4 posts tagged “buffy”

I was flicking through the channels last night, and discovered that Edward Norton was hogging two of them simultaneously! Since we only have four major channels in Britland, that means he had hijacked half our screens! Darn him. On one side he had a goatee, and was chasing down pesky thieves in The Italian Job (the pointless remake)... and on the other he had bleached eyebrows, and was matching wits with pesky serial killers in Red Dragon (which some might say was also a pointless remake). I opted for the latter, and was pleased to find my selection rewarded by an Azura Skye cameo. Hurrah! She was playing the pivotal role of ‘Slightly Flirtatious Bookseller’... I say “pivotal”, because if she hadn’t helped Norton’s character find the book he was after, he wouldn’t have seen the “Red Dragon” illustration... which was probably a vital clue, given the title of the film. I don’t know. I came in late and got out quick!

Azura-skye

So says the editor of the spanking new Dark Horse comic book Buffy: Season Eight at the end of the first episode, ‘The Long Way Home’. I, on the other hand, did not feel remotely chilly, despite the drama of the final page.

I hate to sound consistent here, as I think it makes my blog repetitive, and I despise repetition... but I simply can’t shake the notion that a living human performer is worth all the line-art that has ever been pencilled and inked. Especially when you have a comic like this one, based on a TV show... a TV show marked by remarkable performances and blessed with some of the finest young seriocomic actors in the business. SMG, Hannigan, Brendon, Head, and their many recurring on-screen friends and/or enemies, conjured up screen-genius on a weekly basis, and for that I will always adore them.

That’s not to suggest that watching them improv their way around a library set would have won many Emmy awards. The show’s appeal had just as much to do with the fine writing of Joss Whedon. His dialogue for the new comic is as clever and witty and tricksy as ever, and I was chuckling away like a chuckle-bunny... but the drama of the words, the emotion... that simply wasn’t transmitted to me from the page. I get the terrible feeling I may have forgotten how to read comics! I can appreciate the artwork (and really the artwork in these comics is as close to perfect as humanly possible), and I can love reading the jokes... but it just doesn’t move me. I can’t do that weird little brain-trick, where it becomes “real” and absorbs me. That may, as I say, be more of a fault with my brain than the comics themselves.

In a perfect world, the President himself would divert national funds to allow Whedon to make Season Eight live action, or at least animated. In the same way that ancient cultures used to build towering coliseums and temples, just because they could, Americans should be proud and eager to let this screen-writer’s imagination run wild, to prove just how awesome the human capacity for intelligence, humour and warmth can be. They can put a man on the Moon, but they can’t make another series of Buffy!? For shame!

That rant aside, as comic books go, these ones are great. I certainly don’t want to seem ungrateful to my benefactors... but Kirk did say he wanted my “opinions” on the series. I don’t want to comment on the story itself, because I hate spoilers... luckily there are some other issues I’d like to get off my chest...

Re-watching the TV show for the fifth or sixth time (nerd alert!), it was hard to shake the feeling that my least favourite thing about Buffy was Buffy herself. The romantic angst worked fine the first few times around, but after a while it started to grate on me. That may just be because I’m bitter and alone, of course. Either way, Faith always seemed like a breath of fresh air. She’s the anti-Buffy, perhaps. She was sexier and cooler and more self-confident and less... self-righteous? More rough and tumble, rock n’ roll. And her story-arc was far more involving... even making Angel worth watching for a couple of crossover episodes! Her struggle retains its emotional punch, no matter how many times I sniffle through it. If I were a Buffy writer (Oh, Great Muppety Odin, I wish!), freed from the constraints of a mainstream network sensibility, I would be all about Faith. I’d have her swearing for real, and kicking out the jams. Hook her up with Willow, get a little sexual tension going... who knows where it could lead? Let’s just pause for a few moments to mull that over, shall we? [Pause] Mmmm. I’ve now been re-acquainted with the strangely hypnotic power of pictures of Alyson Hannigan... even in comic book form, there’s something mesmerising about that woman’s smile... sooo cute!

Another irritating thing about that Summers gal was that every season Giles would say that she was getting stronger, faster and more powerful... but she never really, demonstrably did. One of the cardinal rules of writing is “show, don’t tell”, and I always felt a little letdown by how un-uber she was, considering the hype that Giles was laying down. I understand that storytelling requires the hero to face equal or superior opponents or challenges... hence Superman’s weakness around Kryptonite... but even so, I felt frustrated by the limitations put on the character by the format. Blade was a far more “powerful” vampire slayer... but he had the benefit of a multi-million pound movie budget to back up his rep! Theoretically, Buffy can now become the superhero she was always meant to be... but to what extent do the writers feel they have to stay true to the TV series? Going purely on this first “episode”, the fights seem to be getting bigger and the set-pieces more spectacular, and I think that bodes well. They have such a well-established mythology and such great characters to play with... perhaps now, at last, they’ll be able to cash in their experience points and go up a couple of levels? I guess Willow already has, throughout the TV series. It’s just Buffy who was on a power-draining leash.

