From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V4 #99 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Wednesday, July 3 2002 Volume 04 : Number 099 Today's Subjects: ----------------- b/musical [meredith ] Re: b/musical ["David S. Bratman" ] b/Article alert! Cannot access! ["Donald G. Keller" ] b/=NYPost= DVD review ["Donald G. Keller" ] o/harvard man ["Donald G. Keller" ] b/text of Independent (U.K.) article ["David S. Bratman" ] Re: o/harvard man ["David S. Bratman" ] ASH news [Todd Huff ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 20:41:56 -0400 From: meredith Subject: b/musical Hi, So UPN reran "Once More With Feeling" tonight. Dammit, I *still* can't watch any episode involving Tara without getting all verklempt! But oh, what an episode. I'm still in awe of it, after countless times ... ============================================== Meredith Tarr New Haven, CT USA mailto:meth@smoe.org http://www.smoe.org/meth ============================================== Live At The House O'Muzak House Concert Series http://www.smoe.org/meth/muzak.html ============================================== ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 17:56:14 -0700 From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: Re: b/musical At 05:41 PM 7/2/2002 , Meredith wrote: > >So UPN reran "Once More With Feeling" tonight. > >Dammit, I *still* can't watch any episode involving Tara without getting >all verklempt! > >But oh, what an episode. I'm still in awe of it, after countless times ... Yes, a real good one. Possibly the only really great episode of a sadly, and increasingly, dubious season. What most amazes me about it is ... the choreography. BTW, does anyone have any web sites which have finished their plot summaries of the latest season yet? I'm going to be on a BTVS panel at Westercon this weekend, and need a quick reminder course. The sites I usually use are missing the last 3-4 episodes. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2002 21:21:12 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: b/Article alert! Cannot access! David: Thanks for posting the info about that article; however, I've tried to access it twice today (with my primitive Lynx program), and have gotten nowhere. Is it too long to post? I know about the academic conference (at the University of East Anglia); several of the =Fighting the Forces= people are going. I strongly doubt I could get it together to go. But the scuttlebut is they're trying to put together one for next year in the States. Probably take me that long to put together a new paper... ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2002 21:37:57 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: b/=NYPost= DVD review [from =The New York Post=, Sunday, June 23rd:] Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- The Complete Second Season ($59.98; Fox) Does Fox do the best jobs of repackaging TV shows because it's smart or does it look smart because it has the best shows to repackage? It follows "The X-Files" and "The Simpsons" -- which set the standard for TV shows on DVD -- with the second season of "Buffy." For two years, beginning with these shows, there was simply no better series on television. Buffy's passionate romance with Angel came to the fore, Willow fell for a werewolf, Xander and Cordelia turned from bickering as enemies to bickering as a couple and Spike (the marvelous James Marsters) came to town. Future generations will curse us for not showering "Buffy" with the Emmys it deserved as surely as Angel was cursed for discovering true happiness with his mortal honey. --Michael Giltz DGK here. I've been meaning to post this because I thought it was very well put. It's an example of the consensus among media critics that in 1998 and 1999 (basically from "Surprise"/"Innocence" 2nd season through "Hush" 4th season), =Buffy= was the best show on TV. Since then, not only has =Buffy= dipped somewhat (arguably each of the last three seasons slipped a notch from the one before it), but some other critically-acclaimed shows like =The Sopranos= and =The West Wing= have come along to crowd it out of the top spot. It's nice to have the DVDs in existence as a permanent reminder (for those who don't have tapes) of this particular batch of episodes. (Now if I can only afford the discs and a player...) ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2002 22:08:01 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: o/harvard man Your intrepid reporter wasn't =quite= intrepid enough to go see =Scooby-Doo= (and as someone noted, people would have pointed at me and laughed if I had), but I did go to see SMG's =other= current movie, =Harvard Man=. James Toback, the director, got a lot of press a few years ago for his controversial =Black and White=, which got mixed reviews (and which I didn't see); he also directed the better-received =Two Girls and a Guy=, a three-character study with Robert Downey, Jr., Heather Graham, and Natasha Gregson Wagner (which I did see, and quite liked). =Harvard Man= was made a couple years ago, but has had trouble getting distributed. It's an odd movie. First of all, it feels weirdly disconnected: it has a lot of 60s attitudes (particularly about drugs), being at least partly based on Toback's own college years, but it's set in the present day. (A similar tactical error to Kubrick's setting =Eyes Wide Shut=--based on a 1926 story by Arthur Schnitzler--in contemporary New York.) Further, the plot is puzzlingly neat: despite a chaotic mix of college basketball fixing, the Mafia, the FBI, sex, drugs (but no rock'n'roll) and Wittgenstein(!), there's no strong feeling of conflict: whenever a crux occurs, the right person is in the right place at the right time to defuse the situation. In the end, nothing that happens in the movie has any consequences (except, perhaps, the LSD). SMG plays Cindy Bandolini(!!), cheerleader, basketball groupie, and Mafia princess(!!!). She's got a major supporting role and does a very good job. Joey Lauren Adams, whom some will remember from Kevin Smith's =Chasing Amy=, also makes a strong impression as the young baskeball star protagonist's philosophy professor. I can't say I exactly recommend =Harvard Man=, but I thought it was an OK movie, though whether it's a =successful= movie, I'm not really sure. Still, I'm the sort of person who would rather see a failed "art" movie than an achieved "entertainment" movie. