Mike Dionne's Blog I don't think the crazy undercuts my point

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

It was only with some reluctance that I finally broke down and watched Buffy.

I love Joss Whedon; I really do.  The problem is that I love the Buffy movie, and fans of the show have, in my experience, always trashed the movie.  It was only in July 2010, so many years after the show's end, that I was able to break down and watch it.  I did know a certain amount going in having already watched Angel, but much like a Mighty Ducks-style movie where you know who wins, the devil's in the details.
Season one took some getting used to.  The dialogue, especially by the teenagers, is quite unique - constant transformation of parts of speech, especially with nouns becoming verbs.  I saw some of it through Cordelia on Angel, but only in small doses.  From the beginning the show dove into juxtaposing life-and-death supernatural elements with the natural drama of real life.  Buffy has to adjust to a new school and make friends, dividing real friends from false ones, while at the same time being slammed with Slayer responsibilities by her new watcher, posing as the school librarian.  Buffy's parents are divorced, and she feels at least partially responsible, and on top of that, her new school is not-so-coincidentally located atop the Hellmouth, which makes for a handy explanation of the source of strange happenings throughout the series.  Season one sets the tone for the entire series.  Buffy's job is hard, and eventually, she will probably fail and die.  She carries the whole world on her shoulders, and having friends is often as much of a burden as it is a help.  Each episode has its own conflict, but they all lead to one great climax at the end of the arc, which ends at the season finale, except for that really weird one in season four.
In the back of my mind, watching, I know that Buffy's going to win.  Maybe knowing how long it lasts is a giveaway, but I'm not sure.  That being said the suspense is still good in every season.  Maybe Buffy won't die (or maybe she will and they'll bring her back, more than once) - but other characters can die along the way, and she still has to find a way to win.  The minor characters all change, some in predictable ways, but others in ways that are quite surprising.  I found Cordelia's pre-Angel arc to really be something.  She asserts herself against her shallow friends in order to date Xander, and deals surprisingly well when it ends between them, and her parents go broke.  It also instroduces Anya into the show, but I'll get back to her later.
Seasons Two and Three introduce more characters, including Spike and Oz, and grow character development.  Buffy's bond with Giles is cemented, almost ironically, as he is fired as watcher because of "a father's love of the child."  Buffy is faced with the idea that she will survive high school.  She's ambivalent about the idea that Faith may be able to take over duties as Slayer, and she might actually be able to go away to college, but when Faith kills a man Buffy has to turn her in.  Faith goes rogue, without Buffy's knowledge, and starts working for the mayor, furthering his plans to become a giant snake and eat the entire graduating class.  Buffy of course figures it out and has to fight Faith, and then arm the senior class against the mayor.  At the conclusion of season three Buffy leaves high school, Angel and Cordelia are gone, and the show takes a different turn.
With Season 4, Buffy conveniently forgets that she was accepted to Northwestern and felt obligated to attend the mythical UC Sunnydale, and jumps into I'm-a-college-freshman-and-I'm-scared mode.  Oz and Willow adjust more quickly, and Buffy can only feel her way through.  The re-introduction of Spike as a major character gives the show complexity it had lost, especially after he is nabbed and "muzzled" by the "soldiery guys" of the Initiative.  You've also got Riley jumping in as the first human guy Buffy really spends any time with.  Season 4 was really strange as the seasons go; it's one of the few that sits on its own.  Its conflict touches on those of the past, but it's really contained.  Xander and Giles become further marginalized now that the rest have gone on to college and the high school is gone, and that's when the whole lesbian thing started.  It's hard to say if they'd been planning on Oz going all wild all along or not, but his cheating with and ually killing that other werewolf seemed convenient in retrospect.  As ultimate conflicts go, the Initiative running amok and creating Adam was in many ways predictable, but ultimately led to the strangest finale, setting up for the initial end of the series at the end of season five as well as the actual series finale - the power of the original slayer.
Season five introduced my least favorite among the major characters:  Dawn.  Dawn was, from the beginning, a human whine.  She was younger than the rest, always trying to belong, and it really bugged the hell out of me.  After the show revealed what she really was - the key - it made it somehow okay for a while, because she was really important, but that went away.  After a while I was asking if maybe the problems would be solved if they just killed Dawn, only to find out, yes!  But of course they didn't.  Season 5 did have perhaps my favorite villain, Glory.  It was interesting to see how it all unfolded - Glory's connection to Ben, her being a God, what the key was and why she needed it.  Joss Whedon is a master of crazy, and Clare Kramer delivered the crazy without fail.  For me, though, the best episode of the season is The Body.  The previous episode is relatively innocuous.  A girl shows up looking for her boyfriend and with her strange behavior, unusual good looks and superhuman strength, they all know immediately she's a robot.  Warren, not terribly important until the following season, created a lovebot for himself, but left her in his dorm room when a real girlfriend appeared.  Ultimately she runs down, and the episode ends on something of a sad note.  Buffy returns home to find Joyce unconscious on the couch.  Credits roll.  The Body picks up from there.  Joyce, eyes open, is unresponsive.  In many ways The Body was the best episode of the series.  The dialogue, while lacking in the usual humor and wit, was incredibly sharp.  The cinematography was more innovative than ever, and it was easily the most emotional episode of the entire series.  Watching was agony.  There was just the slightest pause when Buffy's still calling to Joyce, and she stop saying mom, and says "mommy."  Clearly in shock, Buffy appears to be a completely different person until she has to go to the school and break the news to Dawn.  The scene where the rest of them assemble in Willow's room shows the depth of a lot of the characters, especially Anya, whose emotion really surprised me.  Compared to the final episode of the season, when Buffy dies for Dawn, I found The Body much more powerful.
