Babble on

Our new TV is very large, and has quite a good picture, which made watching O Brother, Where Art Thou on Sunday a real pleasure. (It really is one of the best movies of the last few years.) The Coen brothers are working on a noir film for their next endeavor. Very cool.

Dave dumped the 4th Season of Babylon 5 on me last night, and I’m going to try to take it a little easier than I did with Season 3 (this means: don’t watch all 24 episodes in 4 days). The whole thing really feels like 3rd and 4th season are one really big single season, but maybe that’s due to watching them all at once. Certainly, a lot of the same stuff is going on, but I’m not enjoying the new, scared Garibaldi.

I see parallels to the attacks from last week in many things I watch right now… certainly in B5, which concerns a war, and right now is centering on random acts of violence from hidden foes whose motivations are unfathomable. I suppose it makes it poor escapism, but that’s what you make of it, I suppose.

Another Whedon Quote

“UPN is on board for letting me do the show the way that works. I don’t think anything will change. I mean, there’ll be wrestling. But tasteful wrestling. Wrestling with a message behind it.”

Heh. Did I mention I love this guy?

Joss

Okay, I worship Joss Whedon. Worship. Woorrrrrrship. Great writer. I finally got a chance to read the Whedon interview that Randy sent me about three weeks ago, and it’s great.

Excerpt:

X-Men was very interesting in that, by that time, I actually had a reputation in television. I was actually somebody. People stopped thinking I was John Sweden on the phone. And then, in X-Men, not only did they throw out my script and never tell me about it; they actually invited me to the read-through, having thrown out my entire draft without telling me. I was like, “Oh, that’s right! This is the movies! The writer is shit in the movies!” I’ll never understand that. I have one line left in that movie. Actually, there are a couple of lines left in that are out of context and make no sense, or are delivered so badly, so terribly… There’s one line that’s left the way I wrote it.

O: Which is?

JW: “‘It’s me.’ ‘Prove it.’ ‘You’re a dick.'” Hey, it got a laugh.

O: It’s funny that the only lines I really remember from that movie are that one and Storm’s toad comment.

JW: Okay, which was also mine, and that’s the interesting thing. Everybody remembers that as the worst line ever written, but the thing about that is, it was supposed to be delivered as completely offhand. [Adopts casual, bored tone.] “You know what happens when a toad gets hit by lightning?” Then, after he gets electrocuted, “Ahhh, pretty much the same thing that happens to anything else.” But Halle Berry said it like she was Desdemona. [Strident, ringing voice.] “The same thing that happens to everything eeelse!” That’s the thing that makes you go crazy. At least “You’re a dick” got delivered right. The worst thing about these things is that, when the actors say it wrong, it makes the writer look stupid.

I love it when people tell you what’s really going on in Hollywood.