Joss Whedon's Serenity 2.0
#826
DVD Talk Platinum Edition
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Traverse City, MI
Posts: 3,955
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
I cant wait till friday Serenity and Into the Blue. Looking forward to Serenity more but I gotta admit Into the Blue looks pretty good. The underwater work looks amazing + Jessica Alba
#827
DVD Talk Hero
I just found out I don't have to go to work tommorrow so I'm going to go see Serenity during the first showing. I'm also planning on going again on Friday and perhaps Saturday and Sunday as well.
#828
DVD Talk Hero
Saw this at http://browncoats.serenitymovie.com
Seems I didn't just imagine that article. I also like the mention of a possible cast commentary on the second release.
Originally Posted by theonetruebix
Word from Joss in some recent interview (sorry, I forget where) is that there will be a regular straight-out DVD at the normal time, and then a special DVD like six months later, where there will be more goodies, most likely including things like the R. Tam Sessions. Also, while deeming the premise of two different DVD releases like this "cheesy," Joss said something like it would give him the chance to try to do a full-cast commentary track, which is something he wasn't able to do for the first DVD that will come out.
#829
DVD Talk Special Edition
Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 1,214
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Originally Posted by RocShemp
I just found out I don't have to go to work tommorrow so I'm going to go see Serenity during the first showing. I'm also planning on going again on Friday and perhaps Saturday and Sunday as well.
Good man! I'm going to see it on Friday and then again Sunday. Then next week a few more times at least.
#830
Senior Member
A second visit with the film has done nothing to extinguish my enthusiasm for Serenity. Just the opposite, in fact.
And I'm tired of having to tell people "Well ... YES, I was a big fan of the show, too." As if it's a defect to love good sci-fi, be it on Fox DVD or at the multiplex.
My review's up at Rotten Tomatoes, so I've done my small part on the Tomamtometer.
To the fans (and newcomers) who are seeing Serenity for the first time tomorrow, I hope you all have a great time. I'm doing my part on Saturday night, and I'm dragging three skeptical jerkwads with me.
EDIT: I removed some blather about the Alba flick. Don't even know what I was thinking........
And I'm tired of having to tell people "Well ... YES, I was a big fan of the show, too." As if it's a defect to love good sci-fi, be it on Fox DVD or at the multiplex.
My review's up at Rotten Tomatoes, so I've done my small part on the Tomamtometer.
To the fans (and newcomers) who are seeing Serenity for the first time tomorrow, I hope you all have a great time. I'm doing my part on Saturday night, and I'm dragging three skeptical jerkwads with me.
EDIT: I removed some blather about the Alba flick. Don't even know what I was thinking........
#831
DVD Talk Platinum Edition
Originally Posted by scott shelton
I call bullshit. I saw the film tonight, and if you don't know the show, you'll be lost right away.
-JP
#832
Senior Member
Yeah, but you and Shelton are not the same person, therefore different things happen when you each go to the movies.
I can see where Scott's coming from, particularly in the two romantical mini-subplots, and also in the relative importance of Book's character.
I do think that enough is given within the movie to make all this stuff work ... but just barely. A newcomer paying close attention to Serenity will almost definitely be thinking "Oh, I guess the meat of these (particular) characters and relationships is covered in the TV series."
I can see where Scott's coming from, particularly in the two romantical mini-subplots, and also in the relative importance of Book's character.
I do think that enough is given within the movie to make all this stuff work ... but just barely. A newcomer paying close attention to Serenity will almost definitely be thinking "Oh, I guess the meat of these (particular) characters and relationships is covered in the TV series."
#833
DVD Talk Legend
Got to see this last night, and I'd give it a thums up. I would think a person not familiar with the show could watch it easily, but I guess that's easy to say having seen the show. Good luck to Universal and Whedon, as I do hope he succeeds
#834
DVD Talk Special Edition
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: Austin, TX
Posts: 1,012
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
They had a special screening of it in Austin, Wednesday night. It was shown outside on the set they used for the Alamo. Summer Glau and Jewel Staite were there. They did a Q&A after the movie. It was a lot of fun. They had a video before the movie of an old Chinese man telling us how to swear in Chinese. It was hilarious. The movie and the whole night was great. Probably going to go see it again this weekend with my girlfriend, since she was out of town for last nights event.
#835
DVD Talk Hall of Fame
Join Date: Nov 2001
Location: Guelph, Ontario
Posts: 9,921
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
I'm really interested to see how the critics treat this...right now it's sitting at 73% on rotten tomatoes...I guess tomorrow will tell the tale...
MATT
should we start a SERENITY 3.0 thread for posting reactions to the film as it opens wide, so new people to MT or serenity won't be intimidated by 34 pages of posts?
MATT
should we start a SERENITY 3.0 thread for posting reactions to the film as it opens wide, so new people to MT or serenity won't be intimidated by 34 pages of posts?