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 20:50:28 -0700 From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: b/text of Independent (U.K.) article The URL was so long it wrapped, and that's probably why you couldn't access it via the Lynx automated links. Unfortunately the article only mentioned Roz's book, not _Fighting_, but so it goes. Here it is: Deconstructing Buffy They're writing theses, calling conferences and compiling essays... The academic world can't get enough of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'. But it's a kids' show, isn't it? Not quite, says Robert Hanks, who knows why Buffy has the critics by the jugular 01 July 2002 It used to be that a vampire was easy to deal with: you ate plenty of garlic, you waved a crucifix at it, you stuck a stake in it  if you wanted to be fussy about it you could go the whole hog and cut its head off and scatter millet over the corpse, so that if it should happen to reawaken for some reason, it would have to count all the grains before it came after you. These days, though, nobody does anything as straightforward as just killing a vampire: they have to go and deconstruct it too. Specifically, they go and deconstruct Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the American television series created by Joss Whedon. In October this year, the School of English & American Studies, and the School of Language, Linguistics and Translation Studies at the University of East Anglia will be playing joint host to a two-day conference entitled "Blood, Text and Fears: Reading Around Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (it was originally planned as a one-day conference but, apparently, interest from academics in Europe and the US was so intense that it had to be extended). Last year saw the publication of Reading the Vampire Slayer, a collection of essays edited by the critic Roz Kaveney, with such titles as "Entropy as Demon: Buffy in Southern California", "Vampire dialectics: Knowledge, institutions and labour", and "'They always mistake me for the character I play!': Transformation, identity and role-playing in the Buffyverse (and a defence of fine acting)". You can find out more about these things at Slayage, "the online international journal of Buffy studies" (www.slayage.tv), where you will also be invited to submit contributions for a planned new collection, Monsters and Metaphors: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The renowned orientalist Robert Irwin is a fan; so is the anti-science polemicist Bryan Appleyard. There's nothing new, now, about academics treating popular culture with a slightly absurd seriousness: large swathes of North America have been deforested to provide paper for theses called "Meep! Meep!  Roadrunner, Wile E Coyote and the Auditory Dynamic of Despair", and suchlike. But nothing has generated the quantity of commentary that Buffy has, and in a comparatively short time (the first episode was broadcast in early 1997). A little essential background: Buffy is Buffy Summers, a pretty, fluffy-headed Californian teenager who discovers that she is the Chosen One, the Slayer  latest in a long line of young women endowed with preternatural strength and fighting skills and charged with the task of slaying mankind's supernatural enemies  chiefly vampires. The town where Buffy lives, Sunnydale, is inconveniently sited over a Hellmouth, a portal to other dimensions which acts as a magnet to all kinds of demon. She is assisted by her schoolfriends Willow (a computer whizz and, later, trainee witch) and Xander (whose main qualities are a gift for snappy one-liners and dogged loyalty); by Rupert Giles, her English-born "Watcher", appointed to guide her with his knowledge of the occult; and by a variety of friends, lovers and allies of convenience  notably Angel, a "good" vampire who is the love of Buffy's life, and has been rewarded with his own spin-off series. Many people are put off by the fact that Buffy is genre fiction. Some Buffy fans complain that this is snobbery, but I think it is quite understandable: genres are defined by a set of expectations, and knowing what to expect is a dubious pleasure. But Buffy rarely settles for satisfying expectations. The scripts regularly add ingenious twists; the expectations are absorbed and transformed. For example, in "Buffy vs Dracula", the first episode of the fifth series (the most recent series on terrestrial television in Britain), Buffy found herself unable to resist the Count's wiles  seduced less by his saturnine good-looks and his ability to control minds than by his sheer celebrity. Knowing what to expect from a Dracula story became the programme's subject. Tried and trusted tropes of the horror genre crop up on a regular basis: werewolves, fish-men, murderous mummies, human sacrifices; but they are integrated into a larger drama of characters and relationships. Often, the supernatural subplot serves as a neat metonym for the wider drama: when Xander and a group of louder, rougher kids were turned