Serenity

Did you miss Joss Whedon’s Firefly when it was on TV? Honestly, who didn’t? The show was cancelled about halfway through the season, and I have yet to find anyone who actually watched it on Fox. Fortunately, the DVD sales were incredibly high, so the movie Serenity is coming out this September.

Malcolm Reynolds (actor Nathan Fillion, the Buffy villian Caleb) is a ex-soldier from the losing side of a galactic civil war. His speech involves a lot of “reckon” and “ain’t”, to keep him from sounding too much like Hemmingway. With his misfit crew, including another Buffyverse bad guy, Gina Torres, he sets out to engage in petty theft and fight the Evil Galactic Empire ™.

I swear this is different from the last 20 anime films I’ve watched.

It’s like a good episode of Star Trek: Next Gen without all that tedious moralizing about the Prime Directive and without the goofy futuristic utopia feeling. (Or a Stargate episode, without anyone saying “But General Hammond, we can’t leave Character X behind!”) In Firefly’s future, there are no replicators and no benelovent federation, just a crew of people with believable motivations in unforgiving space.

The character interactions are really Firefly’s strength. There’s no female ensign who talks to the computer, no token alien team member and thank goodness, an ensemble crew without a precocious kid. In addition to the crew, there is a geisha, a pastor, a shy, nerdy doctor and a female mechanic who’s cute AND knows her way around an engine. All of Firefly’s characters are surprisingly well-developed, with the exception of crazed deus ex machina River. (But I trust this would have explained if the show’d gone on a bit longer. Right?)

Serenity is a stand-alone story for those of us who’d like to bring non-geek dates to the movies. (Don’t tell my boyfriend, since I plan to use the movie to convince him to watch all the Firefly episodes) There are hints that if Serenity is sucessful, this might be a trilogy, and we all know how many movies there are in a sci-fi trilogy…

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Star Wars Episode 3

Mild Spoiler Alert!

I went to see Episode 3 last night at midnight. My boyfriend, Stick, says the spaceships looked fake, but this didn’t bug me too much. I don’t know if this is because my eyes aren’t so great or because I’ve, uh, never seen a real space battle for comparison purposes. Ditto for the lavaflow.

I was happy to see C-3PO and R2-D2 popping up so much in this movie, but it does raise some continuity glitches. Darth Vader and Obi-Wan both see the droids in this film, but fail to recognize them in later episodes. Obi-Wan does ask to have have C3PO’s mind wiped, which is why he doesn’t recognize his homeplanet of Tatoonine in the later movie. Maybe Obi-Wan’s mind is also wiped? And maybe Darth Vader’s too busy grieving, learning Sith ways, killing innocents and becoming still more evil to remember every droid in his path. But here, R2-D2 is a Swiss army knife of ‘bot superpowers, while in the next three movies, he’s confined to beeping clever unmentionables at C3PO.

Plotwise, young Anakin is torn between his beloved mentor Obi-Wan and his growing friendship with Palpatine, between his role as unemotional, unattached Jedi and his secret marraige to Padme, between his duty to the Jedis and his duty to the republic, between Coke and Pepsi, etc. You get the picture.

Palpatine has these temporary-crisis dictator powers over the senate, but he wants to keep them so he gives a speech about saving the republic by creating an empire, there is thunderous applause by his now-puppet senate. Very Roman. Then he proscribes the entire Jedi Order and tells his secret minions to murder their former allies. I’m not sure why it needed to be “order 66″ instead of just “I’m taking over, kill everyone who’s not us,” but it sounds sinister.

This leads to a cool Yoda Vs. Palpatine fight in the senate room, in which Palpatine literally tries to crush the Jedi muppet with the seat of democracy. Brilliant.

Later, newly-Sith Anakin tells pregnant Padme that he turned evil for her! And he wants to off Palpatine and rule the galaxy with her! (Note to Stick: If the situation arises, I’d like “Galactic Empress” for my title) Padme and Anakin’s great love story is stilted at best. If you’re not an English major, “stilted” can be defined as “like watching a Vulcan and a Barbie doll in a Lifetime TV movie.” Usually when we see Padme, she’s wearing a pillow and waiting for Anakin to come home. In her defense, she does not ask him if he forgot the pickles and ice cream.

Then the climactic battle. I didn’t think that molten lava as far as the eye could see really made it more dramatic than fighting in a corridor, although my Star Wars-geek housemate tells me that that’s always been the reason for Vader’s cyborg-ity. The lavaflow fight was worth it for the moment where a burned and mutilated Anakin tells ex-mentor Kenobi that he hates him. (Hayden Christenson can act! Why didn’t anyone tell me this?)

