My Brother Doesn't Know Genius Cinema

When Captain Jean-Luc Picard says "Space: the final fronteir," I don't think that everyone quite understands what he means. I'm not even sure that Gene Roddenberry fully understood it. Joss Whedon does. Fully.

The creator of the wrongfully cancelled show Firefly and the perfectly written, performed, produced, and directed movie Serenity has envisioned a future, five-hundred years off, that is more realistic than any Star Trek fan will have the fortitude to admit. The future is raw, it is harsh, it is made up of real folks struggling to survive. The way it is, the way it was, the way it will be.

The film is fantastic. There's no way around it, so there's no need to explain why it is fantastic. I could get into the fact that the characters are more sympathetic than just about any I've ever seen in a movie before. I could dig into the cinematography and score which make one's blood boil from the first moment we see the metal horse of a ship -- Whedon's tenth character -- as it careens into a planet's atmosphere, unsure of whether or not it'll hold together. I might say that the plot was intricate, complex, and masterfully told, leaving no room for boredome -- and sometimes breathing -- as unexpected occurences are a chaotic certainty. I could say all of those things, but I won't.

In more recent news: I have to find some recent news. I'm going in for an interview with the Oracle, USF's student-run daily paper, and I need to bring in a copy of something journalistic that I've written. Of course, I've never written anything journalistic in my life, but I could definetly use the experience. Graduation should just be about 11 months away, after all. Gonna need to do something (preferably something that doesn't involve large amounts of heavy lifting or tar scraping... or filing, cold calling, secretary-ing, or todey-ing).

I also have some deadlines to get to; fiction, theater, the like. Lots of writing this semester from the Mattster.