Tag Archives: Joss Whedon

Goodbye, Buffy, We Hardly Knew Ye

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So there she is, Buffy Summers, standing at the edge of the crater where Sunnydale, California used to be and where it is no more. Supposedly, the Hellmouth closed forever. Or something.

And there I was, watching the last episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The last episode. No more. That’s when the depression started. It was over.
Now, I’ve watched other shows and the finales of other shows, but I gotta’ tell ya’, I’ve never felt so sad at the ending of a show before. I’ve felt cheated, like with Battlestar Galactica, and I’ve felt satisfied, go, Firefly, but when I watched the last Buffy episode, I felt desolate.

No more Buffy. No more Willow. No more Anya.

Anya was my favorite. I wanted one more episode to watch how the Scooby gang handled her death. I’ll never forget Anya’s reaction to everyone grieving over Buffy’s mother’s death. How she couldn’t understand it, couldn’t understand everyone’s sorrow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I’m late to the party and Buffy’s last episode was almost ten years ago. Or something. Yeah. I’m late. And I’m stupid.

I tried to watch Buffy back in the 90’s, during its original run, but I couldn’t get into it. Season 1 was, um, iffy. Season 2 better, but not good enough. And if you try and come in midway, inscrutable. I had gay friends recommending it, and we all know all gay people have impeccable taste, but, well, I had Star Trek to watch.

Two huge lessons I’ve learned in life: listen to less Rush, more Prince. Watch more Buffy, less Star Trek. There.

So I kept getting slapped and beaten for not watching it. Seriously. Hit. “What–you haven’t watched Buff?” Smackola. So I knew I had to force myself to weather through the first couple of seasons. I did. And I am so glad.

Joss Whedon has genius, certainly, and we all either love him or hate him for it. I secretly want to eat his heart and brains, with onions, in hopes I can ingest some of that genius. The thing is, Joss Whedon can do conflict well, but his real brilliance is making us fall in love with his characters.

And I fell in love Buffy, Giles, Xander, the whole Scooby gang. And so, when the show ended, it was saying goodbye, a forever type of goodbye.

Sometimes I wonder if art and TV and novels are worth anything. If it’s all just a distraction from real life. Maybe to blind us from enlightenment.

But my life was richer for watching Buffy, gotta’ say.

Now, the spin-off, Angel? Um, I’ll post about that later.

Yond Whedon Has a Lean and Hungry Look: How Joss Whedon Failed in The Avengers

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Friends, Avengers, Countrymen, lend me your ears. I have not come to praise Joss Whedon, but to bury him. Yes, I am going to critique Joss Whedon on his Avengers movie. I will not talk about anything I liked.

For example, I won’t tell you that Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk was moving. The actor did in seconds what others needed hours to do. He might have even out-emoted Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy. If there is a heart in The Avengers, it lies within Mark Ruffalo’s sometimes green, monstrous chest. Or in Scarlett Johansson’s bosomy chest. The jaded, shattered spy is a trope, and yet she brings it to life with such pathos that I wanted to pay for her counseling. And her interaction with Hawkeye, where in seconds, backstory was spun out with such depth, such richness, I might have been eating a comic book mousse.

And that is the brilliance of Whedon. Quickly, magically, he can create characters we love. Snap your fingers, you are captured, and if you like the characters, everything else will follow because that is the magic of storytelling.

In Firefly, in the first twenty minutes of the pilot, I knew the characters, I loved them, and I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them.

But I’m not going to talk about how The Avengers is a completely satisfying comic book movie. Nope. I will not.

But I will say this. I have to, dammit. I have to. The Avengers has texture. The characters, the action sequences, the whole mother-lovin’ spectacle of it has texture. And it’s funny.

I howled laughter and clapped my hands with glee. A child again, witnessing the circus. Hee, bloody, hee.

I needed, though, two things. And I just wonder if Joss Whedon knew I needed them.

I am going to go into a spoiler. If you haven’t seen The Avengers, go see John Carter, then go see The Avengers. Please. For the love of God!


I was surprised that much of the tension was due to the Hulk. Here you have larger-than-life superheroes, even a few demigods, and yet, they are afraid of the Hulk. And the Hulk is a massive, ripping thing of unbridled carnage. The scene between him and Black Widow is frightful. And when he punches Thor out of the blue, I laughed. But the best scene is when Loki is going on and on about how stupid and pitiful humans are, the Hulk grabs him like a dog with a sock. Hilarious. But then, why does the Hulk turn hero in New York? He saves Iron Man. Why? I think I know, but I would have liked that spelled out more.

The Hulk would know how duplicitous Black Widow was, and not trust her. That makes sense. But Iron Man, well, the Hulk knew that Tony Stark was generally interested in him and really, wanted to see Bruce Banner overcome his own “breathtaking anger management issues” to become a single entity. I needed that spelled out a little more.

