Once More With Feeling (Buffy the Vampire Slayer): Review

This episode is a spectacle to behold. Just - filled me with glee every single moment. Mom complained it was too cheesy, but that was the point, it was deliberately cheesy as a sort of homage to classic musicals.

Oh, yeah, in case you didn't know? Once More With Feeling is the ever-famous musical episode of Buffy.

This is the (within fandom) legendary group song, and I freaking love it. I mean, not just because I'm a Buffy fan and I have to, but because I legitimately love the way it's written. It's the Buffy mixture I love so much of touching, beautiful, and moments of hilarity. "I'm free if that bitch dies! ...I'd better help her out." "I think this line's mostly filler...." I just think the song's really pretty. (Got it on repeat as I write this.)

But this whole episode in general just filled me with glee. From Buffy's opening number which focuses on Buffy's current dilemma, which is that after having risen from the dead (being torn out of heaven by her friends who thought they were saving her from a hell dimension) she doesn't really have a purpose anymore... she's just kinda floating through life, surviving. Just Going Through the Motions, which is actually the name of the song. And it shows the concept beautifully, actually, while also including some great moments.

Demons: *singing* She's just going through the motions/Faking it somehow

One of the demons: *gets stabbed by Buffy* She's not even half the girl she..... ow. *falls over dead*

And also:

Buffy: *unties hot guy from the tree, rescuing him* Will I stay this way forever?/Sleepwalk through my life's endeavour?

Hot guy: How can I repay - 

Buffy: *dismissing him* Whatever. 

And it just gets better from there, from Anya's hard rock bit about the terrifying nature of bunnies, to Dawn starting to sing but being interrupted by scary kidnappers, to random citizens singing passionately about things like mustard stains getting washed out of their clothes and getting parking tickets.

But don't be fooled; this is not a happy-go-lucky musical where the only conflict is kinda superficial and we all know the guy and the girl will get together and live happily ever after. This isn't that. Actually, season six is known as one of the darkest seasons of the show, countered only by season seven, which I can't really talk about since I haven't seen it. The impending darkness of this season was kinda established in the third episode of the season, in which Buffy lies to her friends, telling them they rescued her from a hell dimension, and then confides in Spike (SPIKE of all people!) that in reality they had torn her out of heaven, and living in this dimension is basically hell now.

 Yeah. Dark.

 And they didn't just disregard that for the sake of having a happy musical. It's really rather grim. Tara discovers that Willow'd been using magic to alter her memory so that they wouldn't have to fight about something Willow didn't want to fight about and is rightfully upset, Giles decides that instead of helping Buffy he's impeding her growth and he should leave, Xander and Anya express terror at the idea of being married, Spike is really frustrated that Buffy is basically only talking to him because she doesn't feel she can talk to her friends anymore (she knows how he feels about her, so it's kind of a tease) and as a result Buffy ends up with no one left to help. So they didn't disregard the storyline to make this, is what I'm saying, and actually furthered the story arc.

And I'm impressed by that, actually, because this too easily could have been just a happy-go-lucky gimmick episode (and don't get me wrong, there were gimmicky pieces) but generally? It actually utilized the musical format. Because the point of having a musical is that music gets to your heart rather than your head, and so when you're singing you're singing your real feelings instead of lying to make other people feel better. Hence Buffy confessing to her friends that in reality she'd been in heaven and they'd ripped her out of there.

The episode is about communication. I mean, I don't know how they do musical episodes in other shows (do they do musical episodes in other shows? My friend told me they do, but I haven't seen any...), but in this one they're completely aware that they're bursting into song and saying things that will probably hurt other people around them, and it scares them and screws up their friendships. And I don't wanna say that's awesome because that sounds kinda cold-hearted, but I really liked that about the episode, because it kinda countered the (deliberate) cheesiness of some pieces.

Also, did I mention that it ends with Buffy and Spike kissing? I AM NOT ON BOARD WITH THIS. Don't get me wrong, I love Spike.... I ADORE Spike. Spike's the best character on the whole freakin' show. But Buffy and Spike....? Really Buffy? ANOTHER vampire? I mean, at least Spike has a personality (*coughcoughunlikeAngelcough*) and I will gladly concede that Spike and Buffy have a connection but I still find it hard to get behind the.... Spuffy. Maybe the rest of the season will change my mind. But I'm skeptical.

