Asking the Wrong Questions

People my age, I think, can for the most part be divided into two groups--those whose first encounter with William Shakespeare the playwright (as opposed to William Shakespeare the cultural icon and creator of such linguistic commonplaces as "To be or not to be") came from Baz Luhrman's 1996 Romeo + Juliet , and those for whom it was Kenneth Branagh's 1993 Much Ado About Nothing .  I'm in the latter group, and--all due respect to Luhrman--I can't imagine a better introduction.  Branagh's sun-dappled, cheerful film, in which he and his then-wife Emma Thompson headline as the argumentative lovers Benedick and Beatrice, is not only a top-notch adaptation of an excellent play, but it has a lightness and an effortlessness that cut through a young person's (or even a not-so-young person's) conception of Shakespeare as serious or difficult.  It's full of song and dance and beautiful scenery which, far from distracting from the archaic language, only e...

My review of The Avengers appears today at Strange Horizons .  Short version: I enjoyed the film, but not nearly as much as so many other have done, and certainly not to a degree that makes its phenomenal box office success understandable to me.  As impressive as it is in its ability to tie together characters and plot points from five previous movies, I can't help but think that The Avengers also lays out very clearly why the Marvel movie franchise is fundamentally flawed.

If you've been following this blog for any amount of time you've probably noticed that I don't have much use for spoiler warnings, or for the primacy that spoilers have gained in the discourse about popular culture.  The conversations I want to have, the ones that seem interesting and worth having, are precisely the ones that don't allow for the self-censorship of spoiler mania, and the truth is that I don't believe that a truly worthwhile work is one that can be "spoiled" simply by knowing what happens next.  So when I say that Drew Goddard's horror comedy The Cabin in the Woods (written by Goddard and Joss Whedon), is the sort of film that rewards unspoiled viewing, that probably seems entirely different to viewers who know its secrets, and that may, in fact, only be worth watching if you're ignorant of its central twist, I'm not being entirely complimentary.  Cabin is a funny, clever, well-made film, extremely effective in its scary scenes...

Dollhouse in its second season was not at all the same show it was in its first.  As far as the internet is concerned--or at least that infinitesimal portion that watched the show to its end--this is very much a good thing, and there's no denying that from a technical standpoint the show was massively improved.  The first season's tedious and contrived personality of the week stories quickly gave way to major upheavals in the show's premise as it raced towards the post-apocalyptic future glimpsed in the tantalizing, unaired first season finale "Epitaph One."  Still, I find myself missing first season Dollhouse .  I didn't like that show, but I thought it had the potential to tell an interesting SFnal story.  The second season tries to tell that story, but does so in a way that is so rushed, so heavy-handed, and most of all that so thoroughly tramples the creepy ambiguity of the first season's character work, that it hardly seems worth the effort.  The imp...

Hey, you know what show could really use a bit more online discussion? Dollhouse ! "Echo," the original, unaired pilot for Joss Whedon's by no means triumphant return to television, and "Epitaph One," the shelved thirteenth episode of its first season, are now viewable through various and sundry means. Taken together, they paint a very different picture of the show from the one arising from the first season. Not simply because they are both well-written, engaging hours of television--hardly stellar on either count, but certainly head and shoulders above most of the season's conventionally aired episodes--but because they illustrate how wide the gap is between the show Whedon envisioned and tried to create and the show he was allowed to make. "Echo," which hews closely, but is not identical, to the script leaked soon after the show's television premiere, confirms the suspicion that Fox executives who demanded that Whedon retool it created a...

Right on the heels of this weekend's announcement that Dollhouse has been renewed for a second season comes the sadder but slightly less surprising news that The Sarah Connor Chronicles has been canceled . (Also, Chuck gets a third season , but, you know: formula + the geek equivalent of frat humor + half-naked ladies = not a terrifically long shot.) This is, of course, very upsetting, but unlike Niall I'm not convinced that, if the decision actually did come down to only one of these two shows, the wrong choice was made. It's true, Sarah Connor is the better show (though this says more about Dollhouse 's problems than Sarah Connor 's strengths), and you don't need to work very hard to read an uncomfortable statement into the fact that the show about scantily clad, brainwashed sex slaves has been renewed while the one about the difficult warrior woman who only takes off her clothes to treat one of her frequent bullet or stab wounds has been axed. But it...

