There's really nothing unusual about this. It is common practice for unfinished prints to be screened for test audiences. Out here in Los Angeles you can see up to a half dozen movies a year for free, as long as you don't mind that the movies will be unfiished prints lacking final visual effects, musical scores, ADR, and final editing.
Its a trip watching these things, with their rough editing and poor continuity. All of that stuff is added later, in response to the questionaires that the audience fills out after the movie.
I saw an old Gene Hackman movie, The Package, that way. They ask you all sorts of questions about the movie and your impressions of it, and modify bits of it according to the audience's answers. Its well worth your time to see one of these screenings. Just be sure to go and see the movie when it is officially released, just to see what they changed.
I suspect that this is nothing more than a typical early screening, and really doesn't have anything to say about whether the studio thinks they have a hit or not. Wait until a few weeks after its release to find out the answer to that question.
As for the whitespace, give me a break, it was my first post, and one after a very long and bad night, so I was a bit frazzled. Come to think of it, I still am. Which also explains the spelling. I was a bit too tired and sick to spell check or edit it. You never mispelled a word?
Actually, it was quite a fair summary. Sure Whedon tried to dress it up a bit, but never really did it right, IMHO. Hell, he never really even seemed to try all that hard. His redemption of Spike seemed at times forced, and at others tacked-on.
Which is of course, MY opinion, something I freely admit. Which of course is something Whedon's base of defenders rarely seem to do themselves.
You have a different opinion of how he dealt with it, which is fine. It isn't however, fact, any more than what I say on a creative matter is. There are some people who swear that Jar-jar Binks is a great character, and the follow-up Star Wars were superior to the original. They are entitled to think what they want, just as I am to present my views.
Whedon IMHO may have tried a bit to present the Spike storyline as you say, but a few weakly done episodes did very little to present it as a viable storyline, or even a very coherent one.
In closing, learn to distinguish between presenting things as fact, and presenting them as your own personal opinions. Thank you.
True, IMHO, though it seems it has some very loyal fans, some of whom compare it to Bab 5, which is totally off. Personally, I think that Whedon has suffered a bit of the old Lucas disease, whereby a once good creative talent loses it. It seems to me that such tends to happen when that person developes a following, and is told that he is a genius for a long period of time by everyone around him. What such people need is for someone to follow them around and whisper to them that they're mortal....
Otherwise such a person starts to buy into the genius thing, and starts thinking anything he does is great. Which typically manifests itself as doing what they think is "edgy" work. They start to darken their work, making it more needlessly violent, including mysogonistic and/or racist themes, and descend into self-parody. I submit the last couple of seasons of Angel and Buffy as additional evidence.
Buffy gets raped, and decides to love her rapist, who then becomes the real star of the show, (and later of Angel). Other characters turn suddenly homicidal without much build-up, and never suffer any consequences from their actions.
At its best, when it was fresh, Buffy was wry and witty, violent, but not needlessly so, and never unendingly dark and grim. But it, along with Angel descended into the pit of Star Wars sequels.
As for Firefly itself, for me, it just never really clicked. Not as bad as late Buffy or Angel, but not really good, it never really seemed any more clever than say an episode of Enterprise, (ok, that IS pretty bad). It was an idea that had been done to death before in various media, unlike Buffy, and its execution was tepid and uninspired at best. Why exactly he was given the opportunity to direct a movie on the strength of this, I don't know, (actually I do, DVD sales).
I'll venture a prediction that Serenity will never quite find an audience outside of hardcore Firefly fans. It might earn back its cost in the US, if its released in a weak movie time, and if Fox decides to heavily promote it, (these days a movie about a guy scraping roadkill off the highway will make thirty million in the opening weekend if the studio promotes it enough). Otherwise, it will take foriegn and DVD sales to turn a profit, if indeed it does. That's probably the fate of a genre film in a year flooded with higher profile films in that genre, a film without bankable stars.
