Tag Archives: Joss Whedon

Captain America And The Real Myths Told By Superheroes (A Discussion)

A few years ago, when the first Captain America film came out, I was visiting my friend Phil Rockstroh. Phil is “a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City,” so leftist he makes me look like Ronald Reagan, and he watched the film with me. To him, of course, Steve Rogers was the very major model of a modern jingoistic character designed to arouse fascistic and nationalistic feelings in the weak-minded.

I tried pointing out that Cap had been created by a couple of Jewish kids trying to encourage Americans to stand against the Nazi threat in Europe before America was even in the war. I tried to delineate the progressive values Captain America has shown over the decades, and how at every point in the film, the creators subverted the potential jingoism that can, indeed, be a part of such a character. I predicted that in future films we would see a very strong anti-authoritarian theme at work in not just the Captain America films but in Marvel films in general. And I’m happy to say I was right.

Recently, while discussing the Joss Whedon/Black Widow foofaraw, we revisited the topic and the discussion got interesting, so I’m sharing it here. Making an occasional contribution is my friend Ed Hall,  a writer and the co-editor of Mothership: Tales From Afrofuturism and Beyond. Continue reading →

I’m Not Your Dummy — And Neither Is Joss Whedon (Part 2 of 2) (UPDATED 10/2017)

Art by Cliff Chiang

[Read Part 1, “I’m Not Your Dummy — Why No One Should Have To Be “The Right Kind of Ally,” here.]

Joss Whedon is a feminist.

He claims the term as a central pillar of his identity. He exerts a great deal of his creative energy on crafting narratives which focus on complex, strong female characters, and behind the scenes he goes out of his way to create opportunities for female creatives. He is a persistent activist in feminist causes like Equality Now, and has been an outspoken supporter of feminist targets of misogynistic harassment like (the awesome) Anita Sarkeesian.

But Joss is not the “right kind of ally.”

Last week, after Avengers: Age of Ultron opened (the film from my dream in part 1), there was a vicious shitstorm of online invective against him because of his treatment of the Black Widow in the film. He also left Twitter, without saying why, and many assumed it was because of the abuse. Or, as one blogger derisively put it, “Feminist and female writers take issue with black widow depiction. A lot of them do. Joss gets saddy pants and leaves Twitter.”

That same blogger was full of scorn for Joss and admiration for “what these intelligent and brilliant women wrote about their concerns with avengers 2…” And what sort of intelligent, brilliant commentary did we see?

Continue reading →

I’m Not Your Dummy — Why No One Should Have To Be “The Right Kind of Ally” (Part 1 of 2)

So I woke up one morning way too fucking early, with a dream dying in my head…

I’m at a huge theater with my girlfriend and my son, waiting to see the first showing of the new Avengers movie, and a nasty racial brawl is about to break out over a stupid misunderstanding. Something annoying was said, someone replied with annoyance, and several others took that as deliberate insult. A spark of irritation falls toward a volatile pool of abiding resentment. Huge violence is about to happen.

I just want to watch the movie, but am also naturally concerned about the fact that we’re smack in the middle of a crowd about to run riot. So I foolishly interject, redirecting the ringleader’s anger my way, focusing the conflict down to me and him rather than everybody. He rushes me and I back away, drawing him from the group. I don’t fight him, I don’t submit to his violence, I try to placate him, to calm him, to help him see that I was just trying to get his attention and there’s no reason to fight. This being a dream, it works. We laugh awkwardly and return to our seats. Everybody gets to see the movie, nobody’s going to bleed or die.

And I awoke. It was still dark, and I’d gotten maybe four or five hours sleep, but I was wide awake. I found myself ruminating about a recent blog post I wrote, and about the reaction it got (and didn’t get). Only after I gave in to the inevitable and got up, while I steeped some hot tea, did I make the connection between that rumination and the dream which preceded it. Continue reading →

Buffy vs. The Black Widow, Who Wins? (Joss Whedon Lets Us Know)

In a short Q&A with USA Today, Joss Whedon was asked who he thought would win in a fight between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Natasha Romanov, the Avengers‘ Black Widow. His response is a very entertaining action sequence all by itself:

Buffy would go easy at first, but as soon as Natasha popped her with a Widow Sting, she’d start bringing some slayer brawn to the fray. Natasha’s fast, but a couple of good connects and she’s wobbling, possibly something broken — she whips out her glock and now Buffy’s dodging — right where Natasha wants her. Natasha shoots the cable holding the steel barrels and they tumble onto Buffy, nearly burying her — Buffy just arcs out of the way, grabbing the splintered cable and swinging directly onto Natasha, a bullet grazing her cheek as her feet land hard on the Russian’s shoulders, sending her back flat — crack! — on the floor, Buffy wrenching the gun away and tossing it, fist ready for the final strike. Natasha, struggling to stay conscious, says the fight’s over. Buffy agrees, but Natasha explains: She poisoned Buffy hours ago. That waitress that brought her salad …? Natasha smiles. The poison is dormant — ’til it’s activated by adrenaline. Buffy’s eyes narrow. “Too bad I didn’t use any.” Wham! Natasha’s out for the count, and Buffy’s heading — slowly — to Willow for a mystical cleanse.

