You can't miss it!

[RedRock]

Hey, guys and gals! You just can't miss this!

Tonight, Fri. 7/29/05, on the SciFi channel at 6 to 8 PM Eastern, the two-hour episode of Firefly called "Serenity" which explains much about the history of the spaceship they fly on in the TV series (and her crew)--it's a really good episode, I just watched it (again) the other day on DVD----AND (I know you're excited about it, you should be!!!) they'll have a sneak peak/trailer from the new movie "Serenity" due out Sept. 30 in movie theaters everywhere: The final domestic trailer for Serenity will premiere on the SciFi channel, Friday, July 29th between 7:45-8PM EST during the airing of "Serenity Part 2". It will have its Internet premiere shortly thereafter (more details to come).

Again, this is a really good SciFi TV series, and I highly recommend you check it out. Lots of humor and interesting dialog, and plenty of action and even some babes. An interesting view of the future, with pioneers on backward planets (the old Wild West influence), evil galactic big brother star empires, greedy men, scheming women, principled mysterious preachers, big freaking guns and the big freaking guys who shoot them, loyal and confident starship pilots, etc.

And the other episodes in the series will be airing on SciFi Channel, continuing next week (Aug. 5, Fri., 7 pm) with The Train Job--my favorite scene from that one involves a really nasty henchman who has a close encounter with a rather large, functioning spaceship engine after aggressive negotiations fail--see how decisive and quick-thinking Mal (Malcom Reynolds, captain of Serenity, Mr. "I live on the edge, but I've been thinking about moving to the middle.") is!!!

www.serenitymovie.com/

Trust me on this one, and BE THERE!

[RedRock]

Oh, and I recommend turning on Closed Captioning when you watch, until you get used to how the people talk and the slang/syntax goes for this "world" of SciFi--for example, when they say "this man's verse"--f you didn't have captions on, you might miss the unusual word "verse" which is slang for "universe, existence, world at large."

[RedRock]

OK, I got my episodes a little confused; this one (Serenity, parts 1 and 2) did tell of the crew history and character, esp. the preacher and the ice-girl and the doctor and the whore and the BFG-fan (the actor is a member of the infamously-liberal, "We're leaving the USA if Bush wins" [but of course, they didn't] Baldwin family, but hey, he does a good job in this series, so I'll let it slide).

The episode I really was thinking of was "Out of Gas": After an explosion leaves Serenity crippled, Mal orders everyone to abandon ship while he stays behind in an attempt to make repairs--and reminisces how he found the ship and picked its crew." Don't know yet when that one will be on, but next week is "The Train Job."

A really funny episode to watch out for is "Shindig": In order to secure a job transporting cargo off-planet for a client, Mal atends a high-class social event where a dance with Inara ("the Companion, or "Whore" as he calls her), saying that this is not his kind of party) but he gets in a fight there with a big-wig (well, he says, maybe this IS my kind of party) and gets challenged to a swordfight duel in defense of Inara's honor.

[RedRock]

OK, I hope you all got to watch some of the series replays on Sci-Fi the last several weeks. This is one of my all-time favorite sci-fi series, blending interesting language, characters, plots, and visuals with a lot of humor and tense action. I sure hope the movie lives up to the series. IT OPENS TODAY. GO SEE IT. THAT'S AN ORDER. LOL.
check out a trailer or so, if you're not sure: www.serenitymovie.com/main_site.html

[Lamron]

I've been watching the Serenity trailers and thinking "I've got to see this movie." I didn't immediately make the connection between it and Firefly. I don't like jumping into the middle of a series and not knowing what's going on, and I couldn't seem to figure out Firefly's schedule. I think the Sci-Fi channel can be hard to follow with their frequent changes.

Anyway, I've decided to get myself caught up. I use Netflix, and I'm getting the whole series set to me so I can watch them in order. Maybe then, I'll be cool like RedRock.

[RedRock]

LOL, Lamron. Me, cool? I wish. I bought the DVD's through half.com and got them new at a good deal. The DVD set has 3 episdoes never aired on TV, too!

Never tried netflix.

The movie is supposedly not dependent upon the series (you don't have to seen any of the episodes to enjoy this movie), and I hope it doesn't repeat series info overly much. Anyway, here's the New York Times (I know, ugh!, but here it is anyway) review (sorry, I can't post the images without a lot of work):

MOVIE REVIEW | 'SERENITY'
Scruffy Space Cowboys Fighting Their Failings
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Joss Whedon’s unassuming science-fiction adventure is superior in almost every respect to George Lucas's aggressively more ambitious screen entertainments.

Published: September 30, 2005

It probably isn't fair to Joss Whedon's "Serenity" to say that this unassuming science-fiction adventure is superior in almost every respect to George Lucas's aggressively more ambitious "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith." But who cares about fair when there is fun to be had? Scene for scene, "Serenity" is more engaging and certainly better written and acted than any of Mr. Lucas's recent screen entertainments. Mr. Whedon isn't aiming to conquer the pop-culture universe with a branded mythology; he just wants us to hitch a ride to a galaxy far, far away and have a good time. The journey is the message, not him.

