| |||||
 Arts & EntertainmentBooks Comics Health & Body Media Mothers Who Think News People Politics2000 Technology - Free Software Project Travel & Food  Columnists
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - Also Today For a full list of today's Salon Arts & Entertainment stories, go to the
Arts & Entertainment home page. - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon - - - - - - - - - - - - Salon Columnists - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment Music Review Movie Review Movie Review Movie Review Complete archives for Arts & Entertainment - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
__c i t y_o f Angel
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Oct. 4, 1999 |
Whedon and co-executive producer David Greenwalt have astutely placed Angel at the intersection of the two genres in which his wounded, night-crawling loner mystique makes the most sense -- film noir and the superhero graphic-novel. In a Raymond Chandler vision of Los Angeles, where bloodsuckers prey on fallen angels' dreams of stardom, Angel takes to the night streets like a vampire Batman; he joylessly saves humans from the clutches of vamps -- they have them in L.A., too -- and kills his own kind with a bitter, self-annihilating relish. He's a damaged protector.
Angel
Roswell
Joyce Millman Joyce Millman's column appears every other Monday in Salon Arts & Entertainment. When last seen in the 1999 "Buffy" season finale, Angel had helped Buffy defeat the demon mayor and his flesh-eating minions (long story) and was gallantly bidding her adieu. Angel, you should know, is under a Gypsy curse levied on him a century ago for his viciousness; he was given a soul and a conscience -- real occupational hazards for an immortal killing machine -- and is able to feel guilt and compassion. Angel can no longer kill to feed (he lives on drippings from the butcher shop and the occasional stolen bag of plasma). But the real drag is the curse's stipulation that the moment he experiences "perfect happiness" (i.e., sex with his true love), he'll lose his soul and revert to his beastlike ways. The last time that happened, after he deflowered Buffy, it was no fun for anyone, believe me. His soul restored by a healing spell, Angel left Sunnydale to spare Buffy the pain of pining after a celibate 200-plus-year-old dude who can't even go to the beach. She deserves better. So Angel is now in L.A. -- yeah, yeah, the City of Angels -- trying half-heartedly to forget. When Tuesday's pilot episode opens, he's drunk on a barstool babbling about his beloved Slayer: "She has this hair." (Even when he's wasted, Angel isn't much of a poet.) His monastic routine in L.A. is pretty grim. He lives in a sub-sub-basement apartment, rising at night to put on his game face and pick fights with bad vamps. Although clearly aroused by the blood trickling from a rescued damsel's forehead, Angel restrains himself, hissing through his fangs for her to get lost. Angel is neither quite monster nor quite human. Cut off from daylight and humanity, he's a lonesome Dark Knight, picking at his emotional scabs down in his Batcave, with a fridge full of pig's blood and maybe a few old issues of Maxim under the sofa. Swell way to spend eternity, huh? One night, though, Angel is visited by Doyle (Glenn Quinn), a wisecracking, Irish, half-human, half-pin-cushion-faced something else who delivers a proposition from "The Powers That Be." Angel will gets the chance to atone for his murderous past (and maybe even lift the curse) if he agrees to perform a few vampire mitzvahs -- he must find troubled humans and save them from harm. But there's a catch. He has to "reach out" to these people and "show 'em there's love and hope left in the world."
| ||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
Next page |