A chill ...

.. is in the air. I guess winter is really on its way.

Firefox

I've already complained a lot about firefox on the Mac OS X here and here. For some reason it always seems to hang when a large number of pages are open in different tabs in the same window. Follow-up (10/9/05) Apparently Mac OS X is not the only only thats a problem, Firefox just hogs all the CPU cycles on Windows too :-|

Lord of War

Interesting premise, 3 stars. Not a must see for me. Its okay if you get it on DVD.

Serenity

Last May, while reading a blog, I found about a short lived TV show called Firefly. The blog described it as a creative mix of Cowboy western drama with SciFi twist with none of the woodenness of the Star Wars Prequels and the sappy feel-good bullshit of Star Trek: TNG.

Intrigued, I went here and got the DVDs, and enjoyed it a lot. The story was pretty much standard fare for the creator of the show, who kind of specialized in brooding heroes (think Angel) and butt-kicking heroines (think Buffy).

Not much of a TV watcher, I only followed those two shows sporadically, but Firefly had me hooked. Its unique vision of mixing story-lines inspired from the old cowboy stories and a futuristic civilization appealed to my favorite kinds of stories. Stories that mixed the past and the future. I went through the DVDs in just a 2 days. The abrupt ending was a disappointment and when I read that a movie version was coming out, I eagerly waited for it.

For people who know Firefly, the story in the movie picks up from the point where TV show left off. The dialogue did seem a bit TV like but I liked the matter-of-fact humor. The other thing I liked about the movie was the fact that special-effects in the movie were not the main characters. This is the one thing that always bothered me about Star Wars. The special effects always overshadowed the characters so much that the real story was always lost. Unlike Star Wars there is only one piece of machinery that was important, and it was the ship. By the ship I don't mean just the machinery, but also the crew that ran it. Serenity didn't insult my intelligence by portraying our heroes (and I'm including the ship here) by showing them to be better than the other characters but by showing that everyone has flaws and everyone has their redeeming qualities. I guess its the imperfections that makes people appealing.

I'm sure that a lot of people are going to disagree with me, but I don't think that the River Tam character was the most important character in the series. I think the really important characters are Malcolm Reynolds and The Operative. They both operate outside the pale of law, representing the necessary evil that organizations or societies must engage in to protect their interests, however honorable they might be. They both have a code of conduct which may appear questionable, but it actually might be superior to those around them.

Personally, I think The Operative was an awesome character. Introduced I think in the second last or last episode, this character just oozed coolness. His unrelenting (some would say ruthless) pursuit of his goals combined with his methodical way of doing things, and understanding of his opponents made him a great character.

Watch the movie. I think people will enjoy it.

Currently reading ...

"What If? 2: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been" (Berkley Publishing Group) and "Entering Space : Creating a Spacefaring Civilization" (Robert Zubrin)