But that added to the episode, though, because needless to say after Spike leaving the Scoobies with a "Bugger this", and Spike's song demanding Buffy let him "rest in peace" (see it's clever 'cause he's dead), and his lines in Walk Through the Fire ("First he'll kill her then I'll save her.... No I'll save her, then I'LL kill her") it was unexpected. So maybe it's the surprise that's got me all mraaargh, cause it didn't feel completely unearned, but I dunno. Point is, the ending for the episode topped it off very well. So yeah.

So in conclusion, well done cast and crew of Buffy for this episode. It could have been bad. It wasn't. It was an unforgettable musical extravaganza Buffy style. It was awesome. Well. Freaking. Done.

So, without further ado, my favourite numbers from the episode:

Going Through The Motions. I've talked about that one already.

Rest in Peace. What can I say? I adore Spike, I love the way he visibly hates himself for bursting into song moments after bragging about how he seems to be immune, I love the end of the scene which I will not spoil but it's hilarious, and the song's just.... rockin'.

Standing In the Way. This scene is so moving. Anthony Stewart Head (Giles) is an amazing actor, and a very good singer. That is all.

Walk Through the Fire. Again, I've already talked about this one. Very pretty. Still got it on repeat.

The rest of it was awesome as well, I just really enjoyed these ones in particular. So..... this review's over.

And curtain.

P.S I just sent out for a book of sheet music for this episode. Thirty bucks, including shipping, 1-2 weeks. WORTH IT.

I'm not obsessed or anything.

Quotes to help with life: the eighth (?)

"Nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff. Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-your-chair-can't-control-yourself love it. When people call people nerds, mostly what they're saying is 'You like stuff.' Which is not a good insult at all. Like, 'You are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness.'"

- John Green

(John Green is just amazing okay. Between writing one of the few books on earth that have actually brought me to tears, writing teenagers in books like they can be witty and intelligent, AND organizing VidCon with the Nerdfighters [his fanbase]? He is made of awesome. Yeah, I'm a Nerdfighter. Didn't see that one coming, right?)

Mortal Instruments, City of Bones: MOVIE Review

Because I was forced to read the book by my friend Jacey, because it's part of her fandom (I'm just going to go ahead and say "Malec for life!" because if I don't I really won't be getting the whole "Jacey" thing across), and it..... isn't my favourite book I've ever read. I'll get to the books, maybe possibly if I feel like it.

But the movie. 

Considering the meh-ness of the source material, it was actually quite impressive. (Even Jacey admits the first book was "meh"). 

But before I get started, the main actress in the movie was totally ringing a bell with me through the whole thing and I couldn't figure out why until I finally realized that she looked exactly like Eliza Dushku, who played Faith on Buffy. Honestly, at first I thought it was her, until I remembered that Eliza Dushku could barely pull off playing a teenager in 1999, let alone now. So then I figured that they were probably related, it was a family thing. Show business is like that, so it made sense to me. Her last name was probably Dushku. Until I was informed by Jacey that her name is Lily Collins. Which really, just..... wha-huh?

Left, Lily Collins, right, Eliza Dushku. There is no way I am the only one seeing this. Right? RIGHT?!

But anyway. Not that that matters.

A brief summary:

Clary is totally a normal teenage girl with her normal teenage (geeky) friend, until one night at a club she witnesses a murder by people that no one else could see. One of these people, Jace, tracks her down, and guess what, he happens to be an (apparently) gorgeous teenage boy so whoa, big surprise, sparkage. (Holy predictable Batman but anyways). And then suddenly her mom is vanished and she gets attacked by a demon and before you know it, she (and her incredibly loyal geeky friend) are sucked into the world of the SHADOWHUNTERS. They're demon hunters. And then there's like a rogue Shadowhunter who took her mom and he's a bad guy and a bunch of stuff happens.

Yeah.

So, okay, the source material? Underwhelming.

The movie? Actually quite enjoyable.

I just have this to say, though: Jace is supposed to be friggin' gorgeous, and they get THIS guy to play him?

Am I the only one that thinks he's kinda ugly? Anyone? No? Fine. 

