![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I never can see him but I am heart-burned an hour after
I do not like the trailer for Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing. Partly it's that I am not a Whedon person: I didn't fall in love with any of his shows (The Avengers surprised me), so the prospect of a cast stocked entirely from his regular company does not fill me with anticipation of old home week/the best crossover ever (Wesley and Fred and Mal Reynolds and Phil Coulson and Topher and Simon Tam and I had to look most of these people up) so much as a slight distrust, because the only actor in that parenthesis who ever really caught my eye was Clark Gregg and I don't consider him a Jossverse discovery. Mostly it's that five seconds into the trailer I was trying to figure out why the swing-themed black-and-white contemporary house porn and ten seconds after that I was ranting at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel about the dialogue. I am hoping it's a function of the pull quotes, but everyone in the cast seems to have exactly one register of voice. I can't hear any resonance, any range. It's all the same dry kind of flat. And the wit and cut of the language is instantly lost. You can make a case for Much Ado About Nothing as the prototype of the screwball comedy, with unexpectedly sharp outcroppings of cruelty and loss. (Look closely at the Hero/Claudio plotline, honestly, and it starts edging out of romance into problem play.) It has verbal fireworks, it has whip-smart repartee, it has characters who are identifiable instantly by their speech patterns and I'm not talking only about Dogberry's malaprops. It has fantastic flyting and chilling seriousness. The actors have to be in tune with all of that. I don't mean that you can't play it naturalistically, but you cannot play it monotone—"By this day, she's a fair lady" cannot read the same as "By this hand, I love thee." And that's all I hear in the trailer. It's my hope I am mistaken, or it's a not very good trailer for a perfectly reasonable film. But right now I want either to rewatch scenes from the 1993 version (which I don't own) or get someone from the Anarchist Society of Shakespeareans to direct one. Other recommendations are welcome.
(As a form of self-medication, I am catching up on Tumblr. A couple of days ago, when I was distracted,handful_ofdust posted me a succession of Leslie Howard gifs from The Stand-In (1937), a wonderful meta-joke of a film I love (and wrote about clumsily, but sometimes that happens). I will never cease to appreciate his willingness to look like a total nerd—I like him in horn-rims, but they do him no favors. Henry Higgins has an even worse pair. I will never cease to be faintly amazed that all sorts of people who weren't me thought he was beautiful.)
derspatchel about the dialogue. I am hoping it's a function of the pull quotes, but everyone in the cast seems to have exactly one register of voice. I can't hear any resonance, any range. It's all the same dry kind of flat. And the wit and cut of the language is instantly lost. You can make a case for Much Ado About Nothing as the prototype of the screwball comedy, with unexpectedly sharp outcroppings of cruelty and loss. (Look closely at the Hero/Claudio plotline, honestly, and it starts edging out of romance into problem play.) It has verbal fireworks, it has whip-smart repartee, it has characters who are identifiable instantly by their speech patterns and I'm not talking only about Dogberry's malaprops. It has fantastic flyting and chilling seriousness. The actors have to be in tune with all of that. I don't mean that you can't play it naturalistically, but you cannot play it monotone—"By this day, she's a fair lady" cannot read the same as "By this hand, I love thee." And that's all I hear in the trailer. It's my hope I am mistaken, or it's a not very good trailer for a perfectly reasonable film. But right now I want either to rewatch scenes from the 1993 version (which I don't own) or get someone from the Anarchist Society of Shakespeareans to direct one. Other recommendations are welcome.(As a form of self-medication, I am catching up on Tumblr. A couple of days ago, when I was distracted,
handful_ofdust posted me a succession of Leslie Howard gifs from The Stand-In (1937), a wonderful meta-joke of a film I love (and wrote about clumsily, but sometimes that happens). I will never cease to appreciate his willingness to look like a total nerd—I like him in horn-rims, but they do him no favors. Henry Higgins has an even worse pair. I will never cease to be faintly amazed that all sorts of people who weren't me thought he was beautiful.)
no subject
Do you own a copy? I seriously need a non-Whedon fix after this.
In Avengers, I liked the performance by Mark Ruffalo, which I credit to Mark Ruffalo.
He was the part of that movie I wasn't expecting at all. I walked out ready to watch him read the phone book.
I don't think Joss understands people very well, or what makes them heroic.
Or trusts his audience.
no subject
My main criticism of Joss is that he doesn't understand stakes, or understands them in an immature way. He's constantly destroying healthy relationships or killing characters to raise the stakes and show that nobody is safe, when for me the driving force of a narrative involves having something worth fighting for. This also inadvertently leads to a perverse reward system where only the dysfunctional and cruel survive, and anyone who has hope or stability or emotional openness is a target.
It's nihilist, basically, and I'm tired of being told it's feminist just because a woman/girl is sometimes doing it. It's an approach that punishes characters who pursue feminist/pro-connection solutions in favor of "get the biggest guns, it's my way or the highway, I'm on my own as the female champion who protects all of you like a patriarch, nobody understands my pain."
no subject
Awesome. Also, we need to meet with
It's nihilist, basically
Agreed. I saw just enough of Buffy to observe his habit of casually dispatching characters and/or destroying their happiness and it never felt like it had any emotional weight: it felt like it was being done just to tweak the audience, which meant that any supposedly shocking twist of events felt especially manipulative and contemptuous of both the characters and the viewers. I wasn't upset that Xander left Anya at the altar. I didn't feel sorrow or regret or frustration except with the writing. I didn't recognize some rueful truth about the fragility of relationships or the fear of change. I just thought, well, that's designed to annoy people.
My very first Arisia, my very first day on programming, I was taken to a panel called "Joss Whedon Is Our Master." Between that and the hell-ziggurat hotel, it's a lucky thing I came back.
It's an approach that punishes characters who pursue feminist/pro-connection solutions in favor of "get the biggest guns, it's my way or the highway, I'm on my own as the female champion who protects all of you like a patriarch, nobody understands my pain."
Hah. I hadn't even considered that angle. That does not help at all, no.