Where there’s life, there’s hope
Every day’s a gift,
Wishes can come true,
Whistle while you work,
So hard all day
To be like other girls,
To fit in in this glittering world.
Don’t give me songs,
Don’t give me songs.
Give me something to sing about.

-Buffy Summers

I’ve been thinking a lot about this song lately. I know, another sad song just by its lyrics. The irony of it is that the sadder I am, the more I crave for songs.  There’s something about haunting melodies that get me all the time. Even when I can’t relate with the exact lines, music touches me in away that mere words can’t. This, coming from someone who fancies poetry just a little too much. I can see myself in a deserted place, cross-legged in a yoga position and eyes closed under the Fig trees , mp3 headset in my ears. Geez, I’m watching too many fantasy shows.

Opening yourself to songs is not without ramifications, though. Sometimes they hit nerves you didn’t know you have. And that’s when you start to lose joy in happy songs.

But then again

Life’s not a song,
Life isn’t bliss
Life is just this,
It’s living.

You’ll get along,
The pain that you feel
Only can heal,
By living.
You have to go on living

- Spike

I’ve been reading shooting scripts of some of my favorite TV shows and it’s increasingly being clear to me what I’d really like to do. For a living, hopefully, but more so for myself. No big surprise here, I would like to write. I’d like to be someone working behind the scenes of a good TV show or a movie or a musical. I don’t know where I’m going to start with that but just thinking about it makes me happy already.  

Reading episode shooting scripts, I was amazed how much input the writers have on the nuances of a particular scene. It’s not just about writing dialogues but even expressions and actions, which is not to say that actors don’t really have any creative input. The coming together of it all, the merging of talents and ideas, culminating in a single work of art for all the world to see, is something I’d like to be a part of.

Take my recent fascination with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example. [I know, it's an old show, that's why it's prominently featured at datedthings.com.] Here’s what Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com said about the show:

It’s pointless to spend much time wrestling with the question of whether TV can be art (of course it can be and often isn’t). But there have been many days when, after a particularly potent “Buffy” episode, I’ve found myself feeling vaguely off my game, my mind clouded with a gauzy, muted sense of dread. When a show jostles your equilibrium to the point of haunting your days or robbing you of sleep, when it finds a place in your imagination that also rubs, hard, at the core of who you think you really are, it starts to look like something more than what we simply call TV.

 

To be as effective a writer as those who are rained down by such compliments must be something so fulfilling. Another writer for Salon, Joyce Millman, described the show as

Buffy is an ode to misfits, a healing vision of the weird, the different and the marginalized finding their place in the world and, ultimately, saving it. … the show’s central themes [are] female empowerment, destiny vs. free will, the search for identity and the many varieties of families.

I agree to everything that has been said, but what I most appreciated about Buffy are the hidden and not-so-hidden emotional riches. You can look at it and go, “Wow! Tiny girls saving the world, cool!” and see nothing but that, and that would have been one objective – to have people enjoy watching the action unfold. But for those who look deeper into the many layers of meaning, the allegories, and the metaphors, the series has provided an entire universe of thought, so much so that scholars wrote tons of papers about it.  That’s what I love about the use of subtext; you can have one character go rummaging for an acne treatment, for example, but what’s really happening there in the scene is something bigger (like the demonstration of self-loathing perhaps?). Of course, there are times when subtext needs to be translated to text so as not to alienate the audience, and there’s a certain amount of satisfaction a viewer gets from being proven right when such things come into order.

There’s something about the play with words that fascinates me. Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy, was described as someone who “writes people who are self-deprecating, pop-culture savvy, madly in love with wordplay, quick-witted, terrified of sounding pompous and with wells of emotion lurking beneath a shiny, protective layer of self-aware sarcasm” (Kristi Turnquist, The Oregonian). Which is why despite being so late in the game, I enjoyed his show immensely. I’m twisted like that. But at least it gave me my lightbulb moment, so I couldn’t ask for a better reward for spending hours and hours in front of the TV than that.

