Movies I Have No Intention Of Seeing, #17



Firefly: the Movie

Serenity

starring A Whole Gaggle of Folks Nobody Ever Heard Of

directed by Joss Whedon


My wife and I are proud of a lot of things, and well we should be. We're impressive people.

We have a nice house in a nice neighborhood. We both graduated college. None of our children's names end with the syllables "-aden". Except for my full-chest, armpit-to-armpit full-color battleship, neither one of us has any tattoos.*

I think the thing we're most proud of is that we have a two-car garage that we actually keep two cars in. I'm not bragging about having two cars (although score for me and my American Dream life) so much as I'm bragging about the fact that my garage is not merely a place to keep shit I don't know what else to do with. Unlike all the disgusting lowlifes on my street, there are no cars parked in my driveway, by my curb or on my lawn.

Until I get a pool table.

What I'm getting at is that even I didn't realize what an advantage keeping your car in the garage was until yesterday. In the garage, it can get warm, but the whole no-direct-sunlight thing tends to keep temperatures manageable. So if your kids leave things in the car, say crayons for instance, you don't have to worry about them melting and running festively-colored wax down the interior walls of your hot-ass minivan.

In fact, you can leave crayons in your van forever and ever--completely forget about them even--until you have to take your car in for some stupid-ass recall service at the dealership. Apparently the local Ford dealer already has a pool table because they park all of their cars outside, including mine when it's waiting for service.

Add one typical triple-digit-hot SoCal October day and voila! Melty melty, streaky streaky. A waxen Jackson Pollack masterpiece all over the inside of my poor, defenseless minivan.

Behold!


And this picture represents the state of things after I "cleaned" it up. Fuckers. Fucking sun. Fucking hot hot sun.

You know, I wasn't even going to do MIHNIoS today and just do like 5 single-spaced pages about garages and vans and kids and crayons and dealership motherfuckers and the fucking hotness of the bastard sun. I would have been happy with that. I really would.

But then I remembered this Serenity movie was coming out and how every single person who has ever read this blog ever is some kind of wacked-out junkie-level Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan. Since this movie was written and directed by Joss Whedon, the Buffy-creating thunder-stealing bastard who can't seem to let a bad idea die, I figured I should at least mention it. For you, my loyal Bucketeers. I figure if I can take the time each and every Friday to piss on movies you've never heard of or don't care about, I can make the time today to piss on something you may actually be looking forward to. It is (almost literally) the least I can do.

Mr. Whedon, if you recall, wrote the original Kristy Swanson vehicle Buffy the Vampire Slayer film co-starring Rutger Hauer, Paul Rubens, Donald Sutherland and Luke Perry. It's hard to believe, but even with such a cast and Ms. Swanson's gigantic sweater-fighting breasts, that film failed in many, many ways.

It's a little embarrassing to say this, but I kind of liked that movie actually. If you stick your fingers in your ears and scream until your vocal chords snap every time Luke Perry appears on screen, it's very nearly watchable. I can say that the reason I kind of liked that movie had less to do with its merits than with the fact that it had a scene that acted out (accidentally I'm sure) one of my deepest, darkest celebrity-based sexual fantasies, Donald Sutherland throwing a really sharp knife at my face, ninja-style.

I don't know what it means. I'm sure it's all allegorical like the knife is sort of phallic and Donald Sutherland is probably representative of my old PE teacher or something, I don't know. It just works for me.

Anyway, Whedon took that (failed) idea and turned it into a TV show that ran like seven or eight seasons and wet the britches of eventual bloggers the world over.

Now he seems to have decided "Hey, it worked once, let's do it all again--except in exactly the opposite direction!

Joss Whedon, I hereby declare you to be a Cheeky Monkey. My mind, she is blown.

See, he's taken his failed TV series (Firefly) and turned it into a movie. Not only that, but unlike the first Buffy movie with the all-star cast, in this case he's gone with a cast where the best known person in it is the guy who played the pirate-talking dude in that Dodgeball movie. I have to give it Joss, he's got cojones. Or a raging out-of-control ego that won't allow him to admit it when he's done something wrong. One of the two. This is Hollywood, so I'm sure it's the first one.

I've never seen a minute of Firefly. I've never seen a minute of the Buffy series. Here, let me save you the trouble: "Oh Pops, you have to watch Buffy, you'll just love it!"

No I fucking don't. Because you know what? I probably would love it. And it's already off the air. I couldn't stand to have my heart broken again. Not after SeaQuest DSV. Too late. God, why did I find it too late...

So: sci-fi with hot chicks. OK, that's good for one Hot Babysitter. And I guess the popular Whedomania merits a second one just by popular Bucketeer acclamation which could very well manifest itself in Pops as curiosity. Or petulant resentment. No, the first one, the first one. OK.

Two (out of 3) on the Hot Babysitter Scale

Go if you must. I shall not be joining you.


Pops





*= that one doesn't count because I got it when I was in the Navy. Well, when I was thinking about joining the Navy. Reserves. And was drunk. For three days straight.
- posted by Pops @ 10:15 AM