim-n-gritty hero in a comical world.
Other superhero references: Bethany in Untouched is a mix of Jean Grey from the X-Men and a riff on Stephen King’s Carrie(ish), with incestuous abuse standing in for high school bullying. The faux T’ish Magev in Guise Will Be Guise reminded me of Stick from Daredevil, especially the movie version of same (which I realize came later). The voice-over-scenes-of-guy-working-out-feverishly scenes in Redefinition hearkened back to so many superhero origin stories that they felt like a total cliché stuck in there.
6) Angel and Buffy have switched places by the end of the season — Angel gets the wacky and Buffy turns dead serious. (Uh, no pun intended.)
7) Angel often finds himself in a situation where something crucial is going on just a few feet away, but he can’t intervene, either because the event is in sunlight or because it’s beyond a threshold where he hasn’t been invited. In fact, he finds himself in such a position often enough that I began to think that he really should get in the habit of carrying some projectile weapon around. A gun, a bow, or even a well-aimed slingshot in hand would solve a number of the problems he encounters. Well, okay, maybe not a bow. The fishing rod in Guise Will Be Guise was pretty clever.
8) My goodness but that Julia Lee is pretty. She reminds me of the way Renee Zellweger looked in Jerry Maguire, before Renee’s face weirdly metamorphosed. What’s even better, and I didn’t even realize it until I looked Julia up on IMDb, is that her Anne is the character from Anne (season 3 of Buffy), and Lie To Me before that. She’s Anne because Buffy gifted her that identity. What a cool bit of cross-continuity. Also, while still on the topic of pretty: Amy Acker.
9) So transitioning between the Darla arc and the final Pylea arc, there are a bunch of standalone-ish episodes, and similar to last time, I’m drawn to episode-specific commentary for them.
10) At Epiphany, the show takes an abrupt left turn into the wacky. I don’t mind this — I like the wacky, and it doesn’t hurt that it kicks off with the best wacky episode of the season, Disharmony. This was just an all around great episode. I loved so many things about it — the dialogue, the friendship theme with Cordelia, the idea of a vampire self-help group. Mercedes McNab herself gives her best Harmony performance ever, easily. Loved it. Mind you, there were a few glitches (what was up with the scene where it was raining on everything but the cast?), but still, I loved it.
Favorite Moments:
Least Favorite Moments:
Favorite Episode:
Another season of slayage is through, and the subplots have finally come to eclipse the main plot. This year’s Big Bad was bigger and, well, worse. On the other hand, several of the smaller stories that wove through this season were riveting, and resulted in some of the best scenes and episodes ever.
1) There are, of course, lots of different themes running through any given season of Buffy, but if I had to pick one for this season, it would be family. Buffy lives in a family context this season more than she ever has, even going back to the high school years. College scenes are conspicuous by their absence, and several of them have to do with things like Buffy moving out or Buffy dropping her classes. She’s closer than ever to Joyce throughout, which of course serves to make Joyce’s death even more of a loss for her.
Alongside that, the addition of Dawn, and of Buffy’s shifting feelings about her, allows the show to explore some really fruitful territory, opening up the question of what exactly constitutes family, and how we can choose to create family even without genetic connections. The episode that’s most overt about this is, unsurprisingly, Family. I’m always interested in stories about families of choice colliding with genetic families, so this episode really resonated with me. I loved seeing that the gang completely embraces, accepts, and loves Tara, even when they don’t fully understand her. That’s what family ought to do.
Meanwhile, Spike finds himself on the other side of the coin — the gang rejects him without fully understanding him. They understand enough, of course, that their rejection is completely justified. It’s not until Buffy’s kiss in The Intervention that Spike is officially inducted into the Scooby gang, whose bonds to each other continue to deepen — Anya and Xander, Willow and Tara, Buffy and Giles. Her affirmation of Giles in Buffy vs. Dracula and his injury in Spiral highlighted their connection particularly well. All this closeness underscores Riley’s outsider status, especially during Joyce’s illness. When he exits the show, it’s to return to his real family: the military.
2) Dawn. Injecting Dawn seemed like a real Poochie moment, and I was really worried that the show had just jumped the shark (if I may speak in nothing but Internet TV lingo for a moment). Most irritating was the fact that she seemed to be the Buffy equivalent of Cable.
A word of explanation here for non-comic-book-geeks. My favorite comic growing up was called The New Mutants. This team, as you might guess from the name, was a sort of junior X-Men squad, adolescent mutants who were attending Xavier’s school to learn how to handle their powers. They weren’t meant to fight crime, but managed to get into plenty of scraps through wrongheadedness and bad luck. The first 54 issues were written by Chris Claremont, who basically created the modern X-Men that Marvel has been milking for the last 20-some years. It was a great comic during his run, especially for the period when Bill Sienkiewicz was doing the art.
