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Author | Topic: Firefly | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
Anybody into this series when it was on?
Dan, you had to have fallen in love with Inara. Holmes, I'd like to resume our discussion about why you are totally wrong to have not liked it.
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
Me, I've got a crush on both Mal and Wash.
And the fact that Fox cancelled Firefly in mid-season, even though there was already a devoted fan following that was growing just confirms to me that they are a bunch of wankers who wouldn't know good storytelling, cinematography, writing, directing, or acting if it bit them on the ass. I hate them. Are you looking forward to Serenity? I'm a little nervous about it, to tell you the truth. Whedon's record at making a good feature film is not that great, although we will see what he does now that he has such a great team of writers with him and a real budget.
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Broadcast TV.
quote: You speak the truth.
quote: It was on in the fall of 2002. Whedon made a really good 2 hour pilot, which was broadcast after they cancelled the series. Fox didn't like the pilot because they are stupid fuckheads, so they made Whedon and Minear write a regular-length episode in a single weekend as a different pilot, that was brilliant for a weekend of work but not that great compared to the real pilot. It kills me because Firefly would be in it's 3rd season by now. Does anyone remember how completely awesome the 3rd seasons of Angel and Buffy were? Fox is a fay-fay duh pee-yen.
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
Holmes indicated that he wasn't that impressed with Firefly because he thought that it was, on the whole, derivitave.
My reply to that is that I agree that it is derivitave. Whedon is quite good at setting us up in these familiar genres and themes for the purpose of tweaking and twisting them in unexpected ways. Thus, fun. Besides, just because some art is derivitave doesn't mean it is less good. Nearly all blues music has the same chord progression. When you hear a blues song, you know right away that it is a blues song. Does that mean we might as well stop writing new songs using that format? Any comments?
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
Dan, do you have the DVD?
IOW, have you seen the second Saffron episode? It was never aired.
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
"You know, they tell ya to never hit a man with a closed fist but it is, on occasion, hilarious."
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
Before I begin, I totally get that you, of course, don't have to like anything just because anybody else says so. Taste is taste. I am not trying to get you to like it. I just want to respond to your thoughts. Feel free to respond back or not, I won't expect it.
quote: Huh, you thought that everybody speaking English and Chinese was expected, or that it wasn't odd to be galloping on horseback to catch your spaceship wasn't unexpected, or that in the future a trained prostitute is considered an important, reputable fine lady? I'm not being sarcastic or snotty, I'm truly rather startled that anyone would think that these things are boring or repetitious.
quote: When has it been done like this, though, with real characters that have depth? The show is obviously derived from Star Wars (western in space) but it is nothing like Star Wars in feel. The characters in star wars are written broadly and are iconic, and they are supposed to be, which is nothing like the characers or relationships in Firefly. I've never seen another show like it.
quote: Like I said, the show is only incidentally sci-fi.
quote: Yeah, but a ship rolling around on the open ocean is visually repetitious and BORING.
quote: Well....right. Like being on a ship is setting the scene to get a situation going, such as in Master and Commander. I really don't understand why this is a fault. Every world that is created for a fictional show or play or whatever is a kind of gimick that serves to provide context for the characters. In the case of Firefly, the space aspect allows for quick change and is consistent with how things might be like 600 years in the future. Anyway, good to hear your thoughts.
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Huh, when else have you seen chinese and English spoken, and when have you seen people galloping on horseback to catch their spaceship?? Call me sheltered, but those were certainly new to me.
quote: See, like Dan said, I don't find the scenarios repetitious for the most part.
quote: She did, with the female client from War Stories. But anyway, why do you think it fits with the character that she would actually want to let herself go to the extent that she would take a client only to have "fun"? It seems to me that Inara is very wary of feeling too emotionally attached or out of control in general, so it fits that she would mostly choose clients that she could remain emotionally distant from and be in a superior position to. Also, she's not a prostitute, she's a Companion. Also, in Heart of Gold, at least the whore who is with Jayne is having a pretty good time.
quote: Uh, the super-assasin/bounty hunter who is also a bit crazy and cruel, fooled by the weakest member of the group who is also the one he is hunting? I am afraid that this didn't, for the most part, seem original to me at all. The writing was great, but the writing is pretty much always good. The basic scenario has been done many times in the past.
quote: LOL! Wow, do we have different perceptions of reality. Not a single one of the main characters in several of the Star Trek incarnations was ever allowed to be less than supremely noble and morally pure. They had to be posessed by some alien or otherworldy force to ever do anything bad. None of the characters in Firefly, with the exception of maybe Wash, Kaylee and Inara, are all that nice, and not a single one is particularly noble or morally pure.
quote: Again, wow, we have very different perceptions of reality. So, you figure that the characters on Firefly have no more depth that those on, say, "Walker: Texas Ranger", or "Full House"?
