Tiny TV Review: Mad Men

Confession- this isn't really a review so much as knee-jerk response. I gave up watching the series after only 2 episodes. When asked why, this was my answer:
"Well- it just didn't grab me, for one. The directing and pacing is really odd. And it seems way too amused by its cultural differences and historical no-nos, like we're supposed to say every five minutes "Oh my, they were so ignorant and inappropriate back then!" and to me, that's not the same as immersing the viewer in a different time/culture or good storytelling for that matter. Seems gratuitously self-indulgent, like someone overusing the f-word once they realize they can say it without being punished by their parents."

Though I'll add one thing: nice to see Christina Hendricks featured on a series. And admittedly, I'll likely give the series another chance eventually. But for now, so long boring chauvinists.

Is Fox Playing With Dolls?

Ian wrote an excellent post reviewing the Season 2 premier of Joss Whedon's Fox series Dollhouse. While still paling in comparison to the brilliance of Firefly and creativity of Buffy the vampire Slayer, Dollhouse has the seeds of a great series. The unaired 13th episode of the first season, "Epitaph One", especially, is a knock-out, nearly perfect television episode that launches the series ten years into the future and 10,000 brilliant degrees deeper into the shows potential trajectory. Season 2 is expected to show much of what leads up to Epitaph One.

I posted a comment on Ian's blog, and decided to re-post it here for any of you that might be Dollhouse folk. I have some issues with how the series has been going, that were still present in this Season 2 premiere. I hope it's just the dregs of Fox producers' requirements on the show that will hopefully become unnecessary as the show gets better and better: more Joss, less Fox. Here's my response to Ian.

"I also was very very pleased with the season 2 premiere. Especially, since I re-watched 'Epitaph One' right before and there were totally references to that episode (or rather, this episode foreshadowed Epitaph One's events)- particularly Topher saying "I know what I know"

What did hugely disappoint however, was the Echo/Jamie Bamber sex scene which felt totally gratuitous since we didn't know or care about those characters- just felt like awkward, un-sexy "SEXY" scenes. Would have been better if it just showed the married couple together in bed the next morning, then cut to the shot of Ballard alone on the stakeout sofa. Would have said so much more about the relationships- without the grody muscle make out scenes devoid of feeling or intelligent storytelling.

Also, I have PROBLEMS with the whole Ballard beating up Echo to trigger her into being a weapon/defending herself. I just don't think its okay or acceptable to show men brutalizing women. Culturally, its just way too loaded to have that be part of entertainment.

But those are issues that are pretty connected to the shows themes- and someone could argue that my discomfort is what was intended- but if so, those scenes are so poorly integrated compared to the rest of how the show works. Basically, those feel like the "FOX" scenes; violence and sex for entertainment, rather than as truthful storytelling. I'm not against violence and sex in film- but is it honest? These scenes felt pornographic, in the sense of being objectifying and without integrity.

Hopefully Joss will hold down the fort and keep it about character and narrative from here on, not just ex-Battlestar Gallactica actors getting down and dirty.

And Amy Acker astounded me. Utterly".

Why Publish When You Can Just Twitter?

What's all that tweeting you hear? Oh, just the sounds of my fifteen minutes of fame getting used up. I'm not complaining. The following is proof that Twitter truly is the most powerful benevolent de-centralized (human-made) force in the universe.
It goes like this...

In August, Ian and I start working on a paper about Joss Whedon's series Firefly, to submit to the Whedon panel at the Southwest/Texas American & Popular Culture Association's Annual Conference. Then we write it. Then we go to the conference. We have a great time, we email the paper to a couple people we meet there. We talk about editing it so we can submit it for publication somewhere like the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. But the re-formatting alone would take major thought, and Kj's still only halfway through a crazy spring term. So we hold onto the paper with an ellipses as to what to do with it next.But in July (last Monday to be exact), we re-deliver our paper presentation along with a film screening at MHGS. Josué suggests we include a write up about the event for the new Experience MHGS website. He goes ahead and makes a paper link in case someone wants to read it. I think, "That's awfully nice, but who that's investigating MHGS is gonna read a 35 page paper about fundamentalism and a cancelled TV show?"

But I go ahead and tweet the link to the EMHGS site.
Then this happens. My initial tweet is way down there on the bottom, then next thing you know, It's on Whedonesque, the ultimate Whedonverse hub for both fandom and academia. So within a few hours, it went from living in my docs file to being accessible to every hardcore Whedon fan on the planet. By the time I got out of bed, it already had a comment stream 30 posts long.

