Buffy the Vampire Slayer – TV Review

I came late to the Buffy party. I think season five or six was screening in Australia by the time I started hiring them from my local DVD shop and making my way through the whole lot. I dread to work out how long I have spent watching this show (or indeed television in general…), but it was definitely worth it.

If you don’t know, Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is a cheerleading high school student who lives a secret double life as a vampire slayer at night. She lives in Sunnydale, which is unfortunately located on the hellmouth, which means there are not only vampires, but demons of all kinds. Buffy’s watcher is Giles (Anthony Head) who works with her friends Xander (Nicholas Brendon) and Willow (Alyson Hannigan) to research and fight all the nasties. Then along comes Angel (David Boreanaz), a vampire who has a soul, and everything changes. And then later, Spike (James Masters) and Anya (Emma Caulfield) and so many more.

It’s the wit of the creator of the television series, Joss Wheedon, that I really love. Personally, I found Buffy to be an annoying, whiney spoilt brat, but she needed to be like this to give the show the structure it needed. Luckily she was surrounded by funny and quirky characters who made me laugh and kept me interested.

I want to watch it all again, but I have far more important things to do (and to watch). Perhaps I’ll just satisfy my witty vampire needs by re-watching the film the show was based on. I recall loving that one as well.

The Expendables (2010) and The Expendables 2 (2012) Film Review

 

Don’t watch this film for the storyline. There is one. I think. But who cares? If you’re watching these films, you’re watching them to see Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Terry Crews, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris and heaps of other massive action film stars all in it together.

The films don’t disappoint – if you want explosions, guns that literally rip people in two, blood, serious muscles and corny one-liners. They do disappoint if you want plot, sub-plot and facial expressions (man, the amount of plastic surgery on screen is surprising). You don’t need the first film to know what is going on in the second, and the second is heaps better. Unfortunately, Jet Li is out of the film early on, but in the second film there is one scene with Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone all with massive machine guns killing bad guys in the airport. What more do you want? Chuck Norris? Yeah, you get him too. And I’m pretty sure he made a Chuck Norris joke.

Expendables 3 is on IMDB, apparently to be directed by John Woo and Nicholas Cage is on board. I was hoping for Wesley Snipes – he should be out of jail (tax fraud) this year, according to the internet. But Cage will do.

Angel – seasons four and five – TV Review

**SPOILER ALERTS**

Finally my video shop and I got our acts together and I have watched Season Four of Angel. It’s really crap. There are some good things, but generally it’s dark and broody and boring. I never bought the Angel/Cordellia love story. It always felt forced and dumb. I’m over the Fred/Gun/Welsey love triangle. I want more of   and his delightful nightclub-ness. I hate Connor with his emo fringe and attempts to out-brood his father.

I think there was not enough humour and too much fear of the end of the world. And yet another unexplained demon pregnancy? Yawn. Of course, I watched the whole thing. I mean, why stop watching it just because I’m not enjoying it? Duh. I think it’s major FOMO. Fear of missing out, that is. It’s why I can rarely stop reading a book that I’ve started or walk out of a movie.

Having said that, when I returned the DVDs, I picked up the final season. Possibly a bit of FOMO, but more likely because I have seen a couple of these eps back when it was on TV and Spike’s back. I love Spike. It’s bound to be better… I hope.

I’ve been a bit crap at actually getting my posts from my computer onto the online world as of late, and in the meantime, I’ve finished Season Five. I think that’s it – five seasons. The last scene is kind of cool, although I got fed up with the whole Fred possessed storyline. It almost felt like the last five or six episodes suddenly had to wrap up lots of stuff and close the whole thing down, and it did it in a pretty clunky way.

I missed Cordellia. That was a surprise. Not that she is dead or anything, but she’s only around for, I think, one episode. It was marvellous having Spike back, and the flashbacks to the past he and Angel shared were good fun. There were two episodes ‘featuring’ Buffy – that is, she was referred to and glimpsed at from afar, but it was very bloody obvious that it was just a stand in, and that Sarah Michelle Gellar was nowhere in the house. Why did they bother? At least we got a last goodbye of Willow. That was nice.

Some of it was really surprisingly dark – like when Spike’s hands got chopped off. It felt more like Dexter than Angel, and I kind of liked it, but I wasn’t expecting it. Overall, I did like season five better than season four, but I think I lost the love I had for it at the very start, and it never measured up to Buffy. I’m going to miss Lorne, though. He was ace. Plus I got to see this episode.

And if that picture doesn’t give you enough of an idea on what’s going on, check this one out.

Teehee. And some final broodingness.

Bye, Angel. It’s been fun.

Angel – Mostly season 3, with a bit of 1 and 2 – TV Review

**spoiler alerts – although it started last century, so I think that you can get over any being upsetness, really**

I resisted watched Angel for so long. I mean, I loved Buffy, but Angel never really held the same appeal to me. I should clarify this – I loved Buffy the show, but I hated both Buffy and Angel, the characters. What won me over was that recently I wanted something I could watch without using too much brainpower and that would make me laugh. Thank goodness, my local video shop (what an outdated term – video shop. Haven’t seen a video since the late nineties) has lots of television series.

My viewing pleasure was not helped by the fact that I started watching from the last disc of the season and thought that Joss Wheedon had done a terrible job at introducing these characters. Duh. Of course he didn’t. He’s a genius, I tells you. That’s what you get for watching the last three episodes first. (Yep. I was totally brain fried when I started watching. Didn’t even have the brainpower to check that the discs were in the right order) I got over that. I don’t think I mind spoiler alerts so much – it didn’t bother me knowing where the script was going. In fact, I had to watch them again at the end to really know what was going on.

One of my other not-so-secret-or-shameful loves is bad tv, and I include American cop shows, even the really good, well-respected cop shows in that. I love Bones, although I miss Zac. Bones helped me to love David Boreanaz, and I’m discovering that I can tolerate the brooding of Angel and just look forward to the fighting and the gags.

Season three broke away from the lightness of the first two seasons and had some deep, brooding darkness. It worked for me – although I hate it when they lose too many gags. I was really appreciating the fact that there was not that sense of sexual tension between Angel and Cordelia, and then they started having a whole heap of sexual tension between them. Yawn. Although the scenes in the theatre dressing room – spicy. May have to start writing a romance set in a theatre… The whole Fred/Wesley/Gunn triangle was played out pretty nicely – much as I love him, it felt pretty real to see him get his hopes up only to realise he was wrong – and his heartbreak was effective as a red herring away from the stuff with Angel’s son.

I’m ready for Season four. Season three ended on quite a cliffhanger – well, a series of cliffhangers. I just hope that however Angel gets free, somehow he and Wesley can start working together. And Cordelia doesn’t go too far away. And that guy from the other world – he can bugger off. I’m not a fan. Oooh, and the singer demon guy – more of him, he’s a delight. I’ve seen some later episodes, and I know that Angel and Fred are in them, but I don’t recall Wesley or Cordelia. Or Gunn. Guess I’ll have to wait and see!

My video shop doesn’t have season four. It’s damaged and the new copy should be in around March. I’ll either have to wait, or have to beg, borrow or steal season four.

I just found the image below. I don’t know what season it is from, but it looks awesome. And is that Wesley on the right? Hmm, is it just me, or does he look a lot ‘Chris in the morning’ from Northern Exposure? Gotta love all of that!