JMA-PSOS

Finished my Buffy Rewatch finally - and forgot how good the finale was, all things considered. They had a lot of character plot threads to juggle and somehow managed to land most of them. That and a lot of unnecessary back stage drama, burned out writers and exhausted actors.

Weird tid-bit? The "I Love You/No You Don't" exchange between Buffy and Spike in Chosen, isn't repeated in the flashback of it on Angelin S5 Episode 2. ( Read more... )

Re-watching it - it's kind of obvious to me that she's telling him that she really loves him, while he's saying - hey, don't do that again, go live your life. ( Read more... )

Anya - actually isn't completely forgotten - Xander looks for her, and he asks Andrew what happened to her, and Andrew tells him that Anya fought valiantly and saved him. Her character also gets a sense of closure - in that she and Andrew kind of bond, and Anya is showing bonding with guy, without sex being in the offing.

The writers do a good job of wrapping up all of the characters arcs neatly.
Even Faith and Wood. And they didn't kill off all of the potentials with speaking parts. It is interesting that it is only Dawn looking out of the back of the bus for Buffy. And Buffy says barely anything at the very end.
She jumps off the bus and looks back out over the crater, which she watched as she rode the top of the bus out of town and away from the carnage.
( Read more... )

I enjoyed S7 far more than I remembered. It's main flaw was too many characters and group scenes. But I'm not sure how they could have fixed it without losing track of the theme. Also, it fell into comic book plotting and comic book plot devices here and there. The Scythe is very comic bookish as is the Guardian who pops up out of nowhere. Both are connections to Whedon's comic book Fray - which he wrote and published around the same time S7 aired, and was clearly attempting (poorly) to connect the two. He continues to attempt to connect the two with the Buffy comics (which doesn't quite work). Fray was NOT that good a comic. But they kind of needed the Scythe to get out of the corner they'd written themselves into.

Angel S4 in comparison - kind of lays there like a limp noodle. (The actors on Angel didn't get paid as much as they did on Buffy - by the way. Nor did they make anywhere near the amount the folks on Bones were making.)
If Buffy had a lot of unnecessary back stage drama - Angel had it too, in spades. Whatever was going on between the show-runners, the studio, and Charisma/David Greenwalt - was affecting moral on set. VK states the series felt like a job that no one was really invested in and kind of tired of. The difficulty with Angel S4 was Connor and Cordelia. Mainly Cordelia. It does work thematically as a counterpoint to Buffy. Angel unlike Buffy - has to be the one to save the world, and doesn't necessarily share how. The series is neo-noir in nature, and in that type of series - the hero always inadvertently falls into the abyss while attempting to escape from it, and often pulls the world in after him. The gang is brought briefly together, then broken apart. At the end of the season - they don't trust each other, and are only still together because they have no where else to go. Angle unlike Buffy, doesn't inspire or empower anyone, and clearly cares mainly about Connor. (Kind of annoyingly, actually. The rest of the characters are clearly fed up with it and wish Connor would just go away.)
( Read more... )

I should do my taxes but I am procrastinating. But I need to do it, so that Turbo Tax will stop nudging me to do it. I miss the days in which everyone trying to sell me something didn't have my email address.

Knee has been bugging me off and on today - I did laundry and alas, had to stand to do it. For a long while. My knees don't like it when I stand for longer than ten minutes. I stood for thirty. Suffice to say? They weren't happy campers.

Television Bits and Pieces:

David Boreanze cast as the lead in the Rockford Files Reboot by NBC

( cut )

Can we just not? I told mother, who loved the Rockford Files when it first aired.. in the mid-70s, actually, I enjoyed them in reruns and whenever I saw it at night. And my father loved it - it was among his favorite shows. For those who don't know what it is? It was a private detective series, featuring a down-on-his-luck PI. Reminded me a little of the Trevor McGee mysteries.

Me: So they are rebooting the Rockford Files, you'll never guess who they cast in the lead..
Mother: probably not.
Me: David Boreanze - the guy who played Angel.
Mother: Ugh. You've got to be kidding me? Well, that's one show I will definitely not be watching. Boreanze is all wrong for the part - he doesn't have the sense of humor that Garner had.

True. James Marsters has that same dead pan sense of humor, as does Nathan Fillion and Jensen Anckles, not David Boreanze.

Oh well, at least this means that it is highly unlikely that he'll appear in the Buffy Sequel.

But I really wish they wouldn't reboot "good" old television series. There's a list of classic television series that should NEVER be rebooted: Rockford Files, Gunsmoke, the Original Star Trek, The Prisoner, MASH, Fraiser, Hill Street Blues, Homicide Life on the Street, ER, LA Law, St. Elsewhere, Gilmore Girls, Friends, I Love Lucy, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy, Rhoda, The Mary Tyler Moor Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Supernatural... leave the classics alone folks. Come up with something original?

I don't necessarily mind sequels? Although I'm not watching Scrubs (I barely watched the original.).