So no more wondering who our audience is for this thing. It's out there. They're reading it, and they're already debating everything from the specifics of taking holy orders, to mind-reading to biblical innerancy, (not to mention finding all our typos).

Oh mighty Twitter. Thanks for getting us out there. You put a skip in my step all day. Tweet tweet tweet.

As Close To A Talk Show As I May Ever Get

Please come- and bring opinions. If you want (its so worth it) Watch the series first. You've got time. Only 14 episodes. And watch Serenity also. The follow up movie kicks hard core ass.

(also- there's a chance food will be involved- just a chance at this point. Stay tuned)

Small World Haiku

Alexander Payne
is my cousin's ex-girlfriend's
ex-husband. Weird, huh?

When Your Friends Start Getting Famous For Singing Songs About Famous People...

...you must put them on your blog. Apparently my fellow Bennington-ite Jonathan Mann has been making his way up the YouTube charts and even onto MSNBC. I've known for awhile that he's been writing a song a day, I'd just lost track of how awesome they are. Here's his paean to Jon Stewart. It's incredible. Check out his Battlestar Galactica song on Maryann's blog as well.

Go get 'em Jonathan.

Food Movies: Theology and Psychology

To my delight, I was again asked movie advice by a professor who's working on co-teaching a class with a psychology professor on some aspect of food and theology. The email said "if you think of some good movie titles that would work around that topic, could you send them my way? I already thought of Babette’s Feast, and there is the one about the two brothers with an unsuccessful restaurant (title?)."

Here's the list I responded with. I'm hungry just thinking about these.

"The two brothers film is "Big Night" very excellent!

There's a Japanese film called "Eat Drink Man Woman" which was also remade in the US as "Tortilla Soup." Both have food as the backdrop for family stories about people living into fullness and desire instead of deprivation ie: learning to grieve as well as to celebrate. very lovely films.

"Like Water for Chocolate" is a magical realist story about revolutions and family dynamics- mostly food is the metaphor and medium for personal liberation within unfair constraint. it's a sexy movie- many people love the book and the film. it's in Spanish.

There's a documentary i've not yet seen called "How to Cook Your Life" about chef Edward Espe Brown, a Buddhist chef in San Francisco. might be some valuable stuff in there- just came out in 2007.

Some people like "Waitress" as a food movie, but I think you and I both had mixed reactions on that one.

"Chocolat" is about chocolate, but has been used in a lot of contexts about community, worship, etc. There's a lot of Lenten guides about it actually.

"Mostly Martha" is a German film that was recently remade as "No Reservations" with Catherine Zeta Jones. I saw the remake not the original- the original might be worth investigating. in this case, it's the chef who needs to learn about living life- her sister dies and she's left caring for her niece- which of course exposes the walls she's built up around herself. the US one was "okay" but the original might be excellent.

That's what comes to my mind moviewise. On a side note, my housemates and I have become ADDICTED to Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares, which we watch on BBC America. Famous Chef Ramsey goes into American restaurants that are about to collapse financially or otherwise, and he discerns whether its relational issues, financial mismanagement, plain old bad cooking or lack of understanding their context (are they one of 40 italian restaurants on the block...)

This show is astounding- the human dynamics are terrifying and hilarious to watch, and have often brought us to tears as well. i've thought of mentioning the show to our psychology faculty as an outstanding resource for profiles of various personality disorders, family systems playing out, and with Chef Ramsey as an astute and unflinching counselor. He nails narcissists to the wall and builds up those who have been trod upon. And you learn a lot about what makes restaurants a place of life vs a place of death. a lot of these are available on DVD or free on the internet.

There's my 12 cents. what an exciting class to be working towards!!!
thanks as always for letting me access my internal narrative database"

Conversion, Atonement, and Spaceships

Now that Ian and I are done with the conference and the seven months of research and writing (not including the work we'll do eventually to make it journal-submission ready), we're finally getting our paper out to people- hoping to generate dialogue beyond our half hour at the conference panel.

One of the paper presenters at the Religion panel did an investigation of the origins of religion as expressed in Sci Fi/Fantasy literature. She and I had a teeny bit of chat time while out to dinner with other Religion panelists (Ian and I accepted the invitation to head out with the religion folk, and for whatever reason, didn't end up socializing much with the Sci Fi bunch), and she mentioned work she's doing on representations of Christianity in Sci Fi. I asked if I could send her our paper, since that's totally what ours is about. I'm excited that Dr. Davis is excited about our work, and look forward to hearing more of her perspective.

