Sunday, March 31, 2013

Slayer Soundtrack Sunday - Sarah McLachlan

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Popular artist Sarah McLachlan provided two songs to the Buffy series, and both seem appropriate for Easter Sunday.

"Full of Grace" is about being strong in difficult situations, and was played in "Becoming, Part Two," in Season Two when Buffy has kill her lover Angel in order to save the world. The song plays as Buffy leaves town. The song is found on McLachlan's 1997 album Surfacing






"Prayer of St. Francis" is from Season 6, "The Grave." It's included on Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Radio Sunnydale



This song seems even more significant now, since the new Pope just took the name of St. Francis of Assisi who wrote the prayer.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury,pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen




Three big things happen while this song is playing at the end of the show. Xander is able to stop Willow from destroying the world, Buffy and Dawn emerge from graveyard hole - appearing resurrected into a scene that looks like the Garden of Eden, and Spike the Vampire painfully gets his soul back, which Buffy doesn't find out about until Season 7, "Beneath You" when Spike explains it in the church and throws himself of the cross. While smoke rises around him from the cross, he isn't destroyed like other vampires because his soul protects him.

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From Buffy Wikia "The Grave"
Buffy comments to Giles that she feels that when she crawled out of her grave, she left part of herself behind. At the end of this episode, she must once again crawl out of a grave, this time with Dawn. The first time, she was disoriented, it was night, and Sunnydale had been overrun by demons. This time, it is morning and she is with Dawn, and they look out over a beautiful forest. It is a chance for her to start over, and really live for the first time since she was brought back to life at the beginning of the season - thus completing the circle begun with her resurrection the previous fall.

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From tabularasa.net
As Buffy and Dawn emerge from the grave-like hole in the ground, Sarah MacLachlan chimes in, singing the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi ("make me an instrument of your peace..."). It seems, largely, that everyone is where they are supposed to be. Buffy is back on good terms with Dawn (the best part of herself, as she described her last year). Xander is consoling Willow, who is most likely finally allowing herself to grieve for Tara, not to mention regretting her actions. Anya is helping Giles out of the ruins of the Magic Box. Jonathan and Andrew are nervously sharing a ride with a too-friendly trucker. As the song reaches it's conclusion, Buffy and Dawn walk in a graveyard far more scenic (and Garden of Eden-like) than we have seen before.
"And it's in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.", the song concludes, as we see a badly beaten Spike lying in the cave. The demon informs him that he has endured the trials. Spike demands what he wants - "make me what I was - so Buffy can get what she deserves". The demon agrees, grasping his chest - "we will return your soul".

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Happy Easter ~ It Must Be Bunnies!

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(via BuffySpirit)

In the Buffyverse, Anya is synonymous with Close Encounters of the Bunny Kind. In that spirit, I'd like to wish all my readers a Happy Easter!

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(via daisybones)



Thursday, March 28, 2013

Why Seth Green Practiced Voice of a Serial Killer

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Seth Green, who played Oz on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has been the voice of "Chris" on The Family Guy for eleven years now - not a bad gig if you can get it! Green told Conan O'Brien that he based the voice on Buffalo Bill, the fictional Serial Killer in "Silence of the Lambs." And he still got the job, wow.


Sunday, March 24, 2013

Slayer Soundtrack Sunday ~ "Danse Macabre"

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The memorable episode "Hush" in Season 4 is considered by some Buffy fans to be the scariest of the whole series. A group of creepy floating demons known as "The Gentlemen" are haunting Sunnydale in order to capture the voices of sleeping people. As part of their evil plans they also begin to harvest the hearts of various poor souls for a ritual.

source: Wikipedia
The Gentlemen, called the "creepiest villains we've ever done" by series writer Doug Petrie, were inspired by a nightmare Whedon had as a child, specifically one in which he was in bed and approached by a floating monster. Whedon fashioned The Gentlemen as something from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, intending them to be frightening to children — monsters who carve out people's hearts, smiling as they do so. Nosferatu, Pinhead from Hellraiser, and Mr. Burns from The Simpsons all served as physical models for The Gentlemen.
Elegantly Victorian in costume and demeanor, Whedon found their politeness and grace especially unsettling. Their metallic teeth were inspired by the intersection of Victorian culture with the height of the Industrial age, an era that Whedon considers "classically creepy". For Buffy studies scholar Rhonda Wilcox, The Gentlemen and their straitjacket-wearing minions, who clumsily flap, gyrate, and crouch as they move, are representative of class disparity and patriarchy: The Gentlemen, with their Victorian suits, move effortlessly to accomplish what they set out to do while their minions, whom Whedon called "footmen", do the "dirty work".

