Bobster Commands Thee!

This is for all non-EC or peripheral-EC topics. We all know how much we love talking about 'The Man' but sometimes we have other interests.
bobster
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Bobster Commands Thee!

Post by bobster »

To see "Serenity" this weekend, opening in a theater hopefully near you in North America, the U.K., and Australia (I think..might be a couple days later or slightly sooner).
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Post by Poppet »

YAY!!!!!

i personally plan on seeing it twice this weekend, and at least once next weekend.

:)

honestly folks, it is a good movie. and all the actors are signed on for two more movies if *the studio will give them the money* - so BUY TICKETS!!!! poppet wants sequels!!!!!!!!!
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Post by selfmademug »

I think I will be seeing it, but only once. :o
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Post by BlueChair »

I'm gonna pass.
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Post by oily slick »

what the hell is Serenity?
I'm not concerned about the very poor.
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Post by selfmademug »

I believe it's some kind of incontinence product (why am I getting serious deja vu...?). Oh, and also the name of the new film by Joss "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" Whedon.
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Post by noiseradio »

meh.
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Post by El Vez »

Will I get a personal call from Bobster thanking me for my Wheedon patronage and, perhaps, a little small talk as well?
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Post by alexv »

Serenity now!!!
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Post by oily slick »

just thinking about a girl named "Buffy" makes me feel all dirty. But i'm all for this Serendipity thing.
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Post by bobster »

El Vez wrote:Will I get a personal call from Bobster thanking me for my Wheedon patronage and, perhaps, a little small talk as well?
No! But you will get a spelling correction. It's Whedon (hey, at least you haven't turned him into the ever popular "Wheldon")...and what are we going to do with Noise and Blue...How to fight the mighty "meh"?

Oh, well, the tides of history will have to deal with that. Vin is coming the revolution....
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Post by bobster »

And I just noticed that the UK opening is 10/7...So, I command thee UK folks...then, I guess....
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Post by El Vez »

Well, if I see Serenity it won't be this weekend because it looks like we're actually gonna get A History of Violence here in the boondocks.
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Post by Poppet »

if anyone wants a personal call from me to congratulate them for seeing Serenity, send me your phone number by PM. if that's what it takes for you to go see the movie, i'll do that.

('cause damn it, i want SEQUELS. if it does really well, the studio will greenlight sequels!!!)
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Post by bobster »

El Vez wrote:Well, if I see Serenity it won't be this weekend because it looks like we're actually gonna get A History of Violence here in the boondocks.
Like there's some law that says you can only see one movie per weekend! Get on the stick, people! (I saw a clip from "History" at the San Diego Comicon where Cronenberg spoke -- the movie looks pretty damn amazing.)
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Post by noiseradio »

Joss Whedon or David Cronenberg. That's a tough call. Think I'll have to go with Cronenberg.
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Post by El Vez »

bobster wrote: Like there's some law that says you can only see one movie per weekend! Get on the stick, people! (I saw a clip from "History" at the San Diego Comicon where Cronenberg spoke -- the movie looks pretty damn amazing.)
Ah, but you forget which state I live in. They're trying to outlaw book learnin' so you know it's probably illegal for me to see two first run movies that don't star Gavin McCloud and/or Kirk Cameron.
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Post by Who Shot Sam? »

Those cheery folks over at Slate are having a dig at "Serenity". You ain't a "Browncoat" are you bobster? ;-):

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Joss Whedon
Why he should stick to television.
By Seth Stevenson
Posted Friday, Sept. 30, 2005, at 8:23 AM PT

My girlfriend was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer addict. Later, she was an Angel addict. As these weird, one-hour vampire dramas packed our TiVo and filled our TV screen, I had little choice but to watch them. And slowly, to my own surprise, I began to see that their creator, Joss Whedon, had a geeky sort of auteur charm. I wasn't headed to Comic-Con in a "Joss Whedon Is My Master Now" T-shirt. But when Whedon launched a new TV series called Firefly, in 2002, I tuned in from the start. I was genuinely disappointed when it was canceled after half a season.