As the creator of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," writing the original movie and producing the television series, Mr. Whedon has enjoyed an exalted position in the pop stratosphere. Over the years he has lent his talent, sometimes without credit, to screenplays for "Toy Story," "Speed" and the last and least successful "Alien" film, "Alien: Resurrection." He also writes comic books, including an "X-Men" line. But Mr. Whedon, the son and grandson of television writers, is principally a natural-born small-screen auteur, graced with a quick, idiosyncratic wit and a facility for serial storytelling. In addition to "Buffy," he created that show's spinoff, "Angel," and in 2002, a curious genre hybrid called "Firefly" he had pitched as "Stagecoach" in space.

Fox aired just 11 episodes of "Firefly" before pulling the plug. The network refused to commit, but not so the fans who, as they did with "Buffy," turned this patchwork of fan-boy love and recycled parts into a cult. Evidence of their passion was later reflected in the DVD sales of "Firefly," which were impressive enough for Universal to pony up for a big-screen version. Named after the ramshackle spaceship that hauls Mr. Whedon's characters from one far-out adventure to the next, "Serenity" picks up where the series left off, with these plucky, shambling outsiders fighting oppression against impossible odds. As Mr. Whedon knows, the fastest way to a geek's heart is a story about other geeks, albeit ones with good hair and hot bodies.

The story so far: Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), Mal for short, is zipping around 500 years in the future trying to make ends meet by scrounging for freight and hauling passengers. A veteran of a war of independence, Mal fought on the losing side and has yet to cross over to greener, more lucrative pastures. Along with his second in command, Zoe (a ferocious Gina Torres), Mal runs the Serenity with honor, guts and a touch of panic. He is the kind of leader who barks out a rhetorical question - asking if any of the crew want to run the ship - only to be flummoxed when he receives a resounding yes in return. (Mal then stammers to Adam Baldwin's thuggish crew hand that he can't.) Mal's iron glove covers a velvety soft fist.

Mr. Whedon sketches his characters with quick brush strokes, leaving his appealing cast to fill in the holes with banter and serious-looking busywork. Everyone takes to their task well, though only Mal and a fierce Whedonesque creation called River (Summer Glau, a pint-size Barbara Steele) take root. Hot-wired to kill and on the run from her government masters, this spooky beauty floats through the ship in a series of fetching shifts that make her look like an errant Martha Graham dancer, every so often going entertainingly berserk and wreaking Michelle Yeoh-style damage. Underlying River's murderous power - and perhaps her government-induced psychosis - is a lost little girl trying to carve out a place and a self to call her own.

As this scrap of boilerplate narrative suggests, Mr. Whedon is too much of genre savant to take his film anywhere genuinely surprising. He may also be too much of a movie novice to exploit his material as boldly as you might hope. What made "Firefly" stand apart from the usual television dross, beyond Mr. Whedon's chatter and characters, was his fusion of science-fiction tropes with those of the western. Mal wears a gun strapped to his thigh, while a lariat necklace circles Zoe's throat. He peppers his speech with "y'all," and together they travel to dusty towns that look as if they might have been built for a Roy Rogers oater. And just to bring this science-fiction fantasy up to geopolitical speed, every so often somebody spits a curse in Mandarin.

Transposing a western to outer space presented a calculated risk, the stuff of either "Star Trek" legend or kitsch. Yet what was most beautiful about "Firefly" was that Mr. Whedon wasn't afraid of looking silly. Taking its cue from the famous first words of "Star Trek" - "Space, the final frontier" - his show reinvigorated Gene Roddenberry's premise with the sincerity of a true believer. "Star Trek" was born at a time when space travel was cloaked in optimism and cold-war anxiety. "Star Wars," meanwhile, born out of Saturday matinee clichés and in a time of political cynicism, trafficked in a gee-whiz escapism so strong it survived even a recent swerve into realpolitik. In the years since, and for myriad reasons, science fiction, at least in film, has turned Dystopia into a boomtown.

Mr. Whedon shows little interest in recycling the gloom-and-doom scenarios that have become ubiquitous in science-fiction cinema over the last few decades. Mal is no Neo redux; he's closer to Indiana Jones, if absent Harrison Ford's rakishly handsome looks and star magnetism. Like the rest of the cast, Mr. Fillion is a charming performer, but he borrows rather than owns the screen, which dovetails with Mr. Whedon's modest aspirations for this film. As both a writer and a director, he isn't staking a claim on genre; he's just using it for a short while to tell a story about some decent men and women struggling against both the tyranny of bureaucratic control and their own very human failings.

"Serenity" works nicely as a movie, although in blowing his television series up to the big screen, Mr. Whedon has lost some of the woolliness that made "Firefly" such a pleasant oddity. (Alas, he also lost most of the banjos and twangy guitars.) Even with a bigger canvas, Mr. Whedon doesn't do much with the camera. His setups are generally perfunctory: a means to a storytelling end for what is, at heart, a $40 million B-movie. It's too bad there isn't one image here as striking and resonant as the shot that closes the opening-credit sequence in "Firefly," the one with the horses galloping toward the camera as they're buzzed overhead by a spaceship. With this single image, Mr. Whedon announced he had reopened a frontier some of us thought long closed.