But Anakin, sorry, I mean Vader, surives, because Palpatine puts him in a medical pod sized for legless men, takes him back and gives Vader cyberlimbs, a heavy-breathing mask and James Earl Jones’ voice. Meanwhile, the twins are born and Padme kicks it, in a scene that should be dramatic and moving but somehow falls flat. Senator Organa mentions that his wife wants to adopt a baby girl, and Obi-wan takes the boy to Anakin’s relatives, because Darth Vader will never think to look for him there. Or something. There’s a great nod to the later story when baby Luke is held by his aunt against the Tatoonine double-sunset.

Anyway, I was expecting a trainwreck and I got a decent movie. Not life-changing or brilliant, but a fun night and worth seven bucks. But the best part was in the line to get in when a lightsaber duel broke out between an overweight Darth Vader and some Jedi knights.

www.violeteclipse.blogspot.com

The Grocery Store Wars

Sometimes the fan films and spoofs of Star Wars are more fun than the real thing, and that’s definately the way I feel about this one Grocery Store Wars produced by the Organic Trade Association.

Here you will see Obi-Wan Cannoli and Cuke Skywalker defend the grocery store from the dark side of the farm, where genetically modified, irradiated and sprayed produce have taken Princess Lettuce. Cuke will need a little help, of course, from Ham Solo and Chewbroccoli.

This is a really cute film with a message about eating organic foods that we would all do well to listen to. It’s good for a laugh, as well. (The fight between Cuke and Darth Tater in the produce scale is particularly amusing.) Check it out!

The Village

I’ve just watched The Village with full knowledge of the ending. M. Night Shyamalanananan went downhill on this one. I understood what was going on but still had questions. If the red headed girl was blind, how did she know where to run after that talk she had with Adrien Brody’s character? She ran down a hill like it was nothing, without hitting or tripping over anything. And why does M. Night have to be in every movie he directs? We all know what he looks like. Does he really need to be in the movie too? Or does he have plans of becoming an actor? The movie wasn’t all that bad. It was just kind of…bland.

Wanna See My Spaceship?

My boyfriend Stick has sworn to watch the next six million, forty-seven thousand, three hundred and ninety-two bad Star Wars prequels in the hopes that one of them will be half as good as Return Of the Jedi. Speaking of trilogies that won’t quit, we went to see The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy this weekend.

The characters have the same names as Adams’ did, and the backdrop is clearly the HHGTTG world. The plot is similar in that it involves mayhem and the destruction of the Earth. Since I’ve just summarized almost every sci-fi story in existance, it’s time for some name-dropping.

Mos Def as Ford Prefect is brilliant, he would have made a Star Wars prequel worth watching. Zaphod Beeblebrox is well-cast and well-costumed but the extra-head gag should have stayed on the radio. In a film full of really good Muppets, there’s no reason for his extra appendages to look so goofy and so low-budget. Alan Rickman, also known as Professor Snape, is the bitter and depressed voice of Marvin the paranoid android. Bill Nighy, known to Anglophile dorks as Phillip from Shawn Of the Dead, is an amusing Slartibartfast, and Stephen Fry (author of The Hippopotamus and other novels) is the all-important Book. The visual component for the book’s sections are a bunch of psuedo science-museum-y animations (think of the frog-DNA bit from Jurassic Park). Not brilliant, but Fry sounds a lot like Peter Jones, the original voice of the guide on the BBC radio plays, and the guide sections are pure Adams genius.

There’s something off with the timing in this movie. Scenes that are marginally funny are dragged out until they aren’t, and many memorable Adams jokes are cut. The spaceship doors sigh as they open and close, but this is never explained. Eddie and Marvin don’t get nearly enough screen time and there’s way too much of Arthur making moon eyes at Trillian. Still, the improbability scenes are fun in a Yellow Submarine kind of way, and the new dialogue, like “Zaphod, buttons are not toys!” or Arthur’s “Leave this one to me, I’m British and we’ve very good at queuing.” is pretty good. And the sperm whale monologue, here in all it’s guilty glory.

Stick would like me to take back what I said at Team America and admit that I was wrong, he was right, and vomiting can be funny.

Some parts of the movie could be disjointed to those who haven’t read the book(s) or taken me along to narrate (I have the radio plays on cassette, the audiobooks on MP3, Starship Titanic for the PC, and all five books in the trilogy, and, yes, I caught the part when Zaphod starts to call Ford “!X”, and no, I don’t get out much, why do you ask?).

The film ends with all that covert Trillian-and-Arthur chemistry becoming overt, and Zaphod’s inexplicable hookup with a the Galactic Vice President. I half expected Ford and Marvin to pair off for a perfectly Hollywooded ending, but fortunately Ford just suggested that they pop over to Milliway’s for a bite to eat.

www.violeteclipse.blogspot.com