Now Whedon has written and directed Serenity, a feature-length film that revisits the Firefly world (and opens in theaters tonight). At an advance screening earlier this week, I found myself surrounded by "Browncoats" (that's what Firefly junkies call themselves—don't ask) who'd waited hours in line for another glimpse of their gone-too-soon Firefly friends. When, toward the end of the film, one of these beloved characters died in a sudden and violent manner, the crowd gasped loudly. This character had about four lines in the movie. But still you could feel the stunned sense of loss permeating the room.

At this point I realized: Joss Whedon should stick to television.

Whedon, who got his TV start writing for Roseanne in the late 1980s, has long said that his true ambition is to make films. But nightmarish experiences with his scripts for the original 1992 Buffy movie and for Alien Resurrection (both were butchered by inept directors) sent him trudging back to the small screen, licking his wounds. In 1997, he recreated Buffy for TV—where, despite being about vampires and dorky high-school kids, it became both a critical and popular success.

Now—with Serenity out and a version of Wonder Woman in the works—Whedon seems poised to make the leap back into features. But it's an odd move for a man who once said, "Why are the best writers in TV? Because they can control their product. They're given something resembling respect. …" (I'm quoting here from the evenhanded biography Joss Whedon: The Genius Behind Buffy.) Perhaps Whedon figures he now has the clout to control a movie set. But I think his skills—imagining every nook and cranny of an intricate fictional universe; conjuring an ensemble of nuanced characters with complex, long-running relationships—are actually far better suited to television. When he's got a TV show humming, Joss Whedon, bless his pasty, dough-faced soul, is the most gifted serial storyteller alive.

Whedon has some sort of preternatural feel for TV-making. When you listen to his DVD commentaries, you hear him effortlessly cataloging the narrative devices at work, the shortcut gimmicks that establish character and advance a plot, the genealogy of the jokes. He explains that a kindly, pure-hearted character can serve as the audience's guidepost—whenever she speaks up, we know she's speaking truths. Want to make a villain scary? Show the toughest character getting a little freaked out. It's like these rules are in Whedon's DNA. And they may well be: As his IMDb biography notes, Whedon is perhaps "the world's first third-generation television writer." His father wrote for Alice and Benson, while his grandfather wrote for Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show.

Of course, a tried-and-true TV-making toolbox by no means ensures a quality show (quite the opposite, much of the time). But Whedon is so efficient with his plotting that each new twist develops the drama and the characters. When Buffy loses her virginity to her boyfriend Angel, he loses his soul and turns evil. Many have noted that this is a clever metaphor for teenage sex. But it also sidesteps a classic narrative pitfall: the Sam-and-Diane problem, wherein the romantic leads finally get together … and the show loses all its tension. Whedon skips this slack phase by immediately transforming Angel into an archenemy who must be killed. At the same time, Buffy's character matures, a new villain is introduced, the saga churns on, and the audience is rapt. In a later season, when Buffy's mom dies, the most poignant moments come as Anya—an ex-demon from another dimension—attempts to make sense of human grief. The point, of course, is that humans on the show can't make sense of it either. The melodramatic sci-fi plots serve to lend the characters greater depth (as opposed to a show like Lost, in which the characters exist to advance the plot). And remember: He's doing this with demons!

Whedon has killed off his shows' major characters, then resurrected them—repeatedly. He turned Buffy's friend Willow gay, then made her into a murderous hellion, then turned her sweet and good again. But even as Buffy's plots whirligigged around, the characters remained self-aware, and the banter remained off-handed and cute. For me Buffy's greatest appeal always lay in its use of language. The show created its own slangy patois—or at least did a stellar job of instantly adapting new teen lingo. (There is in fact an entire academic treatise on Buffy-speak.) Strange constructions were invented. Parts of speech popped up in novel contexts. "[Quirky adjective] much?"; "Don't get all [infrequently used noun]-y on me, Mr. [run-on sentence describing recent actions of the person being addressed]"; "It's a [blank]-a-palooza!" Besides being funny, the dialogue made the characters seem authentic: They feel like a real group of pals who've crafted their own, organic dialect. And you feel you're watching a reasonable approximation of what might happen were your own friends to fight vampires.