quote: Uh, please explain. I have no idea what you are talking about. All the characters are PC? The chatacters that are not PC are still PC? I don't get it. If you want to see a tired PC universe, try the Star Trek world. This message has been edited by schrafinator, 12-30-2004 08:31 AM
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Only you, holmes, would fault a TV show for having a character who is a prostitute and is also considered in that created world to be a high-class, very well-respected, fine, educated lady because she doesn't conform to your particular views on sex. You have every right to, but I have got to say that in retrospect, I am not surprised. This is the subject that you grind your axe upon. I see that you ignored my two examples (one with Inara and one with a regular whore) in which the women ARE having sex for fun. Also, Kaylee clearly considers sex a great deal of fun. Remember what she was doing when she was offered the job of ship's mechanic? She obviously wasn't in love with the guy, and once the talk turned to mechanics she ignored him completely.
quote: I watched ST:TNG pretty religiously for years, and have seen many reruns of the original ST. Kirk, Picard, Riker, Troy, Wesley, Spock, Bones, LaForge, and Worf can all be counted on to come through and do the right thing in the end. Any bad thing they do is generally due to extreme circumstances or some kind of strange influence of a drug or alien force. I wouldn't consider a single one of these characters anything other than morally pure and noble. Their characters are pretty shallow because they don't really seem to ever screw up royally so that anything really terrible happens, or act in a purely self-interested way. They all have the prime directive to guide them.
quote: Well, yeah, I know it broke ground with race, and with having a russian on the crew during the cold war, etc. But then you say:
quote: How is the original ST not doing exactly what you fault Firefly for? It's not like nobody was talking about race in the 1960's, for goodness sake. Or the Cold War and the USSR and China. Or gender roles, or Vietnam. Those were all extremely hot social and political issues of the day, right there on the screen. The original ST simply was the issues of the 1960's played out by that era's PC characters, in the far future, if there was such a thing as PC back then. I guess you could call them "progressive" instead of PC. And again, only you would fault a TV show for turning the idea of a prostitute, who in today's America are viewed as the lowest of the low but in the show are higly repected and the pinnacle of high-society, because she doesn't have sex in the way you think everybody should.
quote: Nothing about Jayne is nice and he is nost certainly pretty bad. Remember, he sells out Simon and River to the Alliance but is double crossed. Mal is constantly having to keep an eye on Jayne because Jayne is pretty much an amoral mercenery. Book appears very nice but we see glimpses of his past life that make us think that he may have been very, very not nice. River is crazy so we don't know if she is inherently bad or not, but she did pick up a knife and slash Jayne in the chest. The show wasn't on long enough to really get into any of those past stories.
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: And my example of Kaylee when we first meet her was that she was having sex, purely for fun in the engine room with the hot but dumb mechanic.
quote: Well, that is part of what makes her character more interesting and somewhat mysterious. In Heart of Gold we hear a tiny reference to Inara's past at the companion school, and that she might have left under unusual circumstances. There may be a history there that we never had a chance to learn about and would explain some things. Anyway, you are still insisting that the demeanor of a companion and this particular character narrowly conform to your views on how she should have sex. Besides, she does have fun sex, with the female client.
Kaylee clearly considers sex a great deal of fun. quote: What? I count Kaylee as one of the more emotionally healthy people on the ship.
quote: See, I think you are using your own personal definition of PC that doesn't reflect how most people use the term. Here's a definition I found:
1) Of, relating to, or supporting broad social, political, and educational change, especially to redress historical injustices in matters such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. 2) Being or perceived as being overconcerned with such change, often to the exclusion of other matters. Gee, the first Star Trek series surely fits in nicely here. Especially that "black and white" episode. And ST:TNG, there was that episode where the people they encountered were supposed to be androgynous and anyone showing signs of leaning male or female were "fixed", and the other episode where Troy's mother fell in love with a man and wanted to marry him except that on his planet all people were killed when they reached the age of 50 or something. And anyway, I'd love to hear how Jayne's morality is anything like Kaylee's.
quote: Perhaps you can give a couple of examples of the unsavory aspects and diverse moral landscape of the wharacters on the first Star Trek series, just so I can understand what you mean when you say that that show was not PC at all.
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
Holmes, just so you know, it's no big deal to me if you don't feel like replying. Things are slow on the board and although I pretty much know that we will not likely come to agreement on this particular subject it is fun to spar.
I just don't want to come across as angry or pissed of, because I'm not.
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
Put the fanboy back in the box. quote: Awww, me too. I've got it just as bad.
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: I think it has a LOT more to do with the fact that the final Star Wars movie is being released in May, and they didn't want Serenity to be overlooked during the hype of what will almost certainly be a much higher grossing yet completely inferior movie. That is, if the other two movies are to be any measure of the third. The prase, "downward spiral" comes to mind.
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: "Redeem her?" Why would they do that? She hasn't done anything that needs redemption.
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: In our real world, yes, but not in the world in which her character resides.
quote: Of course, but you spoke of her "creators" (Whedon, Minear, etc.) redeeming her, not the networks, so that's the context I responded in.
quote: I was wondering why you thought Whedon would want to redeem her, since in her world, the world they created, she is a member of the elite society and important; hardly in need of any redemptopn. ...at least, not for her profession. We hardly know anything about her past.
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