I fucking loathe J.J. Abrams. Fucking. Hate. Him. Him and Joss fucking Whedon. I understand that they are bad ass, blockbuster directors or whatever, but fuck those guys. Now, before the nerdrage takes me, I've got to justify. I love, at least bits and pieces of, everything these guys have done. the first two seasons of Lost were wonderfully tense. Fringe was the first serious attempt at hard, contemporary science fiction on t.v. in years. Firefly... it breaks my heart how much I love firefly. I even got some kicks out of Buffy and Angel. That's why I hate them.
See, a shit director like goddamn Michael Bay I can forgive. He's just an idiot who gets paid to make boom-boom in the movin pit-chers so a wounded industry can squeeze a few more bucks out of our baser needs. Everyone has something simple they like, for many of us that thing is explosions, no shame there and it keeps Mr. Bay working on something more socially gratifying than fingerpaints. Narcissistic sociopaths like James Cameron, I can mostly forgive. I can't imagine he knows how terrible he is, but I have to at least give him a little credit for pulling in 2.7 BILLION FUCKING DOLLARS on Pocahontas in space. Hell, I can even kind of forgive George Lucas for accidentally creating, and then shitting all through, one of the richest and most engaging universes in modern fiction.
The bit that makes Abrams and Whedon different is that they ought to know better. Pretty much everything either of them has done has smacked on some level of visionary brilliance. Fuck, Buffy was a serial remake of a fun but terrible movie that by all rights should have died in the cradle. Whedon made it work, turned it into a long standing cult classic. Even managed to pull a mostly watchable spin-off out of it. Abrams took a story about a plane crashing and managed to make it into a quasi-spiritual dissection of the whole spectrum of human behavior, it got all fucked up, but the potential was certainly there.
Abrams and Whedon fall into what I like to call the "visionary but" category. I have never heard someone say, "Oh, I loved Serenity" and not follow it up with, "but man the way they killed Wash...". That is their problem fully encompassed. They both have wonderful ideas and direction, but they fall flat at some vital, unforgivable point. Abrams its lens flares and mystery boxes, Whedon its trying too hard to elicit a response.
Seriously though, fuck George Lucas.
No comments:
Post a Comment