Of course, you can fit stunning plot twists and brilliant dialogue within the confines of a 100-minute movie. But it's not the same. Take that character who dies in Serenity. Had Firefly lived on as a TV series, Whedon would have invested the character with foibles and hidden strengths. Our bond with the character would have had ample time to develop as we watched countless informal, telling moments. Then the character might have been killed in Season 3—only after this loss would be certain to stomp the heart of any die-hard viewer. Later, Whedon might bring the character back to life. Then make the character gay.

It all adds up to a richer relationship than can be had with even the most carefully drawn movie protagonists. The way characters can accrue definition over time, the opportunity to draw on a long back story of events—this is TV's powerful and innate advantage. It's the advantage of all serial narratives. Ask comic book fans (Whedon's one of them). Ask Charles Dickens.

Or, ask the new generation of TV auteurs that's been exploding the medium's limits and lending it some long-missing gravitas. Shows like The Sopranos, Deadwood, and the Sorkin-era West Wing have elevated the form. Perhaps Whedon, steeped in TV all his life, takes it for granted. There's no doubt that film has traditionally been considered the higher art. But the line is blurring fast. Whedon is bailing out just as TV finally gets the respect it deserves.

I'm sure when Whedon makes the Wonder Woman movie he'll do a fine job. He's a gifted guy, he throws all his talents into everything he does, and his script-doctoring work on Speed and Toy Story proves he has excellent screenwriting chops. Still, I'd much rather he pitch some new show to HBO. Don't get all silver-screen-y on me, Mr. I've Got a Fetish for Teenage Girls Who Know Karate. I eagerly await your return to my living room.

Seth Stevenson is a frequent contributor to Slate.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127162/
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Post by selfmademug »

Not dissimilar review from the Times , but more positive.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

September 30, 2005
Scruffy Space Cowboys Fighting Their Failings
By MANOHLA DARGIS
It probably isn't fair to Joss Whedon's "Serenity" to say that this unassuming science-fiction adventure is superior in almost every respect to George Lucas's aggressively more ambitious "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith." But who cares about fair when there is fun to be had? Scene for scene, "Serenity" is more engaging and certainly better written and acted than any of Mr. Lucas's recent screen entertainments. Mr. Whedon isn't aiming to conquer the pop-culture universe with a branded mythology; he just wants us to hitch a ride to a galaxy far, far away and have a good time. The journey is the message, not him.

As the creator of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," writing the original movie and producing the television series, Mr. Whedon has enjoyed an exalted position in the pop stratosphere. Over the years he has lent his talent, sometimes without credit, to screenplays for "Toy Story," "Speed" and the last and least successful "Alien" film, "Alien: Resurrection." He also writes comic books, including an "X-Men" line. But Mr. Whedon, the son and grandson of television writers, is principally a natural-born small-screen auteur, graced with a quick, idiosyncratic wit and a facility for serial storytelling. In addition to "Buffy," he created that show's spinoff, "Angel," and in 2002, a curious genre hybrid called "Firefly" he had pitched as "Stagecoach" in space.

Fox aired just 11 episodes of "Firefly" before pulling the plug. The network refused to commit, but not so the fans who, as they did with "Buffy," turned this patchwork of fan-boy love and recycled parts into a cult. Evidence of their passion was later reflected in the DVD sales of "Firefly," which were impressive enough for Universal to pony up for a big-screen version. Named after the ramshackle spaceship that hauls Mr. Whedon's characters from one far-out adventure to the next, "Serenity" picks up where the series left off, with these plucky, shambling outsiders fighting oppression against impossible odds. As Mr. Whedon knows, the fastest way to a geek's heart is a story about other geeks, albeit ones with good hair and hot bodies.

