Category: Story & Song

Serenity got some cautiously supportive advance reviews in the Free Press and I decided to catch it at a Sunday matinee when it opened last weekend. It is an adaptation of Joss Whedon’s Firefly TV series. I wasn’t familiar with this series – I went to the movie as a Firefly Virgin. Most or all of the regular cast of the series were in the movie. They have a fair number of TV guest credits and a few movie credits, but none of them have achieved any stature in the movie industry. Canadian actor Nate Fillion, who plays Captain Mal Reynolds, was in Saving Private Ryan. British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, who wasn’t a regular in the series, was in Love Actually and Dirty Pretty Things. What this movie had working for it, to attract an audience, was Joss Whedon’s reputation as the creative force behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the reputation of the series. After that it’s going to rest on review and on word of mouth.
IMDb reports it did well on its first weekend. It deserves to do well. It’s a clever, stylish production.
The story has a classical sf setting on the fraying edges of an interstellar human civilization. Ship’s captain Mal Reynolds is a freewheeling smuggler, bandit and buccaneer, in the tradition of Han Solo. He has a past as a rebel soldier in an unsuccessful rebellion or civil war by the libertarian outer planets against the control of the more civilized inner planets and the central Parliament. His voyage becomes a mission and an adventure, protecting River Tam (actress Summer Glau) and her secret from the Parliament’s sinister Operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor). The acting is competent, perhaps a bit over the top – in the wise-cracking, ironic style of the early Star Wars movies and Buffy the Vampire slayer. The plot is tight and fast. The visuals and special effects are professional. There are a couple of great martial arts scenes which will certainly build Summer Glau’s reputation. There is a strong ethical theme about peacefulness, aggression, social controls, free will, human nature and the messiness of life – think Brave New World or Clockwork Orange. We get an early glimpse of this in scenes of River’s back story, when she was being educated and socially conditioned as a young child on a planet controlled by the Parliament. The Operative provides a second ethical theme. He is a perfect soldier, proficient in his technique, aware of the immorality of his violent intrusions into other people’s lives and freedom, justifying it in the faith that he is working for a better world. Because he does have an ethical compass, there is a continuing tension in his character. But enough hints and spoilers
This movie has all the pieces and put them together very well.

Crash – the 2004 movie written and directed by Paul Haggis – is excellent. I missed it in its first theatrical release, but it is still playing in the second run theaters in Winnipeg. Haggis is a Canadian who made it in LA, writing for TV. I liked his work on Due South. He made a move to feature films a few years ago and his screenplay for Million-Dollar Baby has been highly praised.
His membership in the Church of Scientology was in the news when he left it in 2009.

Crash follows several sets of unrelated characters as they run into each other, over the course of couple of days. Two young black men jack the District Attorney’s car, freaking out his wife – Sandra Bulloch is brilliant as a self-centered, privileged bitch, proving that she can act outside the box. When they get home, she had her husband change the locks, then complains loudly that she does not trust the Hispanic locksmith, Daniel (Michael Pena). Daniel absorbs the abuse quietly, goes home and finds his daughther hiding under the bed. He has moved his family to a safe neighbourhood, but she was frightened by the sound of distant gunfire. He gives her a magic inpenetrable cloak, in a beautiful scene of parental love. Farhad (Shaun Toub), the owner of small convenience store, middle-aged, Iranian, fearful, paranoid, buys a snub-nosed revolver from a racist gun store owner. Two cops pull over a black producer and his white wife – their car is a Navigator like the DA’s car, although the licence plate doesn’t match. The senior cop, Sgt. Ryan (Matt Dillon) harasses and abuses the couple. He is a racist, grieving and angry about his father’s health, carrying a grudge against affirmative action programs which drove his father out of business and into poverty. Don Cheadle, playing a homicide investigator, is drawn into the DA’s orbit when he investigates shooting of a black, off-duty police officer shot by a white police officer. The DA and his sleazy political operative want him to spin the investigation and suppress evidence make sure a white man gets charged because the DA is worried about the black vote. Cheadle’s character is navigating grief and shame – a drug addicted mother who wants him to save his younger brother, missing, and a criminal. He is having an affair with his partner Rea (Jennifer Esposito) but keeping his distance, wounding her with racial remarks about Hispanics.
The acting is brilliant, characters are engaging, the mood and pace of the film are maintained well, the story drives forward. It is an emotionally engaging, intellectually challenging story of conflict and ethics.
For the first half hour, every character except the locksmith Daniel is angry and self-absorbed, unattractive, unworthy of any sympathy from the audience. Some are fearful, some have more power, some feel oppressed, some feel screwed. No one trusts anyone. Everyone thinks he or she is alone, unsupported and vulnerable. Enemies and threats are identified by logical but stereotyped profiles. Everyone lashes out verbally. Racial conflict runs through everything. The metaphor isn’t as much urban jungle or state of nature as human atoms colliding randomly, with terrible energy.
I won’t spoil it. There is violence, and people die. There are moments of redemption – heroism, random acts of kindness, arcs of anger and violence suddenly failing by chance, moments of grace.
Brilliant.