"I aim to misbehave."
Posted by freedomforall 9 years, 6 months ago to Movies
Joss Whedon’s painfully-beloved, endlessly-missed, didn’t-even-get-a-God-damn-full-season sci-fi Western Firefly had its libertarian moments. Hell, the pilot has the main character, the funny, but wounded Captain Malcolm Reynolds, say the following piece of dialogue: “That’s what government’s for — get in a man’s way.”
Take my love. Take my land.
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don't care, I'm still free.
You can't take the sky from me.
Take me out to the black.
Tell 'em I ain't comin' back.
Burn the land And boil the sea.
You can't take the sky from me
Have no place I can be
Since I found Serenity
But you can't take the sky from me.
Mal: "let me make this abundantly clear: I do the job. And then I get paid."
Mal (quoted by Book): "A government is a body of people, usually, notably ungoverned."
And of course: "You can't take the sky from me".
"well, well well... looks like we got here just in the nick of time. What's that make us?"
"Big damn heroes, sir"
"Ain't we just".
...
"yeah, but she's our witch, so cut her down".
"You turn on *any* of my crew, you turn on me!"
"Why'd you come back for us? You don't even like me"
"Cause you're on my crew... why're we still discussing this?"
"Ship like this will be with you til the day you die"
"Cause it's a death trap..."
"He named the ship after Serenity because, when you go there... you never leave." (deleted scene)
"Do you know your role in all this, little one?"
"Do you?"
"This is what I do darlin' (pauses to look unsettled)... this is what I do..."
"This landing is gonna get pretty interesting. "
"Define 'interesting'. "
[deadpan] "Oh God, oh God, we're all gonna die?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2OsPGnr...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_q...
And just my personal opinion, but don't bother with the movie wrap-up Serenity. Too many loose ends to tie up in one movie-length feature to satisfy me. Especially when (spoiler alert) one of the best characters (Wash) DIES. I liked the plot, it was just that they tried to use the movie to address WAY too many things you would have needed at least another season to address.
But Straczynski still reneged on his promise to me. :(
E.g. I would be morally obliged to issue a 'SPOILER ALERT' if I were to describe what is going to happen to Augie in 'Covert Affairs' next month. I even might err on the safe side and warn 'POSSIBLE SPOILER', if I were to discuss who walked into that house that blew up...
{sorry}
BTW, did you see the western Silverado?
I enjoyed Silverado, especially when it came along after a long dry spell for movie Westerns when it came out in the late-80s. Maybe that dry spell was due to too many cheap Spaghetti Westerns of the 60's and 70's.
I'm 67. Been around for a while.
They set up the ending for a sequel to Silverado but it just never happened. Now they have no excuse but to get another cast if they want to do one. Still I'd like to see it happen.
(I actually saw you pop on while I was staring at my email page to decide where to click on next.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSbTP6-yz...
Whedon's difficult to pin down politically (and I do not know how much of the stories and dialog he wrote himself vs. others on his crew.) On the one hand he writes brilliant pro-individualist, pro-freedom scenarios, but on the other he's doing gratuitous slams against Founders (I remember a scene in "Buffy" where there's a discussion about Jefferson's line "all men are created equal" and a character dismisses him with a curt: "Kept slaves.")
I've given up hope for the resuscitation of it, for the simple reason that the principle actors have visibly aged too much. I take it for the brief, brilliant value that it presented, but look elsewhere for worthy television - meaning: other genres.
There's really nothing of note happening in televised sci-fi right now, I think for the simple reason that Hollywood has finally realized that science fiction, perhaps more than any other fictional genre, not only presents but presupposes a future with all of the pro-humanist values in play, or at least as the backdrop: reason, at least semi-capitalism, freedom, technology, and the positive aspirations of exploration, of advancing the human condition. Note the aggressive, intentional fusion of sci-fi with "horror," which latter is the polar antithesis of all of the best elements of sci-fi. I expect a long, long wait for a new sci-fi series to emerge that's worth a damn, at least in this country.