I'll probably have some more substantial thoughts about Battlestar Galactica in a day or two, but in the meantime it's worth noting that it was a big weekend for science fiction all around, with several interesting developments. The Sarah Connor Chronicles , "The Last Voyage of the Jimmy Carter" - a strong conclusion to last week's equally strong episode, which brings the Jesse-Riley storyline to a satisfying close. There are lots of good character scenes, and the flashbacks-to-the-future aboard the doomed Jimmy Carter are tense and quite creepy, and do more than the rest of the season put together to make Jesse sympathetic while stressing that she's caused as much suffering and horror as was caused her. On the other hand, the plotting is still middling-to-poor, most notably in the first and only encounter between John and Jesse, when the two of them have to pause what is otherwise a riveting conversation in order for John to spew exposition, alternately t...

Via Micole , what's rumored to be the original script for the Dollhouse pilot.  As several scenes and lines of dialogue within it appeared in the first Dollhouse trailer , I think this is the genuine article.  Unsurprisingly, it's a massive improvement on "Ghost," not only because it dives right into the arc elements of the show, stressing Agent Ballard's investigation of the Dollhouse and Echo's potential awakening, but because it's engaging--unlike the by-the-numbers kidnapping story in "Ghost" the plot here is interesting and entertainingly twisty, taking me by surprise with its turns on several occasions.  The secondary characters--Boyd, Topher, Dr. Saunders--are also more believably sketched and and more intriguing, and there's some interaction between Echo and Ballard.  Perhaps most importantly, the episode suggests believable uses for the actives that go beyond the jumped-up prostitution the show has thus far concentrated on. As dep...

What is it with TV scheduling?  It was bad enough that something like half of the shows I follow air new episodes on Monday, but now Friday's become a hot spot as well.  On the other hand, maybe it was a good idea to suddenly supersize the quantity of shows I watch on this night, because quality-wise nobody brought their A-game this week. Battlestar Galactica , "No Exit": This episode was trying to be one part "Downloaded" and one part "quick!  There's only six episodes left in the series and we still haven't tied our wildly self-contradictory backstory in a satisfying bow!"  It's kind of a dud on both counts.  I liked seeing Ellen again, and liked even more that in her present incarnation she has both a spine and self-respect, since in the past it's seemed like she could only muster up one at a time.  I also liked that the episode made some vague gestures towards some of the issues I raised in my most recent Galactica post, including...

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

I mean, really, what else is there to say?

Three excellent discussions of class and gender issues in Firefly , all of which end up, in one way or another, dealing with the character of Inara and her relationship with Mal. Maia at Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty discusses Firefly 's two class-crossing couples, Mal and Inara and Simon and Kaylee, and then veers into a discussion of the mechanics of the Companion guild. The Rabbit Hole takes the discussion further and compares the Companions with both Dune 's Bene Gesserit and Discworld's Seamstresses. Sartorias discusses the ways in which Inara's character fails, particularly her failure to demonstrate self-control and, in general, to act anything like a geisha.

One of the very first coherent thoughts I had about Joss Whedon's television series Firefly was to observe that it took place in a world in which the civil war was actually fought over the issue of states' rights. The desire for freedom, and for the ability to freely govern one's life and decisions, informed many of the show's episodes, and even its theme song yearned for the freedom of the skies after all other freedoms had been lost. Post-war hardship on the one hand, and the restrictive, domineering Alliance on the other, made Firefly 's universe one in which genuine choices were becoming a rare commodity. Serenity , Firefly 's feature film continuation (and, possibly, conclusion), expanded on this theme of freedom and choice. The film pits Serenity's crew against the forces of the Alliance, who seek to regain control of River and prevent the dissemination of the truth about their actions on the planet Miranda. The Alliance, the film tells us, had sought...