Of course after Season 5 I knew something had to be up.  Two more seasons?  But here we start in six and Buffy's still dead.  But they raise her.  And the big shock is that she wasn't in a Hell dimension, which is where everyone else seemed to go.  But why not still assume the slayer would go to heaven?  I never got over that.  Season six also had the musical episode, which was quite entertaining, and Xander leaving Anya at the altar, which brought back her demon face, which made me a little sad.  The villains were the triad of Jonathan, Warren and Andrew, which seemed weak until the end, where the big climax was not a fight against them.  Warren shooting Buffy and Tara did two things:  it said that the writers finally realized somebody can just shoot the slayer and her friends, and also killed off Tara, who I never liked.  It brought to a head the idea they'd been pushing so long:  that Willow had become too powerful, and something was going to really push her over the edge, far beyond the afterschool special thing they tried with the car accident earlier.  Willow starts by killing Warren in prime fashion, ripping his skin off, then going after Andrew and Jonathan.  Buffy and her friends become their reluctant protectors, ultimately unable to defeat Willow but only hold her off a while.  At the end Xander finally gets to save the world, talking Willow off the ledge of destroying it.
Season 7 introduces the First, the new school, its enigmatic principal Robin Wood, and the Bringers.  All over the world girls are being stabbed by weird guys with no eyes.  The First Evil has declared war on the slayer line, and it becomes clear that all potential slayers are at risk, so they flock to Buffy and start sleeping in her house and eating all of her food.  And there's another lesbian, and this time she's pretty and doesn't stutter so now we know it's serious.  Here and there they try one of those episodes where they deal with smaller, secondary conflicts, but there just isn't the time for us to care that Willow's not over Tara yet or that Spike killed Robin Wood's mom.  Not a lot of black people on this show, not too hard to see that one.  The world's about to end again and this time it looks like Buffy might lose.  Joss Whedon is really good at making you forget that the good guys are going to win, and this season was maybe the best yet at doing that.  Caleb, played expertly by Nathan Fillion, is maybe the strongest one yet, and he's killing people for real, not just eye candy we've never seen before on a Friday night.  While the First cannot yet take human form it can give power to Caleb, and only after Buffy gets the weapon he's protecting is she able to beat him.  It ends where it began, at the high school, which was appropriate.  Leading up to the end Faith returns, and so does Angel, only to be sent away again as the "second front."  Buffy loses it a while and is sent away in defeat, and of course has to pull it together and beat Caleb almost on her own before she can head back to her own house and tell all the teenage girls she's their leader again.  That was an odd sequence.  But I digress.  Willow's powerlust is finally tapped when she pulls off a spell to make every potential slayer an actual slayer, which gives them the strength they need for the fight against all those "ubervamps" under that goat seal at the foundation of the school.
Here's where I got mad.  I know slayers are really strong and heal fast, but Robin Wood and Buffy both get run through and manage to get through it.  Anya is struck down saving Andrew and they don't even find her body on the way out.  All we get is a flash of her falling, and a shot of her face as they run out.  When Anya died, which I knew was coming, my spirit broke.  It was different from when Joyce died.  I felt defeated, even though Buffy and her friends saved the world.  Spike died, soul redeemed.  At the end Sunnydale's just one giant sinkhole.
Over four months I grew to know and love the characters (not all of them, but many) on the show.  The actors showed skill and depth I never expected.  Sarah Michelle Gellar somehow earned my respect.  James Marsters, who I liked on Angel, showed he too could be crazy, and between that, the thing with his mom, and his extremely complicated relationship with Buffy, he made Spike a complete character.  Emma Caulfield made me fall in love with Anya.  I felt happy and totally pathetic at the same time.  Now that the show is over I feel like I've lost friends.
Granted, I didn't like all of it.  Though they poked fun of it themselves, you've got Buffy hanging around with dead guys more than living ones, two vampires with souls, Buffy flip-flopping between being a ditz and a mature wit, Dawn being awful, not to mention how completely and utterly sick of lesbians I am now.  But overall I absolutely adore this show.  It so skillfully juxtaposed the ordinary and the extraordinary that often it was a question which was the greater conflict.  These were characters that could be envied an pitied simultaneously.  That I simultaneously hated and loved Joss Whedon for the emotional roller coaster that was this series shows just how throroughly he succeeded.