This episode was nominated for Emmy Awards in the categories Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series and Outstanding Cinematography. It also received a Writers Guild of America Award.

A little girl appears in Buffy's prophetic dream singing a song about The Gentlemen:

Can't even shout
Can't even cry
The gentlemen are coming by
Looking in windows
Knocking on doors
They need to take seven
And they might take yours
Can't call to mum
Can't say a word
You're gonna die screaming
But you won't be heard



When Giles has to silently explain his discoveries about The Gentlemen using an overhead projector, for background music he plays "Danse Macabre" - a classical work by the composer Camille Saint-Saens, inspired by Medieval morality plays and paintings about Death:





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Source: La Mort Dans L'Art
The dances of death were mostly painted (or more rarely carved) on the outside walls of cloisters, of family vaults, of ossuaries or inside some churches. These frescoes represent an emaciated corpse or a skeleton coupled with a representative of a certain social class. The number of characters and the composition of the dance vary. The dance of death often takes the form of a farandole. Below or above the picture are painted verses by which death adresses its victim. He often talks in a threatening and accusing tone, sometimes also cynic and sarcastic. Then comes the argument of the Man, full of remorse and despair, crying for mercy. But death leads everyone into the dance: from the whole clerical hierarchy (pope, cardinals, bishops, abbots, canons, priests), to every single representative of the laic world (emperors, kings, dukes, counts, knights, doctors, merchants, usurers, robbers, peasants, and even innocent children). Death does not care for the social position, nor for the richness, sex, or age of the people it leads into its dance. It is often represented with a musical instrument.

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Dance Macabre is better known today as the background music for several Halloween cartoons. Americans may remember the one that was shown on PBS, along with the classroom filmstrip with Harold Dexter Hoopes watercolors, which reminds me the most of The Gentlemen because of the big clock tower. The last one is a fantastical award-winning animation from Ireland. It's very Buffy-esque, with skeletons popping up out of the graveyard - enjoy! :)






Monday, March 18, 2013

Veronica Mars Gets Kickstarted - What about Firefly?

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The TV show Veronica Mars won new life this week when fans decided to fund a new movie via Kickstarter, a funding platform for creative projects.

From the LA Times
And so there will be a "Veronica Mars" movie, because on Wednesday some 30,000 fans (and counting) pledged $2 million (and counting) via Kickstarter, the popular crowd-funding website, to make it so.
. . . the show ... was created by Rob Thomas ("Party Down") and starred Kristen Bell as a teenage girl detective in fictional, coastal Neptune, Calif. (It was canceled in 2007 after two seasons on UPN and one on the CW, into which UPN had been folded.)
. . . By 9 a.m. Thursday, Thomas had exceeded his stated goal — the amount a Kickstarter project has to reach or the pledges are voided — by nearly $700,000, with 29 out of 30 fund-raising days left to go. By Sunday morning, nearly 55,000 backers had signed on, pledging more than $3.5 million.

Lucky them! Of course the fans of Firefly immediately wondered if they could contribute to the same type of fund to resurrect their favorite show, but Joss Whedon had to put the brakes on the endeavor for now:

Via Den of Geek
Buzzfeed talked to Whedon, a long-time Veronica Mars fan, and he admitted that he was thrilled to see the movie project funded, and funded in the way it's been. "It feels like a real game-changer", he admitted.

And then the obvious question. Is this something he'd consider to get more Firefly off the ground?

"I've said repeatedly that I would love to make another movie with these guys, and that remains the case. It also remains the case that I'm booked up by Marvel for the next three years, and that I haven't even been able to get Dr Horrible 2 off the ground because of that".

