So a few of my favorite bloggers have gotten together to start a group blog called “The League of Ordinary Gentleman.” (Funny that Freddie DeBoer, a Watchmen hater, is now on a blog with a name derived from another Alan Moore comic…) In a set-up that I hope to see appearing more and more on group blogs, the ongoing conversations are specifically grouped for easy browsing and reference. This is the good news.
The bad news is that I'm going to have to cut back on my own blogging this semester. I'll do my very best to keep this site from turning into a dead link, and maybe I'll find a rhythm that lets me keep up the pace I want, but real life is intruding.
Quickly: I'm going to mostly endorse Freddie's take on the incoherent plotting of The Dark Knight. The point of the movie was never to tell a compelling story; it was to mix and match a series of political symbols in such a way that people in the audience can draw on its mythic structure to examine their own unarticulated questions about the use of (super) power in an age of terror. But in order for for such mythic structure to stand, it needs a solid foundation, and can't have these gaping plot holes and out-of-character decisions.
(I have similar problems with Battlestar Galactica, where Apollo seems to become a different character every few episodes just to fit some plot twist that the writers want to hit us with.)
That being said: what the comics fan enjoys in the movies is seeing big-screen versions of their favorite characters that somehow carry through the soul of the comics character. And Nolan got that right, unlike the awful Joel Schumacher. So the comics fan in me had to give the movie a thumbs up, whereas the movie fan in me had to give it an ambivilent sideways shaking thumb.
8 comments:
That's about 100 percent right, what you just said there.
BSG's characters were what really bothered me, really. Apollo is the best example, but in a lot of cases, in the season and a half I watched, I felt like the story was pushing the characters, rather than the other way around. A total reversal of my beloved Star Trek: TNG, where even though the characters were largely archetypes and only so dynamic, the stories were always built around those archetypes' interactions with each other and others.
I do enjoy both TDK and BSG, but they're not going to hit my best-of-all-time lists. And I have to say that BSG has had some great ideas in terms of realizing a particular kind of space opera where the future is not bright and shiny.
I thought Firefly struck a pretty great balance, despite all its production and cancellation problems.
Back in middle school, I was a huge Star Wars partisan and one of my best friends was a Trekkie. We had some pretty epic arguments about it. Then Lucas went and pulled the carpet out from under me.
My dream science fiction series: in the season premiere of season 8 of CSI: Miami, a corpse comes back to life in the autopsy room. The rest of the season is spent fighting a spreading and eventually massive zombie outbreak. At the end of the eighth season, the outbreak is finally stopped. The ninth season is just like the first seven.
You're on to something there, although CSI kinda drives me nuts (or has, the few times I've watched it) with how it manages to make the acting and exposition on Law & Order look subtle. (Which is not a dig at L&O, a program I have long maintained is a cousin to TNG.) I haven't seen much of Firefly, either, but I thought the movie was great and the series is on my to-watch-someday list.
I think BSG and TDK (the latter of which I had a lot of fun watching; the former, unfortunately, I wasn't into beyond the miniseries, which was excellent) may suffer from the same problem, which is that "gritty and dark" and "of exceptionally high quality" tend to get confused. People get so caught up in the idea of comic book and SF stories always having the good guys win that you just have to show some bodies, kill one major character, and film a scene or two of the hero looking pained, and that's supposed to elevate an entire genre. (That sounds more cynical than I mean it to.)
And yeah, speaking as a fellow former Warrior, I think our great advantage over the Trekkies was how much less in-canon output there was on our side, which left much less room for mistakes. I still defend the original trilogy pretty vehemently, but I realized a few years ago that my crush on Jean-Luc Picard was actually a full-fledged going over to the other side.
Hahaha. I figured a true son of the South would appreciate Firefly's separatist overtones.
But yeah, I second your assessment of the Dark Knight. I happen to be a BSG partisan, but the show's quality has also declined dramatically since Season 2.
As for the blogging hiatus, I call shenanigans. Surely you ivory tower elitists can hang with the output of us 9-5ers?
Josh - Oh, I don't usually watch crime procedurals even when they're good. And I know CSI can be pretty bad sometimes. That's why it would be so great to have them fight zombies! And I think David Caruso's style would be absolutely perfect for a bunker-down-against-the-zombies situation.
Will - it's no hiatus. Just less posting midweek, I think. Lowering my own goals from seven posts a week to three or four. I was busy enough yesterday that I guess I made it sound worse than it is.
The real trouble is going to be figuring out which feeds to cut from my Google Reader, because I just don't think I can read hundreds of posts every day, and I feel so pressured when they pile up.
William, thanks for the mention. I've gotten to the point where if I feel like I'm forcing posting it undercuts the quality of the posts offered. So I might as well not bother posting at all because doing so hurts rather than helps my cause.
Funnily, it was Freddie who came up with the name. Go figure...
I am with you 100% on the Apollo thing. And what they're doing with Gaeta now is equally shameless. Oh well. BSG has always been a show I enjoy more for the mythology than the characters...
I was watching the Sci-Fi channel last night with my roomies, and a commercial for BSG came on (a show i have never seen). I made a joke about Apollo based on this thread, and everyone in the room laughed and laughed and thought better of me as a person.
thank you for that.
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