Serenity on cable this month

Just TiVo’d Serenity from cable, I think one of the Starz channels. I watched it before but not since recently embracing the series. Now that I’m emotionally invested in it, I can’t hardly bring myself to watch it, knowing what goes down.

I here you…and yet, the movie is so good…how often does a movie move one like Serenity? Watch it, then watch it again. It is brilliant, beautiful and yours.

Enjoy my friend.

Amen, brother. Amen.

It’s actually on HBO, if any of you are looking for it.

There’s a lot of things I love about the move Serenity, but most of all it’s that it has some awesome moments and scenes with River.

I have an itty bitty little nitpick with Serenity, and I was wondering if I’m alone in this: In the scene before they incite the Reavers into chasing them to eventually battle the Alliance, Mal speechifies as they all sit around the table. My nitpick is Joss’ conscious choice (and I’ve listened to Joss’ commentary and understand the symbolism, so you don’t need to explain to me why Joss does it) to keep Mal in a position where we don’t see him clearly until the end of the speech. To me, it just looks like someone screwed up the lighting, and it takes me out of the moment every time, out of Mal’s speech and I find myself thinking about how Joss could have accomplished this more effectively. Anyone out there with similar feelings, or am I just being too nitpicky?

I didn’t notice – or, therefore, mind. I did, however, liked the washed-out (is that the correct term?) lighting in that scene.

My major beef with the movie is – I forget who pointed this out previously – how the relationship between the Tans and Mal takes like eight steps backward between the end of the series and the start of the movie: At series’ end, they seemed pretty well accepted as part of the crew. Then in the movie, Mal seems to barely tolerate the good doctor and his sis.

Actually, it didn’t even take the whole series for the Tams to become family. It seemed to me to be pretty much a done deal after “Safe.” I think in the time between “Objects in Space” and Serenity, things have not been good, and Mal has lost his way, gotten stuck in a dark place. He’s just not the same guy who took the medicine back to Paradiso as we see when he sacrifices the kid in town rather than dump the payload. Any trace of idealism is gone. They are, as he puts it, “on the raggedy edge”–Serenity’s falling apart, they’re having trouble getting work, Book and Inara are gone. Things have been rough for the crew for some time, and Mal feels it particularly. It takes River’s plight and what they uncover about Miranda to bring him back to himself (which is exactly the moment I was talking about in the earlier post, when he steps into focus, as it were).

There’s a comic book series that bridges the series and movie and attempts to explain the breakup of the crew.

Trade paperback available? Thanks!