Posts tagged ‘Firefly’

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?

A few weeks back, I was checking all my nifty RSS feeds when I noticed that Whedonesque.com were announcing preview screenings of the Firefly movie, Serenity, in Victoria. I rushed over (in an internet sort of way) and booked me some tickets. Of course, the screening wasn’t in a sensible place like Southland or the Jam Factory; it was in Knox City.

I had a look on the Melways to see how far away that was. It didn’t seem so bad, I thought, but I was looking at the map of the whole of Melbourne, and nothing looks too far on that one. And so it was that we were still driving ten minutes after the preview screening was supposed to start. People who know me will have a good idea of how stressed I was, though it wasn’t showing as much as usual in my driving, I flatter myself (probably without justification).

My brother’s friends were already there, and making the sort of panicky phone calls that I would have been making had I been in their shoes. Everyone else was bagging them though so I joined in and pretended like I wasn’t a stressbag.

Knox City, it turns out, is arranged like a segmented fortress, and not every car park links up with the others. Cue more panicked driving, panicking, rushing about, until finally I run into the cinema, give my credit card, get the tickets, run up to cinema 2…

And find a queue a mile long, populated by a group of nerds ranging from our high-class level to 50-something fan-club presidents. The 50-something fan-club president was actually standing next to us in the queue and insisted on talking to us. Friendly, if somewhat irritating. Once we got inside we discovered that while the huge nerd contingent didn’t look huge, there were enough of them to make the cinema smell rather like a meeting of the Doctor Who Club of Victoria.

On the way in, a man swiped a metal detector over us a few times, and our phones were taken; thus disabling our cunning plan to record the film with camera phones taking 5 minute movies at a time. They looked at us suspiciously when we each handed in 6 phones but they didn’t say anything.

My brother picked us Serenity #1 for me today. A comic book. Haven’t gotten me one of those in a while.

I’ll be using the fact that comics look a bit like books to put any review I do or do not do of these comics in the books section of grapefruit, which is frankly a bit paltry and could do with beefing up, anyhow.

The trouble with comics, of course, is how quickly you can read them. I idly intended to read the first page or two and before I knew it I was half-way. Silly little things.

…

And a minute later, I’ve gone and finished it. Damn.