Cage Match: Gaiman vs. Whedon

Okay, so no, it’s not really a cage match. What it is is a really good interview in Time with Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon, on the eve of the release of their movies, Mirrormask and Serenity (respectively).

Plenty of good stuff in this interview — I knew I was going to enjoy it right from the start…

TIME: Joss, this is Lev from Time magazine. You’re also in the virtual presence of Neil Gaiman.

Neil Gaiman: I’m not virtual. I’m here.

TIME: Sorry. You’re virtual, Joss. Neil’s real.

Joss Wedon: Okay. I wondered.

TIME: I’m glad we settled that.

Neil on writing, and the drive to avoid repeating yourself:

I saw a lovely analogy recently. Somebody said that writers are like otters. And otters are really hard to train. Dolphins are easy to train. They do a trick, you give them a fish, they do the trick again, you give them a fish. They will keep doing that trick until the end of time. Otters, if they do a trick and you give them a fish, the next time they’ll do a better trick or a different trick because they’d already done that one. And writers tend to be otters. Most of us get pretty bored doing the same trick. We’ve done it, so let’s do something different.

Neil and Joss on their primary fan base:

TIME: Let’s talk about your respective fan bases. A lot of them self-identify as kind of on the geeky side.

NG: I think the fan base is literate. You need to be reasonably bright to get the jokes and to really follow what’s going on. That, by definition, is going to exclude a lot of people who will then get rather irritated at us for being pretentious and silly and putting in things they didn’t quite get. But it’s also going to mean that some of the people who do get the stuff will probably be fairly bright.

JW: Especially, I think, living in any fantasy or science fiction world means really understanding what you’re seeing and reading really densely on a level that a lot of people don’t bother to read. So yes, I think it’s kind of the same thing.

But I also think there’s a bit of misconception with that. Everybody who labels themselves a nerd isn’t some giant person locked in a cubbyhole who’s never seen the opposite sex. Especially with the way the Internet is now, I think that definition is getting a little more diffuse.

On mainstream culture’s growing acceptance of genre work:

TIME: I almost miss the stigma that used to attach to these things. Now everybody’s into Tolkien. And I feel a little like, hey, I’ve been into that stuff my whole life. And in fact, you used to beat me up for it.

JW: I miss a little of that element, the danger of, oh, I’m holding this science fiction magazine that’s got this great cover. There a little bit of something just on the edge that I’m doing this. That’s pretty much gone. Although when I walk into a restaurant with a stack of comic books, I still do get stared at a little bit.

NG: I always loved, most of all with doing comics, the fact that I knew I was in the gutter. I kind of miss that, even these days, whenever people come up and inform me, oh, you do graphic novels. No. I wrote comic books, for heaven’s sake. They’re creepy and I was down in the gutter and you despised me. ‘No, no, we love you! We want to give you awards! You write graphic novels!’ We like it here in the gutter!

JW: We’ve been co-opted by the man.

Neil on “family” films:

…in America, it almost seems like family has become a code word for something that you can put a five-year-old in front of, go out for two hours, and come back secure in the knowledge that your child will not have been exposed to any ideas. I didn’t want to do that. I like the idea of family as something where a seven-year-old would see a film and get stuff out of it, and a fifteen-year-old would get something else out of it, and a 25-year-old would get a different thing out of it.

Joss on his upcoming “Wonder Woman” treatment:

NG: She’s such a character without a definitive story. Or even without a definitive version.

JW: That’s how I feel. I hope to change that because I really feel her. Let’s face it: She’s an Amazon, and she will not be denied.

TIME: I’m really hoping her bustier will slip down a little bit further than it did in the show.

JW: You’re just after a porno, aren’t you?

TIME: Yes.

JW: It’s all about priorities. Yes, it’s very empowering for her to be naked all the time.

(via Pop Astronaut)

Shiny!

Just a quick note of thanks to Bryan, Dori, Shelley, Tvindy, Jacqueline, Johan, and probably others that I’ve forgotten. All of you have, at one point or another, either personally or through your weblogs, recommended Firefly. I just finished watching the last episode tonight…

…and damn if I’m not as excited about Serenity as the rest of you are.