So anyways, the movie:

Quite well done. I dunno, it's hard to do this without comparing it to the book. The actress who played Clary, our Eliza Dushku lookalike, did a VERY good job with portraying Clary, and the guy who played Simon (A.K.A. the geeky friend) freakin' NAILED it. All the acting was very good, now that I think about it. I did have a problem with Jace - he's supposed to be very arrogant and non-chalant about, well, everything, and in this movie he treated everything like it was deadly serious. But besides that....

Also, they switched the plot around, like, a lot. It wasn't a bad thing, and probably worked better that way, I just thought I'd mention it.

The pacing was very good. In movies like the Hunger Games, where nothing ever happens until twenty minutes into the movie, and then another half hour until the Games actually start? Pacing is a problem. This movie did not have that problem. Everything moved at a good pace, not so slow that we were bored, not so fast we didn't know what was going on. It was good.

Everything was set up perfectly in this movie, also. There was nothing that came around that felt kinda cheap, everything was explained and made sense and was earned. Which, not gonna lie, I thought was going to be kind of a problem.

There was one thing that bothered me especially:

Valentine. A.K.A evil bad guy.

He's supposed to be crazy, no doubt, but a sophisticated kind of crazy. Sort of.... Hannibal Lectar-esque, but less creepy. He's supposed to seem reasonable, charismatic, intelligent, always going for "I've got the good of the world at heart" kinda thing going. The kind of guy who kills people, but is able to justify it and no one can argue with him without feeling wrong. All this, but with serious anger management issues, basically, is what Valentine is supposed to be like. Appearing to be a charismatic, intelligent humanitarian, when in actuality he's basically a cold-blooded, sadistic, racist murderer. I loved that when I was reading the books. He was such a fascinating character.

But there's definitely a line between the crazies. There's sophisticated crazy, like I just described, and then there's just psychotic, insane, I-will-murder-six-people-by-myself-with-my-bare-hands-if-you-don't-obey-me crazy. And, disappointingly, in this movie Valentine crossed that line.

Between trying to force Clary to drink his own blood, slamming heads into tables with scary force multiple times and nearly stabbing (what would seem) his own son, I just think they kinda missed the point of Valentine. He's supposed to be persuasive. That's where half the suspense from the original story came from. They missed that. And that disappoints me, because, truthfully, I liked the character of Valentine more than I liked Clary or Jace.

And I'm not even going to talk about that horrifically cheesy greenhouse scene.

But the thing about the movie is, surprisingly for me, the emotions were conveyed perfectly. It will scare you when its purpose is to be scary. It will make you laugh when its purpose is to be funny. That was extremely well done (especially with the scary part) so kudos to them for that.

So, yeah, it was enjoyable and about a billion times more exciting than (the book) I expected. I wouldn't necessarily watch it again anytime soon, but it's a fun experience while you're watching it.

3.5/5 stars. 

My Chain of Obsessions

Y'know what I found out the other day?

Whose Line had Jeff Davis on as a regular fourth seater.

Currently Jeff Davis does a podcast with Dan Harmon. Yes, the Dan Harmon who incidentally created one of my favourite shows ever, Community.

Due to my love of Community, I got myself a Greendale Community College T-shirt, which, guess what? A nearly identical one is worn by someone in a Jacksfilms video.

Jack Douglass, A.K.A. Jacksfilms, also happens to play Intern 2 on a certain web series called MyMusic.

This same web series also features a character called Indie, who happens to be played by Adam Busch, who also, incidentally, portrayed the character Warren on a little show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was created by Joss Whedon, the same person who created a little show called Firefly.

IS YOUR MIND BLOWN BECAUSE MY MIND WAS BLOWN.

I guess this just shows that at least I'm consistent in my obsessions? I mean, if they all kinda lead to each other like that, it just means that they all kinda have something in common, right? I'm going to go ahead and say intelligent humour. Yeap, I'm playing the smart card. Deal with it.

Joss Whedon Scripts are the Best Scripts

I found a website that has all the original shooting scripts for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Of course, being a student of storytelling, I read them. Not all of them, but a good amount of them. And, because Joss Whedon (along with people like Benny and Rafi Fine) are on my list of insane people that are to be admired, reading these scripts have made it so that I have a special folder on my desktop, simply entitled "Joss Whedon Scripts are the Best Scripts".

