HIGHLA-L Digest - 22 Sep 2004 to 29 Sep 2004 (#2004-180)
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Wed, 29 Sep 2004 22:00:10 -0400
There are 8 messages totalling 464 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. Season Five dvd commentary: Haunted
2. Highlander: The Video Game (6)
3. OT: Mortal Kombat 3 movie
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Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 11:03:03 -0400
From: kageorge <kageorge@erols.com>
Subject: Season Five dvd commentary: Haunted
Commentary w/screen captures at:
http://www.wordsmiths.net/MacGeorge/episodes/Season5/Haunted.htm
COMMENTARY: Stan K. talks about how he (as Richie) was given the
opportunity to, while still making juvenile mistakes, “come from a more
mature place”. Stan reports that he was working to have his character
deal with MacLeod on a more equal footing. The script had a lot of that,
but Stan says he had grown as an individual and understood more how to
handle the scenes and not just play into the sidekick role. On an acting
level, he was looking more for the nuances in things. In a series, a lot
of the scenes are the same over time, with different words, and you have
to find it in yourself to make it different.
Bill P. notes that an integral part of the Highlander legend is that
“when you take someone’s head you have a Quickening, and you get their
knowledge, their power, their essence, their good, their bad.” This show
was the first time they dealt with that notion, that the Quickening
includes some “intangible something” that allows someone who is close to
that person to get a sense that there is something of the other person
in the one who took the Quickening. They thought it was a really
interesting idea, and it was the only time it was ever done.
Stan says there wasn’t a lot of time for him to fall for Alec’s wife,
Jennifer. For her, she was sensing her husband in Richie, but from
Stan’s point of view, he tried to find things in her that weren’t just
physical and be drawn to those kinds of things, so it didn’t come off
so, “Oh, it’s just Richie wants to get laid.” The actress Kathy Evison
was very genuine, and also as an actress a little tentative and more
guarded than many on the show.
OUTTAKES: They show the filming of the Quickening, without sound.
Watching those things is always interesting and slightly uncomfortable,
for me. Each time it strikes me how difficult it is to sustain the
physicality and the tension, to try to make each one a little different,
but essentially the same, and do it consistently with all the special
effects exploding and things flying around. Bizarre.
THE EPISODE: (Audio commentary was provided by Stan K. and Don P. I
listened to it for a while, but for a couple of reasons I’m afraid I
find Stan K. to be one the least interesting commentators, and since
watching an episode with a distracting (and, for me, boring) voice track
over the episode is annoying, I gave up on it rather quickly.)
The prologue is an old house in San Francisco during a rainstorm, with
thunder and lightening combining to waken a young woman, who believes
she hears someone call her name (“Jennifer”). She rises from her bed,
hearing someone humming and playing the piano, but finding the music
room empty. She calls for Alec, a window breaks from a branch hitting it
in the storm, then believes she sees a man in a mirror. Grabbing a coat,
she gets in her car and drives through the stormy night to a cemetery
where she kneels in front of Alec Hill’s gravestone, weeping and asking
what he wants.
Richie is working out with a wooden sword in the dojo, when Jennifer
enters and sees Alec’s face in the shadows of Richie’s bare back and on
his face. They awkwardly introduce each other as she says she’s there to
see Duncan, and there seems to be some immediate warm flirtation going
on between them.
Mac is delighted to see her, but shaken to learn that her husband Alec
was dead. Jennifer evidently knows about Immortals, and tells him that
it happened the previous summer and that “after 110 years, he finally
found Gerard Kragan.”
We get a flashback to San Francisco, 1886, where Duncan is helping his
friend Alec Hill build a house for Alec and his beloved Genevieve,
Alec’s mortal wife. While Duncan and Alec go down to the stream to wash
before lunch, Genevieve is accosted by Kragan (played by the same actor
who had the role of the sheriff from “An Innocent Man” in the first
season). Evidently Kragan had initially taken in Genevieve, then trained
her and used her as an artist’s model. “You are who you are because of
me, and you ran away.” He feels he owns her and tries to kidnap her, but
Alec and Duncan hear her cries and come running. Turns out Kragan is an
Immortal, and he pulls out a knife and holds it to Genevieve’s throat,
backing her towards the edge of a bluff. There’s a confrontation and
Kragan ends up deliberately jumping off the edge of the bluff and taking
Genevieve with him. Alec leaps off after them, but by the time he
revives and Duncan reaches them, Kragan is gone. Genevieve is, of
course, dead.
