The Trouble with Firefly

I know why Joss Whedon's Firefly didn't take off.

Whedon's got the rep of writing good TV stuff. He's known for dialogue and character building. He did that darn well with Buffy, which I saw three seasons of. His weakness? Story arcs. Buffy was new and novel enough to struggle through the times when Whedon's lack of an overarching plot covering a season or more threatened to sink it. (It might have even lost a bunch of viewers through the shaky fourth and fifth seasons.)

Firefly's got stuff going for it. The characters are meaty and tangible. Mal Reynolds is a great character, the spiritual successor to the original, non-neutered Han Solo. Jaybe Cobb is another great character, fatally flawed but still serviceable. The other characters are less textured but are still much more than cardboard.

The episodic stories are also decent. The Firefly crew gets into a situation, then they get out of it.

The problem is what keeps the viewers coming back? There is only one overarching story hook - what happened to River Tam. The problem is River doesn't get enough screen time. Halfway through the 14 episodes, she's got less screen time than Shepherd Book, who is the other sotry hook (the venerable "man with a secret past").

Compare this to Battlestar Galactice, which tends to have three or four overarching storylines going at the same time. It's always good to have loose ends all the time, so that people tune in to see them advanced or resolved. Hook them into the characters (good) or into the world (even better). BSG is all about the Cylon war and the search for Earth. But it's also about Adama struggling with his son and his command, and Roslin strugling with politics, and Tigh struggling with alcoholism, and Starbuck+Apollo struggling with themselves. Major plot hooks are dropped in, including the Caprica survivors and the Pegasus. And of course, there are the flesh Cylons.

Firefly has nothing going for it. The universe is Alliance controlled, but no one is actively chasing after Mal and his crew. They're nobodies. The people after Simon and River are afterthoughts, and appear as an episodic hook and not steadily as a theme. They crew is constantly broke, but that's hardly a come-on to tune in. "See how the Firefly crew earn money to keep flying!" Yeah, that'll reel 'em in.

So, no surprise that it got cancelled. No surprise that Serenity, which didn't help the fatal flaw at all but rather tied up the major story arc in a minor way, didn't make huge waves. In the end, the writing wasn't strong enough, and Whedon was unable to invest enough story into the series to keep it flying.

John Lasseter's Cars (3.5/4 stars)

Yes, it was good. Very, very good. Part of this reaction may be due to the cinematic sewage that I have been subjected to lately. However, my faith in John Lasseter and his team at Pixar continues to be affirmed. They can tell a good story, the can write good characters, and Lasseter can compose a film with the best of them.

Pixar's strength has always been its ability to merge a good story with strong characters and keep the whole thing rolling along. Cars is no exception. The story may not be all that original, but it feels fresh when placed in the context of the animated world.

Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson, who dials his performance up or down really well) is a brash rookie racecar, the LeBron James of his racing era (sorry, I'm not well-versed in NASCAR). He's on his way to the biggest race of his life when a mishap lands him in a forgotten town off the interstate.

The story then shift modes into the push-pull of "he wants to go but he wants to stay". This segment of the film is its heart, and Lasseter's team paints the town of Radiator Springs and its quirky inhabitants deftly. The three main characters are the redneck towtruck Tow Mater (Dan Whitney), the diffident oldtimer Doc Hudson (Paul Newman), and the misplaced lawyer Porsche Sally (Bonnie Hunt). All three voice actors turn in excellent performances, especially Newman, who is a NASCAR racing team owner.

It's easy to get lost in the sights and sounds and inhabitants of Radiator Springs. There are the in-jokes of course, but the little town does feel alive. One memorable sequence involves bringing the town back to its heyday when interstate traffic flowed through it. The nighttime scene with the buildings alight in animated neon is one of the prettiest things I've ever seen in an animated film.

The animation in Cars is breathtaking. Bonnie and Lightning go on a drive, and one s hard-pressed to tell the difference between real scenery on celluloid and rendered pixels.

While all of the characters in Cars are, well, cars, they exude a lot more human character than many of the characters in recent films I've seen. This includes most of the casts of The Da Vinci Code, X3 and MI3, and ALL of the cast of The Omen remake. When Owen Wilson can act circles around you and he isn't even on screen, you know you just sucked.

Bottom Line: So far, the best film of 2006. You HAVE to see it on the big screen. And yes, the double-disc DVD is going to be a must as well.