Here's what's inside.

(If you can't read them due to the size being incompatible with the blog, you can just click on them and you should get them in the size they were originally screenshotted as).

This one isn't REALLLLLLY funny like the others, but Spike's "love's bitch" monologue is one of my favourite monologues, like, ever. I know it by heart. So it always interests me to read it how it's written versus how it's delivered. You'd be surprised at how much delivery can change it. 

"Pruitts the son of a bitch into unconsciousness". I'm very curious as to how many scripts that aren't created by someone completely insane describe things like that.  

"Incredibly poignant Sarah Mclachlan song". I laughed out loud, not gonna lie. 

I love Whedon speak! He "gets snacky". 

Again, this one isn't funny as much. I just find it interesting because in these scripts, even though the character is (in this case) already casted, and you can definitely explain the look to wardrobe and makeup yourself, they describe the character as if it's a novel. I don't know, I find that interesting.

"fruit punchy". They reference a dumb joke made by their own show two seasons ago in the script whilst describing what is essentially a Buffy supervillain. I love these people.

These last three are all from the finale of season five, in which (SPOILER ALERT) Buffy dies, and I kinda get the feeling that Joss MAYYYY have been so (unsurprisingly) passionate about this one that he stayed up a little too late working on it. Well am I WRONG?

Yeah...... these are pretty much the best.

Mama: Review

Yep, that horror movie that came out relatively recently. Directed by Guillermo Del Toro, who directed the utterly FANTASTIC foreign movie Pan's Labyrinth (and who also helped with a book called "The Strain" that I never finished reading). The concept was cool, Guillermo Del Toro had no problem scaring me to death with Pan's Labyrinth, so, needless to say..... I was kinda excited for this movie.

A brief summary:

A man murders his wife and kidnaps his daughters..... something about a murder/suicide, I'm not sure, but the point is as he's fleeing with his daughters he crashes the car. So they're wandering through the woods and they come to an apparently abandoned cabin (though the older daughter clearly tells him "There's someone in there") and basically the dad gets taken out of the picture by a strange ghost type phantom thingy. Five years later, people are still searching for the girls and they finally find them. Except they've gone feral. Eventually the oldest one, Victoria, who's nine years old, recovers her language and social skills, though for Lily, who was one when the incident occurred, and is now six, is obviously having more trouble. Anyway, Victoria tells the psychologist about someone she calls "Mama" who took care of them. The psychologist comes up with the brilliant theory that in order to survive on their own, the girls created their own, imaginary guardian/parent figure to keep them safe. They're put in a certain house for special cases like themselves with their uncle and his girlfriend. And then..... Mama followed them. Cue the horror.

Except, my first reaction? Not horror. At least not as I know it. I'm not sure what it IS, precisely, but it didn't seem like a horror movie, the same way that movies like The Woman In Black or Dawn of the Dead or Insidious or.... or even something like The Messengers (which is a crappy Kristen Stewart movie) seemed like a horror movie. I mean, it was scary..... and there were enough jump scares, for sure....... but it seemed that the movie was trying less to scare you and more to make you understand about the situation as a story. I'm not saying it's a bad thing - I really enjoyed that side of the movie -  I'm just saying it was a different tone for a horror movie to take. An interesting choice.

And that honestly surprised me. You've got your ghost, you've got your creepy children and creepy children's drawings, you've got the contorted bodies of ghosts and possessed people, insane asylums, don't look in the closet, incoherent whispers.... I mean, it was filled with things that horror movies do specifically to scare you, but it didn't FOCUS on those things, and that's what I find interesting. It focused on the relationships between the people in the movie - Lucas and Annabel, the girls and them, "Mama" and the girls, etc. Which again, is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is an interesting choice.

I'm not gonna lie. I was scared. I yelped. I hugged my blanket pretty much the whole movie. They nailed the suspense, and the release. But I'll not be getting nightmares from this movie, I don't think, and that's what lacked.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but when I watch a horror movie, I want to be haunted by it. I want to be scared to be home alone again. I want to have to sleep with the light on for a week. I want to be terrified of things I see out of the corner of my eye, and of sounds that I probably wouldn't even hear if I wasn't so damn tense. The Woman in Black did that for me, no doubt. By the time my parents came home the day after I watched The Woman in Black I was sitting on the floor cuddling my dog because I was scared to go anywhere else in my house. Mama won't do that to me. I knew it as I was watching it that it wouldn't be doing that to me. And I thought about why.

