Posts tagged ‘joss whedon’

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.

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.

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.