film: September 2005 Archives

I’ve just come from my second press screening of Serenity. My review of the film isn’t posted yet, but if you take a look at my on-the-fly ranking of the year’s films so far, you’ll get a clue as to my reaction.

I’ve been wondering if perhaps a lot more people aren’t going to feel the same way I do. At my first screening, last week -- which was packed not just with press but with fans and other assorted non-press, non-fan moviegoers who scored tix somehow -- two women got up and left halfway through the film. But there were many, many more cheers and claps and snickers of recognition and gasps and cries that mirrored my own. The audience at tonight’s screening was somewhat less vocal -- instead, they were so respectful they were almost silent, which is almost unheard of at an all-media advance screening. Both screenings had long lines of non-press folks who waiting more than an hour for the film with no guarantee of getting a seat.

There have been numerous advance fan screenings of the film over the past few months -- none have been advertised, and all sold out almost instantly; how fans found out about the screenings is anyone’s guess. The buzz around the Net has been extraordinary, not just at the typical venues but also at major political blogs, like Atrios’s Eschaton and Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, not the first, second, or even third places you’d expect everyone to get worked up over a movie based on a failed TV show.

So what I’m wondering is: Is Xer Joss Whedon’s little movie gonna leap out and become a huge hit on the backs of a cult that no one even realized was there? Cuz that would be cool... and it could signal a new era of geek Xer influence not only in the audience but behind the camera.

Nathan Fillion, the star of Serenity, is a big ol’ geek. He posted this at a Firefly fan site (and I snatched it from FireflyFans.net):

It is times like these that I feel like Malcolm Reynolds.

A friend of mine recently wondered, just where is this Gen X perspective I’ve been talking about? How come it’s not showing up in our pop culture? If we’re going to have a new Golden Age of movies (and TV and literature and I’ll even include video games and comic books and other entertainments), shouldn’t we be seeing some of it already? After all, the oldest Xers are now over 40 -- if some special Xer perspective was going to show its face, wouldn’t it have done so already?

Fanzines, fan sites, fan films... One of the characteristics of geeks that best defines us and distinguishes us from society as a whole is that we are active consumers of pop culture. Geeks don’t veg out in front of the boob tube, at least not as a way of life -- for us, the experiences of TV, film, books, graphic novels, and games are not merely receptive. Even if we don’t produce fan fiction, for instance, we watch and rewatch our favorite shows and analyze them, hash over the plotlines and the character interactions either on our own or with other fans. We refuse to be force-fed pop culture -- we may eat it, but we do so in full awareness of what we’re consuming. We challenge what we consume, turn it around and upside down and attempt to figure out what it’s all about, or at the very least, why we think it’s cool enough to even warrant so much attention in the first place.

Which makes Charles Ross something of an übergeek. His stage show, One-Man Star Wars Trilogy, is the ultimate expression of the geeky experience of pop culture. The New York Times, in its review of the show, exudes the mix of cluelessness and condescension that has lately typified its discussion of anything remotely geeky (which is ironic, because the paper is allegedly attempting to reach the very audience it regularly disdains). The Times derides Ross’s audience as "composed largely of very intense-looking overgrown boys wearing Coke-bottle glasses and Darth Vader jerseys" in the same way that it never, ever characterizes the crowd at an NFL game as "a bunch of morons courting pneumonia by appearing shirtless and painted in team colors in below-freezing temperatures." It pointlessly insults Ross himself -- "who reportedly has a girlfriend, although she may be the victim of a Jedi mind trick" -- in the same way that it never, ever characterizes the performers of an off-Broadway production as "a bunch of theater nerds who mistake overenunciation for acting and bland prettiness for presence."

But most egregiously, the Times reviewer misses the point of Ross’s performance entirely:

The energetic Mr. Ross, who cannot be faulted for lack of effort, is a mediocre performer, especially when compared with the many brilliant quick-change artists in the crowded field of multicharacter solo shows. There's not a trace of smooth Billy Dee Williams in his Lando Calrissian, and his Princess Leia could be confused with a man. No one expects him to have the baritone of James Earl Jones, but there were a couple of potheads in my freshman dorm who did a better Darth Vader.

As I point out in my review of the show at FlickFilosopher.com:

This isn't about perfect impersonation of famous actors; it's emphatically not about watching Ross and seeing Sir Alec Guinness or Mark Hamill; it's about watching Ross and seeing ourselves. Ross holds up a mirror to our own geekitude and shows us how silly and how wonderful a healthy grownup playfulness can be.

Naturally, I have a lot more to say about the show. Check it out.

Am I gonna have to take Bruce Campbell off the Perpetual Boyfriend list? It would be a very sad day indeed on which I was forced to take such desperate measures, but my patience does have limits, even with the man who gave us Ash and Brisco County Jr. and Roland the Intrepid Explorer and Smitty the ‘Argus’ reporter and Autolycus the king of thieves and...

*sigh* Okay, I spotted Bruce ‘Alien Apocalypse,’ cuz everyone's allowed an off day, even a god, so we won't talk about that one. But ‘The Man with the Screaming Brain’ is just a horribly cruel geeky tease. Campbell simply cannot toy with our affections this way, seducing us like he did for the last few weeks with those hilarious ads on the SciFi Channel, the ones that knew exactly what we wanted to hear: ‘Oh yeah, baby, I know how you like it, all snarky and pulpy and B-movie and self-referential and deliberately trashy...’

From my review, over at FlickFilosopher.com, of The Man with the Screaming Brain, Bruce Campbell’s new less-than magnum opus.

I missed my chance to party at Mardi Gras. I never listened to jazz on Bourbon Street. I never saw the French Quarter. And now I never will.

I feel very much like I did after 9/11. New York is my heart and home, but I never even visited New Orleans... and yet I feel the same sense of helplessness combined with an itch to do something useful (without there being much I could usefully do) and an overwhelming dread that this is only the beginning of Very Dark Times.