That’d be my first guess.


Good Memories of 2010, Day 3: The Black Widow

Fifteen or more years back, some friends and I were talking and the question arose, “If you could write and direct a movie about any Marvel Comics character, who would it be?”

I didn’t even think about it. “The Black Widow.”

It wasn’t an answer I’d have predicted. I wasn’t an enormous Black Widow fan, and hadn’t really given her much consideration in any way when I wasn’t reading about her or admiring some George Perez portraiture. But when the question appeared, my mind was on the case, and the sultry sexiness, mystery, and espionage background of the heroine offered up exactly the sort of cool superheroic options I was in the mood for.

And there’s just never enough hot femme fatales in catsuits on the screen. Continue reading →

Make Your Own Buffy

Sometimes I’m amazed at what people think to do — and can do. Check this out:


That’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, made out of paper. Somebody did that.


You can too, if you want. You can download the images, print ’em out, cut ’em out, and put ’em together for your very own. Just go here.

Me, I’m just going to watch in admiration.

TODAY ONLY: Full Set of ANGEL for CHEAP @ Amazon!!!

Amazon’s “Deal of the Day” today is the boxed set of all 5 seasons of Joss Whedon’s Angel, usually selling for $125, for only $57!!!

This is an incredible deal, for some incredible television. If I didn’t have all of it already, I’d grab it up.

You can get it here.

Joss Whedon Hilariously Accepts the Bradbury Award

Joss, showing yet again how freaking funny he is, as he accepts the Bradbury Award this year from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.It’s heartening that the Story God was so inspired by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury was the guy who made me decide to be a writer.

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How to Save Dollhouse (or whatever show floats your boat)

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An excellent article on “The Big Money,” which is an offshoot of Slate, breaks down the fruitlessness of trying to boost the numbers of people watching a show as it’s televised if those people are not in the microscopic subset of watchers with Nielsen boxes:

Trying to convince more people to watch a struggling show on TV is entirely useless. The television industry is not a democracy; the only votes that count—scratch that, the only people allowed to vote at all—are the 12,000 to 37,000 households that have Nielsen boxes sitting above their TVs. Nielsen boxes are poll stations for the Nielsen company—the organization that reports all of the ratings for the television industry. If Nielsen doesn’t know you exist, then neither do the TV networks. And if the TV networks don’t know you exist, then tuning in to an endangered show is a waste of everyone’s time. If a show is turned on and Nielsen isn’t there to hear it, it most definitely does not make a sound…

…But the country has only somewhere between 12,000 and 37,000 homes reporting back with data. Compare that with the more than 112 million television-equipped households in this country. Now, even if we assume that these Nielsen readings are accurate—and there are many who believe that’s not the case—the huge gap between 12,000 and 112 million means almost everyone is stripped of an actual voice in the process….The “save our show” campaigns are ill-advised because they fail to take into account this all-important gap between the sample size and the size of the sampled audience.

The way to bypass this shitty system is to watch the episodes of your beloved show online:

The alternative is to drive people where they can actually be counted—and these days that’s online. The Internet offers metrics everywhere you turn. The networks can analyze the number of streams, number of ad impressions, number of page views, number of visits, number of visitors, number of comments, etc. It’s a democratic space where the eyes and participation of fans can actually be seen by the network bosses making the decisions. Unlike with analog TV, online fans can actually speak directly to power. So whether it’s through iTunes, Hulu, or one of the networks’ proprietary streams, the smart way to campaign for a show’s renewal is to stream it after the fact…

You can also record the show on your DVR, then watch it within three days. If you do that, it gets counted. If you just watch the show live through that same DVR, you don’t count. Let me say that again, lest you missed it: if you’re watching your favorite show live, your viewing does not count. Unless you’re a Nielsen household.

So if you want to help Dollhouse stay on the air, or The Sarah Connor Chronicles or Chuck or Gene Simmons’s Family Jewels (gods forbid), do your part by either recording your show on DVR and watching it soon after, or by watching (and even rewatching) episodes online.