Slashdot Mirror
There's really nothing unusual about this. It is common practice for unfinished prints to be screened for test audiences. Out here in Los Angeles you can see up to a half dozen movies a year for free, as long as you don't mind that the movies will be unfiished prints lacking final visual effects, musical scores, ADR, and final editing.
Its a trip watching these things, with their rough editing and poor continuity. All of that stuff is added later, in response to the questionaires that the audience fills out after the movie.
I saw an old Gene Hackman movie, The Package, that way. They ask you all sorts of questions about the movie and your impressions of it, and modify bits of it according to the audience's answers. Its well worth your time to see one of these screenings. Just be sure to go and see the movie when it is officially released, just to see what they changed.
I suspect that this is nothing more than a typical early screening, and really doesn't have anything to say about whether the studio thinks they have a hit or not. Wait until a few weeks after its release to find out the answer to that question.
As for the whitespace, give me a break, it was my first post, and one after a very long and bad night, so I was a bit frazzled. Come to think of it, I still am. Which also explains the spelling. I was a bit too tired and sick to spell check or edit it. You never mispelled a word?
Actually, it was quite a fair summary. Sure Whedon tried to dress it up a bit, but never really did it right, IMHO. Hell, he never really even seemed to try all that hard. His redemption of Spike seemed at times forced, and at others tacked-on.
Which is of course, MY opinion, something I freely admit. Which of course is something Whedon's base of defenders rarely seem to do themselves.
You have a different opinion of how he dealt with it, which is fine. It isn't however, fact, any more than what I say on a creative matter is. There are some people who swear that Jar-jar Binks is a great character, and the follow-up Star Wars were superior to the original. They are entitled to think what they want, just as I am to present my views.
Whedon IMHO may have tried a bit to present the Spike storyline as you say, but a few weakly done episodes did very little to present it as a viable storyline, or even a very coherent one.
In closing, learn to distinguish between presenting things as fact, and presenting them as your own personal opinions. Thank you.
True, IMHO, though it seems it has some very loyal fans, some of whom compare it to Bab 5, which is totally off. Personally, I think that Whedon has suffered a bit of the old Lucas disease, whereby a once good creative talent loses it. It seems to me that such tends to happen when that person developes a following, and is told that he is a genius for a long period of time by everyone around him. What such people need is for someone to follow them around and whisper to them that they're mortal.... Otherwise such a person starts to buy into the genius thing, and starts thinking anything he does is great. Which typically manifests itself as doing what they think is "edgy" work. They start to darken their work, making it more needlessly violent, including mysogonistic and/or racist themes, and descend into self-parody. I submit the last couple of seasons of Angel and Buffy as additional evidence. Buffy gets raped, and decides to love her rapist, who then becomes the real star of the show, (and later of Angel). Other characters turn suddenly homicidal without much build-up, and never suffer any consequences from their actions. At its best, when it was fresh, Buffy was wry and witty, violent, but not needlessly so, and never unendingly dark and grim. But it, along with Angel descended into the pit of Star Wars sequels. As for Firefly itself, for me, it just never really clicked. Not as bad as late Buffy or Angel, but not really good, it never really seemed any more clever than say an episode of Enterprise, (ok, that IS pretty bad). It was an idea that had been done to death before in various media, unlike Buffy, and its execution was tepid and uninspired at best. Why exactly he was given the opportunity to direct a movie on the strength of this, I don't know, (actually I do, DVD sales). I'll venture a prediction that Serenity will never quite find an audience outside of hardcore Firefly fans. It might earn back its cost in the US, if its released in a weak movie time, and if Fox decides to heavily promote it, (these days a movie about a guy scraping roadkill off the highway will make thirty million in the opening weekend if the studio promotes it enough). Otherwise, it will take foriegn and DVD sales to turn a profit, if indeed it does. That's probably the fate of a genre film in a year flooded with higher profile films in that genre, a film without bankable stars.