I didn’t watch a single movie this week. Nor did I write up a God of the Week, only a couple of weeks after starting the feature.
Arthur and I are deeply, deeply committed to So You Think You Can Dance. That’s three hours of TV a week, so that definitely cuts into the movie-watching. I love the show. I love the beauty and excitement of the dance, and I love that it’s committed to dance as an art form. It doesn’t “tart up” the dancing too much to make it crowd-pleasing. I mean, sure it does. But the producers and judges also pay attention to the technical and artistic integrity of dance; this ain’t no Dancing with the Stars. And I find that I care about it; about the people and about the pure artistry. We talk about it all week long.
We’re also catching up on our Angel DVDs. I bought all five seasons. Many of the shows we’ve seen only once, so this is a real pleasure. Except when it isn’t. Some episodes really don’t hold up. I’ve watched the 14 episodes of Firefly four or five times straight through, and none of them get tired, but the whole Pylea excursion in Season 2 is mostly only fun once. Don’t get me wrong, there’s great stuff here, but rewatching it is educational.
Speaking of the Whedonverse, I am probably the only Whedon fan who is unimpressed with Dr. Horrible. Neal Patrick Harris is awesome, but it’s a whole lot of mildly amusing for me.
re Dr. Horrible… My initial reaction was kind of “eh – it’s okay” as well. I can’t say I’d ever given much thought to NPH before -I’d never seen him in anything outside of a small role in Starship Troopers – and he is pretty incredible in Dr. Horrible.
But then I readjusted my sights – when you say “it’s a whole lot of mildly amusing” I think you’ve found exactly what it’s supposed to be. It’s not earth-shattering, it’s not a pilot for a new series, it’s not a Big Damn Movie… it’s “Mickey and Judy put on a show in the (digital) barn”. And the ending was pure Joss….. damn him. I’ve watched it several times over the weekend (I went ahead and bought it from ITunes) and while it’s no Once More With Feeling I realized that a one-shot one hour (with commercials) TV movie could never be what we want from Joss. So taking it for what it was I think it was quite successful. It introduced several stock characters, Jossified them, gave them some cute dialog and cuter songs, gave Nathan Fillion a line that only he could deliver, and hit us with an ending that, while I should have expected it from him, still shocked me.
And I have to admit that I am already planning on buying the DVD because…. a musical commentary track? How can I not?
No, Deborah – you are not the only one. The first act took too long to get going, the second act was much better but the third act’s turn into tragedy really ticked me off. The songs were wonderful as were the performances by all three principals but I thought the storyline was weak.
I ended up thinking of it more as a Joss-doodle (“I doodle. You do doodle, too.”) than anything major. Maybe that’s why the ending annoyed me this time. He’s doing it almost as a reflex now, or because it’s expected of him. Yeats defined sentimentality as “the will doing the work of the imagination,” and negative sentimentality is still sentimentality.
Still some fun stuff. Joss still does the best off-hand banter, Filion seems to be enjoying himself preening, and Felicia Day is lovely.
Melville, I think a “Joss-doodle” is a perfect description.
Joss did a Q&A with the Washington Post Online today and somebody addressed the question of the ending….
Richmond, Virginia: Joss,
The device of killing lovable protagonists has long been a hallmark of your work (work that I cherish, I hasten to add). Lately, it seems to happen in almost every story you tell. Do you worry about something as big as a character death taking on a by-the-numbers feel? I know the idea in your work is always to subvert the expected, but what happens when sudden, brutal death becomes predictable?
Joss Whedon: Boy, you kill someone, everyone makes a fuss! Yet I still feel differently about this than what I’ve done before. It’s a tragedy, classically structured. Usually death is meaningless and arbitrary in my work, to reflect life, but this is the old brew. And yes, I have issues. This will come up again, I’m sure.
(I sort of thought I needed to follow this up with zombie horror pic that had a romantic comedy ending — then I remembered Shaun of the Dead already did that. Perfectly.)
Of course, Joss is right (Joss is always right, that’s what makes him so annoying. That, and that he writes better than me). But why stick a classically tragic ending (which I can see) onto a doodle? It can’t sustain it.
Or maybe I’m just still mad at him for killing Tara. 🙁
I’m mad at him for killing a lot of people. But tell me this…. Did you see it coming? Even knowing Joss, did you anticipate the ending of Dr. Horrible? And if he had gone for the happy ending we expected, what would your (my, Deb’s, anyone else’s) reaction have been? I know mine would have been “Oh, it was a nice piece of fluff, but it didn’t [i]mean[/i] anything”…. but now I’m just as shocked as I was when the ending of Serenity rolled around. Damn you, Joss Whedon!
Oy.
I watched Ep. 1 and half of Ep. 2. I didn’t tell y’all that because I didn’t anticipate that there was a big tragic ending I’d have to be protected from knowing in advance.
Oy – and I assumed, since you posted on it, that you had watched the whole thing. Well, it’s still going to be worth watching the DVD for the “musical commentary track”…. apparently they’ve written a whole commentary track to be sung by the cast and crew.
Did you see it coming?
I didn’t see it coming, but I wasn’t shocked, either. Like I said, the whole thing isn’t consequential enough to support a tragedy. It is a piece of fluff, and I liked it as a piece of fluff. The result being that I wasn’t shocked, just, as I said, annoyed.
That’s fair enough criticism. I guess “shocked” is a little strong – I was surprised, and I felt much the way I felt a number of times while watching Buffy and Angel, when he would suddenly veer off from humor to tragedy. The difference being that in those shows one became invested in the characters, and Dr. Horrible wasn’t designed to get you involved.
I didn’t see it coming, but upon a second (and third and fourth) viewing, it was all in the lyrics. I think it would have worked better if it had been a one-time showing, rather than broken down into parts.
Deborah, I am also watching So You Think You Can Dance. Monkey and I went to the tour last year, we might do that again this year.
ooh, tour. I should totally do that.