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missed the slayer When I got home from work this morning, all that I wanted to do was sleep and I started on that plan as soon as I could. Sadly my sleep ended much earlier than I had planned, because the telephone rang at five this afternoon. Struggling to stand up from the couch I managed to pick up the phone even though my arm was asleep and almost useless. On the other end of the line was my sister telling me that there wouldn't be any Buffy tonight, because a baseball game was being aired instead. Smallville however would still be on tonight. I thanked her for the information, hung up the phone and went online. Time passed and I didn't any more about what she had said until the phone rang again at eight thirty. It was my sister again. She said that she had been wrong and that there was a new episode of Buffy. She had tried to tell me more than once, but I am one of the few who still use dial up she could never get through to me until it was too late. Oh, well. To be honest the show has lost my interest and I won't miss it once the final episode airs. ... Looking back a year ago, I can see that I was still on a rant about the Spiderman movie. I didn't do that with X2 this year, but I could have quite easily, because once again what happens in the movie just vaguely resembles what happened in the books. What the movie kept was notion of persecution based on being a mutant which is key to the books, but doesn't always have to be the central theme of a good story in the books themselves. Some of the better stories have been character studies which is where the movie still falls flat. The movie still places its emphasis on special effects be it Nightcrawler teleporting his way through the White House or Wolverine taking down Lady Deathstrike. Of course very few people want to see a talking heads movie and I'm not talking about David Byrne and company. Years ago in the books, Charles Xavier recruited Colossus, Nightcrawler, Storm and Wolverine at the same time. The new writer and artist team of Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum wanted to give the new members of the team a more international feel than the original five had. Suddenly instead of five middle class white students at the school there was a Russian farmboy, a German circus performer, an African woman worshipped as a goddess and a Canadian government agent on the run. This new group was much more mature and all of them had fully formed personalities to go with the mutant talents. What Chris and Dave did was breathe life back into a dead title that Marvel had reduced to a reprint book. I am curious to see how they bring the Phoenix element of the books to the big screen. Somehow I doubt that they will use the fiery bird image, because that would be too silly just like the idea of people running around in spandex. |