Saturday, 1st of October, 2005

Wow! It's Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman, chatting together, over at Time magazine.

For those in the know who care, I'm up to Buffy Season 7 and Angel Season 4 in my DVD-watching. I bought the entire runs gradually while JB Hi-Fi had them for $21 (I'm in Austrralia) per 3-DVD set last year, after watching and getting addicted to Buffy as borrowed from Kit Brash a little while before. Actually, probably seeing an episode of Angel S5 at his place sometime before that convinced me that I'd left it way too long, and it no doubt was as good as I'd been told and as good as the small amount I'd seen in the past. And oh boy how it is!
I can't claim Mr Brash as the progenitor of my Neil Gaiman fandom. Baseline would be being a Terry Pratchett fan ever since The Colour of Magic came out, and thus discovering Neil through Good Omens and eventually getting into Sandman and all the rest through that connection.

So… last night I saw Serenity, and it was wonderful. I do wonder whether non-Firefly-fans will get it to the extent that, erm, Browncoats do… But then Ange came along, and she's no fan of "spaceship movies" and has never wanted to get into Buffy/Angel/Firefly, and she didn't think it was too bad.
The only real gripe is that it really is effectively just the continuation of Firefly Season 1 with a much bigger budget. The characterisation and plotting therefore suffers, in the context of a single 2-hour movie: if you don't know the extensive backstory of these beautifully-rendered characters, you miss an awful lot, and it looks like they're really quite flat character-archetypes, give or take one or two. Hopefully it's got enough glossy Matrix-like coolness to it to draw more people in, anyway – and Joss does imbue it with a philosophico-politico-religious subtext which you're unlikely to find in most other, er, spaceship movies. I loved seeing his atheism and left-liberalism shine through, and most importantly I guess his humanism.
No spoilers here though, so the for the other joys and hearbtreaks, you'll have to go see it.

And meanwhile, I picked up Neil's new Anansi Boys at Pulp Fiction (no website) here in Brisvegas and can't wait to read it. Will start tonight methinks. I'm up in Brisbane recording the new FourPlay album, which is going smashingly. Will report more on it maybe at the end of next week.

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