Serenity Found: More Unauthorized Essays on Joss Whedon’s Firefly Universe
edited by Jane Espenson
Rating: 3 out of 5

What can I say? Meh. Another collection of essays (following the superior Finding Serenity) discoursing on the deep meanings to be found in the universe of Firefly, a short-lived TV series as well as Serenity, its major-picture followup.

Let me preface by saying: I “get” Firefly; I’d be a Browncoat if I were any sort of joiner. I loved the show, which I discovered post-mortem like most people; and I think that Serenity is the best-made science fiction movie of at least the past decade. Its technical execution is mind-blowingly awesome. I’ve bought Those Left Behind (the limited-run comic series), and the RPG, and, and the soundtrack for the TV show and the one for the movie, and both versions of the Serenity DVDs. I get Firefly; I’m a fan.

After which, all I can say is: Meh.

More below the fold.

Another excellent piece is “Firefly and Story Structure, Advanced” by Geoff Klock. I usually have no patience for lit crit or its bastard offspring, film crit. But Mr. Klock’s essay makes clear why that’s a limiting viewpoint. He walks the reader through the convoluted structure of the episode “Out of Gas”. While I’ve always been amazed by the complexity of the plot, Mr. Klock brings it to a whole new level, focusing on the transitions between scenes and how the writer and director used these to further the message of the episode. I learned a lot from the essay and enjoyed every moment.

Unfortunately, on the other side of the sheet, there are the people who love Firefly so much that they’re convinced it must be about whatever their own little bugaboo is about. They so want to have their important totems validated by a revered authority (Joss Whedon) that they manhandle and force the material to eke out a glimmer of that. “River Tam and the Weaponized Women of the Whedonverse” (Michael Morano) and “Freedom in an Unfree World” (P. Gardner Goldsmith) commit this sin the most egregiously by attempting to make the show little more than a rant on feminist issues or on libertarian philosophy, respectively. They boil the complexity and nuance out of this rich show and leave us with an unappetizing paste. “The Good Book” (Eric Greene) falls prey to this syndrome, too, but manages not to succumb entirely, as do “The Bonnie Brown Flag” (Evelyn Vaughn and the idealized South) and “Signal to Noise” (Jacob Clifton and the triumph/threat of media).

These authors go astray because they mistake one theme for the theme. Firefly was deep and nuanced, and hit many different levels of meaning. Indeed, one of the themes running through the show — through all of Joss Whedon’s show, I believe — is that there isn’t just one theme — that life is rich and complex and anyone pruning away that is doing you a disservice.

To wrap, I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about “I, Malcolm”, by Nathan Fillion, the actor who portrayed Captain Malcolm Reynolds. This essay was worth the price of the book. It’s insightful and revealing and touching. For me, it reminded me why the show resonated so much with so many people and why, even six years later, people aren’t willing to give up on an experiment that — by all the usual standards of TV — failed. People talk about “life-changing roles”; clearly, Mr. Fillion has had his and he lets the reader into a private space in exploring it.

So, final conclusion: Would I recommend this book? Just barely, if you’re already a Browncoat. For me, it turned out to be thoroughly zemu.

Apparently Spike TV is running all of the Star Wars movies as a “mega saga event” over the course of the next weekend. I happened to come across their “ultimate trailer” online, which stitches together bits from all six movies. And strung together like that, all those bits suddenly make clear what’s gone so horribly awry in the Star Wars franchise:

The later movies (Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith) are certainly much busier than the first three.

But they aren’t any better.

It would seem that George Lucas’ sole “lesson” is “more lasers! more droids! more ships! more explosions! Oh, dear God, many more explosions!” It’s become a cliche that modern filmmakers allow special effects to overwhelm the story; George gives them a play-by-play on how to do that.

Meh.

Lunacon 51 (2)
Some thoughts on my second con (should that be “sec-con”?), jotted down at midnight, though they’ll be posted much later.

The first panel I intended to attend was “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”, a documentary on the failed vision of futurists from the 1930s through 1960s. Due to the weird layout and unpredictable spacetime anomalies that have caused the Lunarians to christen this hotel the “Escher Hilton”, I arrived at the room far in advance of the panel. Indeed, I arrived at the start of “Not 2B Toyed With”, a 12-minute movie that the moderator assured us was absolutely hilarious. She had to assure us, because she couldn’t show us, because in the rush to pack for the con, she’d left the DVD at home. But she was appropriately contrite and, at the suggest of a snarky audience member (me), proceeded to illustrate by sock puppets, stopping only when, well, she ran out of socks and hands to put them on.

As it turned out, “Not 2B Toyed With” – even though it never actually showed – was a better presentation than “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”. The latter, it developed, was a 1999 documentary financed by Disney and shown on Showtime exactly once. The moderators liked to call it “the documentary Disney won’t let you see” (since the studio hasn’t released it at all) but there isn’t anything spectacular about it. Instead it was a bunch of self-involved baby boomers narcissisizing about their impressions of the vision of futurists. It had a lot of cuts to semi-celebrities pontificating, like you find in those “I Love the 80s” shows on VH-1. It was a true waste of my 90 minutes.

