Oh Internet

Serenity: We didn’t get tickets to the premier of this, but we did get Joss Weedeon and some of the cast stopping in breifly to introduce the film. They seemed knackered and were literally on their way to the airport, so there wasn’t a chance to speak to them afterwards. Probably just as well, since I doubt I’d actually have been able to form proper words around Summer Glau.

The film was excellent, but I don’t know how much sense it would make if you haven’t seen the series. The look was a pretty standard “TV show on a bigger budget” but the point of Firefly was always the one-liners and action sequences, and there are plenty of them here. The story wraps up a couple of the smaller dangling questions from the series, but leaves most of the big interesting stuff alone. I think a lot of the more interesting plot points could only be solved by having another series, since they’d take a while to play out properly, but that’s hugely unlikely to happen.

Mirrormask: This is a mixed live/animated film by Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman, and tells the story of a girl living in a circus who wants to run away and join the real world. The visuals are totally lush and hugely detailed. I imagine that when the DVD comes out I’ll be single-stepping a lot of sequences.

The story is pretty interesting, but a bit muddled and vague. It follows some themes that are present in a lot of Gaiman’s writing, like children finding a way to “another place” and having to make their own way from there (Coraline, Wolves in the Walls, Stardust, Sandman.)

The actress who played Helena was great. She was convincing and never quite fell into the too-annoying child-actor trap. It was pretty weird seeing Rob Brydon play the circus leader/serious father character. He does it really well, but it feels odd after all the British TV comedy stuff he’s done.

So I liked the film a lot, but I can see why some people wouldn’t. It kind of meanders around, doesn’t make much sense, and is a bit disjointed, but it’s really well made, so you can always just go back to looking at the pretty pretty scenery if things get too confusing.

Mirrorball - Animation: A collection of the year’s best animated music videos. I’ve been to a few of these Mirrorball showings before and they’ve always been interesting. This year’s was a bit patchy, with some stuff that felt like filler to pad the showing out. “The JCB Song” by Nizlopi was the standout, I think, and “E-Pro” by Beck was neat too. There seems to have been a theme of looming all-enveloping danger in this year’s videos, with about half of the videos shown here using the “big, scary thing about to destroy everything” motif. “Eye for an Eye” by UNKLE was probably the best of those.

Mirrorball - Best of the last 10 years: This was a wrap up for the 10th anniversary of Mirrorball at the film festival, where they played 2 videos that were shown in each year. Some of these made me feel old, in an “it can’t have been 10 years ago I first saw that” kind of way. There was a lot of neat stuff, but they deliberately stayed away from putting on the funnier, more throw-away videos, instead focussing on the more “worthy” stuff. To be honest, I think I’d rather have seen a “Mirrorball - Funniest of the last 10 years”, but still, good stuff.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 16th, 2005 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Media Consumption, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.