I was the bald-headed, goateed guy wearing the Blue Sun baseball jersey sitting right behind your group, apparently. :eek:
Damn, next time I’m going to yell out something like “Okay, who here is a Doper?”
Would’ve been nice to put a face to a name, Tracy!
Gamera…I think you might need to get a bit of perspective here…
To use a similar example from elsewhere. I know you agree with me that Blue Beetle’s death in Countdown was very well done, a good end for the character, and an important part of the plot that’s building through the entire DCU.
There are, however, people who use the exact same arguments you are here to say that his death was unneccessary, a slap in the face to the fans, a slap in the face to Giffen and DiMatteas, ‘hack writing’, a sign of ‘sadistic hatred’ of everyone G&D have ever written, and so forth.
Just something to think about.
CandidGamera, you claim that Joss’s suffering on screen is “bad,” and though I can’t argue with your subjective opinion and tell you you’re wrong about this, I can say that, in my opinion, your arguments about why it is bad seem to contradict your negative assessment of such works. This tragedy obviously has a huge emotional resonance for you that you dislike. Do other “bad” works often make you so angry and so frustrated?
Let me take an example I’ve came across again recently: Battlefield Earth. Let me tell you, that movie blows monkey testicles. It is baaaaaaaad. But I say that because it had no effect on me other than robbing me of a couple of hours of my life. It didn’t penetrate, left no lasting impression. Hell, until I perused a movie review a couple days ago that summarized the entire miserable plot and every single pointless directorial gimmick (especially hated were the wipes, the slanted angle, and the entirely random uses of slo-mo), I couldn’t even remember anymore what it was about. I just remembered it made no sense and was boring as hell. It was bad.
How can you in any seriousness affix the same label to the Buffy episode “The Body”? That episode is the best television I’ve ever seen. In other words, it’s really good. It’s so heartbreaking, in fact, I don’t ever want to watch it again.
You can call what you see cliche or gratuitous or bad or whatever else you like, but if death on screen has an effect on you, if it digs inside your guts, jars the way you think, makes your heart hurt and your head ache, then that movie is powerful. You are, of course, free to call it powerfully “bad,” but from my perspective, what’s so amazing and good about these works is that they’re able to involve me so deeply and on such a visceral level, even though they are entirely fictional. This isn’t an easy thing to do. Any “bad” filmmaker can throw together the deaths of a few main characters and call it drama, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna give a damn. Think about The Matrix: Revolutions, another bad movie. When some of the main characters started dropping dead, did you care at all? Me, I was all yawns by that point. It sucked. It was bad. If the movie had managed to involve me, to pierce the many layers of hardened cynicism that have been deposited on my psyche over the years and actually move me, even if it made me sad or upset or depressed, then it would’ve been a good movie.
There’s a hell of a lot more to this (especially whether a work achieved whatever goals it set for itself), but based on the effect Joss Whedon obviously has on you, I don’t think you can fairly say that his stuff is bad. If a real stomach-turning death ain’t your cup of tea, that’s just fine–after all, we all watch movies, read books, listen to music, etc. for our own reasons–but the reasons that you watch do not correspond to the reasons Joss Whedon makes movies, and quite frankly, you should’ve figured that out a long damn time ago. Your blaming him for his “bad” stuff misses the point entirely. You suspend your disbelief and enter fictional worlds with a very specific set of arbitrary rules (as do we all), and you should not be surprised when the author does not share your beliefs about how the story should go. It is simply lazy analysis to ignore a work’s affect and purpose because it doesn’t fit your pre-arranged schema of “How Art Works.”
Feel free to hate all things Whedon. It’s not gonna hurt us Browncoats none. But I would advise that you use a little more care when you tell us why you find his stuff so “bad” because your very intense reaction only solidifies for me the quality of his works. Whedon entertains us, makes us laugh, shares with us his own perspectives regarding existential philosophy and the like (also, space bounty hunters are hella cool), and every now and again he hurts us, hurts us terribly, to remind us of how short and precious our lives are. I, for one, value his integrity for doing that. He creates fantasy worlds, but he doesn’t let us forget where we came from to get to that illusion.
I didn’t mean for this to become a diatribe, but I really believe your criticisms have been short-sighted. No one here can make you like Serenity, but it might be helpful if you’d take a broader view when you’re examining movies that you don’t much like. When a filmmaker (or musician or author or artist or whatever) creates, they’re not just creating for you. Hate away, but be more careful with it and it’ll be easier for others like me to understand why you hate as you do.
Rock on! I was the short redhead in a black sleeveless shirt and jeans.
(I myself often feel the compulsion to query large groups on their Doper stati – it seems like the odds are in my favor more often than not! ;))
And I wouldn’t bat an eye if someone said it, they’re entitled to their opinion. Even if they merely read a summary of Countdown. 
I can understand someone objecting to Beetle’s death irrespective of context.
Of course.
Stricker : Regarding The Body, it doesn’t effect me with a powerful aversion. It makes me fidgety and bored. I have to fight to suppress my urges to give it the MST3K treatment.
I completely agree, and I’d like to add another example from one of my favorite books, Game of Thrones [del](unboxed spoilers)[/del]: [spoiler]
Eddard Stark is set up to be one of the protagonists of the series. He’s the lord of one of the most powerful houses of Westeros, good friend to King Robert, honorable and just with his people. He accepts Robert’s call to become the King’s Hand, who carries out the king’s will, but soon Eddard runs afoul of several deadly plots and eventually finds himself thrown into the dungeons as a traitor. The word is that he will be exiled to serve on the northern Wall for the rest of his days, and most everyone in the court expects this judgment. However, Prince Joffery decides basically on a whim to behead Eddard instead, and so Lord Stark, the King’s Hand, is executed in public.
