Trying like mad to get a bunch of things done before going away for a week (weekend in Amagansett followed by three days in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Conference).

Tomorrow night we're going to go see Serenity,, the movie spinoff from Firefly. Firefly was a tv series by Joss Whedon of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Fox killed it after a few episodes, but it lived on and was brought back to life so to speak by its DVD release in 2003. So many DVDs were sold that Whedon was able to get backing for a film.

Lisa and I saw an advanced preview back in June. The film was mostly done, I recall some places where music or sound seemed to be missing and I think there was one scene where the star field was empty.

But wait, what is Firefly/Serenity about? The series and movie track the crew of a spaceship sometime in the future (a future where English and Mandarin Chinese are the prominent languages). The crew is not from Starfleet...they tend to do "good works" but along they way they might rob, steal, or otherwise do things which would find them at the wrong end of a photon torpedo in the Star Trek universe.

It's neither Star Trek nor Star Wars.

The future in Serenity is gritty, dirty, complicated, definitely not perfect. People get shot, and die, no fancy gizmos that magically determine all medical problems and fix up the patient for another run. There's grease in the ship's engine compartment, and it looks like the engine compartment of a semi, not the glitzy white-collar office of The Enterprise.

The writing on Firefly was crisp and witty, it's what television is mostly lacking these days: well written, smart dialogue.

The movie opens in the year after the end of the series, some time has definitely passed, but not all that much. There are some changes in the crew, but the core of the crew remains together to the end. Part of the plot point about River gets resolved, though other questions result.

So, anyway, we're going to that tomorrow, along with a zillion other people I suspect. Serenity has had this both cool, and somewhat bizarre, marketing setup featuring fanatic fans called The Browncoats (named after the losing faction of the series' civil war, the faction the crew belonged to). Fanatic. At the preview we attended, the theater manager spoke beforehand and admitted he'd never seen the theater sell out as it had on a Thursday night in the middle of the summer, and this happened in many cities across the U.S. and U.K. Rather than treat the fans as some irritant in the econo-system, Universal and Joss Whedon have worked with (and coöpted) them to be a core part of the marketing machine for the movie.