Cashmere, you had better start packing for your inevitable isolation.

Cashmere, it will almost certainly open much bigger than Serenity did. I'll eat my hat if it doesn't. And it's a very fine hat.

(And by the way, I hear from a little tweety bird who couldn't possibly be me it's an appauling film).

(And by the way, I hear from a little tweety bird who couldn't possibly be me it's an appauling film).

Of this I have no doubt.

I don't think Serenity is the film to end all films. I enjoyed it. It was smart and funny and well written (IMO). I hate the thought of craptacular pictures with bigger budgets and dumber premises and more idiot plot lines getting bigger returns.

I know, I should know better. I mean Fox ordered a full run of Fastlane when it axed Firefly.

But it still galls.

The first night I went to see Serenity, they played the Doom trailer. The entire audience broke into laughter by the end of it, and it wasn't a nice laughter.

I went and checked the largest local theaters, here. Serenity is still playing through the weekend. Yay. However, the Ultrascreen at one of them has Doom on it! What a fricking waste. So, yeah, the piece of crap is going to do much bigger numbers, at least for opening weekend. Hopefully, it will die a fiery and ignominious death.

If Doom does better than Serenity at the box office, I swear, I'm withdrawing from the human race.

Doom has a much bigger built-in fanbase.

I remember, in the '80s, going to really awful fantasy movies knowing how bad they'd be going in -- because if I wanted to see a fantasy movie at all that year, I had to see Krull.

There are more people who feel that way about Doom than there are who feel that way about Serenity.

Serenity is leaving my local theater. To be replaced with Doom. I can't complain too much about Serenity leaving, though. Sunday afternoon, I think that there were under ten people in the theater.

It's no contest that the trailer for Doom was the absolutely worst trailer at Serenity here. The consensus in my group, which clearly does not match the general viewing public, was that even though Karl Urban looked might cute, it wasn't enough to even come close to saving the movie. It looks like dreck to me, which means it will probably do wonderful box office.

During several Baycons half of the attendance was playing Doom.

I went and checked the largest local theaters, here. Serenity is still playing through the weekend.

Woo! I just checked the local theater and they START playing Serenity this Friday. Yay! No more hour long drives to the theater that was playing it (which incidentally is still playing there, just on a much more limited schedule).

So, um, there was this movie I went to last night - and when I say night I mean it, it started on 11:45pm - and I have some thoughts rambling around my brain that I wanted to share. I skipped nearly 1500 posts. I've threadsucked them and intend to actually try and catch up, but before reading anybody else's opinion, I wanted to write down my own. So I am going to blatantly ignore every single ongoing conversation, and apologize in advance for what will be - if ever - a very lame possible later meara.

Also, this is all so very jumbled up. I've hardly had any sleep (only got back around 3am, and got up before 7am), and the holes in that sieve I dare call brain are big and large. I tried not to write down the things I liked about the movie that I already liked about the show - the grow-up characters, with actual friction between them and still that trust and working-together, when needed, for example. It's hard to tell apart, in a way, what's the show and what's the movie and where the one starts and the other ends in my mind, but whenever something felt "I said it once", I just tried not to say it (or at least, how unnatural to me, to say it with fewer words).

Even what I did manage to write is all fragmented. I wish I had the time to make it pretty, to actually put some thought and structure in it. Some of it is just sentences drifting with no connection to anything else other than their floating at one point in my mind through the movie.I don't know when I'll get to sit and try to write later, if at all, but I decided I'd post it anyway - a mess of a post is better than none at all, right? So, um, anyway, sorry. But, hey, fun movie.

It's not fair to make me laugh while I'm in tears. And then again, and then again. It's not like I didn't expect that, but still. They kept the dinosaurs. That was so absolutely lovely. The first thing I could say, when the movie ended, was about those dinosaurs. The moment I fell in love with "Firefly" the show was those dinosaurs.

When the movie ended, in a room full of science-fiction-convention-geeks (and I say that as totally one of them, well, being there and all, so it's not a criticism!), the credits rolled all the way through (usually, in an Israeli theater, you're lucky if you get thirty seconds, even when there are all sorts of fun stuff hidden throughout). The lights were back on only when the last of the credits finished to roll. I was just sitting there in the dark, trying to hold to one more second in that world.