She’s Out of My League

I finally got around to watching this.  I didn't have too many expectations going into it, which is usually good.  I wasn't too familiar with many of the actors though I had seen Jay Baruchel (as Kirk) and Lindsay Sloane (as Marnie) in a few other movies.  The trailer gives you almost the entire premise - a nerdy TSA worker realizes that a ridiculously attractive girl left her phone at a security checkpoint, and agrees to hold onto her phone until she gets back into town so he can drop it off.  He then meets her at a party and cautiously assumes she's just being nice, until she calls him and asks him out.  Everyone assumes it's not going to work out and while the mismatch is apparent, everyone keeps pointing it out anyway.

The premise is nothing special; the value lies elsewhere.  The theme of the movie has to do with self-esteem.  It's a rejection of the idea that attractive people can't be in a relationship with someone noticeably less attractive; when it doesn't work out it's a self-esteem issue on the part of the less attractive person.  If they have confidence in themselves, the movie argues, the problems in these relationships would have been minimal, and things might have worked out.

Comedy is the other reason for watching.  Krysten Ritter (as Patty), T.J. Miller (as Stainer) and Nate Torrence (as Devon) have the best lines as supporting characters.  The plot itself isn't always the mechanism for the humor.  Often, it's Patty and Stainer overreacting to everyday situations, or Devon romanticizing everything, that's the best.  I found Kirk's dysfunctional family to be somewhat funny, and it does create some awkwardness as well as a way of showing how Kirk felt a little better about himself when Molly was around.  But the irreverent writing and the performances of the supporting cast really deserve the credit for why this movie is very funny, rather than just sort of funny.

Also, that girl (Alice Eve as Molly) really was super hot.  That isn't always true.