Alec is devastated and vows to, “see that bastard dead even if I have to
come back from the grave to do it.” He makes Duncan swear that if Alec
dies before he can kill Kragan, Duncan will finish it.
Back in the present, Duncan has told the story to Richie and Jennifer,
and Richie asks what happened to Kragan. Duncan tells him they never
found him, but went back to finish Alec’s house and that Alec had never
lived anywhere else. Jennifer tells them that Alec had been waiting for
“Genevieve’s spirit to join mine.” Evidently, Alec believed in the
“eternity of the soul,” and we get another flashback to San Francisco,
two years after Genevieve’s death, when Amanda had just won Kit
O’Brady’s saloon. Duncan is trying to get a morose Alec to go out with
him, but Alec is convinced that Genevieve’s spirit has visited him, and
believes in the transmigration of the soul, that all souls are eternal
and that Genevieve’s soul is waiting to come back to him. He refuses to
leave and just obsessively plays the same tune (“Aura Lee”) on the piano
over and over.
Jennifer tells Duncan that she believes Alec, “is still here.” Duncan
tries to tell her that Alec is gone, that Alec’s obsession was his way
of coping with the loss of people he loved. But she says she’d heard his
voice, and even seen him, that there’s something Alec left unfinished.
She knows what Duncan promised about Kragan, and asks him to fulfill it.
At Joe’s, Richie and Jennifer chat about her belief that Genevieve’s
spirit is alive in her. They are mutually complementary, as she says
he’s very brave to deal with the difficulties of being Immortal and he
says she’s brave to stay with Alec even knowing what his life was like,
and they gaze, smiling, into each other’s eyes, talking about how if she
was ever to connect with someone like she had with Alec, it would have
to be “someone very special, very kind, someone…” (and we see Alec’s
face transposed over Richie’s). She is taken aback and goes to the
ladies room as Richie lights up a cigar (Alec used to smoke cigars, and
we had also seen that he had just taken up playing the harmonica –
another of Alec’s habits).
Richie asks Joe for advice, reporting that Duncan went to San Francisco
to track down the “son of a bitch who killed” Jennifer’s husband. Joe
looks dismayed and tells Richie that, “You’re the son of a bitch who
killed her husband.” Richie wasn’t aware of it at the time, but during
his “acting out” phase, he had killed Alec Hill without being aware of
who he was.
Jennifer comes to see Richie at his apartment, saying she couldn’t
sleep. He tries to tell her about Alec, but she interrupts him, saying
that, “something happened back at that bar.” He acknowledges that he had
felt it too, and they kiss, and despite Richie’s hesitation, they end up
making quite passionate love as though something was driving them to do it.
In the meantime, Duncan finds Kragan making soft porn films. They fight
on the film set and Duncan takes his head and the Quickening as a matter
more of obligation than passion, but it is clear that Kragan’s death
would not be a great loss to society.
Immediately after the orgasmic violence of the Quickening, we see Richie
and Jennifer still gasping from their own orgasm, and Jennifer whispers,
“I love you, Alec.”
Richie confronts a tired and depressed-looking Duncan in the dojo upon
his return from San Francisco. Richie tells him that Jennifer is at his
place, and makes it clear she was staying in his bed (“I couldn’t stop
myself.”) Duncan is not at all amused at the development, but doesn’t
really get angry until Richie also tells him that it wasn’t Kragan that
killed Alec. Richie tells him the story of his confrontation with Alec,
which we see in a flashback. Alec was looking for Kragan and was angry
and aggressive. Richie’s bike had broken down and was in Alec’s way and
Richie (also angry and aggressive) refused to move it. Their mutual
irritation escalated into a fight and Richie won.
“You could’ve walked away,” Duncan snarls, throwing up the elevator gate
at the loft. “You killed him over nothing!”
Richie insists that it was a fair fight, but Duncan is also offended
that Richie then slept with Alec’s wife, and when Richie defends their
actions by saying that they couldn’t help themselves, that they were
drawn to each other. Duncan angrily tells Richie to “save it for the
romance novels!”
Richie’s way of trying to make things right is to tell Jennifer the
truth, but Duncan angrily disagrees, insisting that all she’ll
understand is that Richie killed her husband. He grimly says that Richie
needs to get out of town immediately, that he’ll deal with Jennifer, and
allow her believe that the man who killed her husband is dead. Richie
turns at the elevator, and while still upset and angry that Duncan
didn’t seem to understand what had been driving his actions, says, “I’m
sorry I killed your friend.”
“Yeah,” Duncan answers, not looking at him. “So am I.”
