Monday various

  • I don’t always agree with Abigail Nussbaum, but I can always count on her for insightful and interesting commentary. This time it’s on the third season of Dexter, which I finally finished watching (and really enjoying) yesterday afternoon. The whole post is worth reading — provided you’ve seen all three seasons, since it’s quite heavy on spoilers — but here’s a taste:

    I’ve written before about the qualities that separate successful multi-season novelistic TV shows from the unsuccessful kind. The key, I speculated, was formula. Not the kind that brings CSI and Law & Order‘s detectives back to the same starting point every week, but the kind that identifies the fundamental, ur-story the show is trying to tell and, though constantly changing its garb, retells it again and again. Buffy is a story about a girl whose impulses towards heroism and normalcy are constantly at war. Angel, the story of an ordinary man faced with the inadequacy of heroism in an imperfect world. For all the differences between its three seasons and their genres, Dexter is that kind of show, telling the same story with each of those seasons.

    And if you haven’t seen the show, the first two seasons are available on DVD.

  • Speaking of Buffy the Vampire Slayer — we were, honest; read up there if you don’t believe me — here’s a terrific fan-made “trailer” for the first season. (The one for Season 2 isn’t bad at all either.) [via]
  • Speaking of dolphins — which we weren’t, but we could have been — apparently some of them have started to use tools. I’d say the invasion couldn’t be far off if it wasn’t for this:

    I think maybe the dolphin invasion’s already here. [via and via]

  • Neil Gaiman does seem to be going out of his way to not directly call The Spirit a terrible movie, doesn’t he?

    It doesn’t say anything about the quality of the film, I should point out. You could make a great film called Batman, in which Batman’s costume is pink and green and he’s a lawyer who works all day and into the early evening to save a small health-food franchise from being taken over by a big conglomerate, and at night he goes on a succession of dates with odd people… and it would be a very bad Batman film.

    Plenty of other people are willing, though. The AV Club, for instance, said it “feels like the follow-up to Batman & Robin no one wanted.” Peter David, on the other hand, suggests “viewing it as a surrealist comedy,” rather than whatever it was Frank Miller thought he was directing.

  • If Hollywood really wants make a movie about a crime-fighting spirit, they could do worse than to look at this news story, about a Malaysian burglar who claims to be have been held captive for three days by a ghost. I’m just saying. [via]

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