Two quick questions (spoiler-free answers, please):

  1. I couldn’t find Book anywhere in the trailer. Am I just missing him, or did they not put him in for some reason? I’m sure I’ve read that all of the primary cast came back for the film.

  2. Isn’t Kaylee just one of the cutest/sexiest women ever? Admittedly, part of that may be that she’s about the closest thing to a “clone” of an earlier Whedon character (Willow, of course) who was consistently my favorite on Buffy…but even if I hadn’t had a silly fanboy tv-character crush on Willow, I’m pretty sure I’d have one for Kaylee.

Anyway, thanks for mentioning this show often enough and with high enough praise that it caught my eye. It was well worth it.

Now to see if I can get Prairie to watch the series before the movie comes out…

QuickTime 7 HD

Oh. My. God.

I installed QuickTime 7 the other day, and found Apple’s HD Gallery page where they’re showcasing a few HD trailers and video clips. The trailer for Serenity is available in both 720p and 1080p formats, and even though my system (a dual 2.0Ghz G5 with a 64Mb Radeon 9600 video card) technically doesn’t meet the requirements to playback 1080p, I downloaded both to see how they behaved.

Beautiful. Not a stutter on either one, and the video quality is amazing. What amused me, though, is that my screen (which I run at a slightly non-standard 1152×870) isn’t big enough to display them at full size! The 720p trailer just loses a little bit off of either side, but the 1080p trailer? I can only fit about half of it on my screen at once. Wow.

Quicktime 7 rocks!Just for grins and giggles, I decided to download all the different Serenity trailers available to compare them. I grabbed all four “normal” versions from the Serenity trailer page (small, medium, large, and full screen), the two HD versions from the Serenity HD page, opened them all up at once, and paused each one at 1:02.

(While I was doing this, I started them all playing at once just to see what would happen. Even with all the other versions playing at the same time, the gargantuan 1080i trailer still kept up a very watchable 18fps average framerate!)

Here’s the end result:

version size (MB) fps size (pixels) data rate (kbits/sec)
small 4.8 8 240×104 288.78
medium 8.45 12 320×136 505.18
large 20.98 24 480×208 1259.23
fullscreen 40.4 24 640×272 2363.67
720p 108.33 24 1280×544 6406.26
1080p 138.36 24 1920×816 8182.54

Pretty damn impressive.

iTunesTell Me Why” by :Wumpscut: from the album Bunker Gate Seven (1995, 4:11).

Serenity

Okay, okay, okay already. When no less than four people on my reading list mention the trailer for Serenity — the upcoming movie from Joss Whedon‘s Firefly show — and I’ve barely started going through my feeds for the day, I figure I should probably check it out.

Dori:

You’ve heard us rave about Firefly and how much we’re looking forward to Serenity, but now, you can go see why for youself: the first trailer was just released. Oh. My.

Shelley:

Thanks to you all I have become addicted to this show and have now watched the entire series three times in a very short period of time. Wonderful show, and the movie looks to be as good.

Tvindy:

Today they released the trailer for Joss Whedon’s new Firefly movie. It looks pretty good. Who knows? Maybe they’ll even base a series on it.

Jacqueline:

Scot got it right when he called it “distilled awesome”.

Admittedly, I’m intrigued. I can’t quite match the level of excitement that other people are, though that may be because I’ve yet to watch Firefly (I just finished Buffy a few months ago, and finally wrapped up Angel last week), so I think I need to pop that onto the top of my Netflix queue. But I know that I generally like Joss Whedon’s work, I’ve heard nothing but good things about Firefly so far, the effects look nice, and there’s some fun dialogue in the trailer.

We’ll see how amped up I get after I know a little more about this thing…

This could get pretty interesting.

Define ‘interesting’.

…’Oh God, oh God, we’re all gonna die?’

iTunesIt Can’t Rain All the Time” by Siberry, Jane from the album Crow, The (1994, 5:35).