I’ve been pretty disappointed by this TV season (looking at you, Fringe and Pushing Daisies!), which has me rooting all the more for Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse. There’s a new trailer and it looks pretty good, as TV trailers go.
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While looking at that trailer, I saw a preview for another mid-season Fox skein called Lie to Me. The show looks pretty bad, but has a song Frank and I have been listening to quite a bit the past few months. The title also reminds me of one of the most amazing and angsty Joss Whedon penned Buffy episodes. At the end of a harrowing day Buffy and Giles wait over the grave of their friend, who has been turned into a vampire. Buffy asks Giles if life ever gets easy. Her friend emerges from the grave and Buffy summarily kills him.
Giles: What do you want me to say?
Buffy: Lie to me.
Giles:Â It’s terribly simple. The good-guys are stalwart and true. The bad-guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats and we always defeat them and save the day. Nobody ever dies… and everybody lives happily ever after.
Buffy: Liar.
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Remembering Michael Crichton: The first Michael Crichton book I read was Sphere, and immediately after chewed through his entire bibliography. The conclusion was at the same time startling and satisfying, like no other novel with a ‘twist’ ending that I had read. I’m sure he had his duds (I’ve deliberately skipped a number of his movies, including the movie version of Sphere and Congo) but Michael Crichton clearly had a rare mastery of storytelling with books, movies, and television. My boss at the library told me that when she finished Andromeda Strain she couldn’t sleep for days afterwards. Everyone seems to have at least one story of a Michael Crichton story really affecting them.
Michael Crichton had his personal problems, and I noticed that his novels began to read more and more like movies in recent years. But perhaps I was just getting older, and the quality of his output remained the same? If so, thank goodness I discovered him early! His books stand with Robert Louis Stevenson and the best genre writers, and I certainly hope that after he has been dead for a sufficient period of time he will enter the literary canon. He was not a Christian, but like Dickens he was damned smart. It will be interesting to see if his common-sense objections to anthropocentric global warming will be vindicated by history.
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While looking for a decent Michael Crichton obituary (the search continues), I was surprised to see an obituary for Yma Sumac. More surprised to see that she had died so recently – her persona was so larger-than-life that I assumed her to be from another time. She was a sensation in the US in the 1950s, a novelty act perhaps comparable to Josh Groban in our time. She had a reported 5 octave range, the largest in the world. I’ve posted a song to the music player so that you can experience it.
That Dollhouse promo looks incredible, if only for the question, “But can you wipe away a soul?” YES! I’m there for this, most definitely.
And wow, Bon Voyage getting used in TV. Always a nice way to put some coin into the ol’ family coffer.