If you want to join the conversation (ie: read our 35 page paper), let me know.

Also a highlight of that dinner was hanging out with Dr. Wes Bergen, the only person I've ever heard of to have published a book on Leviticus and popular/postmodern culture. Gotta love it!

SWTX PCA/ACA Panels

Here are the panels I attended Wed-Sat. Each panel had 2-5 paper presentations. You just role out of bed, take the elevator downstairs and go from panel to panel, and if you're lucky, grab a free soda between 12:30 and 2. Good lord it was amazing.

Sci Fi/Fantasy:
Heroism and Villainy in the Whedonverse

Children’s/Young Adult Literature & Culture:
Across the Harry Potter Universe

Literature:
Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series

Sci Fi/Fantasy:
“Feel Good Imperialism:” Gender, Race & Colonialism in Star Trek

Experimental Writing and Aesthetics:
Extratextual: The Alchemy of Interdisciplinary Writings

***Sci Fi/Fantasy: Philosophy and Religion in the Whedonverse*** Us!

Religion:
Crossing Boundaries: Film, TV, Literature

Classical Representation in Popular Culture:
Greek and Roman History On Screen

Religion:
Labeling the Other

Sci Fi/Fantasy:
Metaphorical Mythology in the Whedonverse

Film Adaptation:
A Novelist’s Perspective on Literature-to-Film Adaptations

Technical Communication:
Twittering and Gaming: Building Communities

Authors, Journal Editors and Special Contributors Panel

Sci Fi/Fantasy: Double Feature:
Once More With Feeling and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog

Shakespeare on Film and Television:
King Lear and The Tempest

Myth and Fairy Tale:
Film Studies

Film & History:
Violence and Genre Cinema

To Do List

(in no particular order)

1) Blog about the transcendent experience of watching the Oscars

2) Buy jeans, slacks, non-sweater tops, cute shoes, trouser socks, plastic slim-line accordion file and Moleskin journal CHECK!

3) Pack the above items into my bright orange luggage backpack thing

4) Transfer Ian's and my paper from GoogleDocs to Word, and add footnotes

5) Print out a bunch of copies of said paper

6) Spend all day and night tomorrow at Ian's finalizing our presentation

7) Get on a plane to Albuquerque

8) Hang out at the Hyatt regency all weekend for the American/Popular Culture Association's 2009 Conference!

9) Present our 10,000 word paper on "Firefly", fundamentalism and loss of self. Whoopee!

10) Knit

Kind of Excited About This...

Though they still spelled my name wrong...


(Blogger is not being my formatting friend, so if you can't read it, just click on the image- Oy)

Footage From Within A Cult Compound

How did I miss this phenomenon?
I find the guy in the armchair most disturbing
and, well, the campfire and sporting event as well.

On Reading a TV Show

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Long Way Home by Joss Whedon

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
As what I believe is the first case of a television show continuing as comic book (this first batch of comics is called Season 8, just as if it were the next series of episodes), this breaks all kinds of creative ground, and of course has the potential to step into some pot holes as it forges its way to unknown territory. (Have I mixed my metaphors enough yet?)

It's hard to imagine what it must be like to be in Joss Whedon's shoes. With the transition from sound stages and scripts to paperback and text boxes, your long-loved characters are no longer bound by location shoots, film crew budgets, actor schedules, or frankly, reality of any kind. The stories are free to go wherever the imagination takes these people. Far more significant than those thousands of Star Wars books that supposedly carry on the story, the Buffy comics are crafted by the creator himself, and are meant to hold the same tenor, language and quirkiness of the TV series. This transition from one television media to comic book media is both a total a paradigm shift, and in another way, a totally logical next step: from one pop culture temple to another. And I'd say, it pretty much does it perfectly. Though I'm not a comic book reader (i have trouble tracking the different text styles- dialogue, narration, etc, and I sometimes forget to look at the pictures) I can hear the characters voices clearly in the dialogue, and the stories still abound with Whedon's obsessive love of underlining his genre while subverting it. It's a meta meta meta comic book- always reminding you it's a comic book while totally engulfing you in the plot.

Though I agree with other critiques I've seen of this volume, that instead of being normal people in supernatural circumstances, the comic books have these characters basically becoming straight up- mega-institutionalized super heroes, I trust Whedon to take us to new places safely, even if its awkward sometimes.

It's a one of a kind experience that I recommend. (though not so one of a kind anymore since Whedon is doing comics for his canceled show Firefly as well).

View all my reviews.