Joss Whedon is My Master Now

[anotheranon]

Things I noticed upon 2nd viewing of "Serenity" (no, I've not had it on constant DVD rotation since September):

• The thing about Serenity's costumes isn't in the cut, it's in the detail. The operative's diagonally pieced sleeves, Zoe's weathered side zipped top, and the buttons on Mal's breech hems all serve to make the pieces more than mere "jacket", "vest", "pants", they really do :)
  
• Summer Glau was excellently cast - graceful AND predatory, vulnerable AND terrifying.
  
• Is it just me or was Jayne constantly eating something?
  
• Joss Whedon is a master storyteller, bar none! This is modern mythology, folks!
  
• Seeing a movie with an audience consisting mostly of fans is just fun on a Rocky-Horror type level - everyone gets the joke :)
  

Deeply tired and headachey now because I'm up way past my bedtime (such a lightweight, me). Time to snooze.

Comments

Re: in which i just go on and on...

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

During the initial descent at the start of the movie, when people go to strap themselves in the camera trucks across a table full of plates/dishes, at least some of which had food.

Didn't remember that, but, yeah - that was an awfully full table if they were literally suffering for supplies :P

but do you know why there is often of Japanese writing on things?

Actually, no I don't! I don't know enough about the languages to tell the difference, though I think a lot of Chinese characters were "borrowed" by the Japanese.

As to why, I can only speculate: the art directors/set designers/Whedon don't know or can't tell the difference. I read somewhere (yes, the nebulous "somewhere" that I can't remember/can't find) that all of the Mandarin is poorly pronounced because none of the actors know Chinese. Perhaps the same ignorance is at work with the text?

Re: in which i just go on and on...

[nminusone.livejournal.com]

Initially there was no way of writing Japanese. Some time around the 4th century AD the Japanese had contact with the Chinese and adopted their writing system, called kanji in Japanese. Since kanji is idiographic rather than phonetic, a given symbol had the same *meaning* in both languages but was *pronounced* totally differently. The Japanese use *both* pronunciations, which they call readings.

Over time the Japanese started using kanji as a phonetic alphabet, to "spell out" the sound of Japanese words. Thankfully someone realized this was nuts, and they invented a new alphabet (aka syllabary), phonetic like ours, called hiragana. For reasons which are not entirely clear to me they also invented a second redundant syllabary, katakana. Every sound in Japanese is represented by 1 hiragana and 1 matching katakana. The 2 scripts are called kana, and there are rules that say when to use one or the other.

Typical Japanese writing combines kanji and hiragana; the kanji represents the stem, root or infinitive, and hiragana are used to add the different endings, as when a verb is conjugated. Hiragana is also used for words which have no kanji, articles and some other parts of speech. Katakana is mostly used to write "loanwords" borrowed from languages other than Chinese, and the names of foreigners.

Anyway. In Serenity there's a bunch of katakana. (I didn't notice any hiragana but it may be there.) Why it is there... I do not know. Whoever wrote it must have known it was Japanese and not Chinese. It just seems like very little in Joss Whedon's work is accidental, so I have to wonder.

Re: see, you already know more about this than I do!

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

I have no idea - much as I love the show I don't know a lot of the behind the scenes stuff (betnoir, wanna pitch in here?)

Again, I would recommend fireflyfans or other Firefly/Whedonverse communities or websites - guaranteed, someone has already pondered this and done the legwork for you, it's just a case of finding it :)