Anyway, after Claremont left, the book took a serious nosedive, and reached its nadir with the introduction of Cable. Cable was the creation of Rob Liefeld, the artist who joined the book at issue #86. The most annoying thing about Cable (and this is a highly competitive category) was the way he was introduced. Everybody suddenly seemed to know this guy. He was a brand new character, but people like Wolverine were giving him a familiar nod and casually referencing history with him going back years and years. My reaction to this was (and is): WHAT??? I call foul when a story suddenly pretends that somebody who’s brand new to the readers has been around forever. It makes me feel like the story hasn’t been playing fair with me from the beginning, and that it’s pointless to pay attention, since major events are being concealed for no good reason.
The parallel with Dawn is clear, I hope. Once it was revealed that in fact the whole thing was a big mindfuck, I felt a little better, but I’m still not sure the show came out better for having added this character. I guess as the Scoobies get stronger, Buffy needs somebody else to protect and somebody else to make her vulnerable. Even more so once Joyce is gone. Still, Dawn seems like kind of a one-note character at this point, which is especially bad when the note is “clumsy, annoying, stupid, and vulnerable”. Then again, I thought Cordelia was a one-noter for a good long while too. I’ll give it time, I guess.
Also, I feel that not enough time is spent on the fact that this is an absolutely horrific thing to do to a person’s life and mind — the lives and minds of many people, really. I would expect somebody to feel really violated and to have some emotions about that. They certainly made a point of this in Superstar, so why not in a situation where the whole season is like one big non-comedic version of Superstar? Well, I guess Dawn herself does have a major meltdown when she finds out (quite understandable), but what about everybody else whose lives and memories have been altered?
3) The Harmony subplot is very funny, and the payoff in Angel is great.
4) Riley. Parts of Shadow are very telling in the way Buffy handles Riley. She doesn’t call him for support. She gestures for him to stay seated as she gets the news from the doctor. She waves away his sensible concern about doing a spell to save Joyce. It’s as if she groups him with Dawn in her mind in the “things I have to protect and who are occasional obstacles for me” category, which is reinforced by the fact that she keeps putting them together. Now, this attitude on her part is certainly understandable, but does not a balanced relationship make. How can a partnership survive when one partner believes she has 100% of the competence and 100% of the responsibility?
I was highly annoyed at Riley’s flirtation with the dark side the first time I watched this episode, but on seeing it again, I’m more sympathetic. It’s still intensely stupid, but I’m more sympathetic, especially when it comes on the heels of the conversation in Family where he can clearly see that she’s withholding information from him. This storyline brings up an interesting question: what does it mean for the Slayer to have a relationship with a “normal”? Or, in more general terms, is it even possible for a superhero to have a healthy, functional relationship with a non-superhero?
Spike makes the point in Fool For Love that Buffy has only lasted as long as she has because of her ties to the world: “your mum, your brat kid sister, the Scoobies.” Riley is noticeably missing from that list (or at the very least, he’s lumped into the Scoobies, which is telling in itself.) Of course, the source is completely biased, but I think Spike is correct that Riley isn’t really one of Buffy’s ties to the world, at least not in a capacity separate from the rest of her friends. He’s not family, and he’s not really a friend. He’s supposed to be her partner, but how could he be such a thing? How could any non-supernatural entity really be Buffy’s equal?
Riley asks himself this very question in Out Of My Mind, and Buffy strenuously objects. In a way, they’re both wrong. Riley is certainly being irrational in wanting to hold onto his superhuman power even as it’s about to kill him. Even if he wasn’t in danger from it, getting into a competition with Buffy is a terrible idea — whether he wins or loses, he loses. However, Buffy is wrong too. “Do you think that I spent the last year with you because you had super powers?” she asks, and the answer is: that’s not the point. As Riley becomes more normal, Buffy distances herself from him. No, she doesn’t leave the relationship, but she leaves the partnership, becoming more protector than partner.
So is it possible for Super and Normal to live happily ever after? I think it might be, but two conditions need to be met. First, Normal must be very secure indeed, and leave ego out of the relationship. Competition is poison, jealousy is poison, and neediness is poison. An entirely separate line of work is probably a good idea. This, clearly, is not Riley. He’s young, insecure, and accustomed to being in charge. Also, demon-fighting is all he knows and apparently all he wants to do. It’s not like we see him pursuing his graduate degree in psychiatry or anything. How could he possibly tolerate being Buffy’s “save the world sidekick”?
The second condition is that both partners, but especially Super, must clearly understand and acknowledge the different but equally important roles that both people play within and outside the relationship. Even though there will always be a huge discrepancy in physical power, the two can meet as equals if Normal has value in the world and isn’t treated as a liability or a nuisance by Super. Super has to allow Normal the space to be important, to be competent, and to be supportive. This, clearly, is not Buffy. As Xander quite rightly points out, she treats Riley as a convenience, and when she needs support, he is an afterthought.
Ah, I see we’re about out of time. Five cents, please.
5) I really appreciate that Tara is kind of odd-looking. Sometimes this show seems a little too full of beautiful people.