And I realized that this is why:

The secret of horror movies is to exploit what we don't know. That's part of the reason why Alien was so succesful in its time - they never SHOWED the alien, in its entirety. What you saw were shadows, drool, people looking up with terror on their faces. That's why The Blair Witch Project is one of the "1001 Movies You Have to See Before You Die" - because those moments of pitch blackness where all you hear is screaming and panting? They feed on your imagination. And no movie can match the high def imagery of your own imagination. Most ghost movies show nothing more than silhouettes, shadows, blurred reflections, out of focus behind-your-back shots, maybe a real shot of the ghost, but from r e a l l y  f a r  a w a y. The vaguer you are, the more scared your audience gets. Hell, Paranormal Activity was insanely low budget and insanely popular because YOU NEVER SAW THE DEMON. You never knew where it was, what it was doing, only how it affected things in the house - a door slam here, a light flicker there, etc. Because the things that are scary about horror movies are not ghosts, or demons, or monsters or whatever - the scary things about horror movies are the things that we don't know. We don't know why ghosts are here, or why they do what they do, or what it'll do next, we don't know what demons are or what they'll do next - more than anything we fear the unknown.

Which is apparently something that Guillermo Del Toro did not account for. Because in Mama, we knew everything.

We knew her whole story. We knew her entire backstory, we knew where she was, we knew why she was doing what she was doing. I mean, we were even told what ghosts, for the purposes of the story, ARE ("bent emotions, doomed to repeat itself until it finally rights the wrong"). But what....... nagged at me the most is we knew EXACTLY what Mama looked like. I mean, no room for imagination. They showed her face almost as freely as one would show the face of the protagonist. And I'm not saying that's wrong, I'm just saying that it contradicts what the horror genre is based on. Because a flash of her face is scary enough - it's a frightening image - but when you see it as much as they showed it, it stops being scary, and you can't imagine something scarier because they've already showed it to you enough that you remember it.

I don't think Guillermo Del Toro is a horror director by trade. Pan's Labyrinth was very frightening, but it wasn't horror. It was the definition of a thriller. And what made that movie so scary was the insane detail with which they showed things, which is the exact opposite strategy you have to have when directing horror.

So, the final word? I liked the movie. Not gonna lie. I enjoyed it. But I find it difficult to count as horror. It's pretty good as what it is, whatever genre that may be. Let's leave it at that.

4/5 stars.

This Post is an Allegory, I SWEAR!

So in my last post I mentioned (a few times) this Youtuber I've recently grown quite fond of called Jacksfilms (whose real name is Jack Douglass).

I didn't mention him quite as much as I wanted to in the last post because it was actually supposed to be more about MyMusic than good ol' Jack here - which is quite remarkable because I mentioned Jacksfilms quite a lot.

But I decided he deserved his own post because there's something about his channel(s) and his videos that kind of..... I can't think of an appropriate verb. It affects me. In a positive way.

Let me explain.

Jack is around..... 25. Thereabouts, methinks. He majored in film and minored in music when he went to college (which I could totally completely see myself doing) and now he makes his living by making Youtube videos. Literally. That's his job. His job is to make music videos or sketches or parodies or whatever that make people laugh.

And he doesn't take it lightly. Every Monday you've got a new PMS (parody/music video/sketch), every Friday we've got a new Your Grammar Sucks video. I mean, now and then the videos are a little late, but they come. They're made. And when they're late they tend to be really good.

And you can tell, when you really think about the videos you're watching that there is a LOT of TIME and EFFORT and ENERGY put into his videos. I mean, you can tell. They're not feature films or anything, but it's a production nonetheless. It's obvious.

