How do I put this? I tried watching "Serenity" (the premiere episode of Firefly) two nights ago: It was painful. Maybe I was tired. It was closing in on midnight, after all. I never made it. And ended up forward chapter searching through the episode, trying to find something... anything that did not bore me to tears; anything that might simply engage me. Yes, it was a tall order.
Last night, somewhere between all the work I am doing at this juncture, I tried watching an episode by the name of "Bushwacked". I decided on this installment of the short lived series (hey...) by reading the backs of the different DVD cases -- there are around three eps on each disc. By the way, 'medical supplies', or 'medicine', was featured in a few of the plot descriptions. Cripes, the blurbs were boring me, never mind spinning the DVDs. At any rate, I put in "Disc 1" and... (almost) went out of my mind! (The CIA should know about this.)
The characters in Firefly are about as stimulating and appealing as shedding epidermal matter.
Being the studious type that I am, I decided to watch, at least, the 28 minute "Making of" extra -- a self indulgent, wankfest documentary, if there ever was one -- and then bounced over to my computer to read this, admittedly, interesting essay on Wikipedia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(TV_series)
I know -- I have the attention span of a firefly.
The good news in all this is -- there's a hockey game on! The Detroit Red Wings and the Chicago Blackhawks are about to battle it out in game three in NHL semi-final ice hockey action. A man's game it is!
5 comments:
To paraphrase a military axiom, "Entertainment is an event that happens in the mind of the audience". Sometimes you either click with something, or you don't. The fact is that this show, like all others, IS film footage of a bunch of sets with actors walking around in costumes, and being SF everything is "unreal" to boot. The rest happens in the mind of the viewer. But the recipe to create that necessary suspension of disbelief works for some viewers and not others.... Always intriguing to see that play out.
Making it look as though the characters are on a spaceship and handling "futuristic" gear, however, is another level.
BUT... your points are good ones, even if they fall into the "goes without saying" box.
To tell you the truth, and this probably falls into that above mentioned box, not a lot impresses me. I see good and not-so-good in a lot of movies/shows but, at the end of the day (or running time), I am unimpressed much of the time.
As an old friend of mine said to me a few years ago (and I laughed out loud after he delivered), "Do you not like anything?"
Interesting. What is "futuristic"?
Food pills? Nah, that didn't pan out.
Given that fossil fuels will reach the point of negative economic return in perhaps 40 years, are horses "futuristic"?
We all know the use of that word... what is means.
As "Enjonze" suggests in an earlier comment, to another posting, SF production designers today are not even trying to extrapolate -- it's crap we have now (for the most part; "Apple City").
[Tyrell] Indulge me. [/Tyrell]
What is futuristic design? A "Newspad"? Nah, we have that already. Floaty-bloaty Baron Harkonnen? Well, we have the same thing on scooter wheels in my neighbourhood; a matter of detail, really. Computers just get smaller until they disappear. Spaceships... well, they turned out to be Really Hard To Build after all, so whatever pretend stuff someone comes up with does fine, it's all made up.
Silver jumpsuits? Wheel-shaped space stations? But that would be so retro...Ron Cobb gave spaceships the clapped-out-oil-tanker look, and the movies never looked back (forward?).
As a few people have put it, "What happened to my flying car and moonbase?"
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