And, I point out to you again, the last several episodes of Dollhouse are available to watch free, right this minute, on www.hulu.com. Get thee hence.

Hope for Dollhouse

At the Paley Fest event dedicated to Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Joss Whedon updated folks on the Dollhouse situation with Fox:

We also talked about next season, they called me specifically to say we’ve been hearing you sound a little despondent, being very clear about this, the show is not cancelled. The numbers have been soft, but the demographic is wonderful. DVR is great, they [FOX] are big fans of the show and they’re waiting to see what happens, so now I’ve gone from a place that’s sort of ehhhhhh, they don’t even care, no one loves me, to a place of – God, I can’t believe I’m saying this…hope.

So…fingers crossed. Keep watching the show, or start watching if you’re not, it’s great (remember, you can find the last several episodes online at www.hulu.com).

Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse: Smart as Hell, Kicking Serious Ass

dollhouse

If you’ve been following my reactions to Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse, you know I was luke-warm toward it at first, then really annoyed with it, then after seeing episodes 6 and 7, I really started to like it and said it was good, but not quite Joss good yet.

Well, now I’ve seen episodes 8 and 9, and I’m loving the show.

Since episode 6, “Man on the Street,” they have fixed the anthology-show weakness that plagued the first five episodes, and each episode has focused on the Dollhouse and its people rather than on the misadventures of their clients-of-the-week. The evolution of Echo as a character is fascinating to watch, considering there’s not supposed to be a character there, but there most definitely is. Those are some still waters running very deep. And the development of relationships and character backstory gets more and more compelling; in this latest episode, “A Spy in the House of Love,” we find out the major secrets of a couple of characters, one of which is a complete surprise and leads to a much deeper understanding of that character, leaving incredible potential for the stories ahead.

There are many themes at work here. This latest episode played brilliantly with matters of trust, from the first conversation between Echo and her handler Boyd, to the implications of their final scene. And seeing the Tabula Rasa Echo step forward as an instigator of significant action was a masterstroke of storytelling and character; I literally got goose bumps.

That a character with no agency develops agency through her own innate strength, even while devoid of her past and identity, is an incredible dramatic device. This show is all about how people use people, and issues of power and responsibility and all that, but the most important thing it’s about might just be the re-enfranchisement of the disenfranchised.

Who on earth could be more disenfranchised than the dolls? Their very selves ripped out of them, programmed and reprogrammed to serve the desires of others, they are the ultimate slaves. And here we have one of them somehow growing as a person right before our eyes, and you just know there are big things ahead.

And hopefully we’ll get to see all of the big things Whedon wants to show us. Fox is playing its usual bullshit games with the show, and now for some reason has decided to show this entire season (and a tenuous “kudo” to them for doing that, at least) except the thirteenth and final episode. Apparently the 12th wraps up the season tidily, and the 13th is sort of a coda after the fact…but still. It doesn’t indicate that the network is supporting the show, and doesn’t bode well for a second season.

But, hopefully they’re watching the reviews, which have been excellent since episode 6, and will recognize they have a gem on their hands and will allow it to grow. This is not just a damn good show, after all.

This show is Joss good.

[NOTE: As of this writing, you can watch episodes 5-9 at www.hulu.com. The show started really getting good in ep. 6, but 5 is pretty good and has some impact on events in later episodes. If you haven’t seen them, catch ’em while you can.]

Numfar, do the dance of grief.

Sad news: Andy Hallet, Lorne the green karaoke demon from Angel, has died from heart disease. He was 33.

I didn’t know him except through his work, but his work was so wonderful that I find myself missing him. He was incredibly talented, and by all accounts a very sweet guy.

For years, whenever I heard “Its Not Easy Being Green” I felt a touch of melancholy because it made me think of the loss of Jim Henson. Now it will be doubly sad.

Catching Up With Dollhouse

eliza1Earlier, I was pretty hard on Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse, which airs on Fox, the network too stupid to make Firefly a hit.

My basic problem with the show was that, while it had a great premise with huge potential, the active structure of the show shoved the things that were interesting about it into the corners and filled the space with bland stories that had little permanent importance to the history the show was building. In other words, the intriguing people running the dolls, and the intriguing things starting to happen to the dolls (especially Echo), were serving as a framing device for stories that were a hell of a lot less interesting.

I wasn’t alone in my response. Many other Whedon fans (and I am, very very much, a Whedon fan) were finding themselves really not liking a show they’re preconditioned to root for. The ratings started weakly, and dropped. Messages came forth from Whedon headquarters, implying that Fox had been too heavy-handed and interfering at first (easy to believe, all things considered), but had loosened up after a while and allowed Joss and his team to start doing things the way they really wanted to.