He added that "I don't even entertain the notion of entertaining the notion of doing this, and won't. Couple years from now, when Nathan's no longer [working on] Castle and I'm no longer the Tom Hagen of the Marvel Universe and making a giant movie, we might look and see where the market is then. But right now, it's a complete non-Kickstarter for me".

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Slayer Soundtrack Sunday ~ Aimee Mann


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Today we have two from Aimee Mann, a singer-songwriter who is the only performer at the Bronze to ever have a line of dialogue in the Buffy episode "Sleeper" in Season 7.

And it's really a good line:

Man, I hate playing vampire towns.

She utters her line while coming offstage at the Bronze after watching Spike dust a vampire in front of everyone.

Spike meanwhile has become a "Sleeper" agent for the First Evil, who triggers his vampire rage with a song his mother used to sing to him called "Early One Morning" - an ironic title referring to "as the sun was rising," which is deadly to vampires.

The song "Pavlov's Bell" is especially appropriate for this episode because it refers to the classic psychology experiment in which a dog is conditioned to search for food when the master rings a bell. In this case, Spike obeys the First whenever he hears that song playing, and that leads him to kill and then bury his victims.

"Pavlov's Bell" and "This is how it goes" can be found on Mann's album Lost in Space. "Pavlov's Bell" is included on both versions of Radio Sunnydale.











Another interesting musical reference in this episode:
In one scene, the bouncer refers to Spike as "a Billy Idol wannabe," and Buffy starts to say that Billy Idol actually stole the look from him (implying Spike had told her this in conversation at some point). In Season Five's Fool for Love, Spike's resemblance to Billy Idol was depicted (though not acknowledged in dialogue) during his flashback fight with the Slayer Nikki Wood in 1977, at which time Spike's attire and hair mimicked Idol almost perfectly, several years before Idol's fame.

Aimee Mann started her singing career in the Big 80s band Til Tuesday and their hit Voices Carry. She even had the Spike-worthy bleach-blond hair!

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

"Much Ado About Nothing" Panel Discussion at SXSW Film Festival in Austin


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Whedon's "Much Ado About Nothing" looks like real movie magic, Shakespeare meets Mad Men!









Joss Whedon Talks Shakespeare, S.H.I.E.L.D., Star Wars, and Success


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Joss Whedon is hot these days, so hot he describes himself as "jammed" by success. He has been at the South by Southwest® (SXSW®) Conference in Austin Texas, where he debuted his new low-budget version of "Much Ado About Nothing." So several interviews have come out of that:


This one on the red carpet:



A tidbit about S.H.I.E.L.D. from a Q and A with the crowd, via Comic Book Movie:
. . . Coulson died at the hands of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) in The Avengers. With the show taking place after the climatic battle with the Chituari in NYC many theorized that Coulson would be seen in flashback, that he was really a robot, a Skrull shape-shifter or something else equally outlandish. Well S.H.I.E.L.D. executive producer Joss Whedon told the crowd at SXSW that Coulson is in fact returning from the dead.
“I’ll tell you guys this, Heimlich,” Whedon joked, before effectively clamming up about the show. “I can’t talk about it,” he admitted, but said that he did bring Coulson back from the dead for the ABC drama. “Yes. For realsies.”
Now that it's established that Coulson really did die in The Avengers and that Fury didn't lie to the other Avengers, the question now is HOW does Coulson come back from the dead? There are a number of items and methods that this could be used to accomplish this in the pages of Marvel Comics but the vast majority of such devices have yet to be presented in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

On bringing back the original Star Wars characters, via Digital Spy:
The director has said that he would have been interested in the job of directing Star Wars: Episode VII, had his commitments to The Avengers 2 not taken him out of the running.

Asked by Digital Spy which original series characters he would want to see return in the new films, Whedon said that he would take a different approach.

"You know, I wouldn't go back, I'd go forward. I would want to create characters that would resonate the way that they did," he explained.

Whedon also discussed the rumors that Lucasfilm and Disney may be looking to recast the role of Han Solo with a younger actor for a potential standalone film.