"Serenity" is rated PG-13. (Parents strongly cautioned.) Despite some fight scenes, this is a relatively clean PG-13 with little graphic violence and no sexually exploitative snark.

Serenity

Opens today nationwide.

Written and directed by Joss Whedon; director of photography, Jack N. Green; edited by Lisa Lassek; production designer, Barry Chusid; produced by Barry Mendel; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 119 minutes.

WITH: Nathan Fillion (Mal), Gina Torres (Zoe), Adam Baldwin (Jayne), Alan Tudyk (Wash), Jewel Staite (Kaylee), Morena Baccarin (Inara), Summer Glau (River), Sean Maher (Simon), Ron Glass (Book), Chiwetel Ejiofor (the Operative), David Krumholtz (Mr. Universe) and Nectar Rose (Lenore).

[RedRock]

I don't want to beat a dead horse, so I'll keep this short, but this posting does provide useful GENERAL and specific info.

For a Serenity review from a source that's 180 degrees from the NY Times in philosophy (still a quite favorable review), check out www.pluggedinonline.com and on the right hand side of the screen under "New Online" click on "Serenity."

This is Plugged In by Focus on the Family, and it presents movie, tv, music, etc. reviews from a Christian perspective. I've found it very informative and insightful, especially as to whether I want my children (and sometimes myself) to see the "garbage" being passed off as "can't miss" tv/movies. I highly recommend this as a no-nonsense review site that isn't so sanctimonious that it can't see the good in a movie that does have some bad. To me, that's the way we all have to live our lives, we try to be the best we can with family, work, government, and God, but we aren't perfect or with people who are--I just expect eventually to be with the one who is.

[Lamron]

I just finished watching the pilot and second and third episodes. Watching it straight through without commercials on DVD is definitely the way to go.

First impressions: very interesting character development. I think this would be a series that would be difficult to jump into the middle of (I'm glad I'm watching it all the way through on DVD). I think my favorite character is the engineer chick who always talks like she's high, and thinks everything is "shiny". She cracks me up every time she says anything.

Sometimes it can be very hard to tell who the "good" guys are. Sometimes "good" is just "less bad". Every moment seems to balance on some aspect of morality. They are exploring difficult decisions in an unusual manner, where "right" "wrong" and "self-interest" can sometimes be mutually exclusive.

The crew is obviously extremely devoted to each other, but would rather die than admit to it. The chemistry between the actors is very good and I didn't have any trouble believing in the characters.

Overall, so far it seems to be well made and well written, but the complex interrelationships and personal motivations of the characters might have been over the heads of some casual watchers. I can see why this series would have a limited, but fanatical, fan base.

Tomorrow night I'm going to watch the next disk (four more episodes).

[RedRock]

Allright!!!

I agree with your analysis, except for the mechanic chick who's high (??) comment. A little slow (unsophisticated, country, backward, goofy) was my impression. Have you seen the episode yet that tells how she became the mechanic?

Do I take it you're waiting until you finish the DVD's before you see the movie? I did go see it already.

[Lamron]

I didn't mean I thought see was actually supposed to be "high". She just has this goofy way of looking at things that I found amusing. Haven't seen one about her history, sounds interesting.

I'm watching the whole series first, then I'll go see the movie.

[Lamron]

Watched the next four episodes tonight and I'm liking it better all the time. I've decided that I must marry Kaylee.

[desmo2]

NO!!! Marriage is cruel and unusual punishment for men, an idea created by sadistic women. Read the fine print! Marriage is a license for a woman to make a man's life an excruciating, living hell! Sure, they seem all sweet and perfect before marriage, but that is because the beast is in its larvae stage. Marriage allows the beast to transform into its true form! That's when they spin a sticky web and shove their man into it, where he is trapped and unable to escape. The woman beast can then torture her prey at her leisure! Avoid her seductive marriage calls! She WILL TRANSFORM into the BEAST!

[Lamron]

Soooooooo..... how's your wife feel about you posing things like this? LOL

[desmo2]

Oh, yeah, like I consulted her highness first?!? If she read this she would have gnashed her teeth, then came racing in for the kill! She would have injected me with a paralyzing poison first, so I would be helpless to defend myself as she painfully sank her fangs into my flesh and slowly sucked my life force from me...

[RedRock]

Mine's fangs go through my wallet first, on their way to my jugular. You know, if I'd have shot her when I first met her, I'd just about now be getting out of prison.

But back to Firefly, Kaylee is a cute little button, isn't she!

But slow down there, hoss---at 4 episodes a night, you'll soon, as in next time you watch, be out of Firefly to watch, except for the movie---and I wouldn't want you all sad and mopey and such. That wouldn't be [speaking chinese] or even Shiney!

And here's 4 words for you to remember, and you'll see why soon: "twixt my nether regions"

;D