Just Saying
More to come soon, I promise. (Yeah, right!)
Just musing after staying up way too late last night watching dodgy movies on TNT:
(1) The film AEon Flux is not a good film.
(2) The film AEon Flux has almost nothing to do with the source material MTV cartoon, to a degree that serves as another brick in my "why bother with adaptations" argumentative wall.
(3) I get why both fans and the creator of AEon Flux the cartoon were hugely upset by the film. Since I don't really care about AEon Flux the cartoon, I don't really care about their upset-ness, except inasmuch as it bolsters (2) above.
(4) Nonetheless, AEon Flux the film was both visually and conceptually pretty interesting. Were the visual and conceptual notions put to best artistic use? No, but there was a lot of interesting stuff there. The central plot questions of the movie - which as far as I know are entirely unrelated to the cartoon - could've been put to excellent use in a much better film, which is sort of the point of this article, as much as I might quibble with its specifics.
***
There's another point floating around somewhere in my head about Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, which I'm relatively certain I like much more than the majority of the 152 people who have been watching it every Friday night. I think the show is still struggling to find its legs from time to time - no shame in that - which will be unfortunate if it's cancelled (which is more likely than not), but most of the criticisms I've seen people direct towards the show (out of those who are willing to sit down and engage with it in a fair/serious manner) seem sort of beside the point. Not beside the point to whether or not they should like the show - you like what you like and find important what you find important - but beside the point to the goals of the show. I agree that it's difficult to care about the characters, especially the dolls, but I think that's in part by design, because it folds so precisely into Whedon's point; these are individuals - at this point, really, bodies - who have been more or less literally dehumanized; one of the show's conceits is that the procedure is not (cannot be?) 100% effective, so some essential spark remains, at least in the cases of Echo and Alpha, but the spark is elusive and near-ineffable. (Unless Whedon's found God in the last few years I doubt he's literally endorsing Paul Ballard's platitudes about the human soul in religious terms, but the logic of the story so far indicate that Ballard is correct [for once!] about the impossibility of truly erasing the dolls' baseline personality, whatever that means in religious/metaphysical/pseudo-metaphysical/neurological terms.) I'm interested in Echo and Sierra and Victor and Alpha and SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER Whiskey, but I'm not invested in them the way I was in Buffy and Willow and Giles. But that's part of the point. The annoying professor guy at the end of the "Man on the Street" episode who points out that if the technology really existed it would be both used and abused and ultimately spell the end of humanity...he's right, and the show in part makes the point by having its central characters be true ciphers with no dependable or consistent personality from week to week. Obviously, Whedon is interested in working with identity, and since that's a relatively new theme for his television work I don't really know what he thinks about it or where it's going to go (whereas I can pretty much guess that in a Whedon work about family, the family you create will be more important and dependable than the family into which you were born, because that's One of His Things), but so far I think he's going about it in a logical sense.
None of that helps someone who feels the need to relate or invest in a character, of course, and I'm not immune to that sensibility; the easiest way to summarize why I've spent the last few years rolling my eyes at House whenever I happen to watch it is because I think 95% of the time the writers "get" House wrong. That's a ridiculous thing to say, of course, because I didn't create the character and they did, and what I really mean to say is that there's a version of Gregory House I find interesting and compelling, and the guy who's given a wide berth to be a monumental asshole in ways both petty and profound to everyone around him, and indulged (by in-show logic) because he always gets medical results, and indulged (by the writers and I think the fans) because he always gets medical results and because he's also a depressed person whom the show will evoke sympathy for...that isn't the guy whom I find interesting and compelling. That Greg House, the one who stars in 20 out of the 22-24 episodes in a given season, is an asshole who doesn't deserve the indulgences he gets and who I can't stand watching for more than ten minutes at a time because both he and the way he's treated by his "friends" and colleagues are unbearable to me. (My other main issue with the show is that it's demonstrated the ability to create phenomenally good and creative episodes of television, almost always by deviating from its own incredibly well-worn tropes. If there was some sort of feed I could sign up for that would alert me when an episode of House is going to break from the traditional patient-of-the-week structure, I'd watch all of those episodes.)
Anyway, so I get why people don't think Dollhouse works, but sometimes I think they're watching the show with the wrong eyes. Also I, personally, appreciate the lengths to which Dollhouse is willing to be nasty; in series past, Whedon has never shied from going for the emotional gutpunch, but the degree to which Dollhouse wants to make you feel uncomfortable, emotionally and intellectually, is I think new for him. Ballard's affair, Echo's return to Patton Oswalt's character at the end of "Man on the Street," a lot of the Alpha stuff, a lot of the Topher stuff, Victor in the chair with Dominic's personality, SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER Whiskey ... this is just meaner than prior Whedon, and I have to say that I like it.
