Have you seen the third part?
Was actually a suprised and totally not the typical cheesy ending...

Yes... And I really thought it WAS cheesy. I mean, James Bond did it in OHMSS, for pete's sake. If you're borrowing plot elements from James Bond that's the very definition of cheese, surely?

thing is, it's deliberate cheese. It's not meant to have been serious from the getgo

I haven't seen OHMSS, but James Bond really turns irrevocably evil and all but loses his humanity?

He is finally resolved to go along the path he had been considering going along anyway when his wife gets killed in front of him.

So? It's hardly like WiR is an original trope exclusive to James Bond. I'm just interested because in Dr. Horrible it's a bad thing, and in so many other cases we see the Man becoming more Manly and Heroic because of the Terrible Suffering losing his wife does.

Well, yes, but in the concept of the story Dr Horrible is the "hero", so him becoming more manly and Evil because of the terrible suffering is not really a subversion of the stereotype.

I didn't read him as the hero. It takes more the eponymity for me to accept someone as heroic. Like - being remotely sympathetic or likeable.

He was clearly supposed to be the sympathetic character that you are meant to root for, although I agree with you that he wasn't.

- yeah, I didn't get that at all. OTC, I thought he was very clearly supposed to be misguided and pathetic. What part suggested otherwise?

Yes, he's supposed to be misguided and pathetic. He's a blogger! That's what bloggers ARE, according to the MSM cariacature, and Joss is a fully paid-up member of the MSM. We are all supposed to identify with him because WE are misguided and pathetic too. We're supposed to look at him ond go ZOMG ITS FUNNY BCOS ITS TROO!!!

MSM?

I have no idea what this comment implies.

Mainstream Media

Oh.

Well.

OK, I see where the blogging part of his character is linked to his patheticness - after all, it's part of the very premise of the story, that he has this blog which he uses to aspire to be someone other than he is in reality. But seeing how all the characters - even the ones without blogs, are just as pathetic and unlikeable, I just don't get a 'you will identify with him because he's on the internet' vibe.

That's fair enough. I did.

* shrug *

World'd be a boring place if we all felt the same, wouldn't it?

I loved it. I loved everything about it. I wish I could come up with nicely structured arguments for just why it is so fantastic, but I'm currently still in the squeeful fangirl phase. Maybe later.

Hey, if you enjoyed it then that's cool. I never got all the fuss about Firefly either...

* shrug *

The fan response is why I'm not touching it with a barge pole. Whenever the majority of my Flist love something, it's always typical that I don't, so I'm not gonna watch it. :|

I am such a squee-harsher... I have been vacillating about it for a couple of days, but I figured I might as well watch it now while it's still free, rather than end up having to pay for it.

I didn't like it either and only watched it because I am shallow and find Nathan Fillion a rather exceptional specimen. Cheesy and contrived.

Bah! And I just posted on LC that EVERYONE in the blogosphere liked it but me! Curse you and your hyperbole-exploding!

IIRC gdwessel didn't like it either.

*goes to find link* Here it is. Short and to the point.

I don't know what it is, hadn't heard a thing about it until it suddenly appeared on my f-list the other day. And I have zero interest in it. Simply because I don't know what the hell it is.

Edited at 2008-07-19 05:19 pm (UTC)

I refuse to even go there.

I'm not letting Wanker!Whedon mess with me again. I'm honestly going nowhere near his stuff again - unless it's the Ripper spin-off...and there's no Spike in it...

Yeah, have had a couple of people tell me to watch it, so your post inspired me to get round to it today. It's not great, is it? As you say, the songs are pretty meh, and the whole thing feels kind of... pointless. I came away from it thinking, first and foremost, what was that *for*? It's just not long enough, subtle enough, spiky enough, original enough, or anything else enough to justify paying it attention. It's a cliched plot, cookie-cutter characters, production values that do just enough, and it tries to justify its complete skin-depth by being a bit arch and funny.

Oh, maybe it's *just* meant to be funny? In which case... well yeah, I laughed about twice, so... not terrible. Better than some sitcoms the BBC pays good money for, so... I could let it off as that. But not really as anything else.

What? It was a laugh. It was the very definition of cheap and cheerful[0]. You don't have to like it, but don't blame it for not having a depth it never promised.

And trite? It's a musical. That's exactly why people like them.

[0] Although it still cost at least twenty times as much as Bloodspell.

I have no idea what it was supposed to be, I just got told by lots of friends that I MUST watch it because it was brilliant and insightful and amazing... Nobody mentioned comedy, and even if they had I would have been disappointed because it ddn't make me laugh

* shrug *

YMMV.

"trite": Worn out by constant use or repetition; devoid of freshness or novelty; hackneyed, commonplace, stale. (or so the OED would have it, anyway)

As someone who likes musicals, I can assure you that I do not seek these qualities in any entertainment, and certainly not in musicals.

It's also not a term I would really apply to Dr. Horrible as a musical. As an experimental short to work out ways of updating the musical format, it's moderately succesful; it cuts away from songs, it has people dismissively sing things like "whatever" as their part of a harmony, etc., and shows that these little meta updates work. It's just a shame that a few stylistic innovations can't really make up for the uninteresting plot and characters, which *are* trite, but not because they're in a musical. And being in a musical really isn't an excuse for this either.

I'm of the opinion that musicals are the only genre that is universally self-parodic. The metatextual adaptations you mention have almost certainly been done before, along with others (a counterpointed love song to Charles Manson and Jodie Foster? overdubbing a character's lines with the voice for the Russian spy he's working for?)---with the possible exception of the last hard-cut in midsentence, which is something you can only really do on television.

I thought that, as a musical, it was good but not necessarily outstanding. I enjoyed it. It deconstructed the superhero/villain genre in an amusing way, it hit all the standard tropes in the right order, and it had wit and charm (and Nathan Fillion). As an experiment into new-media distribution systems, though, it's fascinating, and it's already significantly more successful than the last such major experiment that I know of.

OK, more to agree with here (anonymous was me - sorry, forgot to log in). I would simply say that I didn't necessarily say all the little meta bits were brand spanky new, just that they helped make it feel relatively fresh as a musical, and that therefore it seemed strange to try to defend it from charges of being trite on the grounds that it's a musical, when this was one of the only senses in which it *didn't* feel trite to me. It is trite because, as you put it, it "hit all the standard tropes in the right order". Which it would equally have been if it had been a regular Whedon comedy-drama type thing.

Aww...I really loved it. Loved FF too but never really enjoyed Buffy after the first couple of seasons. Didn't watch Angel either.

Whedon seems to inspire the rabid love that JMS (and maybe RTD) inspire, but there also seems to be a big contingent (including me) who loves some of his stuff but not all.

And, it has to be said, Whedon can be a real soul crusher when it comes to character deaths...