cross with joss

Good news! Serenity is a damn fine movie. Good enough that it's still well worth watching under the following circumstances:

• in the form of a pirated copy downloaded off the internet, with Dutch subtitles,
• projected onto a screen made from a sheet, and carefully ironed before starting,
• by a projector illegally borrowed from work, which requires, in order to project properly, two small tables balanced one on top of the other, two d4s to hold the front up, and a fan held next to it so that it doesn't overheat,
• in spite of which it overheats anyway and turns the picture randomly orange and blue and intervals,
• even though it's working off a bad CD copy which randomly stops every now and then and gives a whole series of gibberish error messages, with numbers,
• causing the room full of computer geeks to spend fifteen minutes in argumentative technobabble to decide what things to randomly type into what appeared to be a Linux command line in order to make it play again.

It was a rather fun evening, all told, and curiously appropriate to the rather Heath Robinson operation of Serenity herself. I am, however, despite my considerable enjoyment and admiration of the film under adverse circumstances, Cross With Joss. Since some of you deprived CT types haven't seen the movie yet, I shall hide more in-depth analysis behind the cut. ( Cross With Joss. )

I should pause at this point to reassure you that I am not generally behind pirating DVDs off artists I admire; I've already ordered Serenity, the Region 2 DVD comes out next month, apparently, and will be airmailed to me posthaste, so I have Done My Bit For Serenity II.

It seems to have been a big weekend for sf movies. I watched an 80s anime film on Friday afternoon with first_fallen. Captain Harlock In Arcadia was... well, very anime, which means it was, in Western terms, really slowly paced, filled with apparently naive and howling character cliches reproduced with the most absolute seriousness, and had a nice line in strange anachronism and weird juxtapositions (World War II, far future aliens, pirates, samurai and German knighthood. Oy, vey). In a weird sort of way I rather enjoyed it. Not, however, as much as I enjoyed today's retro afternoon spent with wolverine_nun, watching the original Battlestar Galactica movie and the 1980s Flash Gordon. Re-watching BG is giving me an increased appreciation of the recent re-make: some very interesting resonances and updates between the two versions, and some lovely moments of homage. Flash is possibly the movie which imprinted me hopelessly with B-movie sci-fi at a tender age: I have very, very vivid memories of watching it when I was about 12. Mostly, I think, the amazing undercurrents, and in some cases, extremely up-front overcurrents, of dodgy eroticism possibly stunned me into hapless memory: phallic spaceships, shiny men's hot-pants, concubines, whippings and all. But it has survived amazingly well, possibly because it's made with such deliberate campness and tongue-in-cheek irony.

Having watched approximately 8 hours of cinema in the last 24, it's probably not surprising that I have a pounding headache; I leave you with the slightly mind-bending thought of what my dreams are going to look like over the next few days, given my recent mental diet...