Meanwhile, away from the SFX and magick, I have to ask... Is Andrew Gay? I don’t just mean “gay” in the makes-slightly-effeminate-gestures-and-seems-to-care-about-fashion sense. I mean GAY in the kisses-men-for-sexual-kicks sense! Because the ambiguity bugs me. It bugged my sister too, in the Angel crossover episode, where he’s hugging random honeys... if he’s Gay, why can’t they just be as upfront about it as they were with Tara and Willow? Why can’t he have a boyfriend? Why is homosexuality so often used as a punchline, rather than an actual character choice? There was a term coined on the Television Without Pity site, in their Smallville reviews, to describe the enigmatic looks that young Clark and Lex shared from time to time... “HoYay!” (i.e. “homoerotica, yay!”) I’m all for that, even if it doesn’t sit well with others. I remember on one forum there were angry declarations that some members were boycotting the Oliver Stone film Alexander, because of the HoYay content... which seemed a bit of an overreaction to me because, at the time, Stone hadn’t actually finished filming the thing. Premature exclamation! I just wish they’d confront the topic, or drop the allusions, because it seems a bit like back in the McCarthy era where it was insinuated that certain people/characters might be a bit Communist, as if that was a bad thing in itself. It’s a Pink Scare!

On the other hand, if he did get a boyf, they’d only end up dying or turning evil anyway... significant others don’t tend to last very long in the Buffyverse.* Of course, tragedy is an important part of the Hero’s Journey, but the problem with superhero comic books is that the journey never really ends, and the same things happen over and over again... I believe there’s a line in the Once More With Feeling musical about knowing that things end, and letting them go. It’s hard to let things that we love go. If Whedon has more stories to tell, then I want to read/watch them... but are we being led on another wild demon chase? It’s fine to keep laying down the “destiny” jive, but at some point it has to actually lead somewhere, or else it’s just a tease.

Oy yey! I’ve rilly out-geeked myself with this blog... time for a nap, I think.

* Speaking of which, I wonder if Amber Benson has any power to prevent them messing with Tara’s legacy? She seemed to have strong feelings on the subject, but now they can use the character without Benson’s physical presence or approval. Hmmm...

Last night BBC2 broadcast the first two episodes of a show called Heroes. More suitable names for the programme might have been “Unbreakable: The Series”, or possibly “Found”... in honour of the film and TV show it reminded me of most.

Of course I was prepared for the comparisons with Lost by the promo photos I’d seen, which depicted the main cast stood in a line wearing shirts and vests in muted colours... the only clue that they weren’t new Lost cast members was the cityscape behind them in place of a more typical beach or jungle scene. Sadly the new show lacked the almighty hook of its island-based rival...

A young man in a suit opens his eyes, waking... he’s battered bruised, cut and bleeding... surrounded by green bamboo shoots. Who is he? Where is he? Why is he? A golden retriever runs past his head, tongue lolling out happily. He stands, reaches into his pocket and finds a tiny bottle of booze. Wandering through the bamboo, he passes a discarded shoe. Claustrophobic, panicked, he breaks into a run... he has to get out, he has to get some perspective... he finds himself on a cocaine-white beach, lapped by baby-blue water. Paradise. He turns, as the sound of screaming hits his ear, accompanied by the uneven whine of a broken jet engine. The sand is littered with the dead and the dying. They are alone, lost and leaderless. He knows what he must do.

I wrote that off the top of my head, after re-watching the first two minutes of the feature-length pilot. I’d be hard-pushed to write anything anywhere near as thrilling about the first scene of Heroes, which depicted a lecturer boring his students with a riff on Professor Xavier’s voice-over from the first X-Men film. Yawn.

I love the X-men films. I’ve never bothered reading the comics, because there are far too many of them out there to keep track of, but I respect the mythology and the wealth of characters... I also dig the “message” of the films, and the books which inspired them, regarding tolerance and self-respect. On top of that, they’re really good fun! This is my main issue with both Heroes and Unbreakable... they take an artform that is colourful and vivacious, and suck all of that icing off, leaving only the bland, beige biscuit beneath. They are superhero stories for people who think they’re too clever and “grown-up” to read comic books. They are also a lot dumber than they appear.

Superhero comics follow in the tradition of the folk tales that every culture produces to help the audience/reader reconcile themselves with their environment and their own nature... they do so largely through the use of symbolism. What may appear absurd and “childish” on the surface, is often much deeper and more meaningful... beneath the witches and the goblins are basic, solid human truths. Like a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, fairy tales deliver a short, sharp shock to the subconscious via a seemingly harmless and frivolous fancy. If you remove the magic, and bring everything to a more conscious “grown-up” level, then you also remove the universal, viral power of a good story... it is no longer an extension, or provocateur, of your own dreams and nightmares.

This is why, for me, Angel and Firefly will always be inferior to Buffy. They were aimed at a more “mature” audience, and strayed too far from the subconscious playground of the young, naive Scoobies. That may also be why the earlier seasons of Buffy are generally considered to be the best... or that may simply be because Joss Whedon’s creative-genius was split between the three projects, and diluted.

The FX in Heroes were stunning, and a couple of the characters were very likeable... but the majority were just deeply blah... I found the worryingly-waif-like-Winona-clone a bit disturbing too. Lost, of course, had the deeply irritating step-siblings, and a few bad or boring episodes along the way, but it also had a mystical absurdity to it that I adore. It’s the closest thing on mainstream television to a fairy tale, and I think that is entirely admirable. I don’t want it to always make sense on a conscious level. Where’s the fun in that?

Of course, it isn’t really a case of “either/or”, because the shows exist alongside one another... but watching American dramas is often like volunteering for some sort of peculiar new strain of water torture... cliff-hangers and clues are fed to you week after week, and you’re kept hanging on, investing time and emotion in a relationship over which you have no control. I’m afraid I saw nothing in Heroes that would make me want to go through all that again. No doubt it will carry on being hugely popular and feted without my endorsement!

Meanwhile, here’s fun... if I could have any three superpowers, they would be:

1) To fly, obviously.

2) To be omnilingual.

3) To draw comic books like a Manga-master.