#837
DVD Talk Gold Edition
Join Date: Mar 1999
Location: Seattle, WA
Posts: 2,146
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Originally Posted by Ghym
They had a special screening of it in Austin, Wednesday night. It was shown outside on the set they used for the Alamo. Summer Glau and Jewel Staite were there....
#838
DVD Talk Godfather
Join Date: Jul 2000
Location: City of the lakers.. riots.. and drug dealing cops.. los(t) Angel(e)s. ca.
Posts: 54,199
Likes: 0
Received 1 Like
on
1 Post
Originally Posted by NatrlBornThrllr
I call bullshit on your call of bullshit. I saw the film tonight, having no prior exposure to Firefly, and I never once felt "out of the loop."
-JP
-JP
There's a lot of Bullshit being called.
#840
I dug around on the NY Times Movies site and found their review a little early...
Full Review (reg. req'd)
The New York Times
September 30, 2005
Scruffy Space Cowboys Fighting Their Failings
By MANOHLA DARGIS
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.
[snip]
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.
[snip]
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.
[snip]
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.
September 30, 2005
Scruffy Space Cowboys Fighting Their Failings
By MANOHLA DARGIS
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.
[snip]
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.
[snip]
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.
[snip]
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.
#842
DVD Talk Hero
I just came back from seeing it. I loved every single minute of it!
Even with everyone here assuring me to the contrary, I was still very much afraid walking in that it'd feel like nothing more than an extended episode. That in itself wouldn't be bad given how great all 14 episodes of the show were but this indeed proved to be much more.
I think anyone unfamiliar with Firefly can easily walk into Serenity and get the gist of it. Throughout the film there were lines that were meant as quick bits of exposition for the individual characters. I can't remember them exactly off the top of my head right now but the opening sequence was not the only portion of the film written to get non-fans up to speed. Either way, watching the series would definitely make you like the characters
a whole lot more.
Now, for those who've already seen the film via advanced screenings or otherwise, I have the following question:
Also:
All in all it was an excellent film and I can't wait to see it many more times. But one thing that bugged me was that, besides myself, there were only seven people in the theatre (of which I'm sure five of them were already fans of the show). I'm hoping this is just because it's a thursday and that it picks up during the weekend.
I really hope Whedon gets to make his intended trilogy, even if the film works as a standalone feature.
Spoiler:
I think anyone unfamiliar with Firefly can easily walk into Serenity and get the gist of it. Throughout the film there were lines that were meant as quick bits of exposition for the individual characters. I can't remember them exactly off the top of my head right now but the opening sequence was not the only portion of the film written to get non-fans up to speed. Either way, watching the series would definitely make you like the characters
Spoiler:
Now, for those who've already seen the film via advanced screenings or otherwise, I have the following question:
Spoiler:
Also:
Spoiler:
All in all it was an excellent film and I can't wait to see it many more times. But one thing that bugged me was that, besides myself, there were only seven people in the theatre (of which I'm sure five of them were already fans of the show). I'm hoping this is just because it's a thursday and that it picks up during the weekend.
I really hope Whedon gets to make his intended trilogy, even if the film works as a standalone feature.
#844
Senior Member
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Orlando, FL
Posts: 485
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Originally Posted by RocShemp
Spoiler:
Spoiler:
Spoiler:
Spoiler:
Spoiler:
Spoiler:
But one thing that bugged me was that, besides myself, there were only seven people in the theatre (of which I'm sure five of them were already fans of the show). I'm hoping this is just because it's a thursday and that it picks up during the weekend.
I really hope Whedon gets to make his intended trilogy, even if the film works as a standalone feature.[/QUOTE]
#845
DVD Talk Hero
Thanks for the answers Matthew.
That does make one wonder.
Spoiler:
Spoiler:
Last edited by RocShemp; 09-29-05 at 06:51 PM.
#847
DVD Talk Hero
Spoiler:
#849
DVD Talk Hero
Ahh. Okay. Thanks. I've only seen the show since I have no comic shops near me.
Spoiler:
#850
DVD Talk Hero
Originally Posted by RogueScribner
Spoiler:
Spoiler:
Originally Posted by RogueScribner
Spoiler:
Spoiler:
Originally Posted by RogueScribner
Spoiler:
Originally Posted by RogueScribner
What kind of screening was it? It doesn't open officially until tomorrow, though many theaters are holding midnight screenings tonight. If no one knew that the movie was playing they aren't very likely to show up for it. It's like when I went to Dragon*Con. I found out that there was a Wednesday night screening before the con, but there was no information posted about it on the web or in any programming material. So the screening was half empty because no one knew about it. I'm sure that's why your theater was mostly empty.
Last edited by RocShemp; 09-29-05 at 09:10 PM.