Serenity Now!

Mom and Dad, if your rebellious young daughter goes astray, maybe she'll have a dream so fantastical, so fairy-tale-like, that she will learn her lesson, and come to understand that Mum and Dad have their kid's best interests in mind.

Mirrormask brings a vision that recalls such fantasy luminaries as Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton. Created by graphic novelist, Neil Gaiman, and directed and written by, Dave McKean, this is a fantasy world that is part Alice in Wonderland, part Wizard of Oz. At its core is fairly simple story. Helena is a rebellious teenage girl whose parents run a circus that resembles some odd looking Cirque de Soleil. She doesn't want to perform as a juggler, and fights with her mom, wishing her dead.

When mom does fall over, and is sent to the hospital, daughter Helena feels that it's her fault. Dad has to put the circus on hold while Mom is in hospital and the small circus threatens to fall apart without his support. Helena feels even more guilty. Mom is scheduled to go to surgery...

This is when Mirrormask enters its fantastical world. Helena, who wants a life away from the circus, had sketched out drawings. She has hundreds on her wall, as she imagines worlds elsewhere. Her dreams take her to this world.

Although the visions of the new world, where fishes swim across the sky, where cats have human faces and rainbow rings, where bird like creatures with muscles and bills that keep falling off, and everything shimmers and glows in this visionary dreamlike world of the mind, even the real world has some fantastical images. The apartment complex that the family lives in looks like some Guggenheim spiral turned squarish, yet, dilapidated over years of neglect. The circus itself also looks strangely peculiar. This isn't your dad's circus. Well, maybe it is.

Unlike Burton, whose characters often embrace the strangeness of this world, Helena is not so wowed by her wonderland. This makes the visual spectacle something less than fantastic. Her companion, Valentine, played by Jason Barry, wears a mask and has a beard that looks like it's made from Play-doh. He jokes around with her, and also doesn't quite seem like part of the fantasy mindset. He's of the world visually, but a jokester and pragmatist, and more like the world Helena comes from.

As Helena's journey progresses, she, like Scrooge, looks into windows that show pictures of her life, and she learns some of the lessons of her life. She imagines that all the wrongdoings are due to her alter ego, the dark princess. She must save the white queen (who is her mother) from the dark queen (also her mother). The story of the dark and white queen is foreshadowed initially when Helena has one white sock with a picture of the white queen, and one black sock, with a picture of the dark queen on her feet, as she does sock puppet theater. This resembles, oddly enough, the opening of Me, You, and Everyone We Know.

If anything, the acting is a little weak. The mother is a bit too witchlike. Valentine, the travelling companion, seems like Shaggy from Scooby Doo. Yet, the kinds of images burn in the retinas. It's a dreamlike world, rather than a fairytale world, where emotions are muted, and the adventure is in the adventure, walking around, taking in the sights, seeing the weirdness around. Even if the emotional core revolves around a simple story, the visuals are amazing.

To catch Mirrormask, I was again rushing to get their on time. Maryland was hosting Virginia for a noon game, which meant traffice was backed up on route 1. I decided to head to Greenbelt, instead of catching the Metro at College Park, which is one exit closer.

Since the Greenbelt exit is at the end of the Green Line, the train often sits there for a few minutes before starting up. I could see it up there, and had no idea how long it would take to get there. I began to jog realizing that the train could leave anytime, and I'd have to wait ten minutes. But luckily enough, just as I arrived at the top of the escalator, the train was still there, and I got on, and it started to roll. Not a moment too late!

I usually get out of Gallery Place at 7th and F, since the Landmark Theater is on E street. That turns out not to be the best idea, since it's on 11th and E, which is 5 blocks away. The other exit is 9th and G, and even though that sounds further, it's only four blocks. To be fair, I might cross a block or so underground in the Metro station, so that may make little difference in the end. However, I convince myself that it's four blocks, and not three.

The previous evening, I had decided to eat with some coworkers. Originally, we were going to O'Learys, an Irish pub-like place nearby. It was crowded, so we headed to Chevy's nearby. Less crowded. I had a super size magarita called the Prickly Pear, some magenta colored drink, and a smothered burrito. This was mostly listening to a coworker rant about another coworker. And then later on, we came back to work, and it went on again. He's a bright guy, and knows a lot of stuff, but too bad that he lets this other guy bother him so much.