When I read this I was completely in shock. In fact, for a long time afterwards I held on to the belief that Eddard wasn’t actually dead, that somehow it was a trick, some common criminal that looked sort of like him was executed instead. How could Lord Stark be dead? He was obviously the big hero of the series - he had all the heroic qualities. I came to realize that this scene established some very important things about the world: Prince Joffery was a sadistic little bastard, encouraged to be so by his mother but now out of control. Life for anyone - anyone - in this world was nasty, brutish, and short. House Stark was fucked. Westeros was about to become a hell of a lot more interesting. And while you can always look back and see the logical progression of events, you can’t readily see what lies ahead. That last point is what makes me think George Martin is a genius storyteller.[/spoiler] Although the totally unexpected can happen, it never feels cheap because it always has story threads leading to it from somewhere.
I feel the same way about Joss Whedon. The disjointed method of storytelling in “The Body” mirrored the way I felt when some of my relatives died. Time seemed to stop and start weirdly, some things seemed a blur while others came into sharp focus. The death didn’t feel cheap, because we knew she had cancer and cancer doesn’t play fair.
sturm, I’ve added spoiler boxes where you deliberately said you didn’t. The thread says that we’ve got unboxed spoilers about Serendipity, but it doesn’t say anything about unboxed spoilers for other works.
Our policy on boxing and unboxing spoilers is kind of ambiguous, I agree. The main point is that someone who doesn’t want to know a surprise (or ending or plot twist or whatever) in advance, should be able to avoid threads that reveal the surprise. We can do that in several ways: the thread title, for instance, if there’s lots of discussion about a work, or spoiler boxes. So, please consider using spoiler boxes, even in a thread that says “open spoilers about X,” if you’re providing a spoiler about Y. OK?
No big deal, as I say, there’s no hard and fast rule about what’s a spoiler. And we haven’t considered “revealing spoilers” as misbehavior.
There was apparently a rendition of Happy Birthday while I was in the bathroom (there was a giant birhtday card for Joss, too, which I admit I didn’t bother to sign), but no mention of the Special Hell that I recall. I figured that went unsaid. No cell phones rang anyway, we are a good audience.
I have to side with CG on this topic, because Wheedon has done exactly this sort of thing before. I wrote a review of an episode of Buffy (“Dead Things”) in which they’d developed a really neat, fun gang of comic-relief inept villains and a strong, willful woman as their foil. The villains develop some kind of mind control device and turn her into their love slave. But just as they’ve got her dressed in a French maid outfit and kneeling in front of their leader and gazing adoringly up at him, she snaps out of it and chews the villains out and kicks the villains’ asses and heads out.
So far, so good. Inept villains 1, willful woman 1, plenty of fun to be had by all. Then as she’s walking out of the place, the leader sneaks up behind her and clubs her to death.
Boy, that let all the air out of all that balloon. The interesting woman character is dead, and the comic relief villains, having killed off a sympathetic character, are a bunch of scum. A really bad, ham-handed, clumsy bit of writing.
And I’m not the only one who thought so. The reviewer for Television Without Pity wrote (I’m paraphrasing here): “Wheedon creates the only feisty, intelligent woman character he’s come up with in a long time, and shortly thereafter has her clubbed to death like a baby seal.”
And the thing is, Wheedon is ordinarily such a skilled, smooth writer that these clumsy, ham-handed killings of characters always stick out like a sore thumb. He’s got the story flowing so smoothly, and suddenly, it’s “Where the fuck did that come from?”
So, although I can’t say for sure about the plot of the Firefly movie, Wheedon has enough of a track record in this area that I find CG’s concerns quite credible.
I
Don’t cite those assholes to me. They have 0 credibility. :mad:
I’m not sure Joss had a lot to do with Season 6 of Buffy anyway. That was mostly Marti Noxon giving us all an insight into how crazy she is.
Okay yeah, Joss likes to upset his audience. He’s gleeful about the angst. Why am I such a bitch to his work, then? Because it’s good! How often does fiction affect you that deeply, you know? I love to read, I like movies and TV shows and all, but it’s rare that I actually get that into something fictional. No novel has ever made me cry. The only movies that have ever made me cry were based on real events. I like fiction, but it’s rare that I feel that level of attachment to the characters. So if Joss can upset me to the point where I can’t watch Innocence without the commentary because the dialogue is too emotionally painful, I have to give the man props. I don’t think he’s doing it because he hates his characters or his fans, but because he wants to give us an exciting, unpredictable, and moving story. And I really think he succeeds in doing that most of the time. But hey, if you want cookie cutter stories where nothing bad ever happens to the good guy and everyone lives happily ever after, 99% of movies out there fit that description, so you’re in luck.
Y’know, when I started this thread, the purpose was to see if there was anyone out there that had the same kind of problem with Whedon as I do in this regard - and finally, there’s one! 
Thanks, EC - may all your dungeons be ever-full.
It’s been suggested that my numerous replies come off as attempts to convert people to my way of thinking, and I wanted to clarify that right now - you are welcome to disagree with me. I won’t even think you’re the least bit “wrong”. I put the idea out there, and the flak started flying, so I kept coming back to defend myself. As long as you recognize that a rational, intelligent human being can hold the opinion that I hold, and don’t imply the contrary, I have no beef with you.
Ya know, this was the only thing I objected to. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion or three, but this line was just spiteful. I think that is what set everybody off. Not that you held a contrary and misguided opinion ( 
), but that you wanted to deny the rest of us something we hold dear.
Sorry, Dex. I usually put stuff in spoiler tags, I just got lazy.