Inasmuch as authors are, by the act of creation, images of God, the idea of making a Buffy movie without Joss Whedon is blasphemy. Buffy was a character that sprang from the brain of Joss (rather like Athena from the side of Zeus) and into boot-kickin’ television glory only after she had been bought from Joss and mostly ruined by Hollywood in the original ‘92 feature film.

Even if you were to leave Joss, Buffy, and the idiot Hollywoodians out of it entirely, I can’t think of a much worse thing you could do to the show’s extremely loyal fans. Buffy has a still-growing fan base, years after its cancellation. A fan base which organizes Meetup groups, holds Buffy-watching marathons, or swamps theaters with hundreds of people descending for a showing of the musical episode, Once More, With Feeling. The fans dress up for cons, dish out for DVDs, and run exhaustive blogs documenting Joss’ every move. Yes, maybe you could draw new fans with a new Joss-less vision — but not without alienating the existing ones, and why on earth would you want to do that?

Imagine if, in a world with no existing Batman comics, Frank Miller had written Batman Begins,* and pitched it to the studios. They bought the idea, but then twisted his script and dumbed it down to campy Adam West Batman. Then they poured the shattered wreckage back into the original author’s hands and said, “Okay, I guess you can do a TV show with this, if you want.” With freedom, Frank had gone on to create his vision of the Dark Knight through seven glorious years of television. (Sure, some years of Buffy were more glorious than others… nonetheless, the show was, overall, great.)

Now it’s like those producers are saying, “Ooh, okay, we’re gonna make another Batman movie — but we don’t want Frank or his vision involved; we want Adam West back.”

We’ve had the Dark Knight for seven years. Adam West was fun, and we laugh at him… but why would we ever, ever want to regress there?

* Yeah, I know Miller didn’t write the movie, but he did write Year One, which is most of where the movie got its meat from the comic books.

Have you ever heard of “The Fall”? No, I didn’t really either, until I was pointed towards it by a friend of mine who was an indie-movie and indie-music buff. Tarsem Singh, director of the incredibly creepy “The Cell,” has done it again: he’s created a work whose visual power will overwhelm you.

I am a sucker for visually intense movies in the first place, but the “The Fall” has something which “The Cell” didn’t, which is: an appealing story. The little kid is cute, Lee Pace is cute, and bedtime stories are timeless, no matter what They Say.

The movie tugs ever-so-slightly on the heartstrings, but not uncomfortably, mostly because the grimness of the story-within-a-story is there to play against the treacle. (This is generally the opposite of how these things work.)

At any rate, this whole post was particularly inspired by the discovery that Tarsem Singh was behind one of my favorite music videos of all time (it was an, “OH, THAT’S why I like it!” moment of sorts) — REM’s “Losing My Religion.”

Which brings me to stage two: review of this video. I’ve always loved the song, but my appreciation of the video has only grown over time. In an era of booty-shakin’ useless videos, the ones which contain an attempt at artistry, symbolism, or any sort of storyline always strike my fancy best of all. This one combines all of the aforementioned ingredients into a frenzy of artistic symbolism based primarily on religious art, and carefully encapsulated in worlds assigned with the three primary colors. The whole video plays as a biography of the stages of faith:

Yellow: Faith, religion, Caravaggio; the Bible (or some weighty Book) appears prominently. St. Thomas sticks a finger in Jesus’ side. Water falls, and the Dutch Masters seem like they might be nearby, because everything is filmed near an open window, with flames, long tables, dripping water. Georges de La Tour would be proud, and Vermeer would wish they’d moved the lights slightly more to the left.

Blue: I do not know the intended purpose, but I have assumed “Gauguin,” mostly from the juxtaposition of the yellows on the blues, but also because of the poses and the presence of Hindu influences. St. Andrew makes an appearance, but the theme is: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Red: Communism. According to Wikipedia, inspired by the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. I’ve never heard of him or seen his films, but the “red” scenes in the video all remind me of serious Communist propaganda art: behold, industry! The youth! With hammers! Working metal! And, red! It isn’t about religion anymore, it’s about politics; the individual is obliterated to make way for the work-driven masses, an army of Marthas.

Religion no longer plays an important role, except as the primary inspiration for what all three universes have been reaching towards: a pair of wings. In the Yellow world, the man wearing the wings is an elderly, father-of-Icarus figure who has strapped on a pair of bird’s wings which in the last frame highlight the Bible. In the Blue world, the wings are more stylistic and carefully sculpted, while in the Red word, the wings are partially made of metal and engine.