Just musing after staying up way too late last night watching dodgy movies on TNT:
(1) The film AEon Flux is not a good film.
(2) The film AEon Flux has almost nothing to do with the source material MTV cartoon, to a degree that serves as another brick in my "why bother with adaptations" argumentative wall.
(3) I get why both fans and the creator of AEon Flux the cartoon were hugely upset by the film. Since I don't really care about AEon Flux the cartoon, I don't really care about their upset-ness, except inasmuch as it bolsters (2) above.
(4) Nonetheless, AEon Flux the film was both visually and conceptually pretty interesting. Were the visual and conceptual notions put to best artistic use? No, but there was a lot of interesting stuff there. The central plot questions of the movie - which as far as I know are entirely unrelated to the cartoon - could've been put to excellent use in a much better film, which is sort of the point of this article, as much as I might quibble with its specifics.
***
There's another point floating around somewhere in my head about Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, which I'm relatively certain I like much more than the majority of the 152 people who have been watching it every Friday night. I think the show is still struggling to find its legs from time to time - no shame in that - which will be unfortunate if it's cancelled (which is more likely than not), but most of the criticisms I've seen people direct towards the show (out of those who are willing to sit down and engage with it in a fair/serious manner) seem sort of beside the point. Not beside the point to whether or not they should like the show - you like what you like and find important what you find important - but beside the point to the goals of the show. I agree that it's difficult to care about the characters, especially the dolls, but I think that's in part by design, because it folds so precisely into Whedon's point; these are individuals - at this point, really, bodies - who have been more or less literally dehumanized; one of the show's conceits is that the procedure is not (cannot be?) 100% effective, so some essential spark remains, at least in the cases of Echo and Alpha, but the spark is elusive and near-ineffable. (Unless Whedon's found God in the last few years I doubt he's literally endorsing Paul Ballard's platitudes about the human soul in religious terms, but the logic of the story so far indicate that Ballard is correct [for once!] about the impossibility of truly erasing the dolls' baseline personality, whatever that means in religious/metaphysical/pseudo-metaphysical/neurological terms.) I'm interested in Echo and Sierra and Victor and Alpha and SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER Whiskey, but I'm not invested in them the way I was in Buffy and Willow and Giles. But that's part of the point. The annoying professor guy at the end of the "Man on the Street" episode who points out that if the technology really existed it would be both used and abused and ultimately spell the end of humanity...he's right, and the show in part makes the point by having its central characters be true ciphers with no dependable or consistent personality from week to week. Obviously, Whedon is interested in working with identity, and since that's a relatively new theme for his television work I don't really know what he thinks about it or where it's going to go (whereas I can pretty much guess that in a Whedon work about family, the family you create will be more important and dependable than the family into which you were born, because that's One of His Things), but so far I think he's going about it in a logical sense.
None of that helps someone who feels the need to relate or invest in a character, of course, and I'm not immune to that sensibility; the easiest way to summarize why I've spent the last few years rolling my eyes at House whenever I happen to watch it is because I think 95% of the time the writers "get" House wrong. That's a ridiculous thing to say, of course, because I didn't create the character and they did, and what I really mean to say is that there's a version of Gregory House I find interesting and compelling, and the guy who's given a wide berth to be a monumental asshole in ways both petty and profound to everyone around him, and indulged (by in-show logic) because he always gets medical results, and indulged (by the writers and I think the fans) because he always gets medical results and because he's also a depressed person whom the show will evoke sympathy for...that isn't the guy whom I find interesting and compelling. That Greg House, the one who stars in 20 out of the 22-24 episodes in a given season, is an asshole who doesn't deserve the indulgences he gets and who I can't stand watching for more than ten minutes at a time because both he and the way he's treated by his "friends" and colleagues are unbearable to me. (My other main issue with the show is that it's demonstrated the ability to create phenomenally good and creative episodes of television, almost always by deviating from its own incredibly well-worn tropes. If there was some sort of feed I could sign up for that would alert me when an episode of House is going to break from the traditional patient-of-the-week structure, I'd watch all of those episodes.)
Anyway, so I get why people don't think Dollhouse works, but sometimes I think they're watching the show with the wrong eyes. Also I, personally, appreciate the lengths to which Dollhouse is willing to be nasty; in series past, Whedon has never shied from going for the emotional gutpunch, but the degree to which Dollhouse wants to make you feel uncomfortable, emotionally and intellectually, is I think new for him. Ballard's affair, Echo's return to Patton Oswalt's character at the end of "Man on the Street," a lot of the Alpha stuff, a lot of the Topher stuff, Victor in the chair with Dominic's personality, SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER Whiskey ... this is just meaner than prior Whedon, and I have to say that I like it.
posted by medrawt at
16:50
