Happy Thanksgiving

I'm thankful for lots of things, some important (my health, my inamorato, my brain) some less consequential (my apartment, the internet, the existence of all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD). Good things all.

Which brings me to the news that hit the geekier realms of the interwebs this week. Warner Brothers distributed a press release that announced that a "rebooted" (how I hate that stupid word - unless you're turning your computer on and off it makes no sense) movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer would be released in 2012. Hm. With no input or involvement from Joss Whedon. Sigh. With a screenwriter named Whit Anderson who has fewer writing credits on iMDB than I do (i.e. none).

Thanksgiving is the most American of holidays. It's about food, gathering with loved ones and possesses disturbing overtones of cultural imperialism. The Jane Espenson penned, Season 4 episode Pangs embraces all three of these key Thanksgiving points.



Later today, I will be heading to Chez Piper McKenzie accompanied by various Stewarts. I love food, and I like cooking, but tend to spiral into a panic when faced with anything domestic. But I'll try to leave the atrocities at home. In an interview with Ms. Anderson, the woman about to be the most viciously attacked rookie screenwriter ever, she referenced Christopher Nolan's Batman as a good path to take in superhero reimagining. Sigh. I know. Everyone loves those movies. Except me. They're painfully humorless, and among other things, Buffy was always a comedy.




Joss Whedon has been through a lot with Buffy. It's always been his dream project, and the 1992 movie version was abysmal. Needless to say, he had no control over it. In a nearly unprecedented turn, he had the opportunity, five years later, to do it right. The show lasted seven seasons, and although it wasn't perfect, it was wonderful. And only ended seven years ago. Joss Whedon is still a young(ish) man. To "reboot" his creation (one of the uglier points of the Warners' press release is that they refer to the owners of the property, as the "creators")this soon, seems like a terrible idea, and a project that absolutely nobody wants.

But Joss Whedon is a class act. He responded in kind, and here is what he had to say in its entirety:

Kristin, I'm glad you asked for my thoughts on the announcement of Buffy the cinema film. This is a sad, sad reflection on our times, when people must feed off the carcasses of beloved stories from their youths—just because they can't think of an original idea of their own, like I did with my Avengers idea that I made up myself.

Obviously I have strong, mixed emotions about something like this. My first reaction upon hearing who was writing it was, "Whit Stillman AND Wes Anderson? This is gonna be the most sardonically adorable movie EVER." Apparently I was misinformed. Then I thought, "I'll make a mint! This is worth more than all my Toy Story residuals combined!" Apparently I am seldom informed of anything. And possibly a little slow. But seriously, are vampires even popular any more?

I always hoped that Buffy would live on even after my death. But, you know, AFTER. I don't love the idea of my creation in other hands, but I'm also well aware that many more hands than mine went into making that show what it was. And there is no legal grounds for doing anything other than sighing audibly. I can't wish people who are passionate about my little myth ill. I can, however, take this time to announce that I'm making a Batman movie. Because there's a franchise that truly needs updating. So look for The Dark Knight Rises Way Earlier Than That Other One And Also More Cheaply And In Toronto, rebooting into a theater near you.

Leave me to my pain! Sincerely, Joss Whedon.

I'm making butternut squash ravioli with mushrooms and leeks in a white wine sauce. Hopefully we'll leave out the traditional fighting and also leave the less traditional syphilis at home, too.



Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

The Disfunctional Family Pryce

The other night while watching Mad Men, a strange feeling of familiarity crept over me. It had nothing to do with my identifying with Joan or Peggy as I so often do. I looked at Lane and went: "Huh."

Lane is an Englishman working in America who came to these shores as a functionary for a large British concern. He was clearly not particularly valued by his former employers, and really only found some sort of happiness working with a smaller, American company. It is often his job to make difficult decisions for the company, and is sometimes viewed with resentment or dislike, something he is clearly used to. But he's finally starting to make some friends and it's kind of sweet how happy he seems to be included and liked. Lane's happy new life is horribly disrupted however, by the appearance of his disapproving and abusive (and bearded) father.

The entire paragraph above could have been written about Wesley Wyndom-Pryce of Buffy/Angel fame. What is it with the fictional Pryce family of Britain? The only essential difference is that I seriously doubt that Lane Pryce's father will turn out to be a robot. For those who are less familiar with the Whedonverse, having characters turn out to be cyborgs is what the writers do when they want to explore patricidal guilt, without making their lead characters actual murderers (see also: Ted). Unfortunately, Mad Men doesn't have this option in its arsenal, so poor Lane will have to deal with his Pryce family problems the old fashioned way: with seething resentment and custodial arrangements.