So what makes a show a cult hit? What is it about some TV shows that garner a cult following – devoted fans, sometimes overly so, that convene on message boards, chat rooms, and even on conventions to share mutual interest and devotion about a particular media – as opposed to others that have a more mainstream appeal? I won’t really go into the psychology of that, although I must say that I find that fans of The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are among the smartest ones around and they’re demographically diverse, too (though you may think I’m only saying that because I’m a fan of both). Anyway, if anything, that is what make these shows good franchises. They may have been off the air for years now but they live on through DVDs, online fan discussions, comics, and even in movies. We haven’t even considered how any franchise can spawn related products – toys, action figures, costumes, books, etc. It spells big money for the entertainment big wigs who are deft enough to play the obsession of the most ardent fans to jump on any franchise opportunity. That’s why we know Twilight is now a huge movie franchise, as much as the Harry Potter movies are never forgotten.

Now if Fox will only give a nod to XF3 and Joss Whedon will seriously consider writing a fantastic script to a BtVS movie soon.

I was watching an episode of How I Met Your Mother yesterday and they have this story about how one day you find yourself not as fit nor in shape as you want yourself to be. I had to laugh at the gags, like Ted (the leading man) feeling stress and tired after brisk walking a few feet, because most of the time I feel the same way, too. So the gang decided that they will join the gym (one thing that I’ve been planning to do again for a long time now) only to be disheartened or diverted away from actually working out by an acutely strict female trainer, a muscular trainer who is not really a trainer, a former flame, or Ted being simply to lazy to stretch his muscles.

There are times when I fear that I may have hormonal imbalance, especially at certain times of the month. But mostly I suppose my feeling lethargic is caused by not enough exercise and an unhealthy diet. It’s hard sometimes to assess yourself if you’re just being paranoid and hypochondriac or if you’re putting off seeing the doctor when you actually have to. Speaking of hormone therapy, I remember hearing from a friend that such treatments sometimes cause dramatic weight increases, so I can only hope I won’t need to have that anytime in the future (we’re not going to talk about menopause here; that’s still too far). There are alternatives like natural hormones, but I’ve read that drugs are not necessarily safe just because they’re “natural.” Oh, well.

It seems that no matter how many new shows pop up and no matter how much I enjoy watching them, nothing can ever replace what The X-Files has meant to me. So I’m starting this new category – bits and pieces of episode recaps, random quotes, real-life analogies, and eveything I want to discuss about a show that has long been gone but will never be forgotten. I think my hosting space can contain it – be prepared to read everything from Mulder and Scully’s gazes to William’s (their son) baby bedding; from alien green goo and monsters of the week to science vs faith debates. If I can get you at all curious, I dare you watch it on DVD, everything from start to finish, and let me do my share in pushing for a third movie.

If you haven’t discovered it yet, also try to double-click any word in this post and in this whole blog. It may come in handy with some of the passages I plan to quote in the future.

I mean her creator and alter ego, Tina Fey.

AP photo

The funny lady won big at the Emmys, although her show, 30 Rock, is still one of the most underappreciated shows on TV today (despite winning the Best Comedy category for 2 years in a row). If I hadn’t been living and breathing the Internet, I probably wouldn’t even know about it. As it is, it’s one of my most favorite shows these days – each episode lasts just about the right time to keep me amused and laughing (about 20 minutes without commercial break); it’s just my kind of comedy. To be honest, if not for this show, I wouldn’t be able to specify what my kind of comedy is (although I enjoyed F.R.I.E.N.D.S. a lot).

The third season is set to premier on October 30. For now, enjoy these clips from the previous season.

Episode Cooter (clip: Jenna pulls out all the stops to get Kenneth to Beijing).

Episode: Succession (Liz goes Corporate!)

The two “politicians” addressed the issue of sexism in the campaign.

Scully is my favorite TV heroine. She may very well be the only one. I admire her intensity, her sense of rigidity that is not quite unflexible but is rooted in something more than fleeting emotions and shallow aspirations. As they say, she’s a buzzkill – she is rarely amused, but when she is, finally, sparks fly.