And people were all: "so do you think he planned that for the Reavers from the start?" and "How do you spell that in English?" and "Oh, the scale of the effects was much bigger" and "It was different from the tv show because - " and "didn't he change Simon's story from the pilot of the show?". And those are all good things to talk about. I'll probably talk about them myself - what I'll be able to, my vocabulary in movies-speak is so very limited (it's not the English, this time, I have nothing to blame). But at that moment, all I wanted to do was slide slowly from that world, that held me for two whole hours. You know, like looking back after you turned to leave? And I think that's the best sign, for me, that no matter what thoughts I may have afterwords, I got inside the movie and its world was real for me. I love it when that happens.

Oh, and the Chinese wasn't translated! When they showed "Firefly" here, the network made the translator translate the Chinese phrases, no matter that the English-speaking original audience couldn't understand them, and that's how they were meant to be. In "Serenity", though, there was no such translation. The Chinese was as non-understandable as it should be. I was so very happy about that (and I'm never happy about being not-able to understand something!).

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I don't think I know how to phrase thoughts regarding actual analysis of the movie. When watching, I was "inside" the experience. I never thought "this is like the show" or "this is different from what they explained on the show" or the like. Also, I don't know to use all those long stylistic words in order to talk about the differences between mediums or techniques or anything. Obviously, it's there, but it's not even that I don't know how to phrase it, I don't think I know how to form the thoughts for it, the actual questions, let alone the answers. So I'm not going to even try to get into that. Just the movie, without any comparisons (other than "this feels like that episode", which are emotional, totally a "me" thing).

Even though I was 'inside' the movie, I remember myself thinking "oh, such a pretty picture!", on more than one occasion. I only remember one of them, now, that didn't involve just "Serenity" moving in space. That image of the ruined planet (Haven, IIRC), and River looking through an empty frame, burning. Just looking through it, standing behind it, her look framed by the flame, with all the ruin around her and she's so alert and so lost.

I loved the shots from River onwards. I'm not sure I explain myself properly. The shots that seemed to move in a direction that seemed to be dictated by a certain movement of river. A hand that's sent somewhere, a strand of hair that move is a certain way, a look that's being glanced in a certain direction. It wasn't the "seeing things in her eyes" from "Objects in Space", but rather the drawing attention to the fact that she sees things differently. To me, at least. I'm still not sure I can explain myself, or even if I have any idea what I'm talking about.

Now, I don't understand a single thing about fighting scenes. My sign of when they're done well is if I can tell who is winning and who is losing without them telling me after the fight "OK, so I won". I was not only able to follow the fight scenes in the movie, both the personal one-on-one and the space-battle ones (though I have no idea who won there, the only thing I figured out was that "Serenity" escaped), but even to realize how beautifully River moves. There's that image of her, with both swords in her hands, drawn each to a different side, her back arched and she forms a sort of half-a-circle with her shoulders - it was just beautiful. Like a waterfall.

I was just so glad to be back, to walk those corridors again with my eyes, to visit with those imaginary friends. The beginning long shot: with the name of the movie being the name of the ship, and how it gets inside and moves inside it. All the way through the corridors, and up and down, and following Mal wherever he went, and just feeling that the ship is really there and people can walk inside it and breath inside it.

I loved the way the Operative walked through the hologram of Simon and River's escape. The beginning of "things aren't what they seem". Also, the way River sees things, the way it's like she's inside somebody else's head - that was looking like the Operative was trying to be inside her head, to figure out what was going inside her and Simon. And in a way, he did. He went through River's head, but noticed Simon's expression, was inside his emotions.

I loved the way River - with her dancer abilities - can choose the most unexpected places to hide, to hold herself, to be in. There was a shot of two characters talking - I can't remember which - and on the floor above, River was lying on the metal grid. We only saw her head, and all the people talking, and it looked completely as if she's part of - not the conversation, but of the minds of the people who take part in that conversation, if that makes any sense.

I loved how, just like in a dance, where each muscle should be stretched as far as it can, where each movement should be as precise as possible for the body to carry it properly, where the slightest change makes a difference in the feel of things, even if one (me) can't see it - that's how River not only moves, but also talks. It's like she's moving her face, her mouth, with the same precision of dancing that she moves her body. Like she sometimes manages to taste the words just the way she senses the earth and the floor with her bare feet

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