And still another in-depth interview on Deadline.com in which he talks about shooting "Much Ado," his own success with gives him little free time to do various projects, whassup with S.H.I.E.L.D., and finally more regret that he wasn't able to direct Star Wars:

Excerpts:

DEADLINE: You shot Much Ado secretly from the press. Did you keep it from Marvel as well?
WHEDON: No, I absolutely told them because if that got out and they hadn’t known, I think that would have caused some concern. I told them I was going to do this and I snuck out for a few afternoons to rehearse, and I took one extra day after Monday. But it really didn’t interfere with the schedule much at all. And I had boundless energy when I returned. I think it worried them! Kevin [Feige] and Jeremy [Latcham], their faces were kind of pasty and their mouths were dry but they said, ‘It’s good, you’ll have a good time… we support you’. I think they found out and I found out what that this was the only way to relax me.

DEADLINE: You need relaxing?
WHEDON: I’m in constant danger of burning out. Look, this is not a healthy person talking to you. ’I’m going to make a sequel to the biggest movie I’ve ever made!’ … ’Perhaps a TV show would go along nicely with that…’ I always order the entire left side of the menu and then wonder why I’m full. With Much Ado it was different because it was truly contained. The script had been written. There were things that took a lot of time to edit. I didn’t know how to work Final Cut Pro — Danny [Kaminsky] my assistant had to teach me. He’s also a producer on the movie and edited it with me. And of course when I couldn’t afford a composer I said, let’s do even more work! But that I could do on our own time around the Avengers schedule.

~~~ snip ~~~  

DEADLINE: You’ve just wrapped the S.H.I.E.L.D. pilot, another part of the Marvel universe. WHEDON: That was fun to do, but again, too much work. The idea of the Little Guy is something that I am very fierce about, and there has never been a better Little Guy than Clark Gregg. That intrigued me, this world around the superhero community. It’s the people whose shop windows get blown up when the Destroyer shows up. It’s the more intimate stories that belong on television that we can really tap into the visual style and ethos, and even some of the mythology, of the Marvel movies. I think we’ve put together another really great ensemble headed by Clark. And how much it’s actually seeding or hinting or reacting to what’s going on in the movies is something we’ll let play out as we go. For me the most important thing is that people fall in love with it on its own merits, rather than constantly asking, “Is there gonna be an Avenger?” Well, there’s not gonna be a Hulk because that guy’s too expensive.  

DEADLINE: Is the plan for you to run S.H.I.E.L.D.?
WHEDON: I will be as involved as I can be – mostly on a story level. On the TV show I can say, “No, do it my way.” I’m just trying to keep it exciting and meaningful and surprising.  

DEADLINE: At what point did you realize these small passion projects could be marketable? WHEDON: Dr. Horrible changed everything for me. We started it because of the Writer’s Strike. And I watched other people making other original shows. I tried to partner with various people from Silicon Valley and that never goes anywhere. Finally I was like, let’s just do this. And it was a monster hit. The payback for the amount that we did was absurd.

~~~ snip ~~~

DEADLINE: You couldn’t do the Star Wars gig. Would you have had a take?
WHEDON: Oh yeah. And it’s not just Star Wars. Everything I see I think, Oh, I’d really love to do one of those. I’ll read something or have an actual idea of my own, and think, I wish I could do something with that. And sometimes you can say, “I think I will”. But I’m trying to be a little more careful in the next few years about budgeting my time than I was in the last two.

DEADLINE: Did you take a meeting with Lucasfilm? WHEDON: No, all of this happened long after I was committed to The Avengers, so there was never any question. There was just a peep of sadness from me. But I think, in all honesty, that JJ Abrams is the guy for the gig and I couldn’t be happier about that.

Monday, March 11, 2013

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Buffy Sixteenth Anniversary Today

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Thank you, Joss Whedon, for creating one of the great TV shows of all time! And thanks to the great cast for years of tears and laughter!