into human hyenas while on a trip to the zoo, a comment was being made on the pack mentality of adolescent boys, the need to get in with the in-crowd. When Oz, Willow's cerebral boyfriend, struggled with lycanthropy, wasn't that just the universal struggle with physical urges writ large? It's not all just adolescent sex, though. In recent episodes, Buffy's "darker side" has become a focus of attention  a sense of kinship with the monsters she combats, and also an underlying desire to have done with the fighting and killing, an urge for oblivion that culminated, at the end of series five, with her (temporary) death: the tombstone read "She saved the world. A lot". To begin with, the series rested on the contrast between Buffy's night-time life as world-saviour and her daytime life as teenage girl, worrying about boys and clothes and school. But now what is at stake  the pun isn't easy to avoid  are the larger questions of what makes us human, how to be good and why we should bother, and why we should stay alive at all. The bleakness of the themes puts the series closer to Philip Roth, even Samuel Beckett, than to Anne Rice. All this makes it sound pretentious and heavy-going. But the other point to make about Buffy is that it is deliciously competent. More than 100 episodes have now been broadcast, plus 50 or so of Angel (which is somewhat inferior): that's over 100 hours of screentime now. Over that time, the dialogue has been unvaryingly slick and witty, often up there with the best Hollywood screwball comedies; the story-lines have been brilliantly laid out, within episodes but also over long spans of time. And the characters have grown in ways that are recognisable from life, while wholly unfamiliar to television  Xander has developed from classroom clown to believable builder; shy Willow, who used to worship Xander, has turned out confident and gay. This is what attracts the intellectuals: the fact that Buffy the Vampire Slayer allows you to choose whether you are going to wallow in mindless, soapy action, or indulge yourself in the luxury of thought. Either way, it is wonderful. Well, maybe not always wonderful. But four or five episodes of Buffy would be on my list of the 10 best pieces of television drama ever made: "The Zeppo", in which Buffy, Willow and Giles save the world from apocalypse in the background, while in the foreground a neglected, self-pitying Xander is thrown into a maelstrom of demon-slaying and sexual experience; "Hush", in which demons steal everybody's voices, and most of the dialogue is conducted in mime; "Superstar", in which a local nerd bribes a demon to transform reality, turning him into a fearless vampire-slayer and all-round sex-god; and "The Body", which followed the aftermath of the death of Buffy's mother  slow-moving cameras, oddly miked sound and long silences made for the most acute portrayal of the isolation of grief I've ever seen. At its best, the intelligence and compassion on display in Buffy can make you glad to be alive. Or at any rate, undead. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 21:02:27 -0700 From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: Re: b/=NYPost= DVD review At 06:37 PM 7/2/2002 , the NY Post wrote: >Does Fox do the best jobs of repackaging TV shows because it's smart or >does it look smart because it has the best shows to repackage? I wonder what they mean by that. I have no complaints about the content of the episodes in the Season 2 DVD, but I have some major complaints about the packaging. The infinitely fold-out-able box was annoying enough, but that's a minuscule complaint compared to that INCREDIBLY TEDIOUS AND IRRITATING video-game-style animation that you have to go through EVERY F***ING TIME you load a disc into the player. You can't skip it, you can't fast-forward: it's like the FBI warning, only pointless. I know that's the style with DVD now, but that doesn't mean I can't hate it. The season 1 DVD is a model of restraint by comparison, and with its use of little audio clips a lot more clever too. >For two years, beginning with >these shows, there was simply no better series on television. That's what I thought was the general consensus: 2nd and 3rd seasons were the best. More recent seasons have been strangely problematic. 4th season as a whole was fairly weak, 5th was somewhat better, 6th season as a whole has been tremendously disappointing; yet the four clearly outstanding individual episodes are from seasons 4, 4, 5, and 6. [Nobody here should need me to say what they are.] >It's nice to have the DVDs in >existence as a permanent reminder (for those who don't have tapes) of this >particular batch of episodes. I was watching 1st season on DVD during the period when the sad, sad later episodes of 6th season were airing. It was a very useful reminder of how good the show used to be. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 21:07:38 -0700 From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: Re: o/harvard man I'd kind of like to see "Harvard Man", especially for a big-screen role worthy of SMG's talent, which she certainly didn't get in S----y D-o. Also on my list, as I like John Sayles so much: "Sunshine State", which features Marc Blucas, ta-dum. And I see that he's also in the upcoming BBC film of "I Capture the Castle", fans of that cult novel please note. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2002 21:09:51 -0700 (PDT) From: Todd Huff Subject: ASH news This is an interesting story that makes sense when you think about it. A good deal for ASH if he's interested. http://www.peoplenews.com/Forward.do?forward=newsx&id=1003255&rangeFrom=1&rangeTo=6 Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V4 #99 ****************************