6) The Body. My god, what a masterpiece. Everything about it was unbelievably good, including its placement in the season. I had a bad premonition when Buffy told Joyce the truth about Dawn in Listening To Fear, but was lulled when she seemed to pull through okay, which made The Body all the more devastating. Not to mention that the character had been in place from the beginning — the beauty of continuity at work again. Watching the episode, I felt like I had lost someone I knew, and that people I loved were grieving. The entire episode was just brilliant. I suppose I’d have to go back and watch When She Was Bad and Hush again to be sure, but I think this is the best episode of Buffy I’ve ever seen. (It seems that all my favorite episodes are written and directed by Whedon. Fancy that.)
I agree with kansasjenny that Anya’s confusion is piercing, but I think the part that got to me most was Willow’s panic about what to wear. It just perfectly captured that helpless feeling when a friend is going through a major trauma. No wait, it’s the horribly cruel but utterly perfect fantasy sequence with the paramedics. Or maybe Buffy’s exchange with the 911 dispatcher: “The body is cold?” “No, my mom!” But what about Tara saying, “It’s always sudden.”? Or the fact that Joyce is killed by nothing supernatural, and nothing Buffy can fight? I can’t choose what moved me the most.
7) Glory. I dunno, I was just pretty underwhelmed by her. The “wicked nasty in an unassuming guise” bit was done earlier and better with the Mayor, and in fact much of the Big Bad arc this season seemed a lot like a retread of season three, with the volume turned up. Season three had a wonderful sense of building menace as the Ascension neared, and I think the same thing was supposed to be happening here, but there was a Keystone Kops quality to the way Glory seemed so totally unable to identify the Key, only stumbling upon it through pure blind luck rather than deductive prowess in the end.
In addition, the whole process seems rather fragile — dependent on a particular time, a particular ritual, etc. Maybe that’s not so different from season three, but I spent that season feeling certain that the Mayor would succeed, and this season I spent incredulous that Glory could even come close to succeeding. For all her godly power, she seems to spend the vast majority of the season screwing up and relying on comically bumbling minions. Where the Mayor was efficient, cunning, and crazy, Glory seems to be just crazy. Consequently, her plot thread repeatedly felt like a mere distraction from the other stories unfolding.
On the plus side, I did enjoy the running gag of all the various appellations Glory’s minions gave her. I also appreciated seeing Buffy so totally outmatched physically, forced into a situation where she couldn’t just beat up the enemy. (Though in a way I suppose that’s what she ended up doing after all.) I thought The Gift had a very interactive fiction-ish quality — inventory items and NPCs were cunningly leveraged to solve a variety of endgame puzzles, and Buffy’s final action would work perfectly as the climactic move of an adventure game.
Okay, let’s talk about that ending for a minute. Once again, I find I lack the expected emotion due to the fact that I’m watching these on DVD. Similar to when Angel kicked it in season two, I just can’t get too invested in the idea of Buffy’s death, knowing that there are two more seasons of the show left to go. Also, I just didn’t think the story made a compelling case for her to do this. Dawn offers to sacrifice herself, but why does Buffy’s offer outrank Dawn’s? They’re both innocents, and Buffy is crucially important to the world, as we saw way back in The Wish from season three. I was totally unmoved by Buffy’s final speech, and felt annoyed that she’d been killed off for such flimsy reasoning. Not too annoyed, though, since I know she comes back.
All that being said, I’m sure if I had actually seen this show air as the season finale, I would have been FREAKING OUT.
8) I thought that Giles getting skewered by the spear in Spiral was eerily reminiscent of Wash’s death in Serenity. I suppose I’m in the minority in having seen Serenity before I watched season five of Buffy. Was anybody else reminded of this moment while watching the movie?
9) The Weight Of The World — I’m a sucker for stories that literalize the mental landscape (going back to New Mutants 26-28, and probably before), especially when there’s a telepathic healer involved, so I loved that entire section of this episode. In general, I really dug the way Willow took charge of everything once Buffy and Giles were incapacitated. I also thought the set for Buffy’s mindscape was really well done — familiar and strange at once.
Favorite moments:
Least favorite moments:
Favorite episodes:
Least favorite episode:
Angel comments will follow just as soon as I can get them written up.
Phrases found in three music reviews, all of which appeared on one page in the recent Onion:
two-year delay
self-proclaimed “white midget”
anti-stereotyping inveigling
girl-fight classic
a rival who layers on liquid-tan
Specials-style ska-pop
PlayStation-fueled beat-smithery
drop-the-bomb bass
love-it-or-hate-it affair
harp-laced fairy-folk
55-minute, five-cut album
stream-of-consciousness mood
Van Dyke Parks-supervised orchestral arrangements
belting, whispering, and soul-baring
too-difficult-for-radio wash of sound
radio-friendly past
That’s leaving out standard designations like “hip-hop”, “nu-metal”, and “B-sides”.
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