And the end battle. I needed a dark moment. Thor was supposed to keep the portal bottled up with lightning, and he does that at first, but then gets caught up in the fighting. I needed aliens to pour out of the portal, completely devastate our heroes, and all looks lost, until Tony Stark takes the nuke and flies back inside the portal, saving everyone.

And of course, that’s when Black Widow figures out how to close it. That whole end battle could have been handled better. More grit and angst.

But the dark moment on S.H.I.E.L.D.’s hover-carrier, well, that was certainly bleak. Bravo, Joss Whedon, bravo.

Shut it! No praises for him! At times, the story was murky, it wasn’t crystal clear why Loki let himself be captured, or why lording over humans would please him. I kind of got everything, but it wasn’t as clear as it needed to be.

But funny, and cool, and moving. I’m telling you, when Bruce Banner walked on stage, I got tears in my eyes just looking at him.

And the shawarma at the end. If you wait through the credits, you’ll see the shawarma. And it’s worth the wait.

Joss Whedon, through decades of storytelling and work, has become an icon. He’s the George Lucas we all wanted. He’s a great man.

And unburied. Arise, Joss Whedon, and bring us more stories. More characters. More! Since The Avengers has become a hulkish hit, maybe you can insist on a John Carter sequel!

The 12 Steps to Writing Success – Donut Love Introduction

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Another writer’s blockage—a more serious blockage—may arise from an excessive need for a success not actually related to good writing: an excessive need to please admirers (that is, to be loved), or prove himself vastly superior to others (that is, to be superhuman), or justify his existence against the too obstreperous cry of some old psychological wound (that is, to be redeemed). No amount of work can solve this writer’s problem, because nothing he writes satisfies the actual motive behind it.
–John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist, p. 135

Everyone loves a dirty little secret, the kind you’ll take to the grave, the kind that just drips with filth and depravity. Yeah, I have some of those, but for years, my biggest secret was nothing so dramatic. Unfortunately. My dirty little secret was that I was a writer who was terrified and lonely and oppressed. I was the Nelson Mandela of literature, locked away in chains I forged out of nothing, nothing at all.

It took literally a decade for me to understand that being an artist isn’t something I needed to hide. It took a little longer for me to understand it was something to celebrate. But I couldn’t have made this journey on my own. I couldn’t have broken the chains without the tools I learned by working the 12 steps of recovery. On my blog, on Tuesdays, I will tell you the story of what I was like, what happened, and what I am like now. And hopefully, by my experience with the 12 steps, I can help others to unleash the creative angels that we keep locked away.

I added a new page, outlining the 12 Steps, and yeah, this isn’t the AA or NA or another other A program’s steps, and I took some liberties, but the basic ideas are still there. Powerlessness, unmanageability, hope, surrender, that kind of thing. I’m going to go through this process slow, step by step, hitting each step, and telling you my story. Next week, Tuesday, I’ll start with a little biography.

Now, I truly believe in the anonymity of the 12 step program model. So I am not going to say what kind of addict I am. Some addictions are more acceptable than others, but it really doesn’t matter. This is not so much about my spiritual ailments, but more about how I used the 12 steps to break through writer’s block and to write. I can write. I’m iffy on social media, and I’m iffy on querying, and I’m iffy on a lot of things, grammar, story structure, laundry, but I can sit down and churn out pages. I’m finding that a lot of people can’t do that and it’s really hard to get published if you can’t write the book. And it’s really hard to stay published if you don’t continue to write books.

But here is your chance to guess what program I belong to. As long as you buy me donuts, then you can guess. Or maybe we can hit a bar. Or meth, I like meth, a lot. I know, we can fly out to Vegas and play Texas Hold ‘Em until we’re both being hunted by loan sharks. And yeah, Vegas has strip clubs. We can go to strip clubs while you try and guess what kind of addict I am. But then, maybe, I’m not an addict, but I love you so much, that you can get drunk, and I’ll stay at home and worry about you and try to control every little part of your life. Wait, that’s the other side of addiction, the co-addict. Maybe I’m one of those. Or maybe I’m a TV addict, a movie addict, a Bioshock addict, or maybe I’m addicted to early morning rosaries at my local Catholic church.

So yeah, addictions abound. I blogged about that.

So, next week, Tuesday, my biography. Where I will tell you the horrible bottom I hit watching Joss Whedon television shows.

I was in the police station, and screaming, “First, just one episode of Firefly, than I’ll talk. I swear to God! Just one episode! Okay, okay, how about fifteen minutes of the Firefly movie, that should work. Avengers trailer? Ahhhhhh yeah, that’s the ticket.”

And then they showed me episode one of Angel. And I got nasty.