Anyway, since I ate with coworkers, I missed leaving and heading to watch Serenity last night, so I decided I'd go this afternoon. The timing was going to be close. Mirrormask started at noon. With ten minutes of previews, and possibly running at least an hour and a half, the film would end at 1:40. Serenity was showing at the Regal Cinema in Gallery Place. Fortunately, Gallery Place is also where Landmark is located.

Once the film ended, I jogged several blocks to get from 11th to 7th. I knew the theater was somewhere on 7th, but not exactly where. Fortunately, they had a sign that was fairly high up. They're located just adjacent to the MCI center. As I got closer, I realized I had been there before. When we went to Best of Youth, Dave and I stopped there, because Regal looks pretty nice, in a gaudy sort of way, from the outside and inside. He called Grecia from there, and we eventually met up with her.

By the time I got my tickets, it was already 2 PM, some fifteen minutes after the scheduled start time. Fortunately, film previews. I just caught the last preview before the film started.

A few Christmases back I had bought my brother all the episodes of Firefly. That would seem like a lot, but it's only 14 episodes. The show had barely gotten off the ground, before it got cancelled. Joss Whedon created the series, and was also creator of the popular cult-hit, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Due, I'm sure, to the Buffy fanbase, sales of Firefly were brisk. Brisk enough to create a movie version of the show.

There's a tradeoff when making a film based on a television series. On the one hand, fans of the series know a lot, and so they don't mind less exposition, and would prefer that the storyline take off from where they knew, giving credit to them as fans. On the other, it's an opportunity to introduce these characters to a broader audience, and so reintroducing characters helps those unfamiliar with the show get background.

The Star Trek films got away without much explanation of the characters. They figured so many people had already seen the series that there was no need to explain Spock, Kirk, and McCoy. Star Trek, in many ways, is the model for large, ensemble casts making the transition from television to movies, and highlights the challenges. In a TV series, a large crew is generally not a problem. With twenty or more episodes, you can devote at least one episode a season to all the characters.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the main characters eventually became Picard, Data, and Worf, in roughly that order, even though originally, Riker was supposed to be a more major character. Jonathan Frakes' acting perhaps contributed to less airtime. However, characters like Crusher (mother and son), Troi, Geordi, and O'Brien all had episodes devoted to their characters. In films, these characters are relegated to minor roles, to keep attention focused on the main three, figuring that it would be far too difficult to track more than three characters (however, see any Sayles movie and even a single Lord of the Rings).

Ironically, Firefly's brief television tenure makes it easier to move to a film. Whedon didn't have time to flesh out the details of all the characters, which, if you saw the series, he had intended to do. When writing a show, one has the luxury of revealing details slowly over time, and they simply ran out of time.

Star Trek also has an interesting historical tie-in for Firefly. Star Trek was originally pitched to television as Wagon Train in the stars. In the sixties, television westerns were still quite popular. Shows like Gunsmoke, originally a radio show, then a television show, and Bonanza were popular. Even Wild, Wild West which was a cross of Westerns and James Bond showed the enduring power of Westerns. Since the 70s, however, Westerns have mostly disappeared, occasionally appearing as Jesse James or Unforgiven.

Firefly imagines the future as a split between the Alliance, who seek to create a civilized group of worlds, and the outlaws, who want to live life on the wild frontier. The show invoked elements of Westerns, partly through its dialogue, using phrases that are just off enough to make it sound like the Old West. Chinese dialogue is interspersed, perhaps owing to Blade Runner, where a mishmash of English, Spanish, and Japanese has become vernacular in future Los Angeles (and Atari makes a comeback as a company).

Even though Star Wars introduced the notion of spaceships that weren't nice and clean (re: Millenium Falcon), it never reminded you of SF versions of excavators.

The crew of Serenity consists of Mal, former war hero, turned petty thief. He leads a band of outlaws, including the husband-wife pair of Wash and Zoe, the Firefly version of Helen and Tom Willis from the Jeffersons (Wash even looks a ltitle like Tom), Kaylee, the starry eyed engineered who's got a thing for Simon, the doctor. Simon has come on board to protect his sister, River, who is 90 lb trained killer. She is a psychic suffering from the trauma of brainwashing, and having escaped from reprogramming with the aid of her brother. Finally, there's Jayne, played by Adam Baldwin, who alas, is not one of the plethora of Baldwin brothers, who plays the tough guy, often trying to challenge Mal, and Inara, who essentially plays a 25th century hooker, but in the future, hookers are treated with great respect.

