“…thus the sentence about it not doing the show itself any favors.” It==Fox killing the show. To expand: Fox killing the show when it did, did the show no favors. You see?
Yes, you may rub my neck. Also, I’d like to hurry things along to the point where one of us can call the other the very definition of pathetic, then ask to be friends.
I quite liked it until I went to an Alien night at the cinema. Watched in direct comparison with the other films shows it up as the massive piece of shit that it is. Perlman and Dourif just can’t quite offset Winona Ryder.
One great bit on the Alien boxed set it the interview with Ryder where she talks about how she was really happy to be in an alien movie and kept taking souvenirs. She then declares how much she loves to steal things!
David E. Kelley on Picket Fences. Chris Carter on The X-Files.
David E. Kelly writes trashy soap opera garbage. It’s even worse when he tries to do comedy. I mean, a unisex bathroom? He’s like the handsome guy who thinks he’s funny because he never figured out all the giggle girls just think he’s cute. And Carter was most valuable as the charming surfer boy face of the X-Files for the suits. Everything anyone likes about the show can be traced pretty directly to the work of Glenn and Darian Morgan and James Wong.
According to Joss Whedon, he was actually approached by Fox to write and direct X3, but turned it down because he thought the timetable they were working with was unrealistic. So it’s not like tossing his name around is without a basis in reality.
I also agree Joss gets too much blame for the late seasons of Buffy, which were pretty well tainted by Marti Noxon who’s always been the fucked up sexuality go to girl on the writing staff. He also doesn’t get enough credit for the late seasons of Angel which took an awkward beginning and gave us some truely brilliant character work. I’m thinking mostly about Wesley here. In any case I think the last two seasons of Angel are some of his best work.
Agreed. Unlike Buffy, Angel improved with each season. It deserved a longer run. Heck, I even found Gunn interesting in season 5, which was the first time I cared at all about him.
Say what you want about Kelley in recent years, but Picket Fences was absofuckinglutely great. That show really needs to be brought to DVD. Best portrayal of the quirkiness of a small town ever done on network TV. The Emmys were well deserved. CBS killed the show with FOX-like scheduling crap.
I don’t get the Chris Carter hate now. Does nobody remember how great the first few years were? Yeah, the show went off the rails the last few years, but the first four or five seasons were fantastic. I like Morgan and Wong, too, and just loved the second season of Millennium that they did. But give Carter some credit. He did create the show and supervise all the scripts. In every way, Carter ran The X-Files.
Marti Noxon and Jane Espensen deserve a lot of credit for killing Buffy, I agree. But Whedon let it happen, one way or another. All Marti and Jane did was ramp up all the dialogue gimmicks that Whedon started, too, and take the “I am womyn, hear me roar, or cast spells, or something” nonsense with Willow to stupid lengths with the Slayer chicks and the heavy-handed female empowerment message and all the Xander sucks crap of the last season. Whedon laid the foundation, Marti and Jane built the crappy house.
And didn’t he either write or co-write that abysmal final episode?
I liked Angel, but did it really end on all that good a note? The last couple of seasons seemed all over the place, with lame villains and some really goofy plot developments that were never really explained or resolved, especially when the gang joined Wolfram and Hart. I also thought obliterating Fred was idiotic, and killing Wesley in the final episode was totally unnecessary. That death was almost as pointless as Anya’s. The final scene was cool, though.
I thought Fred’s death was beautifully tragic. Just when Wesley finally gets the girl he’s pined over for years, she is yanked from his grasp and destroyed in such an utter fashion that he can’t even be comforted by her peace in the afterlife. Further more it’s the act that finally tears the gang apart at the seems. Angel and Spike could have saved her, but chose not to in the interest of the greater good. Gunn is revealed to have compromised himself and it sends Wesley on his downward spiral. Finally, it gives Angel the impetus he needs to bring about some kind of reckoning with the Evil he’s always danced around. I think Wesley’s death was approriate, first, because there was little left to do with the character at that point, secondly, because he was a mortal playing in a game of superheroes, and finally because he got to die in Fred’s arms, just as she had died in his, which was a really beautiful, romantic image.
I didn’t mind the cute little kleptomaniac but overall the film was just a weird kind of action space comedy with lots of gross-out imagery, a very tenuous relationship to plausibility, and a nearly total lack of bona fide tension and excitement.
I agree with Kevin that it has an advantage over Fincher’s Alien 3 in that it was at least original. The extras in the Quadrilogy box explain that they didn’t actually have a script for A3 when they started shooting so Fincher did the best he could – which was to re-shoot Alien in a slightly different setting and with British accents.
Once the unexpected originality of Resurrection wears off the film is just plain bad, though. And veteran series producer David Giler blamed the movie’s failure on Whedon’s script, rather than direction, casting or production: “When I had read the script I told them it would kill the franchise, but they went ahead with it anyway.” (paraphrased from Quadrilogy interview)
But isn’t this thread concerning his actual talent level? Yeah, Whedon deserves some blame for turning over creative control to Noxon, but almost every great TV creator listed in this thread has abandoned one of their series to go off and work on other projects with quality almost always suffering. But saying “Buffy sucked when Whedon stopped having day to day involvement” seems to be a pretty strong indicator that he was pretty important. And you point it out even more by demonstrating that Noxon and Espenson couldn’ walk the same tightwire with regard to the characters and themes that had been present all along.
And you can’t give Chris Carter a pass by saying “sure the last few seasons of X-Files sucked by the first 4-5 were great” while repeatedly complaining about the last few seasons of Buffy which were still better than X-Files seasons 7-9.
For a long time I never cared for Whedon. Hated Buffy, Firefly was blah (ofcourse seeing the movie before the series was probably a bad idea on my part) However he is probably the best Xmen writer in 2 decades.
You don’t like Marti Noxon for the exact opposite reason I don’t like her? How odd.
Can’t really comment on season 7, since I only saw seven episodes of that.
The show effectively loses a lot of female empowerment in the last two seasons, most notably when Xander and Giles saves the world while Buffy is in a freaking hole.
Heavy-handed loses out to stupid, in things that annoy me.
Now that the knee jerk haters and bitches seem to have sorted themselves out I’ll jump in. Joss may get a lot of heat, but he’s done a lot of good work over the years. Yeah, he gets tangled up in his own dialogue from time to time, but Buffy season 3 was a masterpeice, as was Firefly.
And you’ve got to give him credit. It isn’t easy to have any career in Hollywood, let alone convince a studio to turn your failed series into a movie.
He’s also opened the door for a lot more character driven drama on television, and made something of value when everything had turned to teen drivel.
See, all anyone had to say was “he writes X-Men comic books that don’t suck”. That answers the “why wish for a Whedon-led X3?” question.
As to why he needs his hands on every other geek property, eh… I guess the comic book writing credit lends credence to that too.
He make-a the monies.
Although we’ll see with Wonder Woman whether he can really step up.
I like Joss Whedon, a lot. Watch Hush again, you fucking haters!
Agree that it was quality TV, but I think Northern Exposure trumps it in almost every way.
Brilliant, that episode was.
Creepy as hell, too.
Very good, but not as good as the Body. Probably the best tv I’ve ever seen.
Was The Body the one when her mom died? Because that was fucking phenomenal.