That night at Joe’s, Jennifer is gratefully effusive to an uncomfortable
Duncan that he kept his promise and that now Alec’s soul can rest.
Duncan urges her to let it go, to give herself time, and when she tells
him that she had been with Richie and felt guilty about it, he says that
maybe it just wasn’t the right time, and that when it’s right, she’ll
know it. She says she’s still seeing and hearing him, but Duncan assures
her that she’s probably just not ready to let him go yet, but that she
has plenty of time for that.
When she leaves, Duncan is obviously distressed and uncomfortable,
telling Joe, “What a mess!” He clearly hated lying to her, hated that
his friend was dead, hated that Richie killed him.
Joe: “You can’t make any sense out of it, Mac. You just gotta go through
it.”
Richie is packing to leave when Jennifer drops by. She asks him not to
leave and tells him she had a long talk with Duncan, that he had
convinced her that, “it was time to move on, to live again. And Duncan
said when it was right, I’d know it. And with you, I know.”
Richie insists nothing can happen between them, and Jennifer is
bewildered and hurt, insisting on knowing why they can’t be together.
Richie blurts out that it was because he was the one who killed Alec,
that he hadn’t known it was Alec at the time.
She freaks out, calling him a, “Murdering bastard! How could you touch
me?!” She calls him a sick son-of-a-bitch and leaves.
Richie goes to Joe, smoking a cigar and bemoaning his stupidity. “It was
crazy, Joe. It was like a part of me was screaming, ‘What the hell are
you doing?’, and a part of me couldn’t stop.”
Joe theorizes that perhaps they were drawn together because Richie had
Alec’s Quickening.
“Well, I’ve got a much simpler theory,” Richie responds. “I’m an idiot!”
Joe: “Well, there’s always that.”
Jenn goes to Duncan to insist that he now kill Richie, but Duncan says
that Richie is still his friend, and that when one Immortal goes after
another, it’s not murder, it’s the way they live. She says he’s worse
than a liar, that he’s also a coward, and slams out.
She confronts Richie as he is leaving his apartment. He says he’s sorry,
that he never wanted any of it to happen. She’s decided, however, that
to move on and put it all behind her she has to kill Richie and she
pulls a gun and shoots Richie dead.
Duncan has driven up out front and hears the shots, rushing up the
stairs to find Jennifer holding Richie’s sword, ready to take his head.
He tells her that killing Richie won’t bring Alec back, and that if any
part of Alec still lives on, it lives on in Richie. He uses her and
Alec’s belief in the soul, telling her that killing Richie will haunt
her for the rest of her life, then addresses Alec’s soul as though he
actually saw it, talking about the pain Jennifer would suffer at having
killed, asking Alec if that’s what he would want her to feel the rest of
her life. As he does, Alec’s “ghost” says goodbye, disappears and
Jennifer drops the sword.
“Let him carry it,” she sobs into Duncan’s shoulder. “Let Alec haunt him
forever.”
“He will,” Duncan whispers.
Jenn is gone by the time Richie revives. He asks if Jennifer was going
to be okay, and Duncan says that she will, in time. That “she’s dealing
with her demons.”
“What about us, Mac?” Richie asks. “You and me?”
“You screwed up, Rich. But it happens. To all of us.”
“Oh, man. I swear if I live to be a thousand, I’m still going to see
that guy coming at me again and again, just wondering if there was
something I could’ve done different.”
“I know. And he won’t be the last. They all stay with you.”
“I didn’t know you believed in ghosts.”
“I believe in the kind you carry with you. Everyone you loved and
everyone you killed. They never leave you. When you stop feeling them,
when you stop hurting. That’s when you’re dead inside. And that, my
friend, is when I’ll worry about you,” Duncan says, and returns Richie’s
sword to him.
MY COMMENTS: This was a strange episode that I feel pretty ambivalent
about. Richie had a few nice scenes, but his behavior was so dumb
throughout that I had a hard time being anything but irritated with him.
The way they portrayed Alec’s “ghost” left plenty of room for
interpretation that any “haunting” was all in Jennifer’s head, and that
Richie was (contrary to Stan’s attempt to show otherwise) just eager to
get laid and doing all his thinking with his dick.
His sudden cigar-smoking habit and taking up the harmonica, plus jumping
in the sack with Jennifer when it was a patently bad idea are all small
pieces of evidence that some remnant of Alec’s personality was
manifesting itself in Richie, but they could also be just coincidences
combined with a young man’s randy hormones, emotional immaturity and bad
judgment.