I spent some time in the game room, watching some people play “Ninja Burger”, a Munchin-esque game from Steve Jackson Games. It looked pretty fun, actually, and funny and clever as you’d expect from SJG. I also played a round of BANG!, a spaghetti Western shoot-em-up card game. It’s one of those games with hidden objectives – no one knows who the outlaws or deputies are – that had a complicated but manageable cardplay system. I was “The Apache Kid” and the renegade, and I did well for two rounds, until I was accidentally blown up by the very same dynamite I’d put into play. *Sigh* It’s from Mayfair Games, and I think I’ll try to find it online when I get home.

I dropped back to my room to get some dinner (the restaurant was closed by now – a costly mistake on my part) and then went to “Sex Done Right”, a panel on writing about, well, sex. And though it’s easy enough to dive for the gutter, it was actually a semi-serious writers’ craft panel. It had a certain self-involvement among the panel members, though, that quickly killed my interest in their thoughts on writing. I check out as soon as one said, in all seriousness, “But then the werecat morphed and I had to think, will he rip through her? She couldn’t morph, of course, since she was a vampire….” That told me I’d wandered into a particular corner of fanspace, one that holds no attraction for me (and, to be snobbish, one that seems to draw poor talent).

I was also reintroduced to that universal con character, Annoying Guy One Seat Over. There was a nebbish first-time con goer sitting next to me who was too enthusiastic, too eager, and too clueless to be tolerated. Many panels seem to develop such a guy – who has to comment on everything, who is clueless about his cluelessness, and who overrates his own intelligence/humor/relevance. The major ecological function of Annoying Guy One Seat Over is to spread humility – to remind us that we too can be annoying, overbearing, etc. Many a time in a panel I sit back and ask myself, “Is that really a valid point? Or am I devolving into Annoying Guy One Seat Over?” It’s a useful check.

Well, here I sit in the Hilton Rye Town waiting for Lunacon to get started. If you are paying more attention to this blog than you should be, you’ll recall that I attended Lunacon 50 last year as well. This year I managed to reserve early, so I am staying at the correct hotel and don’t need to shuttle back and forth. I also arranged to come up on Thursday (the night before the con opened) so that I wouldn’t feel rushed. Originally, this was intended to be my entire Spring Break trip (before committing to go to Ocala to see my mom).

It took longer to get here from NJ than I had expected — nearly four hours door-to-door. Some of that was just waiting for trains, of course; and some of it was being whisked around Rye, NY by a cab driver who, it turns out, didn’t actually know where the Hilton Rye Town is. At least this time there wasn’t a sudden blizzard.

It leaves me with the question of what to do until the con starts. Since I dragged this laptop all the way up here, some of the time will hopefully be spent writing (and more than just blog posts).

As has been usual, this is another exhortation to “Work to Win”. My “study” of WWI and WWII posters indicates that almost all fell into the “Work harder” or “Buy more bonds” categories. True to form, this poster says, “Victory up here… begins down here“. Overhead are a Retro Rocketship and a DV snub fighter. On the ground, in a vaguely-factory-ish compound, is another Retro Rocketship. It’s not so easy to make clear that this one is being assembled or worked on. I put in a forklift and a repair bot, as well as a guy welding something to the periscope hatch. (He’s hard to see, on the top of the ship.) Actually, I had to go find models for almost everything, as I didn’t have a lot of industrial nick-nacks lying around.

Insta Rating: 4 out of 5

OK, it’s a little odd to be reviewing a movie when I’m supposed to be off on a wonderful cruise. But as mentioned before I was pretty wiped out, so I decided to take advantage of the onboard movie theater and catch Next starring Nicholas Cage and Jessica Biel. I remember when this came out but I never got to see it, despite being a sucker for a Philip K. Dick movie

Nicholas plays Chris something, who was born with the very Dickesque talent of being to see the future but only his own future and only two minutes ahead. He’s making a living as a second-rate Vegas magic act and just trying to have a normal life. The only exception to the rules of his talent is that he saw Liz (Biel) at a diner some indeterminate time in the future. He’s been visiting that diner for a week trying to meet her, which he does, acting in a manner which he hopes isn’t too creepy (but which kind of is).
Unfortunately for Chris, there’s an FBI agent who’s somehow become aware of his talent and wants to use it to track down a missing Russian nuclear warhead which has been smuggled into the US. The movie is about bringing Chris around to the greater good and stopping the bad guys.

More below the fold.

Actually, I liked this movie quite a bit. I’ve never read the associated Dick story (“The Golden Man”) so I can’t say how well it conforms. But unlike most Hollywood adaptations of the author’s work, this one feels like a Philip K. Dick story (except not quite so psychoactive). The talent is done well – the camera gives essentially no hint that Chris is “in the future” until it stops and rewinds. Despite knowing the trick, the viewer is lulled several times into believing something horrific has occurred.

