Worth full price. ;-> ----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -----
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 17:10:30 -0700 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Rick Moen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: The Pigdog Mailing List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [Pigdog] attention all Joss Whedon lovers/haters Quoting Splicer ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > Getting attached to characters is a great way to ruin a good story. It's one of the quickest authorial roads to the shark-jumping ramp: An author needs to be willing to be an utter bastard to his characters, if the storyline calls for it. Once an author starts pandering to fans' whims, it's over. > OTOH, as the article in question pointed out, Joss is at his best > with the serializations, so maybe he *should* stick with keeping his > characters alive. If Whedon can get the funding, the results wouldn't be literature for the ages, but it's as close as we're likely to see out of Hollywood SF in the near future, where the bar's normally pretty darned low. I was among the wackos at last night's 11:59 showing, and can report: Good: The dialogue. Except for some moments when the overeager foley work drowned them out, the characters' lines were refreshingly intelligent and acid-witted. The villain. Mr. government fixer was soft-spoken, polite in the Japanese about-to-cut-your-throat manner, and convinced he was working on the side of the angels. The plotting. I didn't see any gaping plot holes, even in a few points where I feared they were going all "plot coupon" on us. At no point was there anything jarring where you say "Huh, why didn't they do [foo]?" Not So Hot: The camera work. Somebody needs to tell the guy to knock off all that Steadicam-like digital work. It's obnoxious. The music. Maybe Universal had this composer on contract, but he comes across as a second-stringer and his work as OK but a bit banal. The series's background music was one of its joys, and this guy was just doing a somewhat generic movie-bombastic riff on the same general concept -- not as well. The budget. Nothing looked exactly cheap, but it's obvious they didn't blow the wad on sets, locations, or much else. On the other hand, it might have been key to how Whedon was able to swing the deal. The pacing. It was just a little off, most of the time. Not badly, but not quite up to the series's high standards. On the whole: It was pleasant, it wasn't very memorable -- and it just happens to have been (to paraphrase the guy sitting behind me) the best thing to emerge from Hollywood with a space ship in it for many decades. I considered it time and money well spent. -- Cheers, Founding member of the Hyphenation Society, a grassroots-based, Rick Moen not-for-profit, locally-owned-and-operated, cooperatively-managed, [EMAIL PROTECTED] modern-American-English-usage-improvement association. _______________________________________________ pigdog mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://skunk.pigdog.org/mailman/listinfo/pigdog ----- End forwarded message -----
