Tom Charman

Finally got part two of Season 5 of Angel the other day; my collection is complete. It’d be the first time I’d ever owned all the episodes of a TV series, if it wasn’t for that cheating Firefly with it’s all in one boxed set.

The DVD’s quite good — a better than average gag reel, a whole bunch of commentaries, including a Joss Whedon one, and four little documentaries. The one that looks at the series as a whole is particularly nice. I hate it when people making shows act as if their last few seasons were the only good ones, and these folk don’t. Which is nice.

Unfortunately the Joss Whedon (and Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof) commentary is for ‘A Hole in the World’ and as a result they’re all sad and quiet for about half the time. Ripped off! They do apologise sincerely. Alexis Denisof continues to sound exactly like Kermit the Frog. Anyhow, this purchase means that I might actually review the last two episodes. At some point. Maybe.

As the world anxiously awaits my in-depth review of Serenity, sensible folk know there’s only one reviewer who can really be counted on as completely reliable. Yes, Mr Schembri, reviewing in The Age‘s ‘eg’ section. His (complete) thoughts follow:

Totally forgettable, throwaway exercise by director Joss Whedon (Buffy creator) who appears to have stapled together two episodes of his failed sci-fi TV show Firefly. A group of space pirates get involved in one of those civilization-saving space adventures that involve a lot of poorly delivered jokes and crummy digital effects of spaceships that look like cereal boxes.

In case you’re wondering, that’s a One-and-a-half-star review. So, now you know, folks — SEE THIS FILM. Jim amusingly gives Transporter 2 three and a half stars on the same page, noting that the lead actor never has more than one expression, that the main character gets “emotionally attached to a kid” (which sounds new and exciting) and lavishing all his praise on the action sequences (fair enough, of course). But this anti-TV snobbery seems weird.

“Poorly Delivered Jokes”? Can I maim him? Just a little?

I noticed today an interesting upcoming movie that I hadn’t previously heard of, while reading a fascinating TIME interview with Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon. Neil Gaiman is famous for writing the Sandman comic, his novels Neverwhere and American Gods, and writing a fantastic book on Douglas Adams called Don’t Panic.

He also wrote an episode of Babylon 5 one time, but unfortunately he got in late and wrote it in season five. On the upside, it did at least make his script look far better for all the crap hanging around it.

I’m assuming most people here know who Joss Whedon is.

Anyhow, I had a point, and it’s this. Mirrormask is a new film written by Gaiman, and involving the Jim Henson creature shop. According to Gaiman in the above interview, the creation of the film went something like this:

the brief with Mirrormask was Henson coming to us and saying, in the Eighties, Henson’s did The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. They were family fantasy films. They cost $40 million each. We’d like to do another one. We have $4 million. If we gave you that $4 million, could you come back with a movie, and we won’t tell you what to do? As deals go, it’s that bit at the end […] that was, okay, yes, I will happily take not enough money to make a huge fantasy movie and try and make a huge fantasy movie with it.

That could sound good or bad, depending on how you look at it. However, looking at the trailer, I reckon it’ll end up pretty good. Or at least, pretty pretty.

The total amount of RAM available to Grapefruit staff writers today was boosted by two gigabytes.

A last-minute decision to stop by Moorabbin’s swap meet divulged the extra memory to Andy and I, for about the same price we were going to get it from the shop. So, not that exciting, but Moorabbin is much closer than Monash and so we figure we saved at least two bucks in travel costs. It would have been more but we were in an LPG car.

Mmmm. Speedy iMac. Now I’ve got to use my new found speed to make a computer-ish picture for this blog.

Joss Whedon talked to ABC Radio National while he was hanging out in Australia recently and had this to say:

Every now and then you read something that is in your work that you hadn’t seen — a trend, or a concept, or connection that’s absolutely valid that you absolutely did not intend, that you just wrote — and that’s the thing that makes it art.

I mean if it’s just a product that you stick out there that people eat up and then they go on their day, it ain’t art. If it’s bigger than you, it’s art.

This is what clever people are for — to point at when they say things better than you can.