I can attempt to write everything that I appreciated about this character Chris Carter created and Gillian Anderson so masterfully portrayed, despite the fact that her real-life persona will probably giggle over Scully’s repressed personality, but someone else have already done that for me.

Here’s a thoughtful article published on Salon, detailing why Dana Scully, THE “smart-girl icon who was (and would still be, alas) a rare television bird: professional, independent, unsentimental,” became both the cerebral center and the heart of an otherwise formulaic science fiction narrative.

My sister was urging me to watch this new TV series she bought a DVD of – Dexter. It’s another one of those wonderfully weird shows from Showtime (well, that’s only judging from Californication being from Showtime, too, and it’s quite weird. Good show, but in a very controversial way). I didn’t think I’m up for gruesome, crime stories, wherein the main character is the one perpetuating the crimes, albeit only against hardened criminals. But the first episode proved to be intriguing and I think I might stick around to watch the entire first season. Plus, Michael Hall (Dexter), David from Six Feet Under, is a really great actor. Here he plays a forensics expert by day who analyzes blood-splatter patterns, and a heartless killer by night, preying on those criminals who got away from law and justice.

There’s a reason why I stay away from crime shows, CSI, for example. I used to watch documentaries about real crime stories and they give me nightmares. But the whodunit scenarios are always compelling and the use of modern technology in investigations is quite interesting to learn about. The use of PCR, for example, to determine the identity of possible suspects and, in more extreme cases, it’s even curious how they use dental fragments to identify the victims. It must really pay to watch your oral health, if only to have dental records, then. No, really, a charlotte cosmetic dentist is maybe what you need while you’re well and hoping to do some oral reconstructions, but the former is a technology I fear we don’t have here in our country yet (or do we?).

Anyway, we’ll see if I’ll be able to go through season 1 without being squeamish about all those blood.

I’m not trying to shove this movie down everyone’s throats. Well, maybe a little bit (reminder: August 13 is the opening day of The X-Files: I Want to Believe). General reception to the new X-Files movie has been lukewarm but from everything I’ve read, it’s apparent that the movie is a gift to fans (read: X-phile “shippers”). Granted, some who might have been expecting a grander cinematic offering like the first film, Fight the Future, were disappointed to see a smaller-scale thriller with underdeveloped plot. The X file, they say, took a backseat to character study and the exploration of Mulder and Scully’s relationship. It’s The X-Files at its core – the ever-precarious balance between faith and science. It’s a love story, although in the true X-Files sense (ambiguous and repressed). I’ve spoiled myself with the actual movie clips that fans have uploaded at YouTube and I realized that although the words and the looks that these two gave each other brought out the totally squealing fangirl in me, I don’t think anybody who’s not familiar with the show will understand why those seemingly typical scenes that depict two people in a relationship are pivotal in a decade-long wait for tying up loose ends.
MSR, the Mulder-Scully relationship as fans call it, has been nothing like anything depicted on TV before The X-Files and nothing ever since, partly owing to the actors’ much-raved-about chemistry and partly owing to Chris Carter’s (the series creator) initial insistence to keep the two characters’ relationship strictly platonic and professional. I am watching a season 3 episode as I am typing this post, The War of the Coprophages. Without getting into the plot that pretty much revolved around metallic killer cockroaches, I love this episode because Mulder gets to flirt with a scientist named Bambi while Scully acts jealous and territorial. As if to emphasize the silliness of this episode, my favorite (spooky) duo ended up both covered in dung and insulting each other. It was goofy and funny and reminded me of classic exchanges such as the phone conversation below.

Mulder (sitting in a car parked in nowhere land): Did you ever look up into a night sky and feel certain that not only was something up there, but it was looking down on you at that exact same moment and was just as curious about you as you are about it?

Scully (at home, cleaning her gun) : Mulder, I think the only thing more fortuitous than the emergence of life on this planet is that through purely random laws of biological evolution, an intelligence as complex as ours ever emanated from it. The very idea of intelligent alien life is not only astronomically improbable, but, at its most basic level, downright anti-Darwinian.

Mulder: Scully, what are you wearing?

Oh, the humanity! Have you ever seen a more geeky pair than these two?