Brisbane was… interesting. My paper at the postgraduate Work In Progress conference at the University of Queensland went really well. About a week before, I read through the version I presented at BlogTalk earlier this year, and realised that it kinda sucked, so I sweated blood to completely rewrite it. It paid off. (I’ll be replacing the crap version with the better one soon.) Then I caught a virus and spent the rest of my time in Queensland throwing my guts up. So sorry if I didn’t get in touch, Brisbanians. :)
I did manage to catch Serenity on its opening weekend, though. While it hasn’t struck me as the best genre movie in recent memory, it’s really, really excellent, so go see it, despite the terribly uncommercial and undynamic name, and the dreadful visual packaging.
One major gripe, slightly spoilery: the film has been structured and edited in such a way to make possible a drastic misreading of the plot: the idea that the Serenity crew breaks River out of the Alliance lab in the first place. I think lots of uninitiated viewers are making this mistake, and it makes the ambivalence of the crew about Simon and River much more confusing.
Oh, and today I turned 33. Gotta go, the parasite in my tummy is calling.
[ tags: film, firefly, pop-culture, science-fiction, serenity, whedon ]
hey, happy birthday, Ben. and what IS the best genre movie in recent memory?
& hope parasite pisses off promptly. eeuw.
I thought Serenity was kind of awful. Ok, not awful - but not interesting. The 1 hr episodes of the series seemed to restrain Whedon’s sentimental moments in a way this didn’t. And the ‘Al-Qaida was made by the US/Empire’ narrative was kind of heavy-handed but lite. I’m looking forward to that other western, Proposition, for a much darker meditation on law and space.
And happy birthday!
Deborah, I have no idea! Ange, I agree that Whedon’s strength is in television’s serial chunks; I’m talking more about the thrill of seeing a couple of our unfinished arcs playing through, with much obvious love. (On sentimentality: as the kind of person who enjoys a good cry, I don’t really mind — I take it as a given that Whedon is not cool, and is in fact the consumate dag.) Meanwhile, as has been said by many others, episodes like “Objects in Space” are kinda obviously better than the movie.
Bad choice of words on my part. I don’t mind sobbing - I would’ve for instance prefered to linger over the death of a certain character more than the film allowed. I mean the heroic sentiment of the plotline. The Chomskyite program of ‘if you reveal the secret origin of evil (AQ) in the good (US)’, then this information is so scandalous and unbearable that it will change the world.
True, scandals are boring — that was the least convincing part of the film. As figures against the ground of power that suffuses our universe, scandals don’t, uh, wash. But unlike Star Wars Episode 2 (and, er, not Ep3, which is way too clunky) I actually ignored that side of the terror-war allegory, and focused on the construction of docile subjects, which I find way scarier.
happy birthday!
the best treatment of the expose scandal -> revolution theme is, of course, the Running Man