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Almost done with the Buffy S7 rewatch, yet woefully behind on the Angel S4 one. Mainly because Angel S4 kind of goes off the rails post Orpheus, and I find it hard to watch? (All the character plot holes give me a headache.) ( Read more... )

Buffy S7's problem is too many characters, while Angel's is comic book/soap plotting that kind of gets garbled in translation. I can see why the network was flirting with cancelling Angel in S4.
( Buffy S7 Empty Places to part of End of Days )

Off to make something for dinner. I don't know what, but I'll come up with something. Maybe salmon with broccoli.

1. Snagged from colls - "You can help NASA classify telescope images of
galaxies, helping researchers identify very distant
galaxies and black holes and distinguish real signals
from noise. Each classification takes about a minute,
and tutorials guide you every step of the way."

Here's How

I don't know about anyone else? But I'm certainly tempted.

2. RIP James Van Der Beek aka Dawson from Dawson's Creek. He died of cancer at the age of 48. It was announced multiple times on the news this morning. He apparently had six kids - which, well, virile?
( Read more... )
3. Work and public transportation and this week (starting with Sunday)...have made me want to avoid people for the next four days (and since I'm taking Friday off and have Monday off as a paid Federal Bank Holiday - I can do that). To further this? I rescheduled my hair appointment for May. (Well that, and I can't handle going up and down four flights of steps on Monday, with this knee. I need more time. I'm hoping by May, I can do it without too much pain.)
( Read more... )

4. Question a Day Memage February:

12. Do you have any siblings?

Yes. One. A younger brother. Who has gifted me with a beautiful niece.
Siblings are a double-edged thing - both gift and curse, those who have them probably know whereof I speak?

5. People are using AI...to help with commenting on various sites - with ahem amusing results? ( Or it's bots, can't decide.)
( Where I'm complimented for my excellent story-telling abilities in...writing film reviews?? )

Sigh, people continue to bewilder me?

Mother told me all about what my niece is up to. Apparently she has a new boyfriend - a California Forest Ranger, who she met last year. (She's also living with a guy, but he's not her boyfriend, and he's apparently writing a book for his thesis - it's not clear if it is fiction or non-fiction. I'm guessing non-fiction?) And she's come up with an idea for an investigative journalism piece on the political corruption surround fire retardation use and how forest fires are put out or not as the case may be. Her advisor is excited about it - he wants her to pursue journalism and writing. (She's an excellent writer). Statistics is causing her difficulty though - apparently no one in our immediate family has the math gene? She finds calculus and statistics boring, and it doesn't make a lot of sense. (I can relate.)

Feeling rather bored and apathetic with my own life at the moment, not helped by the bad knee, which refuses to get better and makes it difficult to do much of anything but get to and from work, and the occasional errand (including physical therapy). It still hurts. Although my physical therapist, Vishanti, appears to think it is getting stronger and better, so there's that at least. Also, it's warming up - a little outside?
It reached a rather balmy 41 degrees F today, and a low of 29 F.

After some negotiation - I finally managed to convince the Super to turn off the sparkling brand new radiator that they installed in my kitchen. It's black. It takes up more space than I'd like? But I think I can fit a small cabinet in front of it. And since it's turned off - I cancelled my purchase of the window fan. Also it's not quite as warm in the apartment at the moment as it was last night, which made it difficult to sleep. Although the radiators are blasting now - so that could always change?

Every day on my commute, I run across old homeless folks. Today, it was an old white woman, who looked a bit like a gnome. ( Read more... )

Sometimes I think - if I can just help one person in this world. Then maybe the rest won't matter? See? George Bailey moment. [If you don't get it? Look it up. We have the internet - it's easy. Hint: it's a cultural reference from a 1940s Christmas Movie starring Jimmy Stewart. ;-)].

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Question a Day Meme

8. How often do you read fiction?

95% of the time. I also write it. And tell it in my head. And listen to it on audio-book, and read graphic novels or comics that are fictional.

I read non-fiction for work. Fiction for pleasure.

9. This year is the 40th anniversary of the release of the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – have you ever seen it? Bueller…. Bueller…. Bueller…..

Yes. I saw it in the movie theater when it first came out - admittedly with the wrong person (my mother - which ahem, not a movie to see with one's mother). And numerous times on television.

40 years? Damn. I feel old. It was, I think, a 1980s John Hughes film. John Hughes was the King of teen flicks in the 1980s, he, Francis Ford Coppola and a few others - kind of redefined teen cinema.

It grated though - because I identified a bit too much with Ferris' sister.
That said? Required back to back viewing is Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Election - where Broderick is the stumbling adult, to Reese Witherspoon's ambitious and annoying teen.

10. Have you ever owned a Tamagotchi?

I had to look it up - because I had no clue what it was. So clearly no.

Tamagotchi can be found here. Hint? It kind of reminds me of the electronic version of what they were trying to give out in the Buffy Episode Bad Eggs. If it had been electronic - Bad Eggs would have gone VERY differently.

11. Would you consider yourself superstitious?

Not really. I might flirt with it - but I am a born skeptic. I question everything. So no, not superstitious.