Now, I'm hardly the first person to note the Whedonification of Mad Men. With Vincent Kartheiser, Christina Hendricks, Danny Strong and Marti Noxon on board, it's a little hard to miss. I looked at the credits of the actors playing both fathers Pryce, and though Roy Dotrice's (Wesley's Dad) resume is slightly more impressive (having had previous experience playing a terrible father as the elder Mozart in Amadeus), their film and TV resumes bear other similarities. They are both classically trained British stage actors, W. Morgan Sheppard (Lane's Dad) is a former RSC member and Dotrice has a Tony award. They have both worked consistently in television over the past 40 years or so. They have both voiced an impressive array of cartoon villains. But for both, a significant percentage of their incomes has been from appearances in various sci fi and fantasy franchises.

Okay. I know the similarities between the fictional families Pryce are (likely) coincidental. But looking at the long and varied careers of two character actors, neither of which most people would have heard of, is always a worthwhile venture. Both Mr. Dotrice and Mr. Sheppard have well over a hundred credits each on IMDB. Mr. Sheppard is almost 80 and Mr. Dotrice is almost 90 and both are still consistently working in TV, films and voice acting.

(Speaking of fathers and sons, I just realized that Jared Harris who plays Lane Pryce on Mad Men is Richard Harris's son!)

Oh, Joss Whedon

WARNING: If you have not yet seen Season 5 of Angel, and care about such things and don't want any spoilers, you should likely skip this blog post.



Oh, Joss Whedon. The other morning I woke up very, very early and couldn't fall back to sleep, so I got up, made coffee and ate breakfast. While doing so, I turned on the TV and an episode of Angel was on TNT, so I watched that. It was from Season 5 and I'd seen it once before.

Okay. This is the episode where Fred dies. She was always a character that I found to be tolerable at best and a complete annoyance at worst. I don't know if Joss Whedon fell in love with his own creation, or if he was in love with Amy Acker, the actress who played her, but he really did over-play his hand. When she was introduced, all the men on the show pretty much fell for her, so there was an absurd amount of blather regarding the wonderfulness and adorableness of Fred. What is interesting is that Joss Whedon's dramatic sensibilities are strong enough that he made Cordelia, the other female character, simultaneously irritated, baffled and impatient of her friends' fascination.

Back to the episode I saw this week. I don't have much feeling for Fred in a general kind of way, but there was one moment of this episode that made me burst into tears. I mean, I was sobbing. And it happened both times I watched the episode. Even when I knew what was coming. And then when I fast forwarded through the DVD to draw the screen cap, it happened again.

Fred is lying in her bed essentially dying. Wesley, who has loved her for years is with her, looking for a cure or a solution in a book that is really a conduit for calling up every book that has ever existed. Alexis Denisof (who is married in real life to Alyson Hannigan who played Willow on Buffy) is a wonderful actor, and I don't understand why he doesn't work more. The point comes where she is clearly gone, and there isn't going to be anything he can do. Denisof's work here is really lovely. The character he's playing is desperately trying to keep it together as he watches the love of his life die in front of him. She finally asks of the mystical book he has with him: "Can that be any book in the world?" Then we cut to Wesley reading this:

"She was such a little girl that one did not expect to see such a look on her small face. It would have been an old look for a child of twelve, and Sara Crewe was only seven. The fact was, however, that she was always dreaming and thinking odd things and could not herself remember any time when she had not been thinking things about grown-up people and the world they belonged to. She felt as if she had lived for a long, long time."

This is what sent me over the edge. The above quote is from Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess. I'm not sure when I first read it, but I couldn't have been older than six or seven, as I don't remember a time when I didn't know it, and I think I was around the same age as Sara when the story started. To say it was my favorite book is an understatement. For a while there, it was the only book.

Burnett's The Secret Garden gets most of the attention, which I think is a shame, as A Little Princess has so many things going for it. In particular, something I realized embarrassingly recently, is that as much as anything it's about the creation of a writer. It's one of the two great Victorian novels by female novelists about the creation of a female writer. The other being, of course, Little Women, that wonderful and problematic book by that child of Transcendentalism, Louisa May Alcott.

Jo gave up the writing life to marry that German professor and become a teacher, which to so many women and girls was an extremely heartbreaking turn of events. We don't follow Sara Crewe into adulthood, so we don't know if she continued to tell stories, but I choose to believe she did.

"She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself. She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself. Sometimes she had told them to her father, and he liked them as much as she did."

How on earth could the girl described above not become a writer?

I think Joss Whedon is the only man I've ever heard of who has read A Little Princess. Girls are viewed as embarrassing creatures in our culture, so boys mostly avoid books that are too closely associated with them. Fred wasn't a writer, but she was a physicist, a hard scientist who was much more comfortable with books than with people, so her attraction to this book makes sense. It's about story-telling as an instrument of healing and a conduit to understanding the world. Joss Whedon likes morality plays and putting his characters in impossible situations full of difficult choices. He also has written a wonderful and vast array of female characters of distinctly different personalities which is, to say the least, rare. I think this scene (or really, it was just one cut) affected me so immediately and unthinkingly because I am so unused to being presented in our culture with things I actually care about.

Oh, Joss Whedon.