This is used to fantastic effect in the film’s “gotcha” ending, which was entirely worthy of Dick’s brand of madness. I won’t give anything away but suffice to say, the metaphysical rug is pulled out from under the viewer in the last two minutes of the film. Surprisingly this wasn’t frustrating or irritating; the scriptwriters have gotten the viewer to a place where this sleight-of-hand is acceptable. And for all the nay-sayers: There is a visual cue earlier in the movie that sets up the gotcha, if you’re paying enough attention. It has to do with the pupils in Cage’s eyes after a tender scene.

A lot is left unexplained – who stole the bomb? why are they setting it off in LA? – and that’s all to the good. Dick’s stories tend not to give you all the answers; sometimes they don’t give you any. And there are moments when the film bogs down into a standard find-the-bomb thriller. But the depiction of Chris’ ability, and the clever ways he learns to exploit it, make up for these deficiencies. It’s a pretty decent effort at a strange sci fi story, and well worth the eyeball time.

I’ve got a new, rarer “landscape” poster ready. It shows two Zarkov rockets at a docking tower, with crew running to man the ships. A DV snub fighter is lifting in the background, and the ever-lovable jetpack guy has just launched himself. The tag is “They’re Ready to Do Their Part … Are You Ready to Do Yours?“, with the ubiquitous “Work to Win” slogan. I am particularly happy with this one because it is not based on an existing poster, at least not as far as I recall. More below the fold.

This is actually the second major version of this poster (not counting a dozen minor touch-ups). The original looked down on the platform from a much steeper angle and included a third rocket docked at the third station. The sharp angle didn’t blend well with the sunlit clouds, though; it was actually a little vertigo-inducing, since the tower seemed to be at a crazy angle to the normal of the sky. Gah. Lowering the point of view also allowed me to zoom in more and take advantage of the details available in the models I used.

That detail proved challenging in a different way, though. Poser choked, repeatedly, as I tried to render this. Indeed, it even failed with the Poser 4 render engine. (The superior Firefly engine is much more delicate and prone to run out of memory, but the Poser 4 engine has heretofore been pretty robust.) So I had to cut figures and props to reduce the memory footprint. The biggest savings came from dropping the third ship, which in this view was just blocking line-of-sight anyway. I also added some color, especially to the Aviatrices, because their olive vests were hard to see against the metal of the platform.

This is a variant of a classic saying from the Second World War: “Loose Lips Crash Ships!. Of course, in the original, it’s “Loose Lips Sink Ships” and the image is of a cargo ship going down beneath the waves. Well, cargo ship clearly becomes rocket ship… but then I was stuck. You see, my rocket ship models are all intact. I haven’t yet mastered the art of deforming, breaking, or otherwise mangling a triangle-mesh object, so I had to work around it.

My solution? Two ships, one pointing into the ground and the other, some distance away, pointing out of the ground. The intended effect was to imply a single ship broken in twain by the crash. I also sought out some fire effects and decided on — believe it or not — a Witch-Burning set by Peemot. (I can’t find the name of the creator of the terrain piece used. Sorry.) I like to think it works but you’ll have to be the judge…

It’s become clear that I’ve mis-tagged some of these, and I thought it was about time — 1/3 of the way toward a book! — to collect them in one place.

More below the fold.

• “Don’t Let That Shadow…“
• “It’s a Swell Rocket…“
• “Keep Us Flying“
• “The Tools of Victory“
• “See Action Now!“
• “Take the Fight to Them” (revised)
• “Invest in Invasion“
• “…That You May Breathe Free“
• “Take the Fight to Them” (original)

Another in the series, this one with the tag “Don’t Let That Shadow Touch Them“. This is based on one of the most effective WWII posters I know of, with the same tag but the shadow of a swastika. My job here was harder, in that I don’t have an instantly-recognizable symbol of the Martian oppressors. Instead I settled for a Martian war machine off-camera, with a low spotlight to throw a long shadow. I’m of mixed opinion on whether it gets across the shape but I like the atmosphere.

I used the Poser standard figure “Ben” plus the Poser 4 girl. For no good reason I decided on only two children instead of three. The original had the kids playing with toys, so I used a Poser-standard cartoon character “Ginger” for a discarded doll. Ben, meanwhile, holds a scale model of an Avro Lancaster bomber. Technically, this is counter-factual to my timeline, as WW II doesn’t occur in the world of IW2. But surely some further development of the airplane will occur, and the Lancaster is not a wildly unusual design.

Because most of my posters seem to exhort either “Buy War Bonds” or “Work to Win”, I decided to add something more. In this case, I mention the “Second Guardian Drive”. My nebulous assumption is that this is early in the war, when the humans are in the process of expelling the Martians from Earth. The “Guardian Drives” are bond drives to finance the outposts that will guard Earth’s orbit. This places this poster significantly earlier than, say, “Take the Fight to Them” or even “That You May Breathe Free“.