Give us till the sixth episode, they pleaded. It’ll start to get good.

Well, the sixth and seventh episodes have aired at this point. Major things happened, game-changers. Echo went off-task a few times, which seems to be her hobby. The banal storylines that were unrelated to the main story arc went away, and the stories that replaced them had significant impact on the characters and the arc.

Know what? It’s getting good. It’s getting real good. It’s not quite Joss good, just yet, but I do see that coming, and I’m now enjoying the journey.

Unfortunately, the show probably won’t get to explore its full potential. It is on Fox, where shit thrives and great shows die young, and the slow crawl out the gate and low ratings won’t help. I read that Fox is committed to showing the full thirteen episode season, then won’t rerun the show during the summer. I’m thinking that also means they won’t be picking it up for the next season.

That’s a shame, as I think it has the makings of a great show. But at least we’ll have the thirteen episode story arc to enjoy…or the latter half of it, at least, since the first half kinda blew. And Joss can move on to other things, and those things will hopefully be Joss good. Maybe someday we’ll get to enjoy one of his creations for a bunch of years again. But it probably won’t be on Fox.

OK, about that Dollhouse episode…

I made myself watch it. Which was actually pretty easy to do. Easier than making myself finish it, anyway.

The storyline had Echo programmed to be a backup singer to a Beyonce-style pop singer who was being stalked by a homicidal fan. Eliza got to sing. Fox got to have a hot chick in Red Sonja clothes singing bad songs. And we got an After School Special look into the tormented life of the poor pop diva, who finds herself molded into what other people want her to be…hey! Just like Echo!

Yawn.

Great Toasted Jesus With Gravy, I hope it gets better than this. The entire middle third or more was just pure tedium. The final act picked up somewhat, as Echo went “off task” (because she’s been so reliably on task on every other job we’ve seen her on, right, she just never malfunctions) and got creative in solving the problems with her own take on her mission parameters. There was something genuinely cool in that, in the implication that she’d recognized Sierra, and in the little headshake she did back at the Dollhouse, after her Tabula had allegedly been Rasa-ed again.

The problem so far is that the Dollhouse itself, and its workings, and the effects of the personality implanting process on the Actives, is the most interesting stuff in the show, and the structure of the show shoves all that cool stuff into the background and focuses on stand-alone TV stories that could be from any mediocre TV action-drama. A smart hostage negotiator tries to help a kidnapped girl and faces the demons from her own past. A person finds herself hunted by another human for sport (and we’ll call the predator “Richard Connell” just to let you know this is homage, not just another tired retread of Connell’s story “The Most Dangerous Game.”) A pop diva is stalked by a dangerous fan…

Who the fuck cares?

I want to know all the cool stuff without having to suffer through the stuff that’s basically just a humdrum anthology show. I am genuinely interested in Echo, in what’s going on in her head, in her relationship with the other Actives and her handler, and in what the repercussions of her apparent re-growth as an individual of some sort may be. But damn, I hope the stories she finds herself thrust into are going to be way better than this, or we’ll never see much of that cool stuff because this show will die. And unlike Firefly, which Fox royally screwed, it’s going to deserve what it gets.

Oh. I have a new DOLLHOUSE to watch. How ’bout that.

Yesterday was all lack of sleep and divorce mediation and migraine, then a regenerative evening with my son. So I woke up this morning, saw him off to spend the rest of the weekend with his mom, and groggily looked at the ol’ Comcast DVR (still holding in there by the skin of its rotten teeth because I just haven’t gotten around to canceling service yet) to see what I might catch up on.

Hey. There was a new Battlestar Galactica last night. Cool. And there was a…Dollhouse. The third episode of the new series by Joss Whedon, who I consider a deity of storytelling and stuff. Cool…?

Huh. How about that. I watched last week and enjoyed that episode a lot more than I’d enjoyed the pilot, and even started to relate to some characters, got a kick out of the early signs of Echo’s coming individuation…felt more positively about the series ahead.

But now, here I was with Galactica and Dollhouse awaiting my attention, and I was psyched about only one of them, and it wasn’t the Whedon one. I wanted to watch it, sure, but the way I want to do the dishes that are cluttering up the kitchen counter at the moment. I ought to watch it, it’s Whedon, surely it has many pleasures ahead to offer…

But right now, it feels like a chore.

Sigh.

So I watched Galactica, and it was actually sort of ponderous and slow, though narratively interesting. The Dollhouse ep may prove more engaging when I get to it, and put the lie to my gut’s cynical response this morning. Here’s hoping.