Summer Batting Average: 0-for-4

It's been an awful theater run forme this summer. The four films that we saw at the cinema all come in for me below 2 stars on my 4-star scale. MI3, Da Vinci Code, X3, and the god-awful Omen remake sucked time and cash with very little entertainment returned.

There are very few guarantees left in moviedom, but I still believe that Pixar cannot go wrong. I'm banking on Cars to take the bitter edge from my cinematic taste buds.

John Moore's The Omen (2006) (0.5/4 stars)

This is a remake?

I did not watch the original. I understand there wasn't much changed, other than to bring the film into a contemporary setting (you now see a Motorola RAZR, an Apple notebook and digital photography).

That aside, this film was AWFUL.

The story is tremendously dated. The storytelling is extremely bad - the screenwriter and director make no effort to tighten the story and eliminate a huge swath of exposition mid-film. The characters are paper-thin. The two people who are supposed to be sympathetic, Liev Schreiber's Robert Thorn and Julia Stiles as his wife Catherine, come across as granite caricatures. They're cartoon characters. The boy who plays Damien, rookie child actor Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick, does nothing for me. He failed to convey any sort of malice, menace or heat. Dakota Fanning was scarier in Uptown Girls.

Director John Moore falls back to the old reliable "Boo!" movie tricks to try to get a scare out of the audience. He fails. People were laughing during the film. If he was going for the over-the-top camp, it isn't obvious, and he sadly falls very, very short.

Bottom Line: I want my money and time back! Awful film. Avoid at all costs.

Tony Scott's Man on Fire (2.5/4 stars)

This was the film that I saw part of on the way into the US, and part of on the way out.

Dakota Fanning and Denzel Washington turn in decent performances in the Tony Scott suspense/thriller.

Denzel plays ex-military man Creasy, who takes on a bodyguard job in Mexico to escape his haunted past. (Chris Walken plays the friend who gets him the job. There's always room for Chris Walken.) He becomes the guardian angel of Peta (Dakota) who is the daughter of a wealthy family's scion (singer Marc Anthony) and his American wife. Yes, it's cool watching Dakky speak Spanish.

Peta of course gets kidnapped, and Creasy is on the case.

This was a well-paced film. Tony Scott lets the story build, and takes time to paint full pictures of Peta and Creasy and the Mexican environment around them. Man on Fire has that now-popular "dirty look" but thankfully with little of the shaky handheld camera crap that I hate so much.

Denzel and Dakky are competent, as always. The cast around them doesn't get enough time to develop, with perhaps the exception of Radha Mitchell (who plays Peta's mom).

Bottom Line: Not bad. Worth putting on your Netflix queue, or catching when it hits the HBO rotation.

David Dobkin's Wedding Crashers (1.5/4 stars)

This Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn comedy vehicle is built on an intersting premise - two guys who should be well past their "irresponsible years" subscribe to the strange and unique hobby of crashing wedding. It's like their version of Never-never Land. Each year during "wedding season" they go out and attend the weddings (and especially the wedding parties) of people they don't know, with the express end of sleeping with women who they meet at these parties. This covers the first half-hour of the film, and viewers are kept chuckling with ludicrous backstories that the boys present, as well as several shots of topless women.

The film goes downhill after that.

John (Owen) meets Claire (an unusually radiant Rachel McAdams) at one wedding, decides that she's the girl he will sleep with, then inexplicably falls for her in one swift stroke of the screenwriter's pen. Jeremy (Vince) is aghast, and is suddenly reduced to the slapstick punchline of Three Stooges-class physical comedy for the rest of the movie. What began as a rollicking buddy heist film flops into a run-of-the-mill romantic comedy that isn't all that romantic.

To make things worse, Wedding Crashers clocks in at a bloated two hours. If the screenwriter and editor had any feel for pacing, they could have had a much better movie with some judicious rewriting and editing. There's too much of the family (although I will never begrudge Christopher Walken screentime) and Jeremy's very strange relationship with Claire's baby sister could easily have been trimmed down. Finally, Dobkin doesn't get any heat from the pairing of Wilson and McAdams, which is a shame as Rach has never looked this fetching in any film I've previously seen her in.

Bottom Line: Fun first 30 minutes, but feel free to skip the rest of the film unless you just feel like watching Rachel.

Coraline comes to the Silver Screen

Coraline is a young adult (children's?) novella by Neil Gaiman. It's being made into an animated film by Harry Selick (James and the Giant Peach, The Nightmare Before Christmas).

Teaser poster from Neil Gaiman's journal...