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Slayer Soundtrack Sunday ~ Cibo Matto

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Cibo Matto is a group made up of two Japanese women singers, Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, Timo Ellis on Drums, and Sean Lennon, son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, on bass guitar. They disbanded in 2011, but soon got back together again for several fundraisers sponsored by Yoko Ono, including a benefit for the Japan Earthquake survivors. Their blog is Here and you can read more Here.

Both songs found in this episode are included on the 1997 album Super Relax. "Sugar Water" is also found on the imported UK version of Radio Sunnydale.



Cibo Matto played at the Bronze in Episode One of Season Two - "When She was Bad." In that episode (written by series creator Joss Whedon) Buffy is still reeling from her encounter with the evil Master Vampire in Season One that left her literally dead until discovered underground by Angel and Xander, who brought her back to life with CPR. Despite a summer away from Sunnydale with her well-meaning father, Buffy comes home acting sullen and quiet, plagued by nightmares and dark thoughts of death. Buffy mistreats everyone close to her, not just Cordelia who deserves it, but Xander who is still in love with her. In a famous scene, Buffy acts like a bitchy femme fatale, making both Angel and Willow jealous while she dances with Xander, whom she also torments by coming onto him sexually. The background music to all this is Cibo Matto's otherworldly sound.

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It's such an interesting plot twist to have the superhero behaving badly, and it works to humanize Buffy, who is physically strong but often emotionally vulnerable.

The two songs by Cibo Matto in this episode are "Spoon" and "Sugar Water."





One more interesting note: during the dance sequence, a man who looks very much like the vampire Spike dances in front of the band while watching Buffy and Xander. This predates the arrival of Spike later in Season Two, Episode 3 - "School Hard". And it isn't Spike because the same young man appears in the final classroom scene, ironically sitting in front of Buffy's desk, and in the sunlit classroom - so definitely not a vampire either. It's quite possible thought that Joss Whedon was foreshadowing Spike early in the season - he knew William the Bloody was coming to Sunnydale, after all, and this guy has exactly the same hair. Maybe the make-up artist was practicing, LOL.

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Saturday, March 9, 2013

Spike or Angel? Who is more Heroic?

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Here's an excerpt from a great essay comparing the characters of Spike (William the Bloody) and Angel (Angelus).

Spike Versus Angel by Eleanor Kuhns
Transformed to a vampire, (Spike) becomes part of Angel’s coven, and for the first time, he becomes part of something. He has his own little family and is too scary to be mocked. Recalling his experiences with Angel and Drusilla during the Russian Revolution, Spike tells Buffy that it was the best time of his life. His wistful regret for a happy time that has passed really resonated with me. He is never really happy again.

Angel, on the other hand, never worries about fitting in. Why should he? He is always the leader. As a vampire, he has a rep as the baddest of the bad, with no pity or remorse. But when he reforms, he reforms all the way, becoming, to my way of thinking, a little self-righteous. He strides through the episodes like Cotton Mather in a leather coat. Yet, when he loses his soul, he becomes über evil. There are no gray areas with Angel.

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Spike is a mosaic of gray. He certainly never achieves Angel’s almost arrogant level of self-confidence. In fact Spike remains always insecure, a feeling he covers with a flippant swagger. He wants someone to love him, first Drusilla and then Buffy, but never succeeds in attaining the relationship he wants. He wants to fit in but he just can’t manage it. Not and stay who he is. He wants to be good but only sometimes and not yet. Totally understandable.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a multi-layered show with many strands that explain its popularity and its following even now. And Spike is certainly a big part of it. He is villain, hero, and antihero all at once. In the final episode, Angel expects to save the world by sacrificing his life. After all, he is the hero and the good vampire. But it is Spike, the very flawed character whose journey we have shared, who is chosen. And that feels right.

My own feeling is that Spike becomes a true hero - the "champion" at the end of the series - not just because he is more complex, but because he makes a conscious choice to "be a better man" and get back his soul. Angel, of course, has a soul at the beginning of the series, but only through the gypsy curse - he never sought it out. Both characters suffer terribly and struggle with right and wrong - with backsliding, and even murder - but I agree with the essayist that Whedon got it exactly right in the end ~ Spike's journey is more noble for it being more unlikely.

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