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I miss the "hard" science fiction writers like Asimov, Heinlein, Pournelle; I mean, do we even have any like them anymore?
Two presumptions sci fi keeps making on tv and in the movies that keep turning me off; one, that any future society, or society advanced beyond our current level of civilization, *must* be at least semi-socialist in nature (like Star Drek TNG et al). And two, that the cultural mores of alien societies or our own future societies will reflect those of current America.
(for a counter-example, in "Mote in God's Eye", they'd just emerged from a horrific interstellar war, which on some planets decimated the female population, so they had re-developed the mid-20th century America protective treatment of women. Or in "To a Different Drum", a colony ship had been attacked by a space monster that destroyed all their electronics, so all they had to use for knowledge were written books... so they based their societies on a 1920-something copy of the Encyclopedia Brittanica... but these departures are rare...)
Network programming execs are idiots.
(Somewhat explains why I gave away my last tv 20 years ago. A million channels and no decent entertainment, but billions of ads for more bad programs.)
The gaffe about "a society beyond money" was just that - a gaffe, on several levels - but beyond a couple of offhand, passing references to that canard in just a couple of episodes, the very existence of the Federation and the whole ST world itself, logically **had** to presuppose individual liberty. Individual liberty in turn presupposes capitalism, but since few within the viewing population (and maybe even among the series' writers,) made that connection, the series became a far more powerful, if inadvertent, symphony to reason, individualism, liberty and civilization than to any tacked-on nod to fashionable collectivism.
As for hard sci-fi writers, yes they're scarce, but if you haven't already, try Nancy Kress - she's got a string of excellent novels, most of them set in the "near future." It may be a stretch to call her a hard sci-fi writer, but Connie Willis' "Oxford Time Travel" novels are varying degrees of brilliant too, particularly her masterpiece, "Doomsday Book." (Beware the second of her duology "Blackout / All Clear" however - "Blackout" is a fascinating trip by future historians back to the London Blitz, but when Willis decided to split the novel into two releases, she filled the added space in the second volume with so much repetition and overlapping complexity of timelines that I began shouting things at the book like "Get an editor already!" or just "Someone get me out of here!"
"Clockwork Angels," Kevin J. Anderson's (and Professor Peart's) novelization of the Rush album, was a pleasant surprise, albeit more of a steampunk Aesop's Fable than hard sci-fi. Still, an excellent book with an objectivist-friendly, interwoven dual theme: A subtle parable on determinism vs. free will, beneath the more pronounced exposition of the shortcomings of both collectivism and anarchism, in context of human rights as a precondition to human happiness.
So.. good hard sci-fi is out there. But as is the case with good rock 'n' roll, these days you have to mine for it, just like gold.
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I thought the whole ensemble was perfectly chosen, with the possible exception of Kaylee the ship's mechanic. Oh, I loved her character's basic decency and air of innocence, but she seemed too young and lightweight a character to be believable as the engineer of a complex spacecraft. I always imagined someone more serious and intense in that role, like Julie Delpy or Milla Jovovich.
Patterns of speech are windows into the intellect of the speaker. Politicians are quick to adopt those patterns of speech as affectations, 44 does it all the time. also, 44 does it primarily in front of the typical 'low-information' voter, who is unlikely to perceive the insult.
Anyway, If the crew of Firefly were to seek employment with me, I would be uncomfortable to allow most of them near machinery as complex as a bulldozer based on their superficial intelligence.
So, because I am constantly losing 'suspension-of-disbelief' which is *crucial* to enjoying a story, I am unable to enjoy Firefly. I wish it's fans would let the damn thing RIP.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfh-YY465...
You're not going to like Justified then ;)
AND you've clearly not heard db's western Kansas drawl.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQppLW4e4...
I don't drawl like that. but I am probably a little True Grit sounding...if I want to be
But, 30 years in the Indian Nations has given me an Okie speech pattern, if not the actual drawl.