The story so far: Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), Mal for short, is zipping around 500 years in the future trying to make ends meet by scrounging for freight and hauling passengers. A veteran of a war of independence, Mal fought on the losing side and has yet to cross over to greener, more lucrative pastures. Along with his second in command, Zoe (a ferocious Gina Torres), Mal runs the Serenity with honor, guts and a touch of panic. He is the kind of leader who barks out a rhetorical question - asking if any of the crew want to run the ship - only to be flummoxed when he receives a resounding yes in return. (Mal then stammers to Adam Baldwin's thuggish crew hand that he can't.) Mal's iron glove covers a velvety soft fist.

Mr. Whedon sketches his characters with quick brush strokes, leaving his appealing cast to fill in the holes with banter and serious-looking busywork. Everyone takes to their task well, though only Mal and a fierce Whedonesque creation called River (Summer Glau, a pint-size Barbara Steele) take root. Hot-wired to kill and on the run from her government masters, this spooky beauty floats through the ship in a series of fetching shifts that make her look like an errant Martha Graham dancer, every so often going entertainingly berserk and wreaking Michelle Yeoh-style damage. Underlying River's murderous power - and perhaps her government-induced psychosis - is a lost little girl trying to carve out a place and a self to call her own.

As this scrap of boilerplate narrative suggests, Mr. Whedon is too much of genre savant to take his film anywhere genuinely surprising. He may also be too much of a movie novice to exploit his material as boldly as you might hope. What made "Firefly" stand apart from the usual television dross, beyond Mr. Whedon's chatter and characters, was his fusion of science-fiction tropes with those of the western. Mal wears a gun strapped to his thigh, while a lariat necklace circles Zoe's throat. He peppers his speech with "y'all," and together they travel to dusty towns that look as if they might have been built for a Roy Rogers oater. And just to bring this science-fiction fantasy up to geopolitical speed, every so often somebody spits a curse in Mandarin.

Transposing a western to outer space presented a calculated risk, the stuff of either "Star Trek" legend or kitsch. Yet what was most beautiful about "Firefly" was that Mr. Whedon wasn't afraid of looking silly. Taking its cue from the famous first words of "Star Trek" - "Space, the final frontier" - his show reinvigorated Gene Roddenberry's premise with the sincerity of a true believer. "Star Trek" was born at a time when space travel was cloaked in optimism and cold-war anxiety. "Star Wars," meanwhile, born out of Saturday matinee clichés and in a time of political cynicism, trafficked in a gee-whiz escapism so strong it survived even a recent swerve into realpolitik. In the years since, and for myriad reasons, science fiction, at least in film, has turned Dystopia into a boomtown.

Mr. Whedon shows little interest in recycling the gloom-and-doom scenarios that have become ubiquitous in science-fiction cinema over the last few decades. Mal is no Neo redux; he's closer to Indiana Jones, if absent Harrison Ford's rakishly handsome looks and star magnetism. Like the rest of the cast, Mr. Fillion is a charming performer, but he borrows rather than owns the screen, which dovetails with Mr. Whedon's modest aspirations for this film. As both a writer and a director, he isn't staking a claim on genre; he's just using it for a short while to tell a story about some decent men and women struggling against both the tyranny of bureaucratic control and their own very human failings.

"Serenity" works nicely as a movie, although in blowing his television series up to the big screen, Mr. Whedon has lost some of the woolliness that made "Firefly" such a pleasant oddity. (Alas, he also lost most of the banjos and twangy guitars.) Even with a bigger canvas, Mr. Whedon doesn't do much with the camera. His setups are generally perfunctory: a means to a storytelling end for what is, at heart, a $40 million B-movie. It's too bad there isn't one image here as striking and resonant as the shot that closes the opening-credit sequence in "Firefly," the one with the horses galloping toward the camera as they're buzzed overhead by a spaceship. With this single image, Mr. Whedon announced he had reopened a frontier some of us thought long closed.