On a brighter note, before he left this morning, my son and I watched the latest episode of Cartoon Network’s Batman: The Brave and the Bold. I’d avoided this show for a while because it looked way too campy for my tastes, I like Batman all dark and tormented and realistic. I finally gave in though, and we’ve been watching it and enjoying it fully. It’s silver age Batman through the filter of contemporary comics writing, which is to say, it is cheesy and over the top, but it’s smart as hell.

So of last night’s recordings, Batman scores an A-, Galactica a B-, and Dollhouse an Incomplete.

I’ll let you know what its final grade is when I get around to it. Because surely I’ll get around to it. Right?

My Thoughts on Dollhouse

I didn’t love it. I hope to. Maybe I will in time.

I have always loved Joss Whedon’s work. I’ll watch, or read, or listen to, anything he does. He’s a smart man, a funny man, and a master storyteller man.

I also really like Eliza Dushku. Not only is she a hotty, she’s brainy, and she’s a very talented actress who’s been underused over the years.

But Dollhouse. To be bluntly honest about it, if last night’s episode were exactly the same but not a Joss Whedon creation, I can’t say for sure I’d watch again next week.

The setup — Dusku and others are “Actives,” agents for a secret organization whose personalities have been wiped and are replaced in full by other people’s personalities when sent out on various missions-for-hire — is intriguing. On the meta level, it’s an interesting metaphor for the life of an actor, who (if they’re actually a good actor) goes from personality to personality for different jobs. I can see where Joss thinks he can use the structure to explore issues of identity, what it means, how we interact, how we use each other…thematically, it has a lot of potential.

To me, its great weakness (aside from the fact that it’s on Fox, and their meddling in the show is already as obtrusively obvious as a bumper sticker stuck in the middle of the screen) is that the setup might lend itself overmuch to Dollhouse being an anthology show of a sort, each episode a different kind of story that’s disconnected from the greater story arc, and Echo and the other Actives carrying the series on the weight of ever-shifting personalities. How much, week to week, can Joss make us care about the Actives, who are rarely consistently anyone, and when they are, they’re pliable dullards wandering around a pretty room?

So far, I’m moderately interested in the characters, but I don’t care about them at all.

The first half hour was burdened with exposition, which is to be expected in a pilot, but it also reeked of Fox’s network style. The motorcycle chase was ludicrous and boring, the sexy dancing was obvious (if not, truthfully, unwelcome), and the storytelling was patchy. I suspect the original pilot Joss wrote was superior, and the Fox execs wanted him to “cut to the chase” and “add the sexy,” and forced him to build a Jenga tower with some pieces made of pudding. Unfortunately, the Fox execs aren’t going anywhere, they’ll still be making demands as the show develops, and most of the demands will likely be stupid.

Al the same, it is a Joss Whedon show, so I’m here for the duration, unless it turns really bad. I do think it’ll improve, and I hope that Joss’s intentions play out effectively. There’s potential for all sorts of action and emotion and exploration of human existence and relationships, and I’m sure Joss has lots of twisty ideas to surprise us with. Here’s hoping it all gets really good.

Writing Tips From Joss Whedon

Danny Stack at his “Scriptwriting in the U.K.” blog offers up “Joss Whedon’s Anatomy of a Screenplay,” a short piece originally published in 4Talent magazine. As Joss is one of the living gods of Story Itself, I am always willing and eager to absorb any wisdom that trickles down from his pad on Olympus (or his Olympus typewriter, maybe, which would be a cool bit of godlike wisdom product placement, except he probably writes on a computer like the rest of us schlubs, so damn). (But then again, his pad on Olympus, that’s not bad, because it can be his domicile, but it can also be his writing pad, which is something he probably does still use, even in this digital age, so hey, that works, right…right? Damnit, I need coffee. Or something.).

Anyway.

The piece is basically Joss’s ten tips for screenwriters (with a slight emphasis on script-doctoring, which is hiring on to touch up someone else’s script). I love the fact that Step 1 is “Finish It,” and my favorite bit of advice is #9:

Having given the advice about listening, I have to give the opposite advice, because ultimately the best work comes when somebody’s fucked the system; done the unexpected and let their own personal voice into the machine that is moviemaking. Choose your battles. You wouldn’t get Paul Thomas Anderson, or Wes Anderson, or any of these guys if all moviemaking was completely cookie-cutter. But the process drives you in that direction; it’s a homogenising process, and you have to fight that a bit. There was a point while we were making Firefly when I asked the network not to pick it up: they’d started talking about a different show.

The fact that this is my favorite bit would probably come as no shock to my editor (though I listened to him waaaaay more than I didn’t, and the book is better for it).

Go here for the full piece: http://dannystack.blogspot.com/2009/01/joss-whedons-top-10-writing-tips.html