A LIttle Treat...

...for Torchwood fans. If you haven't seen the season finale yet, you'll be saying, "Huh?" Not to worry; all will be revealed. And if you don't watch the show, you can still enjoy the sheer cheesiness of this lovely video. That's Sarah Brightman of "Phantom of the Opera" fame in the funky eyeliner.

Time for a Geekfest!

This is cool!

Comet Holmes has gone in a few days from an obscure solar system traveler, detectable only with powerful telescopes, to astronomical phenomenon, visible to unaided eyes throughout the night, starting after dusk in the northeastern sky.

The comet, which travels in seven-year orbits between Jupiter and Mars, has blossomed like a chrysanthemum for reasons astronomers still don't know.

The comet has been a wallflower since 1892, the last time it brightened like this and was discovered by Englishman Edwin Holmes.

The comet is typically a 17th-magnitude object. In astronomy values, the larger the number, the fainter the object. It is now listed as a second-magnitude object, easily visible without telescopes, even in areas with heavy light pollution.

"That's a millionfold increase in brightness," said University of Alabama astronomy Professor Bill Keel. "The fact that it's done it before and other comets haven't speaks against the most obvious explanation, which is, `Look, it's cruising near the asteroid belt and hit something.' But that doesn't explain why it did it once before in a different part of its orbit."

Read the rest here.

I do love a mystery. Scientists expect the comet to dim gradually and fade from view till the next time it inexplicably brightens, perhaps in another 115 years. Maybe by then we'll have a prototype of the Enterprise to go take a look at it.

Anyway, I'm glad that seeing this comet doesn't cause people to turn to dust.

She Would Sure Be a Better Governor Than That Other Guy

I'm probably the last person in the western world to be aware of this, but apparently next January there's a TV series designed expressly for those of us who'd love to see Summer Glau kick some more ass. I'm naturally dubious about anything on broadcast television (and it's Fox, so if it's any good they'll just cancel it), but the trailer (and user comments) look promising. Lena Headey looks good in it, too (best known as Blanche Glover in Possession). But mainly: Summer Glau kicking ass. What more do you need?

(Hat tip, embarrassingly enough, to Jonah Goldberg, who is dubious--which is yet another recommendation.)

Whedon on Miranda

So I haven't watched my winsome Serenity DVD straight through yet, but I did watch with the new commentary track on. Whedon did a cool thing, which was to watch his original commentary track before recording the new one so that he was sure not to repeat himself.

Anyway, the commentary was good, except that with these group commentaries, you can't always tell who's talking. Adam Baldwin is especially tricky because a Firefly fan is used to his accent, and that's not real, so he sounds nothing like Jayne.

Anyway, Joss was saying that the original script was 190 pages, and he had to get it down to 120, and Nathan Fillion asked him what was in the 190 page version (Ron Glass said "Me! Me!") and Joss said "Basically, all of Season Two" and one of the guys asked "What about the second half of Season One?" And Joss said, "Good point! But no, I always pictured Miranda as being at the end of Season Two."

Which is, like, amazing to me.

I have to say, when I saw the movie (and I guess I shouldn't spoil it by saying what Miranda is or anything), I didn't have the sense that Miranda was planned as the solution to certain series mysteries. It felt like it was the movie version. So I'm stunned to learn that, indeed, the answers to so many of our questions were intended to be found there all along.

Probably the coolest tidbit on the commentary. My respect for Whedon just grows and grows.

(Time for some thrilling cross-posts)

Madeline L'Engle

Madeline L'Engle has died at the age of 88.

A Wrinkle In Time was one of my go-to books as a kid, I read it over and over. Despite my notable memory problems, I remember large chunks of the book. I still find the explanation of a tesseract, as the ends of cloth meeting one another, incomparably useful.

Madeline L'Engle brought me wonderful characters, extraordinary ideas, and concepts of science and philosophy that didn't talk down to a young mind. To me, she will live forever.

(Cross-posted In Time)

Sunday Science And Fiction

Roswell, the story that never dies. Well, somebody who was actually working at Roswell died last year and his sworn affidavit has been released to the public. If even half of it is true, I have one question. Why haven't the aliens ever come back? Didn't they like us? Did they think we were a waste of time and valuable resources? Well, that was more than one question and here is another. Why would the Air Force have crash test dummies in weather balloons that were supposed to be looking for evidence of Russian nuclear tests ...in New Mexico?

Has Google gone too far? According to Duncan at TechCrunch they have, or at least one of their advertising team has. While I may use Google almost exclusively for searches and iGoogle and the Reader for my news and other interests, I will drop them in a heartbeat if they start to obviously take sides with obviously corrupt big business. There are enough alternatives out there for everything that they provide, including the Blogger platform. I'm always willing to learn something new.

