Cal and I borrowed River Queen from the library over the weekend. I was quite keen to see Vincent Ward’s big film with Kiefer Sutherland and Samantha Morton gallivanting through the Maori wars. It had received mostly-bad reviews, but there were enough good ones that I was still curious, and it was a big NZ production to boot. Besides, how bad could it be?
Answer: really quite bad. Made it through fifteen minutes or so then we gave up. I don’t often give up on films, but this one just kept hitting us over the head with reasons to turn it off. It was very pretty, but it made not the least bit of sense, as if a bunch of semi-random scenes were stitched together in the editing room with a voiceover trying to turn them into a story. That’s actually what happened, so I shouldn’t have been so surprised.
Avoid. The good reviews were people lying to themselves to avoid the horrible truth – Vincent Ward, NZ cinema’s maverick genius auteur, screwed this ‘un up real bad. Rent African Queen instead.
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Also picked up issue one of Buffy Season Eight, which is the new comic series continuation of the Buffy TV show, written and show-run by Buffy creator Joss Whedon himself. Here’s how I discussed it on RPG.net:
I enjoyed The Long Way Home pt. 1 (especially appreciate how it is titled “Season Eight” on the cover) a great deal. It really felt like coming home. And the reason was, almost entirely, in the banter. No-one writes Joss-banter except Joss, hence the term, Joss-banter-esque.
Best examples:
“But your nerd points are accumulating impressively.”
“This is all bad math.”
“So you think it’s a frown.”
It was also really nice to get some insight into thought processes, particularly the two-page spread of Buffy introspection. That is a new element for Joss-written Buffy, and it came off really well – completely consistent with the characters and yet surprisingly new.
And the art! Way better than I expected. Great costume detail, excellent representations of the characters we’ve seen before (Dawn in particular), with a lot of clarity and energy. A couple jarring transitions (e.g. Buffy with the crucifix from standing to, er, flying) but otherwise nice flow.
But it wasn’t all sweetness and light.
The foreign accents bugged the hell out of me. Sure, we get it, they’re international. Can we get past the crappy accented dialogue? ‘Dat vent vell?’ Gah.
The visual design didn’t seem consistent with Buffy-on-TV. Particularly the technology, which didn’t feel of a piece with high-tech as we’ve seen previously – it was all a bit ray-gun except the comm centre. Also the monsters – we’ve seen lots of demons on TV Buffy and they don’t look like gigantic beasts. Sure, comics = unlimited budget etc, but the aesthetics of Buffy vs. giant monsters were quite unfamiliar and thus jarring. YMMV.
Joss’ writing was structurally pretty nice, running from setup to setup. The two-pager where Dawn and Buffy chat was nice in that it broke the TV-on-the-page thing I was expecting from him; it only works as comics. Sadly, it doesn’t quite work at conveying that Buffy’s in there talking to Dawn for a long time – the dialogue doesn’t sell the time transitions and missing time very well.
But the biggest disappointment was the finale. I’d seen someone bitching about the issue not being accessible to people new to Buffy, and you know, that is dead on. The big reveal on the last page, “her name is …”, only works if you are at least medium-level aware of Buffy lore. At *least* medium level. If you aren’t, it falls completely flat as a cliffhanger. And this is a big failure, by Joss, because the *actual* cliffhanger break point is thrown away at the top of the previous page. The final page should have dropped both who it is *and* what her first words were. That way, even a completely new reader would get a final page hit; the Buffy fan would get it doubleplus.
You know, all the writing stuff I have a problem with should probably have been picked up in editing.
Anyway. It’s a great first issue, unreservedly recommended to Buffy lovers, and tentatively recommended to those who aren’t.
No-one got the Whedonesque joke. Which I suppose means it isn’t funny. Well, I laugh, so ha.