But what you can also tell from those videos is that Jack LOVES IT. He loves working on his videos. He's got his own green screen and he buys new equipment like microphones and he animates stuff into his videos. AT LEAST half the time he's working on them with friends and stuff - there's a remarkably large community of relatively big Youtubers all kinda in one area in California - so in a bunch of his videos you've got Tobuscus who has his own dedicated fanbase (Jack does too..... we're called his "biches" [pronounced BIH - HES, extra H, Hebrew style]) and you've got Sean Klitzner. This trio in particular are known for working together and being friends, to the point where they've sort of been dubbed the "Sideburns Crew" - all three of them have really fantastic sideburns. He's also friends with Olga Kay and has appeared in her videos and she's appeared in his and a lot of the time he's just goofing off with his friends. Right?

Jack has been making videos for seven years. And still going strong. This gig just doesn't get old for him.

And maybe this is the "two o'clock in the morning clearly haven't gotten enough sleep - holy crap  it's three thirty, when did that happen?!" talking, but I think that's admirable. That he's still going strong, and enjoying it.

I mean, especially in Your Grammar Sucks, it doesn't look like it takes that much effort, right? I mean, he just stands in front of a green screen and recites bad comments. But the thing is, he narrows down like sixty comments to about thirty - seriously, he showed the process, he read all the submissions and picked the ones he thought were really funny - and then he reads them all, out loud, individually, sometimes in different voices that he can choose from in the editing room. I mean, I would say Your Grammar Sucks is probably his most low-maintenance series he has going and that's still a lot of time and effort. And I can't even imagine how long it takes to edit that. Hours, I would guess.

And then.... well, I mean, just look at the rest of his videos. Lots of time, lots of energy put into that.

^He wrote that. And shot that. And edited that. Colour me impressed. (Even if he doesn't have the chest hair.... most of his videos where he's shirtless you can see that he shaved his chest hair into the batman symbol. Because he's a badass, that's why. Yeah, I heard you questioning it all the way from here.)

I mean, then you've got, my personal favourite at the moment:

Never mind that it's Christmas themed. That's a LOT of energy put into that. I mean, come on. You can tell. Right?

I've realized recently that I'm always attracted to (and then tend to get obsessed with) things that have a lot of passion put into them. Things where you can tell that the people making it actually really enjoy themselves and put all that time and energy into it not because they have to but because they genuinely want to. It makes a difference in what the thing ends up being, right? Can you imagine what Whose Line would have been like if they were sick of doing improv? If they didn't enjoy each other? It wouldn't have lasted eight seasons, I can tell you that. 

You can just tell. That's the thing. It comes off kind of stale if they're not really enjoying themselves (that's also what I loved about Community - all the cast members are actually friends, and it definitely is part of the show's magic). And Jacksfilms just is not stale at all. He loves what he's doing. I mean, he's the first Youtuber I've seen where he seems genuinely delighted everytime he gets fanmail. Seriously. Like, almost equal excitement for the smaller things - 

As well as the bigger things - 

And I really like that. 

So how is this post an allegory?

Well let me tell you. 

My fondest wish is that when I am grown up and I have to start making a living for myself and earn money and everything is that I am able to make money by doing something that I love to do, that I am happy to put all my energy and enthusiasm into and I don't get tired of. And Jack does just that. I mean, I'm not saying I'll be a Youtuber - I'm not NEARLY entertaining enough - but I do want to do something that I'll be happy about doing every day. That is my wish. And people like Jack give me hope that I can do that. I watch his videos, I see the time and energy he puts into it, and the fun he has doing it, and it just lights me up. 

See, no matter whether he's doing a sketch with his friends - 

- helping one of them with THEIR videos - 

^ classic Sideburns Crew right here

 - or just messing with them - 

- he has as much fun doing this - 

- as he does doing this. 

(This is my favourite song now, actually. Thank you Jack Douglass.)

And I think that's remarkable.

NAILED IT. 

P.S Look, I would completely spam you with Jacksfilms videos and trivia, but that's kind of a jerk thing to do. I will, however, give you just one more video:

There's a lovely trend you may have seen on Youtube recently, the "Draw my Life" phenomenon. Every Youtuber is doing it. And usually I'm not into big Youtube trends (I only found out about Harlem Shake LONGGGGGG after anyone cared anymore) but this particular trend is actually kind of beautiful. People just..... tell their life story. Which is just so fascinating, to see a different depth to someone that you only know from Youtube or whatever, to have people be that open about stuff. It's awesome. And when I saw Jack's video....... let's just say that I connected.