Anybody with any sense would have known that if there was a fly in the iPhone ointment, it would be AT&T's fault, not Apple's. I wonder how long it will be before that deal isn't exclusive?

Robert A. Heinlein would have been 100 on July 7th, but he was no George Burns. Heinlein was my favorite author growing up, mainly because he was prolific and some of his books had female leads. As a kid I never wondered about the symbolism behind the stories, I just read them and was transported to different worlds besides the one I was stuck on. I'm sorry to hear that he was such a conservative, but then people do like to read more into fiction books than the author actually meant. I notice he didn't bring up Job: A Comedy of Justice.

Keeping it light for the folks at IIRTZ, crossposted at Debsweb.

Serenity Named Best Sci-Fi Movie in SFX Poll

[Hi! This is Kathy from Birmingham Blues. Thanks to Tom for inviting me to post here. Although I usually focus on politics, I thought I'd start off with the Whedonverse.]

This is great news to a big ol' Joss Whedon fan like me. I loved Serenity, although I loved Firefly even more. And Buffy even more than that.

Speaking of Buffy, the Season Eight comic is now available. I'm not sure I want to read it, since I have my very own concept of the series aftermath. Knowing Joss's penchant for not-so-happy endings, I think I might like mine better.

Hat tip to Chet, from whom I pretty much stole this post. And, of course, crossbow-posted at Birmingham Blues.

Spread the Serenity Love

Via SAP and Shakespeare's Sister, respectively, comes news of two Serenity-related events.

First, June 23 is Serenity Day--a day on which fans all over plan to buy Serenity to demonstrate to Universal the purchasing power of the Browncoats (the goal, of course, is to get them to greenlight a sequel). Own it already? No problem; donate it to charity, send it to the troops, use it to convert a friend, or whatever.

Meanwhile, there's going to be a whole bunch of benefit screenings of Serenity, with the proceeds going to Equality Now (Joss Whedon's favorite charity). It's a lot of fun in a very good cause.

[Cross-posted at Property of a Lady]

[That's all, folks]

Jasmine & Miranda

Warning: Serenity spoilers below the fold. If you have not seen Serenity, stop reading now and go rent the DVD.

I recently re-watched the entire fourth season of Angel, and it hit me: Miranda is Jasmine.

Well, actually the Alliance is Jasmine, but that's not as catchy. Anyway, the broad outlines are the same. Jasmine is the god, or Power, who goes to great lengths to become manifest in our world and bring Peace and Love and Happiness to us all. The downside is that she, um, eats people. The bigger downside is that she robs people of their free will, making them an extension of herself.

On Miranda, the Alliance tries to create the perfect society--to make people better, as Mal puts it--by dosing them with a drug that suppresses aggressive impulses. Instead, everybody dies, except for the few who become insane hyper-aggressive space cannibals. Big downside.

In other words, they're two stories about exactly the same thing: the inherent monstrosity of the utopian impulse.

Joss Whedon is a big squishy liberal (yay!), but as I understand it Tim Minear is more of a libertarian/conservative type. The tension between these two worldviews, implicit to one degree or another in Angel, is at the forefront of Firefly and Serenity. The Alliance is every libertarian's nightmare, but things aren't exactly grand in the libertarian paradise of the outer planets: the strong brutalize the weak, the corrupt victimize the honest, and life in general is nasty, brutish, and short. The Firefly verse is not drawn wholly from either worldview, but from the conflict between the two--which is one reason why it never comes off as merely political allegory.

The Jasmine and Miranda plotlines, though, are both firmly rooted in Tim Minear's libertarianish vision. The signal characteristic of the Alliance is that (as River says) they meddle; they fight a war to extend the 'benefits of civilization' to the unwilling and ornery outer planets. The meddling, even on Miranda (especially on Miranda) appears to come from benevolent impulses, but has (has to have) monstrous results.

But here's the thing: whatever Minear's political beliefs, the basic point is (I think) indisputable. It's one of the very few things conservatism (and here I mean classical conservatism, not the bastard child of Marie Antoinette and Al Capone that now calls itself 'conservatism') has to teach liberals. Every action, no matter how benevolent, has unintended consequences. The utopian impulse, if it gets anywhere, if it doesn't strangle on its own idealism (see, e.g., the long-gone utopian communes of the mid-19th century), always has monstrous results.

[That's all, folks]

Serenity and Firefly

The conventional wisdom among a lot of Firefly fans seems to be that Serenity isn't nearly as good. I find this immensely annoying.

