Call me a Browncoat (I’ll be back for Breakfast)

Wow, so much to write about, so little time. Well, plenty of time really, it’s the weekend. More like so little energy. I’ve been feeling incredibly run down for about the last month. I feel exhausted all day, go to bed dead tired, then wake up still dead tired. I went off to the doctor’s on Tuesday and had some blood tests done, although he seems to think it may be sleep apnoea (I was suspecting the same thing actually). To confirm it I’d need to have a sleep study done. This of course is prohibitively expensive, so I’ll just have to try and lose weight. As if I’m not trying to do that anyway 🙁

There are a number of things I’d actually like to write about – assorted birthday stuff for instance – but I simply don’t have the energy right now. So I’m going to try and write a small amount each night and see if that clears the backlog. Hmmm, we’ll see how long that lasts.

OK, so to start, Serenity. Serenity as all would know is the movie that continues on from Joss Whedon’s axed TV sci-fi western Firefly. I have never actually seen Firefly – mostly because the networks down here treated it with the utter contempt that they treat all sci-fi with and put it on at about 2:00am every second Tuesday – but have been hearing extremely good things about it for the last year or so, so put the DVD set on my Amazon wishlist. Naturally I then neglected to actually tell anyone about said Amazon wishlist, so was extremely and pleasantly surprised when my cousin Greg and his wife Antionetta turned up to my birthday get together with a copy of Serenity.

I didn’t watch it right away. In addition to my general malaise it had been a really hot week so I was fairly wiped out. I decided to wait until I could get some semi-decent sleep and actually appreciate it, a circumstance that came around last weekend.

So, what did I think? I was pretty impressed. The setting is really clever (one planet-dense, highly terraformed solar system so you don’t have to worry about fudging the physics for FTL*Apparently this was never actually stated in the series, they only explicitly confirmed it in the movie, but it’s still damn cool), the effects are pretty good for the budget (the reaver land-speeder thingie is a little dodgy at times but apart from that I didn’t see any problems), it’s well acted with a really sharp script and (probably most importantly) it’s funny as hell. Nathan Fillion in particular has a great comic turn and the script gives him some great lines to work with. And the plot is pretty good – as someone who’s never seen the series I was able to jump right in and know what was going on.

And as if all of that’s not enough the DVD has some great extras. Like the out takes. I said Nathan Fillion is funny – the out takes prove it because most of them involve him goofing off in some highly entertaining fashion. The very best has to be the – shall we say – “variation” on the “modify the ship” scene, which almost had me in hysterics. I won’t spoil it for anyone, but the phrase “takin’ a dirt nap with the baby Jesus” may well be entering my vocabulary (assuming I could ever find circumstances to use it in that is 🙂

So, my final opinion? Well in the last week I’ve watched the film three times (once with the commentary, twice without), ordered the complete series from Amazon (I looked at JB’s in the city but couldn’t find it) and found myself with a strong desire to swear in Mandarin and call things “shiny”, so I’d have to say that Serenity is fantastic. Too bad they axed the show, cynical, ratings obsessed liou coe shway duh biao-tze huh hoe-tze duh bun ur-tze.

Oh, and I suppose now I’d better do that personality test linked from Ali’s blog hadn’t I?

Well there you go, exactly the same result (hmmmm, as for the natural mechanic thing does the fact that I just spent 20 minutes rewriting the HTML to make that result nice, clean and standards compliant count? Natural engineer then maybe 🙂