Whew! And that's not even the start of the film.

Like any of the recent Star Wars films, Serenity spends a great deal of time in moving the narrative forward. It's amazing Whedon can throw in character development while introducing so many characters. I had forgotten about the odd sort of dialogue from the television series, which is only part of the delight. Whedon, an expert writer, knows how to manipulate audiences, by working against expectations, and using his deadpan humor throughout. He walks a fine line between sentimentality and poking fun at sentimental scenes.

If there's emotional impact, it's due the film's willingness to kill off major characters. This is one problem that Star Trek: The Next Generation suffered from. They would consistently put the crew in danger, but no one would die. Thus, no tension. If Serenity wanted to build up emotional impact, it would have to be willing to kill off characters, and the times it does really pays off emotionally.

Whedon injects humor throughout. When they decide to meet Mr. Universe, you half-believe that they have hired Arnold Schwartzenegger for the role, gubenatorial duties be damned. Yet, it turns out to be this nebbish Jewish fella who's married a sex android, and owns the largest antenna beacon in the universe. How he managed to get control of this, one may never know. Even the sex android, played as a joke on first visit, becomes important later on.

Whedon knows his fan base doesn't want to see the same storyline as the show. They want to learn somthing new. And so they do. There's more exposition on the backstory of how the universe they live in came to be, and how River became the way she was. To be fair, Whedon resorts to the unstoppable aliens (called the Reevers), which add a zombie like element to the mix. Still, such aliens were in Star Trek: Deep Space 9 (the Jem Hedar), Star Trek: The Next Generation (the Borg), and even Lord of the Rings (the Uruk-hai), and of couse, the aliens from Alien and its three sequels. Fortunately, they're not a big part of the movie, even if they create an Aliens like confrontation (Whedon himself wrote part of the screenplay for the fourth Alien movie).

It's often said that a good film is as good as its bad guy. In this case, it's a guy simply known as The Operative. He intends to capture River Tam, the human killing machine, who looks a perpetually worried Christina Ricci playing Wednesday Addams. He's an assasin, yet, he's calm, assured. It's often risky making your bad guy black, unless the rest of the cast is too, which is perhaps why he's made to act as white as possible. Again, Whedon plays on expectations, making you simply want the Operative killed in the most inhumane way possible, and yet, dealing with him in an unexpected manner.

The odd vernacular makes the acting more palatable. None of the acting is all that superlative, even if that's par for the course in science fiction (Star Wars is hardly filled with great acting, but at least, many of the characters are likeable). Whedon understands the emotional impact of hand-to-hand combat, even if, like Westerns, the fights seem to go longer than the human body could hold out. It made me realize that Lucas managed to avoid any form of fighting in his films. It was either blasters or lightsabers in his universe. Did anyone ever punch anyone in any of the films? It didn't happen. Yet, it happens several times in Serenity.

Whedon has an incredible ability to introduce phrases, events, such that they show up later on, and you remember it. This talent rewards fans for paying attention. Perhaps with the success of Serenity, he'll go on to make other sequels, but he's running out of characters to kill off, and so he needs to find other ways to play up the drama.

Once the film ended I thought about eating sushi, since there are several restaurants in the Regal Cinema location. However, it looked closed. I think I just entered the restaurant from the back, and really had to enter it from the outside. Instead, I ate at Thai Chili eating wide noodles with chicken in basil. I also had a Fuzzy Fuzzy, which is vodka, Peach Schnapps, and orange juice. As I took the Metro back, I again got lucky, and managed to get on the train with only a minute of waiting time.

I was honestly thinking that it was my lucky day. Yet, there I was, at West Hyattsville, when they, surprise, told everyone to get off the train. We had to stand their ten minutes before the next train came by. What made no sense was that the train that left only had three stops more. Would it have hurt them to take us the next three stops before taking it out of service? Odd.

So I stood on the train near some guy wearing a lot of orange. An orange American Eagle cap, and carrying a large orange Adidas gym bag. If I didn't know any better, I'd think he was a Tennessee Volunteer fan.

Finally, got back to the house where Dan had dropped by to meet up with Jaime, around 5:30. He recounted his trip to Vienna, Prague, and Budapest, apparently, each location better than the last, and shortly thereafter, I slept for several hours, until about midnight. And here I am finally closing up a long day. I had intended to see Thumbsucker, but maybe it was good that I didn't. Two movies in a day--two good movies--seems good enough.