Serenity and art murder

Saw Serenity last night with wilds­oda. Bril­liant. As so many of my other friends are post­ing, I’ll also quote: “I am a leaf on the wind…”

It’s almost a per­fect film: superb dia­logue, although delivered a little too cas­u­ally at times and hard to catch on first hear­ing some­times given Joss’s superb feel for dia­lect and the cre­ation of gram­mars. I love the way Mal uses “I con­jure that’s the way of it” as a way to say “I think” and I love the con­fla­tion of com­pound nouns into a met­onymic (Kaylee’s ‘my neth­ers’, for example). Then there’s the plot­ting, the dir­ec­tion, the camera work, the acting, the per­fect timing, the rais­ing of the emo­tional stakes, the ethics, the intel­lect, the mor­al­ity, the fire­fights… the whole thing is just done per­fectly. *stand­ing ovation*.

I do want to see it again and prob­ably soon, so if anyone else is interested…

And then tonight I saw Art Murder: the Pic­ture of Dorian Gray, star­ring spunk­art, pro­duced by hermia8 and with light­ing by hur­lat­ron. My, aren’t you all tal­en­ted? The guy play­ing Harry was utterly superb – really incred­ible. It was funny, because I was watch­ing and the whole time trying to ima­gine what it would have been like with Steven as Dorian instead (some of you may remem­ber that Forget the Rules inad­vert­ently stole Steven – play­ing Pepe – from these guys). I didn’t quite feel the new Dorian did it for me, whether it was because he wasn’t quite as gor­geous as Steven or some­thing else. The assist­ant dir­ector, Zane, gig­gling in the back­ground almost spoiled the first half of the show for me. One of my stu­dents was there – sen­tient­tofu – and he com­men­ted on how well con­densed and adap­ted the script was with all the most intense bits and best lines retained. Oh, and loved the set. It’s still on as part of Mel­bourne Fringe until next Friday, so go see it!