Put another way, it artistically encapsulates the religious and political collision of Western and Eastern cultures, and has as a coda the fallout of poor Russia, which was caught in the middle.

Take a look for yourself and let me know how wrong I am.

Today:

Zombie movies: I Am Legend and 28 Days Later, which are basically the same movie in certain ways.
Dinner at Wasabi Bistro; tons of sashimi. I’m still stuffed. And I still don’t love scallops or sweet shrimp, but I did love the Yellowtail cut they had going on.
Watching “Heroes,” and then reading Hiro Nakamura’s blog on the Heroes Wiki. I heart the internets.

I slept too late today, and therefore am still wide awake at 3:30 AM. Clearly going to bed is not going to be necessary tonight, as I’d just have to awaken at 5 AM anyhow in order to catch my bus.

Yeah. Coffee tomorrow.

I gotta admit it, I miss the days before Facebook and Twitter, when blogs were the one-stop shop for both short, random updates and longer, educated rants…

I know that it is the Fourth of July and, therefore, I should be feeling undivided American patriotism, but right now, I’m thinking a lot about Paris. My parents are there; many of my friends have recently been traveling there, and I seem to keep seeing movies set in or around it.

This weekend, I went to see “Ratatouille.” It was extremely cute, and with several great messages, as well as some classic Pixar-y hilarity, and, well, lots of fantastic-looking food. I’m actually a little surprised that the movie is rated G—not because there was anything in it to warrant a harsher rating, but because G is a rating now reserved so frequently for movies which can only entertain the most brain-dead children, while “Ratatouille” is much more sophisticated. It’s by the same guy—Brad Bird—who was behind “The Incredibles,” but in my opinion, generated a spark of its own that “The Incredibles” lacked. And, well, the scenes of Paris were simply gorgeous.

Today, I went to see “Paris Je T’aime.” I was expecting a very warm-fuzzy tale in the vein of “Love Actually,” but instead, felt like I was at a short film festival. Of course, that’s what this movie is: a series of shorts about various types of relationships, all set in Paris, and each directed by a different person or people. Some seemed really gimmicky, others were very sad (oh! The coffee!), but they were all somewhat entertaining. I adored the mimes, and the blind guy was cute, and Gena Rowlands is always fantastic. I’d recommend it, therefore, if you’re feeling kind of indie and don’t mind sitting through one or two boring bits—but it’s not the place to go for non-stop action. It’s human, and touching, and bits of it are quite bizarre, and imaginative.

And, it’s set in Paris.

I’m totally laughing at Purple and Brown. Seriously, watch those vids, they’re bizarre and stupid, but simultaneously hi-larious. I laughed very very hard tonight, in that wonderful, I-can’t-stop and I-can-barely-even-breathe way.

This is weird: this commercial is decidedly a spin on the whole 1984 thing, and maybe even the old Apple ad, but I can’t imagine that its target audience — li’l kids — would get either reference.

Linklater’s “A Scanner Darkly” arrived from netflix on DVD this week, and blew me away. For those unaware (though I haven’t read the book, I was somewhat familiar with the story), “A Scanner Darkly” is set not-very-far in the future (the movie says “seven years in the future), in a world where the drug war has ramped up several notches because of a new highly addictive drug called “Substance D.” Philip K. Dick apparently based the book on his own experience with drugs, and that sense of being close to the story comes through.

Something about the rotoscoping in this movie fit so perfectly with the story: rotoscoping generates an image that seems very nearly real, but still, obviously, isn’t photographic. (It shakes and boils, and the colors are all flatter.) However, once you are in the world of animation of this sort, it’s practically impossible to tell what’s real and what’s not: there’s no contrast. (Even with the high-level computer graphics employed in movies like “The Lord of the Rings,” moviemakers have not yet perfected CG so that is generally indistinguishable from reality. CG creatures still frequently look frozen, stalled; dead-eyed, and lacking tangibility.) For a world that is being seen primarily through the eyes of a man addicted to a dissociative, psychoactive drug, this is perfect.

The movie also fed a growing interest that I have in illegal drugs, their effects, their origins, and the politics of their illegality. Coming up: a lengthy, libertarian post about drugs…

…still not *good*. I helpfully edited out the part at the end where I totally dropped it.