If they wanted to play with the notion that a Quickening had conveyed
aspects of a specific personality (which they did a little of in
“Something Wicked”), there were probably better ways to do it that
didn’t have Richie come off looking like an immature nitwit (again).
I liked the last scene, where Duncan had gotten over his anger and was
just sad that another friend had died, and that Richie was having to
learn lessons the hard way – the same way Duncan had learned them, by
making tragic mistakes. But he is reassured that Richie’s regret over
Alec’s death had, indeed, taught him those lessons, and demonstrated
that Richie had a good heart, no matter what mistakes he had made.
MacGeorge
All Episode Commentaries at:
http://www.wordsmiths.net/MacGeorge/episodes/indexframeset.htm
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Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 12:39:52 -0400
From: RED57@aol.com
Subject: Highlander: The Video Game
Yes, they're finally getting around to it:
"SCi Entertainment and Davis Panzer Productions today announced they have joined forces to develop the game rights to the classic Highlander franchise."
http://www.sci.co.uk/games/press_releases.asp?id=170
At last, the eternal question can be answered - "Conner or Duncan - who r00lz?"
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Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 14:58:26 -0400
From: Wendy Tillis <immortals_incorporated@cox.net>
Subject: Re: Highlander: The Video Game
Ginny wrote:
>Yes, they're finally getting around to it:
>
>"SCi Entertainment and Davis Panzer Productions today announced they have
>joined forces to develop the game rights to the classic Highlander
>franchise."
Does the phrase "A day late and a dollar short" come to mind?
>At last, the eternal question can be answered - "Conner or Duncan - who r00lz?"
Maybe it will be set up so that Richie can win. Wouldn't that be hysterical.
Wendy(We all know Duncan would win.)(Because Connor is already headless.)(Or..wait)(A *new* universe?)(How many does that make?)
Immortals Inc.
immortals_incorporated@cox.net
"Weasels for Eternity"
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 12:03:09 -0700
From: Stephen Bryce <sibryce@yahoo.com>
Subject: OT: Mortal Kombat 3 movie
I read a few days ago on the Internet Movie Database, it looks like
Russell Mulcahy (director, HL1) is at least the current name to direct
MK3 (I don't remember the "real" title, but it is an interesting one).
Also, it's probably common knowledge by now that CL is reprising
Rayden.
Steve
=====
"I'm an advertising man, not a red herring. I've got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders that depend upon me, and I don't intend to disappoint them all by getting myself "slightly" killed."
(Roger Thornhill [Cary Grant], "North by Northwest")
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------------------------------
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 12:09:05 -0700
From: Stephen Bryce <sibryce@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Highlander: The Video Game
> Does the phrase "A day late and a dollar short" come to mind?
LOL agreed. This would have been nice (and doable), say four years
ago.
> Maybe it will be set up so that Richie can win. Wouldn't that be
> hysterical.
Well, depending on when the game takes place... Even if that doesn't
work, making him a multiplayer skin is reasonable.
Steve
=====
"I'm an advertising man, not a red herring. I've got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders that depend upon me, and I don't intend to disappoint them all by getting myself "slightly" killed."
(Roger Thornhill [Cary Grant], "North by Northwest")
_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
http://vote.yahoo.com
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 10:12:39 -1000
From: MacWestie <mac.westie@verizon.net>
Subject: Re: Highlander: The Video Game
>>"SCi Entertainment and Davis Panzer Productions today announced they have
>>joined forces to develop the game rights to the classic Highlander
>>franchise."
>
> Does the phrase "A day late and a dollar short" come to mind?
Among other ... dark ... things.
> Maybe it will be set up so that Richie can win. Wouldn't that be
> hysterical.
"Hysterical" is that DPP could think anyone cares at this point.
Nina (Kenny should always win; it would fit in w/ the youth-oriented factor
& piss off the most fans possible--DPP's apparent goal for the franchise)
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Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 14:09:03 -0700
From: Danni Bfuss <bfuss@cablerocket.com>
Subject: Re: Highlander: The Video Game
............... pocks head out of lurkers area........................
Hey Ginny! I was really to see your post! I just mostly lurk now. Good
to see your post!
Danni
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Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 18:34:38 EDT
From: Dotiran@aol.com
Subject: Re: Highlander: The Video Game
In a message dated 9/29/2004 2:05:23 PM Central Daylight Time,
immortals_incorporated@COX.NET writes:
SCi Entertainment and Davis Panzer Productions today announced they have
>joined forces to develop the game rights
Excuse me while I yawn. Majorly.
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End of HIGHLA-L Digest - 22 Sep 2004 to 29 Sep 2004 (#2004-180)
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