"Serenity" is rated PG-13. (Parents strongly cautioned.) Despite some fight scenes, this is a relatively clean PG-13 with little graphic violence and no sexually exploitative snark.
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Post by BlueChair »

Reviews have mostly been positive, though I saw a comment today about how Buffy fans are very much like Star Trek fans, talking about how most Star Trek fans knew Enterprise (the most recent series, which was cancelled last season) sucked, but petitioned that it stay on the air anyway simply because it is Star Trek.
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Post by martinfoyle »

Serenity seems to have gotten off to bit of lame start moneywise, then again there seems to be a glut of new films in the US this weekend. Dont usually have much time for sc-fi, this sounds like it's worth checking out all the same.
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Post by bobster »

Yes, I am a Browncoat and not ashamed to say it (though I deleted this line a couple of times anyway).

Thanks for the posts, though gotta say the apparently humoungous number of Whedon-watchers in the media has proved to be a mixed blessing.

Half the time, they end up writing these wishy-washy reviews. Ironically, the uninitiated seem to be having a great time with it (80% "fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes, average score a very respectable 7.1. BTW -- Manohla Dargis is a VERY tough Kael/Simon-esque critic who I think suffers from an oversupply of academically-derived quasi-Marxist/deconstructionist bullshit, it's frankly half-a-miracle that she liked it at all.).

I understand the wishy washyness. There's something about the TV series experience that gets people overly invested, even if they're too insecure not to make fun of the Browncoat tag. (It's a case of the geek calling the geek geekier. Critics are ALL geeks about something.)

It took my third viewing before I stopped looking at like I was working on the movie myself -- trying to gauge "audience reaction" and hoping Joss does whatever it takes to get a big damn hit in the same way that Democrats voted for Kerry in the primary because they thought he was the most electable which has, of course, proven to be a really great way to vote.

Well, as an er, Browncoat and, er, gorram proud of it...I obviously need to be just a bit more commanding!

Finally, after a third viewing, I am here to tell you that "Serenity" is nothing more or less than a great B-movie that A-students can love and even discuss a bit (and C students will still get a kick out of the people getting beat up in more-interesting-than-usual ways).

Folks, good mass entertainment is in trouble. We're seeing an increasily bifurcated entertainment environment where there's "indie" movies for the wine-and-cheese crowd and "popcorn" movies aimed at an imaginary person who is basically a cross between the faux "extreme" athletes from the Mountain Dew commercial, Paris Hilton, and Cletus, the slack jawed yokel and his famiy.

If the thought of never seeing an action movie where the principal concern is actually the characters and the story upsets you, you really do need to see this movie. As soon as possible.

(Grosses were an not-awful but dissapointing $10 million this weekend. The movie needs to at least stabilize at about that level and maybe go on that way for a bit to be considered a success.)
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Post by Poppet »

i'm a browncoat!

and honestly, i would not say Serenity is a good movie if it wasn't. I'd tell you to go watch it for the insanity, or train-wreckiness of the thing.

but, it's a good movie. as bobster says, it's not wine&cheese. it's popcorn&soda fun.

if you liked the star wars movies before george lucas' ego ate his brain, go see Serenity. take the older kids.

and, go soon! :) make poppet happy. please?

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Post by mood swung »

I only watched the show a time or two - am I going to be confused? I mean, more confused than usual?
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Post by bobster »

Moody, like I said, in some ways it's better to go into this movie completely cold than as a big time fan -- though there are little bits that might have more resonance if you've seen the whole schmear, but those are all just gravy and there's plenty there for anyone. There's some pretty well handled exposition right at the beginning so, as long as you're not late, you won't miss much. Even if you are, it's pretty clear what's going on all the way through. It's the kind of movie I can imagine myself walking in on and getting involved with, even if I didn't exactly get the reasons everyone was beating up each other and stuff.

That being said, having seen just one or two episodes might actually be the very best way to see it, because you'll already know the characters a bit, but you won't be too invested.
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