I will happily concede that Firefly is a much better TV series than Serenity. As a TV series, Serenity is sorely lacking. By the same token, Serenity is a much better movie than Firefly, which has enormous flaws as a movie.

(While I haven't read the comic books, I would guess that they're a whole lot better than either Firefly or Serenity as comic books, but not much good as either movie or TV series. But I digress.)

The fact that the two share characters and mythos muddles things. It tempts one to make impossible comparisons between the two, as if they were works in the same medium, rather than judging each individually by the standards of its medium.

I think that as a movie--that is, considered on its own merits in its own medium, separate from any other works (either TV series or comic books) that employ the same characters and mythos--Serenity is a tremendous piece of work, two hours of exciting, funny, suspenseful, thought-provoking movie. Yes, there was more character development in the 15 hours of Firefly than in the 2 hours of Serenity; there was also more character development (of more interesting characters) in Serenity than in a dozen Hollywood blockbusters put together. I enjoyed Serenity more than nearly all of the recent movies I've seen, and that's the standard that matters.

This is why I've come to value the opinions of people who haven't seen Firefly (most recently Shakespeare's Sister) over those of a lot of Firefly fans. They evaluate the movie for what it is, without imposing their ideas about what it could have been on the small screen.

[That's all, folks]

Golden Globlogging

(Try saying that ten times fast.)

Award season is upon us...which means it's time for the obligatory should win/will win pieces. Here, then, is my authoritative¹ rundown of the Golden Globes, just in time for tonight's ceremony:

Picture, drama

NOMINEES: Who knows?

WILL WIN: Who cares?

SHOULD WIN: Serenity, because it has more heart, soul, intelligence, wit, thrills, and suspense than any other movie this year.


Actress, drama

NOMINEES: Who knows?

WILL WIN: Who cares?

SHOULD WIN: Summer Glau (Serenity), outstanding as the tormented-waif-slash-kickass-killing-machine who is the target of the Bad Guys.


Actor, drama

NOMINEES: Who knows?

WILL WIN: Who cares?

SHOULD WIN: Nathan Fillion (Serenity), as the most appealing action hero since Han Solo...whose crisis of faith and conscience is the heart of the movie.


Picture, musical or comedy

NOMINEES: Who knows?

WILL WIN: Who cares?

SHOULD WIN: Serenity, which had most of the funniest lines of 2005.


Actress, musical or comedy

NOMINEES: Who knows?

WILL WIN: Who cares?

SHOULD WIN: Jewel Staite (Serenity), whose comic sweetness gave the movie some of its funniest moments.


Actor, musical or comedy

NOMINEES: Who knows?

WILL WIN: Who cares?

SHOULD WIN: Alan Tudyk (Serenity), who breathes fresh life into the wisecracking-in-the-face-of-doom schtick.


Supporting actress

NOMINEES: Who knows?

WILL WIN: Who cares?

SHOULD WIN: Gina Torres (Serenity), who excels throughout but is particularly effective in the most heartbreaking scene of the movie. (Between her and Summer Glau, it's a tossup who gets lead and who gets supporting; this is an arbitrary choice.)


Supporting actor

NOMINEES: Who knows?

WILL WIN: Who cares?

SHOULD WIN: Chiwetel Ejiafor (Serenity), for a portrayal of evil as nuanced as it is terrifying.


Director

NOMINEES: Who knows?

WILL WIN: Who cares?

SHOULD WIN: Joss Whedon (Serenity). Well, duh.


Screenplay

NOMINEES: Who knows?

WILL WIN: Who cares?

SHOULD WIN: Joss Whedon (Serenity), for packing more humor, heartbreak, tension, and genuine humanity into a single script than most screenwriters get into a lifetime of films.

Television: The Wire and Deadwood should split the drama awards; Arrested Development, Extras, and My Name Is Earl should split the comedy awards.

NOTE: None of the foregoing should be construed as a slight against any of the movies that are actually nominated, some of which have their passionate adherents (Phil, this means you). The truth is, a) I only saw one movie in a theatre this year (guess which one), and b) its omission from the nominations is such an egregious miscarriage of justice that I cannot let it go unanswered.

¹'Authoritative', in this context, meaning 'completely subjective and with no regard for the opinion of anyone other than myself'.

[That's all, folks]

BBC Poll: Best Film of 2005

The BBC is running a poll on film of the year. Go there, and vote your (*coughSerenitycough*) conscience.

