Comments | kattahj: ...am I a Joss fan or aren't I?

kattahj

...am I a Joss fan or aren't I?

Jul 22, 2013 06:53

I was wondering to myself, how is it that I can be a fan of some of Joss Whedon's things, while other stuff he does just makes me want to punch him in the face? (And no, not just the killing characters ( Read more... )

firefly, buffy the vampire slayer, angel

Comments 9

sarcasticwriter July 22 2013, 10:16:21 UTC

Why did you hate Cabin in the Woods?

kattahj July 22 2013, 16:09:18 UTC

Well, basically I felt that it had an air of cynical superiority to both audience and characters. I ranted longer about it back when I saw it.

sarcasticwriter July 23 2013, 09:24:10 UTC

Ah, I think I missed your original rant.

I absolutely loved the movie, in fact considered it one of the best of the year, but that's because it appeals to my sense of cynical superiority as an educated audience member.

Not mocking your phraseology - I'm absolutely sincere. As an audience member, I have WAY more in common with film critics than I do with the general public, because there was a period of about seven years where I saw every single movie released in driving-distance theaters.

Every single brainless horror movie, every sci-fi, every "art house" film, every mediocre drama, every stupid comedy. I saw Battlefield Earth, in the theater. I didn't give myself a choice about whether or not to see a movie, I saw all of them (well, I skipped the Barney movie). Even at 120-150 movies a year, student tickets were $4.25 (less than most espresso-based drinks), so I could afford it. I became perfectly fluent in the language of movies, and because I could usually predict what was coming, very difficult to move emotionally ( ... )

kattahj July 23 2013, 12:11:01 UTC

I can see your point, but it's not the way I work, at all. There's an anecdote about Alexandre Dumas pere, that his son saw him crying and asked why, and he replied: "I have just killed Porthos!" That, I can respect. That's sharing something with the world.

With Joss, whenever anything he writes evokes an emotional reaction, I feel like he's one of those brats who toss balls at your face and go: "Ha ha, made you flinch!"

But yeah, I'm not a sophisticated viewer. I don't want to be - the joy of fiction, for me, lies entirely in making the characters part of my life. That's why I unironically love quite a few stories I think are pretty shite, while several well-done stories just make me shrug and move on. If I don't love the people, I don't love the story, and if I feel I'm being actively mocked for trying to reach out, I just end up resenting the writer.

(For the record, that's also why I mostly avoid comedies. A lot of them just feel like bullying.)

Thread 5

roniabirk July 22 2013, 19:34:49 UTC

I enjoy Grimm. :)

kattahj July 22 2013, 20:24:19 UTC

I'm putting it on my to-watch list. :-)

helios July 24 2013, 13:30:49 UTC

Yes I remember a note I posted on Facebook. I must have similar thoughts somewhere here on LJ. It hadn't occurred to me that perhaps the best eps of Buffy were written by someone other than Whedon. That's a good observation.

kattahj July 24 2013, 15:39:02 UTC

Joss has a tendency to prefer the flashy stuff to more mundane things like character coherence. So he's written a lot of the most memorable episodes of Buffy, but I'm not sure that memorable is always best. It's sort of like the show-stopping numbers in musicals - yes, yes, I've heard your lovely voice, now can you please stop belting?