On edit: They ask you to post a rationale for your choice; here's what I wrote:

Because it is the most entertaining film of 2005, combining action, humor, suspense, wit, terror, and human drama; because it has the most appealing, most interesting, most human characters of any film in 2005; and because it is one of the most intelligent films of 2005, exploring issues of faith, loyalty, fanaticism, and the unintended consequences of good intentions.

Apparently, you are allowed to choose a movie other than Serenity, but I'm not sure why anyone would want to do that.

Serenity in 2000 Words or Less

Huge, huge spoilers--in fact, pretty much the whole movie. Don't go there if you haven't seen it yet. If you have, though, it's pretty gorram hilarious.

Random (spoilery) thoughts on Serenity

Spoilers are in invisi-text below.

• Wow. Just...wow.
• Waaaahhhh!
• Great opening sequence--very witty, the way it pokes fun at clumsy exposition sequences, and keeps shifting scenes out from under the viewer.
• Wanted more Book. Especially since I'd guess he ain't coming back.
• Some great Wash scenes, but still--waaaahhh!
• In the firefight with the Reavers, I wasn't sure anybody was getting out alive.
• Joss is the Shan Yu of screenwriters.
• You think River's creepy...try Miranda. *shudder*
• Miss Isringhausen's cameo was great--heartbreaking and horrific.
• Chiwetel Ejiafor--incredible. The Operative--coolest villain in a long, long time.
• The Operative's face when he saw the Reaver ships--that alone was worth the price of admission.
• Reavers vs. Alliance--way cooler than any space battle in Star Wars. Also, that encapsulated our BDHs' position throughout the series: caught between the Alliance and the Reavers (or other bad guys).
• Wow. Just...wow.

Serenity Review

Wow. Just...wow.

I saw Serenity last night, courtesy of the kind (if slightly pushy) folks at Grace Hill Media, and it was everything I (a Firefly fan) was hoping for and more: tense, exhilarating, smart, heartbreaking, and hilarious.

More importantly, it wasn't just another Firefly episode (or even merely Best Firefly Episode Ever); it was a movie. A Big Damn Movie. The effects are bigger, the cinematography is more fluid, the stakes are higher, and the actors (especially Nathan Fillion and Summer Glau) effortlessly inhabit their new roles as Movie Stars.

An immensely enjoyable opening scene does a great job of bringing non-fans up to speed while avoiding (and poking fun at) the clumsy exposition used in lesser films. This pre-credit sequence also introduces the coolest villain to come along in a long time: The Operative (Chiwetel Ejiafor), an Alliance assassin who believes
absolutely in advancing noble ends through means he acknowledges to be evil. ("I am a monster," he says at one point; "there is no place for me" in the better world he hopes to create.)

Then it's on to Serenity to (re-)introduce the crew. Fans will be happy to settle in with the characters they have grown to love; non-fans will get a brief snapshot of each character, just enough to make them care, before the first of a half-dozen tense and exciting action sequences. About these, no specifics, except to say that when his characters are in danger, Joss makes you believe they're in
danger. Also, River kicks ass--but then you knew that from the trailers.

The rest of the movie is the escalating struggle between Mal and The Operative; beyond that, I won't go into any details. Suffice it to say that it entails enormous stakes, and goes from tense to exhilarating to creepy to terrifying and back again. All of this is leavened with Whedon's trademarked wisecracks--the desperate hilarity of people "out on the raggedy edge" (as Mal puts it)--humor best typified by an exchange between Mal and Wash during a difficult landing:

Wash: This is going to get pretty interesting.
Mal: Define interesting.
Wash: 'Oh god, oh god, we're all going to die?'

If you're a fan, I don't need to convince you; you've died and gone to heaven. If you aren't, then go see the most purely entertaining movie to come out of Hollywood in a long time.

And then buy the DVDs.

Serenity Update

So the passes to the press screening come with a couple of strings attached: I have to link to the official movie website, and I have to post the official synopsis:

Joss Whedon, the Oscar® - and Emmy - nominated writer/director responsible for the worldwide television phenomena of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE, ANGEL and FIREFLY, now applies his trademark compassion and wit to a small band of galactic outcasts 500 years in the future in his feature film directorial debut, Serenity. The film centers around Captain Malcolm Reynolds, a hardened veteran (on the losing side) of a galactic civil war, who now ekes out a living pulling off small crimes and transport-for-hire aboard his ship, Serenity. He leads a small, eclectic crew who are the closest thing he has left to family –squabbling, insubordinate and undyingly loyal.

In other words, to get to see the movie I'm dying to see, I have to help promote the movie I'm dying to see. Fair enough; I'm happy to do it. I might quibble about whether Jayne is 'undyingly loyal', but otherwise it all sounds reasonable.

More, of course, after the screening.